Abstract
This paper explores co-designing with children in the context of undergraduate industrial design education, and investigates the potential of performative and narrative-based design methods in co-designing with children. It addresses the early phases of design process and proposes a co-design method for supporting industrial design students’ eliciting children’s needs and preferences. The field study conducted involves a co-design session with 51 industrial design students and 24 third grade primary school children, and face to face semi-structured interviews with 24 design students who participated in the co-design session. The findings indicate that the proposed co-design method, I-Wonder-How, is supportive for industrial design students in their eliciting children’s needs and preferences. Based on the challenges experienced by design students during the co-design session and the post-session design process, the study draws attention to the importance of the entire co-design experience including pre and post phases. While the pre-session phase entails preparedness of the parties involved, the post-session phase requires design students to focus on reinterpreting and reconstructing design insights.
Keywords
co-design; co-designing with children; methods for co-designing with children; co- design in industrial design education
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.638
Citation
Umulu, S., and Korkut, F. (2018) I-Wonder-How:A Method for Co-designing with Children in Design Education, 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.2018.638
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
I-Wonder-How:A Method for Co-designing with Children in Design Education
This paper explores co-designing with children in the context of undergraduate industrial design education, and investigates the potential of performative and narrative-based design methods in co-designing with children. It addresses the early phases of design process and proposes a co-design method for supporting industrial design students’ eliciting children’s needs and preferences. The field study conducted involves a co-design session with 51 industrial design students and 24 third grade primary school children, and face to face semi-structured interviews with 24 design students who participated in the co-design session. The findings indicate that the proposed co-design method, I-Wonder-How, is supportive for industrial design students in their eliciting children’s needs and preferences. Based on the challenges experienced by design students during the co-design session and the post-session design process, the study draws attention to the importance of the entire co-design experience including pre and post phases. While the pre-session phase entails preparedness of the parties involved, the post-session phase requires design students to focus on reinterpreting and reconstructing design insights.