What “good” children’s design entails
Interview with Bo Stjerne Thomsen, VP and Chair of LEGO Foundation (Part I)
The children’s technology sector must be rebranded. It is often conceptualized as an immature, marginal, and even sleepy niche — and the fact is, this outlook is partially true. There is much work to be done, especially when it comes to raising standards, supporting children’s rights, integrating research, fostering well-being, and enhancing children’s learning. And considering that children are our most valuable asset, as well as strategically important to the world’s future, there is no doubt that we need top people for this top mission.
The above reasons are why I chose to interview Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Vice President and Chair of Learning Through Play in the LEGO Foundation. The LEGO Foundation stands at the forefront of this sector’s growth — and within his leadership role, Bo deals with the business, quality, and research aspects of this industry on a daily basis. His ability to see the past, present, and future of this market puts him in a key position to best explain the tremendous opportunities and promising forecast of the children’s industry.
In Part I below, Bo explains what “good” children’s design entails and reveals how the LEGO Foundation approaches design at the practical level, with a simple yet powerful framework. In Part II, Bo discusses how to potentially attract more “top people” to the field.
Polina: Hi Bo, thanks for meeting with me! Let’s start off by talking about impact. How would you define “good” children’s technology, in terms of supporting kids’ development, creativity, and play?
Bo: For us, the quality of children’s technology is defined by what we want to achieve with these technologies. Across the Lego Foundation, we see it as a framework that we have termed: “Learning Through Play”. This means that anyone who develops technologies is focused on ensuring that the technology’s outcome is enjoyable, engaging, and meaningful for the children, but also that it supports a broad range of social, emotional, cognitive, and creative capacities.
So there is always an intention for a particular kind of experience that requires mindfulness from those involved. We are therefore very deliberate about finding ways to balance fun with the right level of challenge in the experiences that we create. Many types of technologies are very focused on entertainment and rewards (more like gamified success and scores), while others are more academically-driven and focused on instruction, training, and/or delivering information. The Lego Foundation’s approach is uniquely trying to understand the qualities that are actually at the intersection of these two extremes.
We create experiences that allow children to try and test out different types of competencies, address real-life problems, and come up with ideas. We also place an emphasis on rewarding effort, intentions, and good ideas. This is essentially the guardrail of what we call “Learning Through Play”.
Polina: Could you explain more about how you implement this on a practical level?
Bo: Defining what “good” means, in terms of our design, falls down to three main levels — or in other words, three main choices that one must make:
1. Safety & well-being choices — ensuring that the products are safe, diversified, and actually benefit the children who use them. These choices have become the top priority in the current climate because technologies have such a wide span of usage and intersection with children’s lives. There is now an increasing focus on data security & use (setting standards for ethical and safe use of data), social well-being (making sure that technologies are not damaging any kind of communication occurring in the sphere), and inclusion (ensuring that experiences relate to children’s diversity in terms of age, gender, background, and capabilities in as broad a sense as possible). When we approach design, we must do so with the mindset that “children” refers to many types of personalities, genders, and interests. While design can sometimes be quite limited and intended for only a few groups, the goal is to make it as inclusive and useful for as many groups as possible.
2. Strategic choices — focusing on the uniqueness of each playful learning experience. We are not trying to deliberately say how something should look. We have particular aims in terms of quality, but there is a spectrum of options for how we might design in order to support particular aspects of the child’s agency — and the strategic choices we make are based on that spectrum. There are many different ways for technologies to encourage players to come up with ideas or work with others to achieve the goal. Our job is to identify the right choices for the particular experience. Each experience designer must navigate and determine the level of quality/goals that they are trying to achieve.
- How much freedom to give? You can give a high level of choice, or a low level of choice, or almost no choice. We may design experiences that are focused on solving a puzzle or manipulating particular things; or, we might design games with a particular outcome or challenge in mind. We may also offer an open-ended creative platform that provides the player with many different choices, but this runs the risk of being too overwhelming. It is a spectrum and we must always consciously decide how much freedom of choice to offer.
