This paper reports on a joint research project at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Art that investigates whether the making of drawn animation can be demonstrated as a mindful practice. The original intention of the project was to explore the potential application of Buddhist principles and practices such as mindfulness within a practical, secular context to benefit art and design students who experience stress in the learning environment and who wish to examine their learning processes more closely.
This research project is sited within wider developments in UK Higher Education that seek to enable students to engage meaningfully with the affective and extra-rational dimensions of learning. Faced with a complex and uncertain future, art and design graduates need to be able to take responsibility for their personal development and respond to stress and change in generative and constructive ways. During the research process, a series of experiential activities and workshops were devised to explore the development of a group of capacities identified in a number of published sustainability literacy frameworks (Dawe, Jucker, and Martin 2005; Sterling 2012; Villiers-Stuart and Stibbe 2009), in particular, the attributes of personal resilience, self-awareness and interconnectedness through systemic and relational thinking and making. The project looks at the potential of the processes of drawn animation in combination with short-form mindfulness meditation techniques for developing these and associated attributes.

A later and further developed version of this paper is published as a chapter in the anthology 'Animating the Spirited: Journeys and Transformations', ed. Tze-yue Gigi Hu, University Press of Mississippi (2019)

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• http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/2512