Pieces of a Shared Mosaic:
Co-Creating Board Games with symbols and ornaments for Intercultural Dialogue
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Exploring ambiguity and multiple perspectives
Unlike words, symbols rarely have a single meaning. The same shape, colour, or motif can evoke different associations depending on cultural background, personal experience, or historical context. Discussing these differences encourages participants to reflect on ambiguity, question assumptions, and develop empathy for alternative viewpoints.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Making complex concepts tangible
Symbols allow participants to approach abstract concepts such as identity, freedom, belonging, migration, solidarity, sustainability, or democracy in a concrete and accessible way. Working with a symbol requires a sophisticated cognitive process: participants observe, interpret, associate meanings, compare perspectives, and reflect on multiple possible interpretations. Through this process, they learn that meaning is often constructed rather than fixed.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Accessible in multilingual environments
Visual symbols provide a common language that can be used in groups with different levels of linguistic proficiency. Participants can contribute ideas, observations, and interpretations even when they do not yet have the vocabulary to express complex thoughts in the target language. This makes symbolic work particularly suitable for multilingual and heterogeneous learning environments.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Discovering Shared Values Through Symbols
Every culture has developed its own visual vocabulary of signs, motifs, ornaments, and symbols. By sharing and comparing these visual languages, participants explore how different cultures express similar ideas, experiences, and values.This process helps learners recognize both diversity and commonality. Participants discover how universal concepts such as belonging, solidarity, protection, or freedom can take different visual forms while conveying shared human concerns.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Reinterpreting Cultural Heritage Through Creative Practice
Working with signs and symbols offers opportunities to explore traditional motifs, crafts, and visual languages from Europe and beyond. Participants can draw inspiration from elements rooted in their own cultural heritage—such as embroidery patterns, weaving motifs, ornaments, or decorative symbols—and reinterpret them within a contemporary collective artwork.This approach helps preserve and valorise traditional knowledge and craftsmanship while giving it new relevance in today's intercultural context. It can be particularly meaningful for women from rural areas who play an important role in maintaining craft traditions, creating opportunities for their knowledge to be shared, appreciated, and connected to wider cultural narratives. By bringing together symbols from different traditions, participants contribute to a richer and more inclusive understanding of cultural heritage and contemporary European identity.
symbols for unity
slavic
north-africain
middle-eastern
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Encouraging creativity through using simple forms and accessible techniques
Because symbols often rely on simple geometric shapes, they are accessible even to participants who do not consider themselves artists. Drawing, combining, transforming, and arranging basic forms reduces the fear of making mistakes and allows everyone to participate creatively.The activity can be carried out using paper, magnets, recycled materials, wood, resin, digital tools, or collaborative online platforms. Its simplicity makes it adaptable to different contexts, resources, and participant groups.
Let's give it a try! Using only two triangles, create a symbol that represents EQUALITY. Rotate by clicking, move, overlap: rearrange the shapes as you wish.
Now let's represent BELONGING. This time, you can change their size by clicking on them.
Now represent DIVERISTY by changing the colors and moving the in to center all the four triangles.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Combining play and visual creativity
Creating an artwork can sometimes feel intimidating, especially for participants who do not consider themselves creative or artistic. It might also be regarded as something useless by some adult participants. By approaching visual creation through play—and play through visual creation—we make the creative process more accessible and enjoyable. Participants experiment, make choices, and express ideas without the pressure of producing a finished artwork. In this approach, playing becomes an act of creation, and creation becomes a form of play.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Learning through collaborative creation
Creating a shared symbolic board, mosaic, or visual game transforms participants from learners into co-creators. They contribute ideas, negotiate meanings, and collectively shape a common visual language. The process itself becomes an exercise in intercultural dialogue: participants discover similarities and differences, learn to appreciate diverse perspectives, and experience how collective meaning emerges through interaction.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Ecological and sustainable aspects
The activity naturally lends itself to ecological practices. Symbols can be created using reused cardboard, discarded packaging, recycled wood, fabric scraps, bottle caps, or other recovered materials. The resulting game boards and learning tools can then be reused by future groups, creating a tangible contribution that extends beyond the workshop itself.This gives participants a genuine sense of ownership while encouraging reflection on sustainability, reuse, and circularity.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Adaptability and Multiple Levels of Engagement
The activity can be adapted to different contexts, skill levels, interests, and time constraints. Facilitators may choose to create the board together with participants as part of the workshop, prepare it in advance and focus primarily on the creation and interpretation of symbols, or work with virtual game boards in online and blended learning environments.
