Abstract
User-centred design practices in the design of products for children’s use has become common, especially in the field of technology design. Although young users are now considered as essential and reliable actors to inform the design space, design research with children still remains focused on the design process itself, and children’s role in it. In an attempt to steer away the discussion from how children are included in design to how they are represented in design, our paper focuses on understanding and communicating plurality of the experience among young users to inform and expand the early design phase. For this purpose, we present an overview of the child-centred design practices, discuss how designers of children’s products may benefit from an experiential approach for a holistic understanding of the user space; and finally, we present our study on children’s photography to illustrate how a commitment to understanding children’s perspectives can contribute to eliciting, and representing user diversity through personas to guide the design of meaningful products for young users.
Keywords
child-centred design, children’s photography, user experience, persona
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.295
Citation
Süner, S., and Erbuğ, Ç. (2018) Seeking for Diversity among Young Users: the case of children's photography, in Storni, C., Leahy, K., McMahon, M., Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Design as a catalyst for change - DRS International Conference 2018, 25-28 June, Limerick, Ireland. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.295
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Seeking for Diversity among Young Users: the case of children's photography
User-centred design practices in the design of products for children’s use has become common, especially in the field of technology design. Although young users are now considered as essential and reliable actors to inform the design space, design research with children still remains focused on the design process itself, and children’s role in it. In an attempt to steer away the discussion from how children are included in design to how they are represented in design, our paper focuses on understanding and communicating plurality of the experience among young users to inform and expand the early design phase. For this purpose, we present an overview of the child-centred design practices, discuss how designers of children’s products may benefit from an experiential approach for a holistic understanding of the user space; and finally, we present our study on children’s photography to illustrate how a commitment to understanding children’s perspectives can contribute to eliciting, and representing user diversity through personas to guide the design of meaningful products for young users.