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The participation of children in the design of new technology: a discussion paper
By Ben Williamson, Learning Researcher, Futurelab
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Executive Summary
The participation of children in the research, design, and development of educational new technology has gained popularity in recent years, with methodological approaches ranging from usability testing at the end of a production cycle to long-term inter-generational partnership. Despite this, most commercial organisations developing new technology for children do not involve their target group in the design phase at all. In the USA only 5% do so. Most participative design approaches are currently university-led.
Existing participative approaches draw on several rationales. Many researchers argue that children learn best when engaged in authentic activities that matter to them in their everyday lives rather than abstract conceptual tasks. Authentic learning can only occur if we work with children on what is authentic to them. Additionally, a great deal of participative design is based on constructivist models of learning, in which schools are viewed less as environments for assimilating data, and more as environments of active inquiry, investigation and constructing new understandings.
Other researchers are more interested in the forms of democratic participation promoted by the involvement of children in design. The democratic ideal, they suggest, is one in which children's voices are heard and have an impact on their education. It has been argued that much new technology designed without the participation of users is constrictive, only offering opportunities for reactive interactivity rather than the elasticity to stretch students' potential for innovation and creativity.
The most democratic forms of participative design involve children in long-term design partnerships, but such approaches remain to date largely university-based and difficult to implement both commercially and in schools. An iterative 'informant design' methodology, which brings children and teachers together with researchers and designers in a staged process, is described, with recommendations for practitioners in education and the commercial sector in developing approaches to including children in new technology design.
Introduction
In recent years there has been growing debate around the extent to which children can or should be involved as participants in the design process when developing new technology 1 for children. Participative approaches 2 range from the short-term involvement of children in the evaluation of near-complete products, to regular and frequent involvement throughout a product's development cycle. At the root of these approaches are some fundamental questions about the role of new technology in education and, more importantly, how the balance in interactions between children, their teachers, and designers, might stimulate new forms of learning, and contribute to better learning resources.
Since the late 1990s, participative design with children has been most influentially exemplified by the work of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland. Their 'cooperative inquiry' methodology (Druin 1999) treats children as long-term design partners alongside educators, computer scientists and artists. The approach regards children and adults alike as equal stakeholders (Druin 2002) in multi-disciplinary and inter-generational teams, participating in all stages of research, design, development, and technology prototyping.
This mode of inquiry is not, however, exclusively new. Rather, it draws on a range of techniques developed over the last few decades that have recruited children into specific roles in the design process. Seymour Papert's research group at MIT, for example, had already begun to experiment with child participation in the late 1960s and early 70s (Papert 1980). In the Scandinavian countries in the 1970s and 80s, 'participant design' practices with adults were in evidence across a range of industries as worker involvement in the design of working practices, motivated by trades unions, was regarded as a catalyst for societal change (Bjerknes, Ehn & Kyng 1987). The 1980s also saw the growth of 'user-centred design' practices in commercial environments on both sides of the Atlantic (Gould and Lewis 1985). In the field of Human-Computer Interaction - a discipline which only came to fruition in the early 1980s - it has for some time been regarded as unusual for children to be excluded from design practices (Scaife et al 1997).
Today, then, learner involvement in design is increasingly becoming viewed as a common sense approach to avoiding the pitfalls of designing resources that children simply cannot stand, or cannot understand (Kafai, 2001).
Despite this involvement of children in design within academic research settings, however, within the commercial context user involvement in design schedules remains a persistently under-used strategy. Children's television provides a good example. On one hand, Ragdoll, the team behind Teletubbies and Boohbah, have pioneered work with children in the design phase of production, observing and utilising children's play patterns within the context of their productions. On the other, HIT Entertainment of Barney and Bob the Builder fame have only very recently begun to develop such approaches. For the small-scale multimedia development house, working to tight schedules and budgets, the incentive to find
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1 For the sake of brevity, the term 'new technology' is used to mean interactive media, including websites, CD-Roms, and other interactive software, as well as hardware and, of course, any innovation in between. back to report
2 The terms 'participative approaches' and 'participative design' are used in a broad sense to describe any level of child or user participation in new technology design, not to describe one particular approach. back to report
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