Much of the philosophy, method, and techniques for co-design with children were developed for use with children in middle childhood, typically ages 7-11 years old. Many of these can be modified for use with younger children. Younger children, from about 3-6 years old, have different needs that must be considered when working with them in co-design.
- Assume you will need more resources when working with young children in co-design. You will need more time in the form of more sessions to work through ideas and techniques. You also need more adults in the form of a higher adult to child ratio.
- There are certain techniques that are designed for or well-suited for working with this age group. For example, Mixing Ideas was created specifically for this age group, and Bags of Stuff/Low-tech prototyping works well. Fictional Inquiry and Comicboarding have been found to work well with 5-6 year olds.
- Other techniques that were created for co-design with older children can work well also, but with modifications. For example, using Likes/Dislikes/Design Ideas on Sticky Notes can work well, but young children may need adults to write the ideas for them.
- Generally more scaffolding, support, time, and intentional elaboration will be needed with younger children. They have fabulous ideas, but may need more support in expressing them. They might need more questions from adults, more time to converse, and alternate ways to convey their design ideas such as speaking, drawing, or acting them out.
- Consider also the age within “young children” you are working with. What works with kindergarten age children, 5-6 years old, may need to be further scaffolded and supported to work with preschool age children, 3-4 years old.
References
Farber, A., Druin, A., Chipman, G., Julian, D., & Somashekhar, S. (2002). How young can our design partners be? Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, 127-131.
Guha, M. L., Druin, A., Chipman, G., Fails, J. A., Simms, S., & Farber, A. (2004). Mixing ideas: A new technique for working with young children as design partners. Proceedings of Interaction Design and Children 2004: Building a Community, 35-42.
