Co-creating with children | A toolkit for historical museum spaces
By Anjuli Acharya, Siqi Zhang & Tom van Wijland
Children are full of creativity. Their untainted view of the world allows them to see unlimited possibilities, that many adults have learnt to ignore, to their misfortune. What is the best way to harvest this creativity? How do you stimulate it and how do you direct it towards a common goal? Over the course of 4 weeks we investigated how to use children’s creativity for the benefit of historic museums. We developed a toolkit that will allow anyone working on designing museum spaces collaborate with children and improve the engagement children experience when they are in exhibitions.
Introducing: The Making History Fun Again Toolkit
Historical museums serve a crucial role in narrating the past through exhibitions comprising text, artefacts, media, and more. They do this through exhibitions that contain text, artefacts, media and more. In order to engage children into these tales of past time, we asked ourselves the questions:
- What stories ignite children’s interest?
- How do children understand stories?
- How do children tell stories?
The toolkit we designed attempts to immerse the children into a historical context, to then guide them into a storytelling mindset. With successful implementation, we anticipate compelling outcomes from the generative methods outlined in the toolkit.
Toolkit Development
To prepare for developing this toolkit, our team conducted interviews with designers, educators, and museum guides possessing pedagogical expertise. These conversations offered valuable insights on how to work with children and what to expect from them. We also researched existing museums to see how they cater towards children, what the child’s journey through a museum might look like and what elements could be present in a museum. This gave us a good idea of the ‘design material’ a museum exhibition designer has. Where can you intervene in the entire journey, from the home to the museum and back home? What experiential elements are there to a museum that can be optimised to accommodate a child?
To evaluate the initial workshop design, we conducted a trial run with a group of adult participants, our design school colleagues. While they weren’t the intended audience, this exercise provided valuable insights into how the envisioned activities would unfold in practice. Through this testing phase, we identified several areas for potential improvement. Among the most significant findings were:I
- Using crafting material to make stuff is fun and can be fruitful, but it needs a clear input and a clear direction. Without knowing much about the historic context, the participants found it difficult to be inspired to make something. With this in mind we designed the new workshop to have more immersive play to introduce the topic. We also recommend any facilitator of the workshop to let the children participating be taught about the historic context in some form beforehand. For example, if the facilitator has access to a preexisting exhibition space that they are improving, it is wise to let the children go through this exhibition, even if it is not tailored to them.
- Making a collage based on the question ‘How do you learn History?’ might be too much ‘thinking’ for children, and too little doing. However doing it with adults still provided us with a lot of interesting stories about the role history and historic museums played in their early life.
- AI is a good source for making very specific texts and images that can be using during the workshop as input for the participants. Using chatGPT4’s text and image generation software allowed us to visualize a story very quickly.
Illustrations Galore
A key aspect of putting the methods into a cohesive and understandable toolkit was to put them into an illustrated format. Many people, perhaps designers in particular, find it hard to read through steps and execute them properly when they are written down in plain text. Visualising methods might help people get a good sense of what is supposed to happen in the activity that is described after just taking a glance at the illustrations. This resulted in a toolkit that is clear, looks fun, and is tempting to try out.
Whether you are just curious, or if you think this co-creation toolkit might be useful for you, feel free to check the full thing out in the link below:
