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...

Remote co-development of a design education toolkit for children rural Kenya

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...

Effects of Convergent and Divergent Feedback on Creative Thinking During Children’s Design Processes

This paper explores patterns in the feedback preceding instances of design fixation in children (age 9 to 11) carrying out a co-design project. Our goal is to find ways to improve the early mastering of their divergent (DT) and convergent thinking (CT) skills, which in turn will help the children to develop their creative abilities. Previous...

Creativity in co-Design for Physical Education: Comparing Contributions of Children and Professionals

This study is carried out within the context of a research and innovation<br/>project Co-design with Kids that aims to support teaching of broad so-called ‘21st<br/>century’ skills. In this project, design toolboxes for use within primary education<br/>are developed and studied, with real life clients and assignments. In the case<br/>described...

Children as co-researchers: More than just a role-play

Co-research is a method that engages participants in contextual user research by giving them the role of researcher. This method aids to capture their input in the fuzzy front end of the design process. A previous study [5] showed that children can act as co- researchers to gather contextual knowledge. In that study 20 children aged 9-12...

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...

Rebel by design: The merits of rebellious play and how to design for it

Play as a behavioural domain is characterized by freedom and flexibility, which contribute to both short-term and lasting wellbeing. Children play increasingly under supervision of adults, who generally perceive rough and rebellious behaviour negatively. The paper argues that also rebelliousness is a valuable aspect of play. The psychological...

Friends sharing opinions: Users become co-researchers to evaluate design concepts

The role of users in design is diversifying and increasing. Besides product evaluations and idea-generation sessions, users can collaborate in research that aims to find requirements for design by acting as researchers themselves. Earlier studies have addressed a variety of reasons why giving users the role of co-researcher makes sense: users...

Mapping children's experiences: Adapting contextmapping tools to child participants

Within the area of user-centered design, Contextmapping is an approach to participatory user experience research that provides designers and user researchers with a clear workflow and hands-on toolkit. It acknowledges the user as the expert of his or her own experiences and aims to deliver rich insights to designers: deep, authentic and...

Controlling experience or experiencing control? Reversal theory & design for play

Using Reversal Theory (Apter, 2002, 2007a) as an example this paper proposes a way to ‘translate’ a psychological concept into the realm of design in a way that maximizes understanding and potential for application in the context of play. The given presentation of Reversal Theory is the result of the analysis of student’s use of available...

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...