Streets for People

Abstract

In this paper, we present a socio-technical process designed to engage children in an ongoing urban design project-Streets for People-in Newcastle, UK. We translated urban design proposals developed by residents and the local authority to enable children to contribute ideas to the project. Our process comprised three stages: situated explorations and evidence gathering through digitally supported neighbourhood walks; issue mapping and peer-to-peer discussions using an online engagement platform; and faceto-face dialogue between children, residents, and the local authority through a 'Town Hall' event. We report insights gained through our engagement and show how our activities facilitated issue advocacy and the development of children's capacities, but also surfaced tensions around the agency of children in political processes. We reflect on the challenges of working in this space, and discuss wider implications for technology design and ethical questions that 'scaling up' such work might pose.

Designing for Digital Playing Out

“…What remains underexplored in extant work is how design for playing out with IoT may support social interaction and physical wellbeing and how these further connect to notions of community cohesion and placemaking. In respect to the latter, our work builds on [12,37] who describe how public space can be subverted in ways that can be meaningful for children [37]; in doing so, we aim to open-up opportunities, adding important new voices as we re-make spaces owned by the community [12]. Also, we note that there is a dearth of research that methodically observes the physical properties and affordances of IoT technologies/ resources, which may be exploited by interaction designers for enhancing pervasive play outdoors.…”

Engaging Children to Co-create Outdoor Play Activities for Place-making

“…the right to express these needs [14], they are not always included in the development of the urban space [9,36,41]. Involving children in decision-making encourages them to take ownership of their environment [36], become more active and engaged in their neighbourhood [26], with increasing trust towards municipal actors [35,40], enabling them to feel more at home in their local community [38]. It is thus important for children to connect with their direct living environment, to acquire a sense of belonging [31,48] and civic agency [37].…”

“…Some papers (e.g. [9,31,36]) call this process place-making [36]. Place-making can facilitate children's connection with the physical space of their neighbourhood and hence provide the pathway for children to become engaged and feel a sense of belonging towards their local environment.…”

“…Place-making can facilitate children's connection with the physical space of their neighbourhood and hence provide the pathway for children to become engaged and feel a sense of belonging towards their local environment. Nonetheless, more research into place-making is necessary, as current placemaking processes are, by some, considered to be uninspiring and irrelevant for children [36], and the dynamics of involving children in such processes are not properly understood [9].…”

“…This paper builds on the limited amount of promising research (e.g. [10,29,36,48]) with the same goal to explore which PD methods and activities are most appropriate when working with children. Researchers indeed claim that PD methods can increase sense of place, but it is not clear how this exactly happens and which elements of the PD process contribute to this.…”