Rethinking children ’s roles in participatory design: The child as a process designer

We report on a case study in which we co-designed workshops together with 60 children aged 6 to 10 and 8 youth workers. The case study –called ‘Making Things’ –relied on a combination of methods, including participant observations, interviews, sensitising packages and participatory mapping. The reflection on the case study shows how our play perspective provided us with a way of making sense of children’s interactions with each other, adults, objects and their context. Our reflections further point to the emergence of the role of the child as a ‘process designer’. This role entails the collaboration with children for (co-)designing a PD process instead of merely participating in it. The implications of our findings, we hope, is that they extend the further debate on how to pursue genuine participation of children in PD.
Source: International Journal of Child Computer Interaction - Category: Child Development Source Type: research