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 the construction and utilization of a design feedback intervention during a real-life design project with a group of primary school children (aged 8–12). The goal of the intervention was to stimulate young novice designers’ creative thinking by guiding the design feedback dialogues with their peers and clients. The intervention was designed according to the following key principles: (1) guide towards a shared understanding of the design through low-level convergent feedback, (2) stimulate critical reflection and evaluation of the design to help identify and internalize possible shortcomings through high-level convergent feedback, and (3) provide a way to move forward by guiding new generative thoughts through high-level divergent feedback. Overall, the results show that the intervention can support young novice designers, their peers, and clients in engaging in constructive feedback dialogues, thereby stimulating their creative thinking. Our main contribution entails a detailed understanding of the successes and obstacles within the feedback dialogues, as guided by the intervention. Based on these results, we propose a set of refined design principles to inform feedback interventions. With this research we hope to give insight in the complexity of design feedback dialogues, while also inspiring design educators to actively try out these key principles.

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 present in a design process, which in turn stagnates the development of initial design ideas into final designs. Until now, research on design fixation has mainly focussed on creative idea generation in the early phases of the design process through analysing (intermediate) design ideas and completed artefacts. However, children’s fixation behaviours might be identified at an earlier moment through the conversations that take place in the classroom about their design ideas. To this end, we present a case study in which we explored early indicators of concept fixation of a group of 24 primary school children (ages 9–11) carrying out a co-design project. Fixation was observed through the manner in which the design teams responded to questions and comments from their peers and the client. Four categories of response behaviours indicating concept fixation emerged from the verbal data, namely: ‘band-aids’, ‘already-in-there’, ‘question-not-relevant’ and ‘it’s-not-possible’. We expect that the indicators will be helpful in identifying concept fixation during the design process, especially in an educational context. The process of identification of fixation, and reflecting on it, creates awareness. This is considered as an important step by professional designers towards guarding oneself from fixation episodes in future projects, and thus being more creative.

This paper presents a co-design project in a school with 16 children ages 10 to 11 in which three learning goals were defined upfront: creativity, empathy, and collaboration. The first part of the paper demonstrates how these co-design skills were implemented through an iterative process of explanation, practice, reflection, and application. Based on the results of post-interviews and short questionnaires, the second part discusses children's assessments of these skills. Whereas children reported fluctuations in applying these skills, the findings show an overall positive trend towards the end of the project. In future work, these findings will be triangulated with observational data.

This paper explores how co-design activities in schools can contribute to developing children's empathy. A pilot case study is presented in which eight 10- to 12-yearold children participated. The design theme was outdoor education. After discussing the co-design procedure, preliminary results about three empathic techniques are discussed: (1) reflection on the role of empathy in design, (2) storytelling to introduce the design challenge, and (3) defining the needs and wishes of the story's protagonists. The lessons learned are taken into account in a comprehensive follow-up study.

This paper explores indicators of design fixation by following the development of the design ideas of a group of primary school children (age 10-12) carrying out a co-design project. Our goal is to find ways to improve the early mastering of DT (Diverging Thinking) and CT (Converging Thinking) skills, which in turn will help them to develop their creative abilities. The case study presented here indicates that the children showed adherence to the initial design idea and a lack of openness for divergent thinking at some points in the later stages of the design process, which led to little or no development of their design idea. Furthermore, we observed that the occurrence of design fixation in later stages of the design process has a negative influence on the creative development of the design idea. We grouped moments indicating design fixation into four categories that emerged from the data, which we named: “Band-aids”, “Already taken care of”, “Question not used for elaboration” and “It’s not possible”. We expect that these categories we found, which could be classified as indicators, will be helpful for a facilitator in identifying design fixation during the design process and adjusting the facilitation techniques accordingly. We expect these indicators to be present in sessions with students on different educational levels, which make these findings relevant to the education of future design professionals.

Today, it has been broadly acknowledged in the CCI community that children are not only active learners and users of technology, but can also actively participate in the design process. However, it remains challenging to analyze children's experiences and creative contributions resulting from co-design activities (e.g. stories, paper prototypes, enacted ideas). This workshop will explore different ways to analyze children's (0 to 18 years) experiences and contributions in co-design activities, the perceived benefits and challenges of these approaches, and will serve as a venue for synthesizing productive practices that will move the CCI community forward.