Not just bits of paper: design sessions with children

Foundations and Trends in Human-computer Interaction, 2012

Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Terminology 2 Design Process and Goals 2.1 Define the Problem 2.2 Research the Problem-Gather Requirements 2.3 Create Multiple Solutions (Brainstorming) 2.4 Evaluate Solutions 2.5 Reflect Outcomes, Repeat/Iterate the Design 2.6 Design Process and Goals Summary 3 Brief Literature Survey: Involving Users in the Design Process 3.1 How Have Adult Users Been Involved in the Technology Design Process? 3.2 How is Designing for Children Different from Designing for Adults? 3.3 How Have Children Been Involved in the Design Process? 3.4 Why Co-Design with Children? 4 Methods of Designing with Children 4.1 Design Approaches that are Mindful of Children 4.2 Bluebells 4.3 Bonded Design 4.4 Distributed Co-Design 4.5 Cooperative Inquiry 4.6 Children as Software Designers

Designers of children's technology and software face distinctive challenges. Many design principles used for adult interfaces cannot be applied to children's products because the needs, skills, and expectations of this user population are drastically different than those of adults. In recent years, designers have started developing design principles for children, but this work has not been collected in one place. This paper takes a first step towards this goal: based on an analysis of a wide range of research into children's technology, we present a catalogue of design principles for children's technology that are oriented towards the needs of designers.

… of the 8th International Conference on …, 2009

The existing knowledge base on child development offers a wealth of information that can be useful for the design of children's technology. Furthermore, academic journals and conference proceedings provide us with a constant stream of new research papers on child-computer interaction and interaction design for children. It will require some effort from designers to gather and digest the scattered research results and theoretical knowledge applicable to their products. We conducted an extended research project whereby the existing knowledge relating to the design of technology for children aged five to eight have been gathered and presented in a way that makes it accessible and useful to designers in practice. This paper provides and extract from that research, focusing on ten useful lessons learnt from existing literature.

Communications of The ACM, 2005

Working with Young Children as TECHNOLOGY DESIGN PARTNERS How children's technology is developed, and who is involved in the process, can vary greatly. While there are many roles children can play in the design of new technology, at the University of Maryland we have focused on partnering with children ages 7-11. We have found these intergenerational partnerships can lead to unexpected technology innovations, as well as establishing design methods for working with children. Influenced by the cooperative design practices of the Scandinavian countries, and participatory design and contextual inquiry in the U.S., we have developed design methods for working with children called Cooperative Inquiry [3, 4]. A case study illustrates how even young children can contribute to the technology design process.

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.

International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 2021

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) is a steadily growing field that focuses on children as a prominent and emergent user group. For more than twenty years, the Interaction Design for Children (IDC) community has developed, extended, and advanced research and design methods for children's involvement in designing and evaluating interactive technologies. However, as the CCI field evolves, the need arises for an integrated understanding of interaction design methods currently applied. To that end, we analyzed 272 full papers across a selection of journals and conference venues from 2005 to 2020. Our review contributes to the literature on this topic by (1) examining a holistic child population, including developmentally diverse children and children from 0 to 18 years old, (2) illustrating the interplay of children's and adults' roles across different methods, and (3) identifying patterns of triangulation in the methods applied while taking recent ethical debates about children's involvement in design into account. While we found that most studies were conducted in natural settings, we observed a preference for evaluating interactive artifacts at a single point in time. Method triangulation was applied in two-thirds of the papers, with a preference for qualitative methods. Researchers used triangulation predominantly with respect to mainstream methods that were not specifically developed for child participants, such as user observation combined with semi-structured interviews or activity logging. However, the CCI field employs a wide variety of creative design methods which engage children more actively in the design process by having them take on roles such as informant and design partner. In turn, we see that more passive children's roles, e.g., user or tester, are more often linked to an expert mindset by the adult. Adults take on a wider spectrum of roles in the design process when addressing specific developmental groups, such as children with autism spectrum disorder. We conclude with a critical discussion about the constraints involved in conducting CCI research and discuss implications that can inform future methodological advances in the field and underlying challenges.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

How children's technology is developed, and who is involved in the process, can vary greatly. While there are many roles children can play in the design of new technology, at the University of Maryland we have focused on partnering with children ages 7-11. We have found these intergenerational partnerships can lead to unexpected technology innovations, as well as establishing design methods for working with children. Influenced by the cooperative design practices of the Scandinavian countries, and participatory design and contextual inquiry in the U.S., we have developed design methods for working with children called Cooperative Inquiry .

Cognition, Technology & Work, 2008

The field of child-computer interaction has received growing attention as a result of the penetration of IT into children's everyday lives. Consequently, the involvement of children in the design of children's technology has been widely discussed. So far, literature on children's involvement in design has mainly treated design with children as a distinct design discipline regarding children as ''cognitive incomplete'' in comparison with adult users. With a point of departure in the framework of socio-cultural activity theory, this paper provides a new perspective on design with children, based on understanding children as participants in meaningful communities of practices. Thus, we argue that children could and should be involved in design on the same terms as adult users; children are treated as experts in their everyday lives and we cannot design future IT for children without involving these experts. The paper introduces the BRIDGE method including a palette of design techniques as a practice-based method for designing with children based on this perspective.