Peter Börjesson

Designing technology for and with developmentally diverse children: a systematic literature review

This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of research papers on the involvement of developmentally diverse children in design. The review shows that there is a growing tendency to include developmentally diverse children in the design process. Compared to other groups of developmentally diverse children, children with high-functioning autism between 8 and 12 years old are the ones that are most often actively involved in the design process. Other groups of children often have a more passive role, being observed, both in the requirements, design and evaluation phase. Working with mixed groups of children, either children with different disabilities, or typically developing children together with developmentally diverse children, also occurs more seldom. Compared to design with typically developing children, adults are involved more intensively in the design, either as users, proxies, experts and/or facilitators. Specific guidelines for how to prepare and perform design sessions with developmentally diverse children often emphasize the need for a coherence of activities, a clear structure in the sessions, verbal as well as textual explanations, and the active participation of caregivers, teachers and therapists. Based on these findings we give several suggestions for further research.

Legitimate Participation in the Classroom Context: Adding Learning Goals to Participatory Design

In this paper we examine the challenges of introducing learning goals in Participatory Design (PD) activities in a school context. In order to increase the transparency of mutual learning in accordance with traditional PD values, we argue that learning through design approaches can inspire us to actively formulate learning goals, stage activities and include reflection as an integral part in the PD activity in order to meet those learning goals. We tested this approach in several master student projects, where the students were required to involve children in schools in the design of a technology. Our data analysis is based on their written reports as well as a specific exam question. We found that defining good learning goals was hard, but useful, especially when designing and discussing informed consent forms with teachers. Staging activities in order to meet the learning goals was possible, although learning goals were sometimes derived from the activities. Finally, incorporating moments of reflection for children was still difficult for our students because they felt pressed for time. We present some of the advantages and problems so that practitioners can consider the added value of this approach.

Intermediate-level knowledge in child-computer interaction

In this workshop, we invite researchers to jointly explore how the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) field can establish intermediate-level knowledge, being a kind of design knowledge that resides in the realm between the design of particular artifacts and theories. In this full day workshop we want to invite (1) researchers and designers who position themselves as producing intermediate-level knowledge (2) people in the field of design research who have not necessarily thought about their work as producing intermediate-level knowledge. Together we will discuss the pros and cons of different kinds of intermediate-level knowledge and how we can promote the creation of these kinds of knowledge in the CCI field.