Reflection and awareness in the design process: children ideating, programming and prototyping smart objects

Abstract

Design of new technology with children has been widely investigated, and lately several workshops have been organised with children for designing novel IoT or smart objects, e.g., for smart cities or parks. Gradually, the research focus has shifted, from an analysis of the technology itself, which children help create, towards an analysis of children's possible gains in design workshops. However, in spite of several recent efforts, it is still unclear what happens when children participate in diverse parts of a design process, ranging from ideation to prototyping. This paper investigates it, focussing on children's gains in relation to their knowledge of design. A structured design workshop can help obtain such gains and analyse their achievements. Therefore this paper presents a structured design workshop with 27 children, aged from 11 to 14 years old, ideating, programming and prototyping smart objects for their town park. The workshops was structured and centred around a board-game with cards, so as to playfully make children reflect about design, and promote their awareness of what they were doing. Data were gathered in relation to children's reflections from different perspectives, during the workshop, and in relation to their awareness of design, after the workshop. The analysis of the gathered data suggests that the workshop positively affected children's reflections on design and awareness of design, giving indications for future work concerning critical design with children.The order of authors is alphabetical. All authors gave major contributions to the research. In particular, Gennari supervised the overall research design, and acted as moderator. Matera supervised the data processing, and acted as moderator. Melonio supervised the game design, and acted as moderator. Roumelioti developed the game design, and acted as technical facilitator. Rizvi managed the electronics and developed programming snippets for the programming and prototyping part, and acted as technical facilitator. All authors contributed to the paper writing, which was coordinated by Rosella Gennari.

The evolution of a toolkit for smart-thing design with children through action research

“…Results of 2019 actions were reported separately in other publications, however mainly in relation to quantitative data processing (Gennari, Matera, Melonio, Rizvi, & Roumelioti, 2020a, 2020bMelonio et al, 2020;. This paper instead considers qualitative data related to 2019 actions, and findings are presented in relation to the evolution of the toolkit for the first time.…”

“…Others also adopt similar stages but stress the need of embedding reflections along all stages, e.g., Kinnula and Iivari (2019) and Smith et al (2015). All highlight the relevance and difficulty of promoting multiple types of reflection during design (e.g., individual, with peers or adults), as reflecting asks children to develop structured insights (Gennari et al, 2020b;Kinnula & Iivari, 2019;Zhang, Bekker, Markopoulos, & Brok, 2020). Finally, Smith et al introduce a design brief at the start of the design process to motivate children and engage them in the design context (Smith et al, 2015).…”

“…Similarly, SNaP has decks of cards for inputs and outputs, with icons and language adequate for children. Input and output devices are represented in SNaP cards by considering diverse sorts of smart thing technology for children and teens, without committing to a specific one, and yet clearly matching common input and output devices (Gennari et al, 2020b).…”

Children’s Participation in the Design of Smart Solutions: A Literature Review

“…The SNaP toolkit comes into two versions, a physical one (see Figure 5) and a digital one (see left of Figure 6). They have both been used in workshops with children, in presence and at-a-distance described in [48][49][50][51] and in [52,53] respectively. The SNaP toolkit supports children or teens in the entire design workflow, by, firstly, enabling them to familiarise with smart-object components (e.g., sensors, actuators) and, secondly, it guides them in ideating novel smart objects by conceptualising them on boards.…”