- How much guidance to provide? When you design a system, you must choose how much content to give, when to give it, and what types of feedback and instruction you offer in the games and tutorials. Again, this is a spectrum where you can decide to either give a lot of content and structure, or fewer constraints, thus enabling players more freedom to navigate and explore.
- How much creativity to allow? How much creativity do you expect the child to get out of the experience? Sometimes you might offer limited creative opportunities so that the player can focus on the main purpose of this particular experience. Other times, you may look to give broader ways for the player to express themselves and create their own kind of stories and experiences. Again, it is a spectrum.
3. Practical & tactical choices — zooming in on the operational aspects of the experience. We want to ask ourselves about the various practical mechanics for designing guidance, environment, and storytelling in a particular experience. For example, how do we embed social strategies on a practical level? Do we require communication via chat and feedback? Should we include real-time interaction? What are the different ways to engage? Do we use mostly swiping or touching motions, or offer different modalities? And so forth. The answers to these questions are mainly based on the characteristics that we have already defined on the strategic level. We have very specific characteristics of what defines a good experience in terms of children’s active engagement, curiosity, ability to iterate, and so forth.
So the definition of what “good” is actually comes down to three different levels, but each offers simple guidance and a clear framework for moving forward.
Polina: I am curious about how you involve children in the design process. Do you include them in the decision-making at these levels?
Bo: Our mindset is that children have competence. They know what they are thinking about and they live in a world where we do not. So, across all of our work, we have the overarching ambition to view children as our role models. The idea is that we should learn as much as we can from their imagination, creativity, and hands-on approach.
When it comes to the practical level of actually involving children in our design process, we are still trying to figure out how that can best be done. We are always looking for ways to improve our methodologies for testing and co-creating together with children. The way we currently integrate children in our training, onboarding, and compassing is by finding good ways to listen to them. We gather data on what they are actually doing. We observe how they manipulate games and use technologies. This is much more fluid and insightful than any other type of research. We rely a lot on observation in our work right now and use it to guide our design discussion.
The bottom line is that children have a nuanced and diverse perspective of the world that adults rarely take into consideration. We are therefore extremely mindful about speaking to the level where the child is coming from. We must give more time for children to explore technologies at every stage and then read between the lines to talk about their experiences.
Polina: Amazing! Are there any other thoughts you want to add on this subject?
Bo: Just that the main quality of technologies comes out when we are playful with them. This is a fundamental aspect and we can’t really even understand the technologies in depth until we play with them and are creative with them.
When we try to understand EdTech or new types of AI, or even when parents try to understand what their children are doing— we cannot just talk about it; we must experiment, pilot, and play. This is our main mechanism for assimilating and comprehending the technologies. So the capacity for finding good ways to experiment and simulate is actually a playful approach to technology — and one we must embrace further.
Polina: I really agree with everything you have said, because as far as I see it — for children, everything is learning. It doesn’t matter to them whether it’s an educational app or an entertaining app. So I wholly believe that we should look at the children’s sector as one thing and not put too many separating labels. When we look at both things together, we can create better experiences. What do you think about that?
Bo: I am really glad you helped articulate this point even more strongly.
For children, when they test out and try things they are curious about, then some things may be enjoyable and come easy to them while others things may prove difficult, but they are overall learning to understand themselves and the world around them. And this is playing and learning at the same time. They don’t have this kind of differentiation as adults.
We are now in great times, because learning is no longer just about academics and math and literature. It is really a holistic perspective: you obviously need to pay attention, but you also need to regulate your emotions, and negotiate and collaborate with others. So the whole process of playing and learning is very, very similar.
Polina: Thank you so much for your time! I love the elegance of your framework and approach. You give the design process a systematic nature, but also keep it open and flexible. It’s really inspiring to see a real-life example of how a large corporation implements “good” on a variety of different levels. You have given us all a lot to think about.
Read Part II of this interview, where Bo discusses future prospects for current and potential talents in this field.
