A self-portrait: Design opportunities for a tool that supports children's involvement in brain-related health care

Introduction: Paediatric patients with disorders that involve brain functioning are particularly vulnerable with respect to including them in shared decision-making. Current tools are mostly paper or digital patient information. We lay the groundwork for improving engagement with a concept that we coined ‘the Self-Portrait’. The main goals...

Design Space Cards: Using a Card Deck to Navigate the Design Space of Interactive Play

The potential space of game designs is astronomically large. This paper shows how game design theories can be translated into a simple, tangible card deck that can assist in the exploration of new game designs within a broader "design space."By translating elements of game design theory into a physical card deck, we enable users to randomly...

Towards constructive design feedback dialogues: guiding peer and client feedback to stimulate children’s creative thinking

Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate divergent and convergent paths while designing. However, design feedback is often met with resistance, which counteracts its potential to help novice designers evaluate their design and generate new solution directions. In this paper, we report on...

Uncovering early indicators of fixation during the concept development stage of children’s design processes

In this paper, we explore the early indicators of design fixation occurring during the concept development stage of children’s design processes. This type of fixation, which we named: concept fixation, causes a blind adherence to the current (possibly unfavourable) state of a design idea. Its occurrence hampers the creative thinking processes...

Found in translation: Bringing reversal theory to design for play

In the design of objects for children’s play, support from psychology is often sought in general developmental overviews, typologies of play, and age-related performance and preference descriptions. These sources may give an insight into global aspects of child development but have limited utility for understanding the situated motivations of an...

Involving children and elderly in the development of new design concepts to become active together

Designers need to have an empathic understanding of their intended users if they are to design products that fit. This holds especially strong for elderly and children as user groups, because they are very different from the designer. However, it might be harder to obtain this information from children and elderly. This paper describes a...

Essential concepts in Toy Design Education: Aimlessness, Empathy and Play Value

The paper aims at contributing to the professional development of toy design education programs. It draws from the practice of a children’s toy design course at Delft University of Technology. It identifies three major concepts that greatly influence toy quality and that students find difficult to understand and apply: aimlessness, empathy and...

Get up and move: An interactive cuddly toy that stimulates physical activity

Health experts are worried about the increase in the number of overweight children and the decrease in activity levels among this age group. This project explores the possibilities of using interactive toys and social interaction in encouraging children to become more physically active. To arrive at the final concept, research was conducted into...