Rethinking children's roles in participatory design: The child as a process designer

Although children’s roles in Participatory Design (PD) processes have been more or less stable for the last two decades, the recent academic debates have urged us to rethink these traditional roles in order to aim for genuine forms of participation. In this article, we feed this discussion by exploring a play perspective towards the role of children in a PD process. We report on a case study in which we co-designed workshops together with 60 children aged 6 to 10 and 8 youth workers. The case study – called ‘Making Things’ – relied on a combination of methods, including participant observations, interviews, sensitising packages and participatory mapping. The reflection on the case study shows how our play perspective provided us with a way of making sense of children’s interactions with each other, adults, objects and their context. Our reflectionsfurther point to the emergence of the role of the child as a ‘process designer’. This role entails the collaboration with children for (co-)designing a PD process instead of merely participating in it. The implications of our findings, we hope, is that they extend the further debate on how to pursue genuine participation of children in PD.

Publication year:2018