Understanding Children's Design Thinking Processes Through Participatory Design

• In Event: Making the Future: Addressing Critiques, Transitions, and New Challenges in Maker Education

Abstract

Objective: Human-computer interaction (HCI) education, especially that which focuses on design-related concepts and principles, is of increasing interest to the HCI communities. However, the design thinking often involved in HCI education is an inherently personal undertaking, and individual characteristics of designers’ personalities have the potential to impact how they design artifacts. Design thinking focuses on its user-centered approach, rapid prototyping, and abductive thinking (Kolko, 2015). However, most formal HCI and design education occurs during undergraduate and/or graduate years, which makes it difficult to study the development and learning progressions of design thinking in children. To study the development of children’s design thinking around user-experience (UX) design, we examined the co-design process of KidsTeam UW, an intergenerational co-design team of adults and children (ages 7 – 11). Our investigation is a case study of 41 co-design sessions within three years.
Perspective: Our team focuses on using Cooperative Inquiry (Druin, 2002; Yip et al., 2017), a participatory design (PD) method that emphasizes children and adults as equal and equitable design partners. In this study, we used Cooperative Inquiry (Druin, 2002; Yip et al., 2017) to work closely with children, libraries, and researchers as equal design partners. In a framework of equal partnerships between adults and children, we examine relationship building, facilitation, designing together, and idea generation.
Method & Results: This study is a case study (Merriem, 2009) of children’s participation in KidsTeam UW, an intergenerational co-design group of children (ages 7 – 11) and adults. Each of these children has spent at minimum 60 – 90 co-design sessions with our team building, creating, and co-designing new technologies and digital learning activities. In the course of one year, KidsTeam UW meets a full week during the summer and twice a week during the school year (October to December, February to May) on a university campus (for 90-minute sessions). The co-design cycle is repeated the following year, with some children opting to stay for another year and others choosing to depart. Core adults in this group consisted of one professor, postdoctoral scholars, and graduate and undergraduate students. To understand how children approach design thinking during participation in co-design, we used a deductive coding approach with constant comparative analysis and interaction analysis. From this analysis, we determined that children’s design thinking engagement moves along four spectrums: 1) group vs. individual work; 2) creation vs. evaluation responses; 3) fixation vs. diversity of idea generation; and 4) narrow vs. empathetic conceptions of people.
Significance: Our work contributes a close examination of how design thinking can be profiled in children over a period of time. We developed implications for participatory design and the learning progression development within HCI education.

Author

• Jason Yip, University of Washington - Seattle