Kids in Design meeting in Delft
About four years ago, Pieter Jan Stappers from the faculty of Industrial Design at TU Delft introduced me to one of his PhD students, Fenne Van Doorn, and her co-supervisor Mathieu Gielen. Since then, Mathieu, Fenne and I meet at least two times a year to discuss our research about designing for and with children. We used to call our special interest group the ‘CoDesign KidGroup’, but recently renamed it to ‘Kids in Design’ (KID) to better fit the slightly broadened scope. Over the past few years, the group has been steadily growing. First, Remke Klapwijk and Annemarie Looijenga from the Science Centre (TU Delft) joined the group. Afterwards, Marikken Hoiseth (NTNU), Alice Schut (TU Delft), Femke Ijsseldijk (Nieuwe Muze), Annelies Vaneycken (University of Gothenburg) and Anke Herder (NHL University of Applied Sciences) followed. What we all have in common is that we look for appropriate and meaningful ways to give children a voice in design and research processes.
Last Friday we had another meeting in Delft. After giving an update about our current research activities, we discussed the GLID method developed by my Mintlab (KU Leuven – imec) colleague Jan Derboven and myself to analyse co-design outcomes. Everyone had read our recently published paper in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies beforehand (see: http://bit.ly/2dlZxoj), and Fenne and Alice even did a first attempt to apply the method in an ongoing case study. They involved children in a series of co-design sessions to design the school gym of the future. What they found especially useful about the method is the way it facilitates an analysis of the social relationships embedded in children’s co-constructed artefacts and their verbal explanation. This, in turn, reveals children’s view about a specific aspect of reality, also referred to as the discourse embedded in communication. Fenne and Alice did not yet drill down to children’s negotiated values embedded in co-design outcomes, but hopefully, they will be able to do so in the future. In any case, I would love to co-author a paper on their experiences with the GLID method, discussing if and how it could be improved further.
In the afternoon, Anke discussed her research at the Center for Discourse and Learning in more detail. Anke focuses on co-writing activities in the context of inquiry learning of primary school children. Her goal is to gain more insight into interactional language and how knowledge construction is established around certain topics. To put her ideas into practice, we analysed some dialogues between children and an adult facilitator in the ‘School Gym of the Future’ project. It had never occurred to me how useful conversation analysis could be when involving children as design partners or co-researchers. The analysis revealed, among other things, how certain types of questions (e.g. information seeking question) and interaction patterns (e.g. break lengths, turn taking) influence the conversation and how ideas are gradually extended, elaborated and enhanced. Although conversation analysis is time consuming, it can be a valuable approach to analyse children’s verbal explanation of their co-constructed artifact. Interestingly, conversation analysis can fit within the GLID method to analyse the verbal mode of communication.
Afterwards, Annemarie talked about the ‘Playing and Learning Child’ seminar she recently attended in Finland, and Femke discussed her ideas for a PhD proposal. We concluded the meeting by discussing ideas for future collaborations. Fenne proposed to co-organise an academic workshop at the upcoming Interaction Design and Children conference (IDC 2017) at Stanford University (see: http://idc2017.stanford.edu). The next coming weeks we will work on a workshop proposal. The topic will be similar to what we discussed during the KID meeting: analyzing children’s (creative) contributions at the front end of design. To be continued!