Project
Child’s play? Opening up Participatory Design processes to children
Children’s participation has become an important priority throughout Europe in areas such as national policy and city-making. Since the 1990s, increasing attention has been paid to children as a special user group in design processes. Yet children’s involvement in design has often been criticised as being ‘fast and furious’ or ‘reduced’ participation. Children’s involvement is generally restricted to a particular, short-term phase of the design process, in which children’s roles are rather limited and the methods are predetermined by adults.
As a counterweight to the 'fast and furious' and 'reduced' ways of involving children in design, this PhD research project aims to open up Participatory Design (PD) processes to children in order to pursue empowering and genuine forms of participation. The main research question of this PhD research is therefore as follows: “How can we open up PD processes to children by rethinking the time frames of children’s participation, reconsidering children’s roles and facilitating children to design PD methods?” To answer this question, three ways of opening up PD processes to children are considered, combining a focus on infrastructuring with the aim of rethinking children's roles and addressing methodological challenges related to children’s participation. In doing so, this PhD research emphasizes the notion of infrastructuring to account for children’s participation in long-term, sustained PD processes.
This PhD research combines insights from the fields of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) and Participatory Design (PD) and draws on the findings from three design experiments with children between 6 and 16 years old. It culminates in a methodological framework that provides analytical, conceptual and operational support for opening up PD processes to children. This framework offers (1) a lens for extending the time frames of children’s participation in design; (2) an encompassing typology for children’s roles across the spectrum of PD; and (3) five concrete handles for involving children in (co-)designing the PD process and the methods used in it. Besides providing guidance to designers, design researchers, practitioners and others concerned with children’s participation, the added value of the methodological framework is that it can provide a comprehensive understanding and vocabulary for considering children’s participation in relation to infrastructuring. The framework places children’s participation in a holistic context, going beyond formal participation in the design process and project-based temporality. In this way, it fills in a missing view on children’s participation that can be positioned before, after and in-between PD processes.