To play, or not to play? That’s the question! Exploring A Child-Perspective On Play To Negotiate Power Relations In Participatory Design Processes Involving Children

Today, children are more and more involved in ParticipatoryDesign (PD) processes, which entail specific challenges, suchas negotiating power relations and making them explicit. Thispaper departs from the premise that ‘play’ can have a role indealing with these power relations and presents some well-knowndefinitions of play. However, most classifications of activitiesof play have been based upon adults’ definitions rather thanchildren’s understandings. Therefore, we introduce the case study‘Making Things’, in which we collaborated with a local youth workorganisation and children of 6 - 10 years old as a first attemptto come to a child-perspective on play that can be useful for PDprocesses. In this paper, we discuss the first phases of this casestudy, consisting of participant observations, ‘sensitizing packages’and a co-design workshop, and elucidate the major insights in achild-perspective on play that we gained from it and their relation tonegotiating power relations and making them explicit.

ISBN:978-1-910642-18-4

Jaar van publicatie:2016