Co-design with children is built on the premise of idea elaboration. Essentially, this means that when a child or an adult comes up with an idea, the improvisational philosophy of “yes, and” applies. While supporting the original idea, other co-designers can add to, subtract from, and generally elaborate on the idea. Oftentimes, in the end, you cannot tell who an idea came from – rather you just know that it came from the team.
Idea Elaboration can be a departure from how many adults are used to interacting with children. Many times, adults have been trained to observe children and/or question them on their use of technology. While this can lead to a better understanding of what children want in technology design, it is not the goal of co-design. In technology co-design with children, we are striving to bring together experts in many domains to create the best possible technology. On your team, you may have a computer scientist and an educator as well as children who are experts in being children. Asking them to elaborate on each others’ ideas leads to ideas that come from the whole team.