Rules
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Adaptability and Multiple Levels of Engagement
The level of craftsmanship can also vary according to participants' interests and abilities. Activities may involve simple paper-based techniques, collage, drawing, and painting, or more advanced approaches using wood, textiles, embroidery, ceramics, resin, or other traditional and contemporary craft practices. Virtual versions can be created using collaborative digital platforms, allowing participants to co-create, experiment with symbols, and exchange ideas across geographical and linguistic boundaries.This flexibility makes the method accessible to a wide range of learners while offering opportunities for deeper artistic, technical, and intercultural exploration.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
A living artwork and thinking tool
Unlike a finished artwork, a symbolic mosaic or game board remains open and constantly evolving. Every new arrangement produces new meanings, stories, and connections. Each time the activity is played, a different result emerges.In this sense, the board functions simultaneously as an artwork, a game, a communication tool, and a thinking tool. Its possibilities are virtually endless, allowing facilitators to adapt it to different themes, subjects, and learning objectives while continuously generating new opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and discovery.
Rules
Use a grid with as many squares as you wish. You can keep the board simple, with an elegant black-and-white minimalist design, or decorate it with ornamental patterns and symbols placed between the squares where the game pieces will be positioned. Depending on the theme and cultural context, these decorative elements can draw inspiration from a wide range of artistic and craft traditions.
You can also transform a complex ornament made up of repetitive elements into a game board. For example, by using stencils, geometric patterns, or traditional decorative motifs, the ornament itself can become the structure of the game, with the spaces between the motifs serving as positions for the game pieces. This approach offers an interesting way to explore the relationship between decorative arts, geometry, and play.
Prepare a set of vocabulary cards equal to the number of squares of one of the two alternating colours (25 in this example). The cards may be physical or virtual, as in this example.
- Environment
- Environnement
- Umwelt
- Środowisko
- Довкілля
- Mediu
- بيئة
- পরিবেশ
- Friendship
- Amitié
- Freundschaft
- Przyjaźń
- Дружба
- Prietenie
- صداقة
- বন্ধুত্ব
The cards can be multilingual if the objective is to learn and compare terms in different languages while playing in an intercultural context. Alternatively, when working with participants with low literacy skills, audio recordings can be added to the cards to make the activity more accessible and inclusive.
Use this side of the card to provide more information about a topic. Focus on one concept. Make learning and communication more efficient.
Use this side of the card to provide more information about a topic. Focus on one concept. Make learning and communication more efficient.
Use this side of the card to provide more information about a topic. Focus on one concept. Make learning and communication more efficient.
Title
Memory
Respect
Write a brief description here
Diversity
Empathy
Cooperation
Trust
Trust
Dialogue
Creativity
Tradition
Title
Title
Democracy
Identity
Heritage
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Subtitle
Subtitle
Now each participant draws at least one card and thinks about how to represent the word, idea, or concept using a symbol or a simple sign. To support the creative process, facilitators may invite participants to reflect on some of the following questions:
- What is the first image, object, shape, or colour that comes to mind when you think about this concept?
- Can this concept be represented through a simple geometric shape?
- Is there a symbol, ornament, or motif associated with this concept in your culture or region?
- How might people from other cultures represent the same idea?
- Can you simplify your design even further while keeping its meaning clear?
- Which elements are essential, and which can be removed?
- Does your symbol represent an object, an action, a feeling, or a value?
- Could the same symbol have different meanings for different people?
- How can colours, size, or position help communicate your idea?
- Can you combine two or more simple shapes to create a more meaningful symbol?
- Would someone unfamiliar with your culture understand the symbol? Why or why not?
Create your symbols on small square or circular pieces using paint, markers, or any other materials you prefer. Feel free to experiment with colours, shapes, and textures while keeping your symbols simple and easy to interpret. Then, play! You can invent different rules, but we recommend keeping the game simple, as the main objective is to reflect on concepts, ideas, and the relationships between them. The goal is to gradually fill the board with symbols and signs. Place the pieces only on squares of the same colour, creating a diagonal network of connected concepts across the board.
The player who places the symbol must identify the concept it represents and use the corresponding word in a meaningful sentence. For example, if the symbol represents empathy, a player could say: "Empathy helps us understand the feelings of others." Here, the cognitive process works in the opposite direction: instead of creating a symbol from a word, players must interpret the symbol and connect it to a concept before using it in context.
