Children imitate!

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children - IDC '10, 2010

In this paper, we present a qualitative comparison of different sketching techniques, assessing their suitability for co-designing interaction design with children. It presents a study conducted in an experimental field research, in which children aged 6-12 were engaged in a co-design process, aimed to the creation of novel communication devices or services that fit their particular needs. The study compared embodied, physical sketching (body storming that was documented as photo stories) with disembodied, drawn sketching (comics), as for their creative results, and how the children, reportedly, felt during the creation process. The results indicate that embodied sketching techniques were more suitable for the children, both as for the quality of the results, and for the subjective experience of the children while designing.

2015

This work addresses the creativity and intuitive approach of children to improve design teaching and research visualisation. Three experiments involving children as user, tester, and informant are presented. Methods and results obtained by each experiment are described herein. Parts of the results are consistent with past research. In particular, children proved to be free from certain creativity barriers observed in students. Other findings are described and discussed. The results of the aforementioned experiences led to the development of two further experiments to target design teaching and research visualisation. The former experience involved undergraduate design students to test the disciplined improvisation teaching method. The latter involved children and researchers to test tangible representation in shared understanding. This last experience highlights certain challenges of the child’s role for researchers.

2009

Design researchers are increasingly interested in techniques that support creative teams in various design processes. The methods developed for sharing knowledge and generating solutions are mostly focusing on adults. Creative collaboration with and among children have a specific set of challenges to be considered. In this paper, we describe two design experiments that were conducted with children aged 7 to 9, to explore the applications of co-design methods with children. In those experiments, we observed that children are capable of utilizing make tools but have challenges in group dynamics and reflecting everyday experiences into design ideas.

Proceedings of DRS2018: Catalyst, vol. 7, 2018

This paper explores co-designing with children in the context of undergraduate industrial design education, and investigates the potential of performative and narrative-based design methods in co-designing with children. It addresses the early phases of design process and proposes a co-design method for supporting industrial design students’ eliciting children’s needs and preferences. The field study conducted involves a co-design session with 51 industrial design students and 24 third grade primary school children, and face to face semi-structured interviews with 24 design students who participated in the co-design session. The findings indicate that the proposed co-design method, I-Wonder-How, is supportive for industrial design students in their eliciting children’s needs and preferences. Based on the challenges experienced by design students during the co-design session and the post-session design process, the study draws attention to the importance of the entire co-design experience including pre and post phases. While the pre-session phase entails preparedness of the parties involved, the post-session phase requires design students to focus on reinterpreting and reconstructing design insights.

This article takes the position that space as designed is a material setting for learning, accommodating specific functions, while people can give meaning to space through their engagement with it, making it a place. This approach specifies that an essential characteristic of a child-centered design method is the active participation by children, teachers, and family members in planning elementary and middle schools. Since space is given meaning by its occupants, the actual users have to be included in the project: as children and their teachers and parents become active stakeholders, the spaces envisioned by professional designers can become “places” with their own special meanings and suited to the special needs of each community. The way of involving children in such a process should be age and culturally appropriate. Moreover, such participation in placemaking needs not end when the building is complete but can be extended into the life of the school. The article ends by proposing that learning environments should have “unfinished spaces” for children and teachers to manipulate and interpret, as a means to enhance a stronger involvement and attachment to spaces created by professional designers.

European Journal of Education Studies, 2024

This research examines whether children can acquire aesthetics through design in their everyday lives. Students recycle their old school seats, following their own ideas. The aim of the project is for children to get to know sustainable design through a construction of their own and to work cooperatively, resulting in offering their work to the community. The study comes to answer if children can implement a design thinking project in primary school if they have the ability to become the designers of their own things if they can understand sustainability through design, and if they can work with the intention of offering their project to the community. Students develop thinking and life skills through design thinking, experimentation, and playful art, as well as through sensory and narrative design, two processes that are perfectly natural in the world of children. Participatory work in a collaborative community form helps the children to step outside themselves and acquire empathy for the rest of the school community.

2016

Spatial designers, who engage children in their design process, most often frame children in this context as experts in their own lives. Findings from a study based at the University of Sheffield, point to new understandings of this participatory role, in which children move towards the role of designer. Drawing on interviews including visual methods with 16 spatial designers and guided by phenemonography, the paper seeks to represent the designers’ perspectives on the under-explored area of child–designer interactions. Findings suggest that the designers understand these interactions to comprise a reciprocal and co-created space – a sphere of behaviours, actions and ways of being which together becomes an enabler of change. It is proposed that what Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994) refers to as a ‘Third Space’ in which the ‘dominant culture might be temporarily subverted and its structural systems of power and control renegotiated’ can be re-imagined in this co-design context....

Interaction Design and …, 2002

Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, 2019

Child participation in design is a central focus of Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research, however, examples of participatory research with children are primarily situated in adult-led contexts (e.g. design lab, classroom, museum) where design objectives, activities and tools are devised and facilitated by adults. In this paper, we contribute to current discussions by describing a participatory study situated within the "child-led nature-play contexts" of nine children (7-11 years). By adapting the role of "least-adult" originally described in the childhood studies literature, we describe how this role can be established to access these exclusive play places and maintained through co-inquiry into each child's unique play practice. This research contributes to current discussions of child participation in CCI by (i) introducing the role of least-adult as an approach to engaging with children through participatory research, (ii) recognising the influence of place in shaping child participation , and (iii) pointing to spatial-temporal contextual factors as an important factor for enabling and shaping participatory research. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Participatory design.