Hannah it’s good to hear your experience, and that our recent ustwo article Designing for Kids stirred a response that you’ve shared with the design community.
I couldn’t agree more with your sentiment, I should have made it a little clearer in the age range we were referring to, the use of more traditional materials really resonated with age ranges 3–9. The creativity and ease to open up through mini creative designs really helped to bring to life ideas that the children would otherwise struggle to communicate.
In my experience the tween ages 10–12, and young teenager 13–15 can be the most challenging when determining the most effective co-design activities, but at the same time when getting it right you can really be rewarded by a wide breadth of highly creative ideas and stimulus.
Also quite rightly so taking away devices from these digital natives, no matter, what their demographic would likely cause a backlash.
A number of co-design activities for 10–15 year olds that I’ve found to be well received include:
- Hackathon/Hack day events, bringing together designers, developers with school students. Getting the students 10–15 to focus on a topic that is meaningful to them. This is embracing digital, where students become highly engaged as they help to form an actual prototype.
- Acting/Drama, encourage students to co-design by acting out ideas, or working with drama students of their similar age to communicate their design ideas through them. This can be very engaging and what you often find is that the rebellious will like to take centre stage.
Bringing it altogether, encouraging the 12–15 year olds to partake in debate, how would they improve the workshop, what did they/didn’t they like.
Recently we held a Games design workshop, to design games for 9–11 year olds. 15-16 year old students firstly co-designed a number of ideas for a Game. Then welcomed in a large group of 9–11 year olds to feedback and test the ideas. This truly was a very vocal bunch, the older children would hear their ideas be dissected, but then gradually the 9–11 year olds reformed the original ideas into something that most resonated with them.
It was so fun to watch as the 15–16 year olds became the facilitators, using many different approaches to bring the game ideas further though digital designs/illustration even some where using prototyping tools to make what they were hearing in realtime.
I’ve gone a tad off tangent, but in short, great to hear and read your experience, and remember always go to the workshop with a raft of approaches, some may work well one day and the next depending on the crowd you’ll need to use a different approach. I’m sure we can also take advice from school teachers who teach year 8–11 students :)