To facilitate the process, keep the list of concepts visible to all participants throughout the game.The next player chooses another symbol, places it on a neighbouring square, and creates a sentence using both concepts. For example, if environment is placed next to empathy, the player could say:"Empathy for future generations can encourage us to protect the environment."
As the board fills up, the sentences become increasingly complex because players must incorporate all the concepts represented on the neighbouring squares. For example, if environment, empathy, and cooperation are connected, a player might say:"Empathy and cooperation are essential if we want to protect the environment together."
For an additional challenge, place the symbols face down so that players cannot choose which symbol they will receive.This is a cooperative game: all players play together against the game itself. Participants are encouraged to help one another, translate, reformulate, explain ideas, and build sentences collaboratively.The game ends when the entire mosaic is filled with symbols.As the game progresses, collect and record the ideas, reflections, and associations that emerge. You may discover unexpected connections, creative solutions, or new perspectives on complex issues and shared challenges.
Concept and realisation:
Storytelling Rule (Core Rule): Each time a checker stops on a point, the player must: Explore the point by hovering over or clicking on the images. Discover the hidden word(s) revealed in the tooltips. Pronounce or write a sentence that integrates: all the revealed words from that point. The sentence: Must include every word revealed by the images, Can be poetic, narrative, abstract, symbolic, or descriptive, May continue an existing story or open a new narrative direction. Multiple Images, Multiple Words: If a point contains several images: Each image reveals one word, All words must be used in the sentence. One longer sentence may connect all the words revealed during the turn (optional rule). Winning the Game: The first player to bear off all their checkers wins the game. Alternatively, the game may end when: The story feels complete,or players agree to stop once a shared narrative has emerged.
Storytelling Backgammon – Rules (Image & Tooltip Version) Players 2 players or two groups (Optional solo mode: one player alternates turns and voices.) Game Pieces : The game uses two types of checkers: - Round checkers - Triangular checkers Objective: As in traditional backgammon: Move your checkers around the board, Bring them into their home area, Bear them off one by one. In addition, players collectively create a story through spoken or written sentences. The Board: The board is divided into 24 points. Each point is represented by one or more images. Each image contains a hidden word, revealed when the player hovers over or clicks on it (tooltip). The images act as visual story prompts, while the hidden words guide the narration. Movement: At the start of each turn, the player rolls the dice. The player moves their checkers according to the numbers rolled. Standard backgammon movement rules apply.
Pieces of a Shared Mosaic:
COTA ONG
Created on May 29, 2026
Start designing with a free template
Discover more than 1500 professional designs like these:
View
Magazine dossier
View
Momentum: Onboarding Escape Game
View
Momentum: Manager Guide
View
Wizardry Letter
View
Search Bar Card
View
Piñata
View
Microlearning: When to Use Chat, Meetings or Email
Explore all templates
Transcript
Pieces of a Shared Mosaic:
Co-Creating Board Games with symbols and ornaments for Intercultural Dialogue
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Exploring ambiguity and multiple perspectives
Unlike words, symbols rarely have a single meaning. The same shape, colour, or motif can evoke different associations depending on cultural background, personal experience, or historical context. Discussing these differences encourages participants to reflect on ambiguity, question assumptions, and develop empathy for alternative viewpoints.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Making complex concepts tangible
Symbols allow participants to approach abstract concepts such as identity, freedom, belonging, migration, solidarity, sustainability, or democracy in a concrete and accessible way. Working with a symbol requires a sophisticated cognitive process: participants observe, interpret, associate meanings, compare perspectives, and reflect on multiple possible interpretations. Through this process, they learn that meaning is often constructed rather than fixed.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Accessible in multilingual environments
Visual symbols provide a common language that can be used in groups with different levels of linguistic proficiency. Participants can contribute ideas, observations, and interpretations even when they do not yet have the vocabulary to express complex thoughts in the target language. This makes symbolic work particularly suitable for multilingual and heterogeneous learning environments.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Discovering Shared Values Through Symbols
Every culture has developed its own visual vocabulary of signs, motifs, ornaments, and symbols. By sharing and comparing these visual languages, participants explore how different cultures express similar ideas, experiences, and values.This process helps learners recognize both diversity and commonality. Participants discover how universal concepts such as belonging, solidarity, protection, or freedom can take different visual forms while conveying shared human concerns.
