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The participation of children in the design of new technology: a discussion paper
By Ben Williamson, Learning Researcher, Futurelab
Page 5 of 7 |
forward their points of view or ideas. The interventions of an adult facilitator can also become overbearing for children, who may begin to feel their contributions are being ignored. Scaife et al also raise the problem of an interdisciplinary team imposing their own views on classroom culture, especially if insufficient time is given to early stage research with the child and teacher informant groups and insufficient definition given to the prototyping phase.
2.3 Design partners
There are two principal approaches to working with target users as design partners. These are 'participant design' and 'cooperative inquiry'.
2.3.1 Participant design
Participant design (PD) (Schuler and Mamioka 1993) treats users as partners in the design process who contribute equally throughout the product development cycle and work more as peers within the design team than as end-users. Primarily, PD has been mobilised successfully with groups of adults who are able to work together as peers naturally. Indeed, PD is rooted in the Scandinavian approach of the late 1970s and through the 1980s which was principally trades union-motivated and intended to enhance professional development for, among others, graphics workers and hospital workers (see the UTOPIA and Florence projects (Bjerknes and Bratteteig 1995)). Many of the techniques pioneered in PD over the last two decades have been co-opted into other techniques, such as co-operative inquiry. The original Scandinavian work was, however, primarily adult-oriented and politically motivated; still, discussions continue as to the level of societal influence that democratic design processes can leverage (Bjerknes and Bratteteig 1995).
2.3.2 Cooperative inquiry
The cooperative inquiry methods developed by Allison Druin and her team at the University of Maryland have come to dominate HCI and interaction design conferences and publications in more recent years. This approach involves children as equal members within an inter-generational and multi-disciplinary design team, often comprising computer scientists, educators and artists (Druin 1999). It involves working with groups of children on a regular basis - usually once or twice a week in out-of-school clubs over the course of at least one year. Some children return in later years as more experienced facilitators. During cooperative inquiry research 'children and adults write in journals, work on low-tech prototypes, brainstorm on paper or sticky notes, draw pictures, and think about how technology should change' (Knudtzon 2003: 51). As a result of this process, both children and adults involved in the process are seen to proceed through four distinct roles or stages:
1. As a learner making sense of the process of invention
2. As a critic of what is good and bad in other inventions
3. As inventors suggesting new ideas
4. As technology design partners collaborating with adults and children in the invention process (Druin and Fast 2002).
Cooperative inquiry has its own established techniques, drawing on a range of activities that can be performed with children. The first step is 'contextual inquiry', during which adult and child participants, working as a team of researchers, 'observe and analyse the users' environment for patterns of activity, communication, artifacts, and cultural relationships' (Druin 1999). This allows both the children being observed to express their needs and wants from technology within their own social settings and in forms that are more comfortable than face-to-face interviews, and the researchers to note things down as they see them. This note-taking often takes many different forms, as verbal notes or as simple flow charts, diagrams and illustrations, as appropriate to the abilities, experiences and skills of the participants. It is usually not appropriate, for instance, to expect 7 year-olds to write extensive contemporaneous notes. Contextual inquiry thus allows the research group to identify the needs of the user group, and to proceed on to the next stage of participatory design. At this stage, the team develops low-tech prototypes of their ideas, including storyboards, plasticine models, drawings and sticky-notes.
The final stage in this process of cooperative inquiry is technology immersion. At this stage, the children are put in an environment with technology resources that they might not normally have access to, so that they begin to understand and explore potentialities that would otherwise be inconceivable to them. This freedom to explore technology is also observed using similar techniques to contextual inquiry, and subsequent low-tech and gradually high-tech prototype iterations emerge.
2.3.3 Design-centred learning
Druin (1999) has come to describe the types of learning that occur during cooperative inquiry as 'design-centred learning'. Highly constructivist in its principles, design-centred learning enables all participants to have a meaningful learning experience as part of working as a team - whether these are content-based learning experiences or skills in working together as interdisciplinary and even intergenerational teams. Learners in the process begin to see themselves as more than just users of technology, but rather inventors and innovators. It also has resonance with the influential research of the New London Group (1996) who describe ideal learning environments in terms of design. In a somewhat similar manner to Druin and Fast's (2002) conception of child as learner, critic and inventor, the New London Group suggest that children proceed through three 'design' phases in the construction of meaning and knowledge:
1. Using previously 'designed' resources to discover new things
2. 'Designing' meanings through interactions with and between these resources
3. Producing 'redesigned' resources that feed back into the first stage.
In the New London Group's conception, 'design' is more than technology invention - it is about identifying the social and cultural 'fixedness' of learning resources, and transforming meaning through utilising these resources alongside each other.
2.3.4 Problems with design partnerships
Cooperative inquiry has proven very beneficial for the students, designers and researchers involved. Of the approaches described it is clearly the most democratic in principle. However, it remains primarily university-led, and works well only with very small groups - precluding larger groups of children from participation at all. From this perspective, it presents only a very limited form of democracy. What is more, Druin (1999) and Knudtzon et al (2003), amongst others, report that most children above the age of about 10 years tend to describe what they see as the 'right answers', or what is 'supposed to be', rather than acknowledging the potential for creative thinking around technology. For such reasons, cooperative inquiry in particular has to date proved unsuccessful in working and designing with older children - though this should not preclude other researchers and designers from
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