Design feedback is an essential pedagogical tool that can help young novice designers navigate divergent and convergent paths while designing. However, design feedback is often met with resistance, which counteracts its potential to help novice designers evaluate their design and generate new solution directions. In this paper, we report on the construction and utilization of a design feedback intervention during a real-life design project with a group of primary school children (aged 8–12). The goal of the intervention was to stimulate young novice designers’ creative thinking by guiding the design feedback dialogues with their peers and clients. The intervention was designed according to the following key principles: (1) guide towards a shared understanding of the design through low-level convergent feedback, (2) stimulate critical reflection and evaluation of the design to help identify and internalize possible shortcomings through high-level convergent feedback, and (3) provide a way to move forward by guiding new generative thoughts through high-level divergent feedback. Overall, the results show that the intervention can support young novice designers, their peers, and clients in engaging in constructive feedback dialogues, thereby stimulating their creative thinking. Our main contribution entails a detailed understanding of the successes and obstacles within the feedback dialogues, as guided by the intervention. Based on these results, we propose a set of refined design principles to inform feedback interventions. With this research we hope to give insight in the complexity of design feedback dialogues, while also inspiring design educators to actively try out these key principles.

This paper presents a co-design project in a school with 16 children ages 10 to 11 in which three learning goals were defined upfront: creativity, empathy, and collaboration. The first part of the paper demonstrates how these co-design skills were implemented through an iterative process of explanation, practice, reflection, and application. Based on the results of post-interviews and short questionnaires, the second part discusses children's assessments of these skills. Whereas children reported fluctuations in applying these skills, the findings show an overall positive trend towards the end of the project. In future work, these findings will be triangulated with observational data.

This paper presents the Collaborative Design Thinking (CoDeT) co-design approach, its theoretical framework, and its application in a case study with 49 children aged 9 to 10 in two schools. CoDeT aims to scaffold children's collaboration and design thinking in co-design settings characterised by a high child-to-adult ratio (ca. 1 adult for 15 to 20 children), such as schools, museums and maker spaces. In these settings, children have to work relatively independent from adults who become guides on the side. This can be challenging due to children's limited understanding of the design process and their lack of skills to collaborate productively towards a shared design goal. CoDeT addresses these challenges by integrating principles of Social Interdependence Theory (SIT) and Design Thinking (DT), which together form the theoretical backbone of the approach. CoDeT was first applied in a case study and yielded promising results in terms of children's collaboration and design thinking skills, yet possible improvements were found. The insights of this case study informed the revised version of CoDeT presented at the end of this article, in a what-why-how structure, allowing researchers and practitioners to apply the co-design approach in a wide variety of contexts characterised by high child-to-adult ratios.

This paper explores how a co-design process can be centred around pre-schoolers' enjoyment of constructive play practices, so that they, rather than adults, become protagonists in a design process. The pilot study was conducted involving 25 children from 3-6 years of age in an intuitive three-step design process that allowed the children to self-reliantly express themselves and make their own design decisions. Generative tools, storytelling, and a set of open-ended design tasks stimulated the pre-schoolers to design tactile 3D shapes. Observational data provided insight in the children's playtime and focus during the design process. The results showed that it is possible for pre-schoolers to (1) establish focus on construction play (environment), (2) that their explorative playing is led through distinctive phases of a design process (activity), and (3) that they are able to construct something specific by playing (concept).

The Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Community has a long history of innovating methods and techniques for the design and evaluation of technologies for children. Many innovations have been reported in the academic literature but the uptake of methods by industry has been slow and the community has hitherto failed to seriously consider how best to develop, present and promote their methods beyond academia. The aim of the workshop is to weave together IDC researchers and IDC key personnel coming from the industry, with genuine interest in industry-academia collaboration, into a community interested in building a coherent, high-impact collaboration channel. The goal of the workshop is to encourage a critical discussion and debate about how IDC methods can be further adopted, modified or even extended by the IDC related industry. This workshop is expected to reinforce IDC industry-academia collaboration with an ultimate goal to increase understanding and develop a community of interest that is going to co-develop ideas and novel design approaches that can bring IDC methods closer to the industrial practice.

This paper presents a co-design toolkit, Storytelling Shapes, that enables children to tell personal stories using various wooden shapes. Starting from these stories, designers can engage in a conversation about children's needs and wishes. The toolkit was tested and improved based on a pilot study and two co-design sessions with 16 children aged 6 to 11. After introducing the toolkit and discussing its iterative development, the paper concludes with a set of guidelines for using Storytelling Shapes in co-design activities with children.

To date, the developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account in the early stages of interaction design. This paper addresses this gap in the research by exploring how children between the ages of 26 and 43 months interact with spatial manipulatives. To this end, we modified intervention techniques for early spatial learning found in cognitive developmental studies and combined these with design methods used in Child-Tangible Interaction (CTI). From the former we borrowed the Preschool Embedded Figures Test (PEFT), and from the latter a storytelling approach incorporated into structured tasks with hands-on tools. In this paper, we first discuss related work on early spatial learning and CTI methods. Then, we describe a case study conducted with 14 parent-child dyads. Finally, we present the results, which offer insight into young children’s mental rotation skills, different rotation action strategies and parental input requirements. Our findings contribute to design methods to elicit age specific knowledge about young children’s hands-on learning, and set forth techniques and design considerations for evidence-based CTI to scaffold early spatial thinking skills.

Children's play objects are increasingly shaped by technological innovations that can transform them into hybrid, internet-connected toys, a phenomenon referred to as the Internet of Toys. Previous research has presented user research on connected toys, but little is known how to approach them from a design perspective. This paper investigates whether and how an animistic design perspective can foster a fruitful exploration of the design potentialities of connected toys. It addresses this question by analysing three design concepts of connected toys that were developed in the course of an R&D project. These included a high-tech bracelet with digital passport, a card game with a customizable 3D-printed figurine, and a robot as a board game play mate. The results show how the design qualities of connected toys can be categorized on a spectrum ranging from a certainty-driven, problem-solving logic to an uncertainty-driven, animistic design perspective. The contribution of this study is a better understanding of how connected toys emerge in a broader ecology of children, toys, and data that all act upon each other. By embracing the uncertainty in this complex and fluid network of subjects and objects, the animistic design perspective allows to explore a broad set of design opportunities relevant in the realm of the Internet of Toys.

In a participatory design process, patients as well as care providers play a critical role in the design and development of healthcare apps. However, special attention should be given to problematic group dynamics that may arise from unequal power across participants. In this paper, we present Turning Tables, a focus group method, inspired by social interdependence theory (SIT), to mitigate asymmetric power. First, we present our SIT-inspired protocol for conducting focus groups. Next, via a qualitative analysis of 2 focus groups, we describe group dynamics and evaluate our method. Observations show that by splitting teams into patients versus care providers, and by specifying turn-taking (giving the floor to patients first), unequal power can be mitigated. However, observations also show that participants default back into their traditional roles during less formalized moments.

This paper explores how co-design activities in schools can contribute to developing children's empathy. A pilot case study is presented in which eight 10- to 12-yearold children participated. The design theme was outdoor education. After discussing the co-design procedure, preliminary results about three empathic techniques are discussed: (1) reflection on the role of empathy in design, (2) storytelling to introduce the design challenge, and (3) defining the needs and wishes of the story's protagonists. The lessons learned are taken into account in a comprehensive follow-up study.