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 highlevel 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.
This paper presents a structured way to evaluate challenging group or 'co-design dynamics' in participatory design processes with children. In the form of a critical reflection on a project in which 103 children were involved as design partners, we describe the most prevalent co-design dynamics. For example, some groups rush too quickly towards consensus to safeguard group cohesiveness instead of examining other choice alternatives (i.e., groupthink). Besides 'groupthink' we describe five more challenging co-design dynamics: 'laughing out loud', 'free riding', 'unequal power', 'apart together' and 'destructive conflict'. We argue that balancing these dynamics has a positive impact on the dialectic process of developing values and ideas in participatory design, as well as on children's motivation. Therefore, the CCI community could benefit from our in-depth exploration and categorization of challenging group dynamics when co-designing technology with children.
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.A. Schut et al.
This paper explores the use of participants as research collaborators in the domain of contextual user research. In participatory-and co-design, users participate increasingly early in the design process. When conducting user research in order to gain contextual knowledge about the lives, experiences and wishes of users, collaborators can be of help in setting up, conducting research and analyzing the data. A case study was conducted to investigate if and how children are able to perform as research collaborators. Children conducted interviews with other participants, and in doing increased their knowledge about people close to them, and about themselves. The gained insights were personal and the used personas proved to be a valuable tool. In the role of researcher, the children discovered similarities and differences between themselves and others. Besides gaining valuable insights from their participants, they accessed and shared their own experiences, so while listening to others, the children got sensitized themselves. In other words, the current study found that next to gathering more data, "super-sources" are created when children become research collaborators.
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 coresearchers to gather contextual knowledge. In that study 20 children aged 9-12 interviewed their peers or their grandparents. One of the findings from that study was that the professional role of the co-researcher is a motivating and influencing factor, which we want to enhance in a follow-up study. Another finding was that the way of reporting (audio-recording and notes in a research booklet) could be improved.In the present study 28 children (aged 9/10) acted as coresearchers by interviewing their peers. The goal of this study was to enhance the professional role of the children and to experiment with different recording devices, in order to explore the methodological consequences.Using co-research gives an opportunity to go to places that are less accessible to lead researchers, like the child's room, and looking at it through the children's perspective. Making a choice between audio recorders and video cameras depends on the research set up and topic, in this case video added a lot of context since we were interested in personal belongings and a tour though their bedroom. It was found that giving mobile phones to coresearchers in order to record their interviews is not advisable; the quality of the audio is not that good and switching between making pictures and explaining them on audio is hard for them.
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