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Reinterpreting Cultural Heritage Through Creative Practice
Working with signs and symbols offers opportunities to explore traditional motifs, crafts, and visual languages from Europe and beyond. Participants can draw inspiration from elements rooted in their own cultural heritage—such as embroidery patterns, weaving motifs, ornaments, or decorative symbols—and reinterpret them within a contemporary collective artwork.This approach helps preserve and valorise traditional knowledge and craftsmanship while giving it new relevance in today's intercultural context. It can be particularly meaningful for women from rural areas who play an important role in maintaining craft traditions, creating opportunities for their knowledge to be shared, appreciated, and connected to wider cultural narratives. By bringing together symbols from different traditions, participants contribute to a richer and more inclusive understanding of cultural heritage and contemporary European identity.
symbols for unity
slavic
north-africain
middle-eastern
Why work with signs and symbols to enhance intercultural dialogue?
Encouraging creativity through using simple forms and accessible techniques
Because symbols often rely on simple geometric shapes, they are accessible even to participants who do not consider themselves artists. Drawing, combining, transforming, and arranging basic forms reduces the fear of making mistakes and allows everyone to participate creatively.The activity can be carried out using paper, magnets, recycled materials, wood, resin, digital tools, or collaborative online platforms. Its simplicity makes it adaptable to different contexts, resources, and participant groups.
Let's give it a try! Using only two triangles, create a symbol that represents EQUALITY. Rotate by clicking, move, overlap: rearrange the shapes as you wish.
Now let's represent BELONGING. This time, you can change their size by clicking on them.
Now represent DIVERISTY by changing the colors and moving the in to center all the four triangles.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Combining play and visual creativity
Creating an artwork can sometimes feel intimidating, especially for participants who do not consider themselves creative or artistic. It might also be regarded as something useless by some adult participants. By approaching visual creation through play—and play through visual creation—we make the creative process more accessible and enjoyable. Participants experiment, make choices, and express ideas without the pressure of producing a finished artwork. In this approach, playing becomes an act of creation, and creation becomes a form of play.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Learning through collaborative creation
Creating a shared symbolic board, mosaic, or visual game transforms participants from learners into co-creators. They contribute ideas, negotiate meanings, and collectively shape a common visual language. The process itself becomes an exercise in intercultural dialogue: participants discover similarities and differences, learn to appreciate diverse perspectives, and experience how collective meaning emerges through interaction.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Ecological and sustainable aspects
The activity naturally lends itself to ecological practices. Symbols can be created using reused cardboard, discarded packaging, recycled wood, fabric scraps, bottle caps, or other recovered materials. The resulting game boards and learning tools can then be reused by future groups, creating a tangible contribution that extends beyond the workshop itself.This gives participants a genuine sense of ownership while encouraging reflection on sustainability, reuse, and circularity.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Adaptability and Multiple Levels of Engagement
The activity can be adapted to different contexts, skill levels, interests, and time constraints. Facilitators may choose to create the board together with participants as part of the workshop, prepare it in advance and focus primarily on the creation and interpretation of symbols, or work with virtual game boards in online and blended learning environments.
Rules
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
Adaptability and Multiple Levels of Engagement
The level of craftsmanship can also vary according to participants' interests and abilities. Activities may involve simple paper-based techniques, collage, drawing, and painting, or more advanced approaches using wood, textiles, embroidery, ceramics, resin, or other traditional and contemporary craft practices. Virtual versions can be created using collaborative digital platforms, allowing participants to co-create, experiment with symbols, and exchange ideas across geographical and linguistic boundaries.This flexibility makes the method accessible to a wide range of learners while offering opportunities for deeper artistic, technical, and intercultural exploration.
Why create a board game as a collective artwork?
A living artwork and thinking tool
Unlike a finished artwork, a symbolic mosaic or game board remains open and constantly evolving. Every new arrangement produces new meanings, stories, and connections. Each time the activity is played, a different result emerges.In this sense, the board functions simultaneously as an artwork, a game, a communication tool, and a thinking tool. Its possibilities are virtually endless, allowing facilitators to adapt it to different themes, subjects, and learning objectives while continuously generating new opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and discovery.
Rules
Use a grid with as many squares as you wish. You can keep the board simple, with an elegant black-and-white minimalist design, or decorate it with ornamental patterns and symbols placed between the squares where the game pieces will be positioned. Depending on the theme and cultural context, these decorative elements can draw inspiration from a wide range of artistic and craft traditions.
