Layered Elaboration: A new technique for co-design with children

(per Allison Druin et al)

(text)

In the University of Mariland in the United States, a design team meets two times per week during the school year. They were trying to designing new technologies that would enable other children to learn about history and green approaches to life. At the same time their intergenerational design team has begun to develop new codesign techniques suited to designing the increasingly mobile and social technologies inherent in the lives of 

today’s children. 

According to the text," Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team used the technique to design a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation. There are many techniques included in this method: “Bags of stuff” is the name children gave to low-tech prototyping sessions that employ craft materials [6] as the building blocks. Big paper is similar in that it uses a common area to collect ideas, but, design partners write directly on to the paper and discuss their ideas at the end of the session. With sticky notes, the design partners evaluate technologies by writing likes, dislikes and design ideas on sticky notes and placing them on a whiteboard. The ideas are arranged into groupings and a frequency analysis of ideas emerges." The technique is named Layered because it uses layers of paper and transparent materials and Elaboration because it lets design groups add to ideas presented by others while encouraging design team members to expand on those earlier ideas.

"Layered Elaboration is different from other techniques because few lend themselves to revisiting design ideas and adding upon them in a straightforward manner. Many design techniques require the permanent change of original items as additional designers modify them. Layered Elaboration enables co-designers to add and modify ideas without permanently destroying the original through the use of transparent materials."

Advantages and disadvantages in the use of layered elaboration observed during the project:

• The ability to add to and modify the storyboard without permanently damaging it. 
• The ability of the design team to stack the transparency overlays over the original storyboard to see common trends in the different groups' feedback. 

• The portability as a co-design tool. Instead of needing a large physical space for low-tech prototyping, the stackable storyboards are no larger than a clipboard. 
• The relatively rapid, iterative nature of the technique allows a number of design partners to provide input and ideas in a short amount of time. 
• The cost of the materials is low. 
• Transparent overlays are difficult to locate at office supply stores as overhead projectors are less frequently used. The washable markers used by the design teams were inadequate for writing on transparent overlays because they smudged; permanent markers were required.