You can also transform a complex ornament made up of repetitive elements into a game board. For example, by using stencils, geometric patterns, or traditional decorative motifs, the ornament itself can become the structure of the game, with the spaces between the motifs serving as positions for the game pieces. This approach offers an interesting way to explore the relationship between decorative arts, geometry, and play.
Prepare a set of vocabulary cards equal to the number of squares of one of the two alternating colours (25 in this example). The cards may be physical or virtual, as in this example.
The cards can be multilingual if the objective is to learn and compare terms in different languages while playing in an intercultural context. Alternatively, when working with participants with low literacy skills, audio recordings can be added to the cards to make the activity more accessible and inclusive.
Use this side of the card to provide more information about a topic. Focus on one concept. Make learning and communication more efficient.
Use this side of the card to provide more information about a topic. Focus on one concept. Make learning and communication more efficient.
Use this side of the card to provide more information about a topic. Focus on one concept. Make learning and communication more efficient.
Title
Memory
Respect
Write a brief description here
Diversity
Empathy
Cooperation
Trust
Trust
Dialogue
Creativity
Tradition
Title
Title
Democracy
Identity
Heritage
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Use this side to give more information about a topic.
Subtitle
Subtitle
Now each participant draws at least one card and thinks about how to represent the word, idea, or concept using a symbol or a simple sign. To support the creative process, facilitators may invite participants to reflect on some of the following questions:
Create your symbols on small square or circular pieces using paint, markers, or any other materials you prefer. Feel free to experiment with colours, shapes, and textures while keeping your symbols simple and easy to interpret. Then, play! You can invent different rules, but we recommend keeping the game simple, as the main objective is to reflect on concepts, ideas, and the relationships between them. The goal is to gradually fill the board with symbols and signs. Place the pieces only on squares of the same colour, creating a diagonal network of connected concepts across the board.
The player who places the symbol must identify the concept it represents and use the corresponding word in a meaningful sentence. For example, if the symbol represents empathy, a player could say: "Empathy helps us understand the feelings of others." Here, the cognitive process works in the opposite direction: instead of creating a symbol from a word, players must interpret the symbol and connect it to a concept before using it in context.
To facilitate the process, keep the list of concepts visible to all participants throughout the game.The next player chooses another symbol, places it on a neighbouring square, and creates a sentence using both concepts. For example, if environment is placed next to empathy, the player could say:"Empathy for future generations can encourage us to protect the environment."
As the board fills up, the sentences become increasingly complex because players must incorporate all the concepts represented on the neighbouring squares. For example, if environment, empathy, and cooperation are connected, a player might say:"Empathy and cooperation are essential if we want to protect the environment together."
For an additional challenge, place the symbols face down so that players cannot choose which symbol they will receive.This is a cooperative game: all players play together against the game itself. Participants are encouraged to help one another, translate, reformulate, explain ideas, and build sentences collaboratively.The game ends when the entire mosaic is filled with symbols.As the game progresses, collect and record the ideas, reflections, and associations that emerge. You may discover unexpected connections, creative solutions, or new perspectives on complex issues and shared challenges.
Concept and realisation:
Storytelling Rule (Core Rule): Each time a checker stops on a point, the player must: Explore the point by hovering over or clicking on the images. Discover the hidden word(s) revealed in the tooltips. Pronounce or write a sentence that integrates: all the revealed words from that point. The sentence: Must include every word revealed by the images, Can be poetic, narrative, abstract, symbolic, or descriptive, May continue an existing story or open a new narrative direction. Multiple Images, Multiple Words: If a point contains several images: Each image reveals one word, All words must be used in the sentence. One longer sentence may connect all the words revealed during the turn (optional rule). Winning the Game: The first player to bear off all their checkers wins the game. Alternatively, the game may end when: The story feels complete,or players agree to stop once a shared narrative has emerged.
Storytelling Backgammon – Rules (Image & Tooltip Version) Players 2 players or two groups (Optional solo mode: one player alternates turns and voices.) Game Pieces : The game uses two types of checkers: - Round checkers - Triangular checkers Objective: As in traditional backgammon: Move your checkers around the board, Bring them into their home area, Bear them off one by one. In addition, players collectively create a story through spoken or written sentences. The Board: The board is divided into 24 points. Each point is represented by one or more images. Each image contains a hidden word, revealed when the player hovers over or clicks on it (tooltip). The images act as visual story prompts, while the hidden words guide the narration. Movement: At the start of each turn, the player rolls the dice. The player moves their checkers according to the numbers rolled. Standard backgammon movement rules apply.