Initial description of the Project

The proposed project aims to find a way to make more interesting and stimulating the creation of characters for children's books for children . In the initial project children simply drew the characters that were applied to the history and book. The intention was to bring children into the design process . For it would be important and a process of creating complex characters that children could participate in the process as a whole, not just developing the characters , but can participate in layout , binding and choice of materials , to the view that that material was produced by her ( in partnership with a designer ) at all stages could distinguish a value and so she could identify more deeply with the material . According to Dan Arielly from Duke University and his research : "people Involved in the process of creation had a substancial bias When Evaluating Their own work ." The idea of ​​co - design would be applied in the sense that some designers could work together and guide a group of children . For a job that was efficient , being able to actually reach a satisfactory end product involving children and to awaken the spirit of working together and fellowship is the proposal that a single final product was developed by the group. In this case there would be every child developing your group of characters , but all the children together developing not only the characters , but the other stages of completing the book.
All begin with a discussion whose purpose is to define the characteristics of each character . The designer would raise questions about the physical and behavioral development of each character urging children to loose their creativity . Issues such as the age of the character, it would be an animal , a human being , a child , black or white , and be happy , sad , playful . What is your favorite color and he loves popsicles ? Children would be involved , as well as hone their creativity , ability to expose their opinions , argue and reach a consensus together . Thereafter initial setting can be made individually or in subsets , while at the end of this step the features which will be developed and compared with the final profile of each character. For this step in the process of co - design process was studied layered elaboration . According to studies of Allison Druin et al , University of Maryland , this process has benefits as the ability to modify the storyboard without causing permanent damage to the originals , the ability to overlay transparent layers of different groups to compare aspects in common and uncommon work of each ; portability of this method as a tool for co - design , since its area is about the size of a clipboard and requires only a few brushes , to be a process enabling quick interaction designers to reach quick conclusions and order by possessing a cost of materials relatively cheap compared to other methods of co - design sessions . At this stage each participant or subgroup receive the kit comprising a clipboard , the base would be the body of the characters (only the shape of the trunk , head and limbs ) , some transparency sheets and permanent markers in various colors . Based on the previous discussions , the children begin to complete the design with aspects they deemed necessary , drawing on transparency that would be attached to the clipboard on the base sheet . Every child could draw more than one model and decide between one of them at the end of this stage and each character would have a sheet different basis. At the end of the stage , all the participants to meet and assisted and coordinated by the designers , would compare the drawings and through the layered elaboration might notice similarities and differences between the drawings and discuss what is more interesting and go selecting the main features to develop the visual end of the character. The end result would be scanned to be printed on white paper , where children could color and finishing the characters that would apply to the book .

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. 

Reading

Working in the reading of the text: "The role of children in the design of new technology" by Alisson Druin, (text)mentioned in the last research. Work in progress.

Co-designing with Children

Today was read the article "Co-designing with Children", by  Catalina Naranjo-Bock for the site UX Matters (site), which deals with methods for research and development of new products developed in partnership with children. According to the article "Children are naturals for co-designing. In the right context with the right tools, kids have no problem unleashing their wildest dreams and ideas to create previously unimagined product concepts". She presents the "Alison Druin’s roles for children in designing new technologies" that shows us that at different stages in a product development cycle, co-designing with children may include some combination of all of these roles.

In the text, Bock suggest different readings and supplementary texts and also suggests steps for co-design with children, it would be:

1. Developing self-awareness

2.On site research 

3. Generative research

4. Conception of the product.

Plus she talks about research methods online and talks about the stimuli given to children during the sessions: "All the co-design sessions require the use of stimuli or a toolkit that facilitates discussion and spurs creative thinking...the creation of these toolkits requires secondary research into psychological and developmental guidelines...if you are conducting user research sessions at frequent intervals throughout a product development cycle, you'll be able to refine your toolkit."

Concerning to the children's age ranges the author comments that for children between 3 and 6 years "conducting co-design session with this age group is challenging Especially because of the children's developmental stage. For children of this age, more than any other, it is important to invite parents or teachers to the sessions, because they can help you to fully understand what the children are saying, doing, or making and can provide greater context. She finishes with some final important thoughts:

You should have clear objectives and research questions.

Follow a moderator guide and research protocol—although this can be more flexible in this case than for more traditional research methods.

Clearly explain your research project to all participants and their caregivers, as well as what you’ll do with the data that you obtain.

Analyze the results of your research as rigorously as you would for any other research project. In this case, the data is very visual and tangible, and this helps you to illustrate your results when presenting them to stakeholders. You can apply synthesis methods of analysis like affinity diagramming or parallel clustering using your initial research questions.

Listen carefully to what children are saying. Generally, children will come to the sessions with a high degree of enthusiasm and have the expectation that they will be heard, as well as preconceptions about how you’ll use their ideas. It is important to communicate clearly that you will not use all of their ideas and that most ideas get transformed radically during the design process. Throughout the co-design process, it is also important to make sure children are feeling comfortable with the way you’re asking them to share their ideas.

"Discovering emotions, values, ideas, 

dreams, desires and ideal situations is a

 crucial part of the user research during the 

early stages of the design process"

Reading

Today was read and analyzed two academic texts resulting in internet search based on children as designers.

The first "Children as designers of an educational multimedia software", by Yasmin B. Kafa, Cynthia Carter Ching and Sue Marshall from the University of California, (text) proposes that when children participate in the creation process they tend to learn more easily and "personal expression of one's ideas in an important feature of learning through software."  The text is not specifically geared toward the theme but this brings important information regarding the way of learning the children and as part of the process of creation can be beneficial to their education.

The second text is "Designing tangibles for children - what designers need to know " by Alissa N. Antle, from Simon Fraser University in Canada, (text) talks about how children make relations between the virtual world and the real. Basically for a better understanding of what happens in an "abstract plan" the child would have to make comparisons with tangible examples. This is a  natural learning process of the child that when applied in studies and research facilitates the understanding of the subject in question on the part of children. According to the text "... an embodied perspective on cognition cognition views the bodly grounded in experience ... for example often do children learn to count using their fingers." and " ... often do children to develop understandings of abstract concepts based on existing understanding of body based and spatial concepts" and so it would be very important "... to support children visualize relationships between 3D geometric forms and their 2D representations. For example the Tetris game, 2D, in digital media and 3D

geometric blocks placed on the table ".

As a continuation of the research will be important to search for more texts that focus more specifically in design with children, what will be the next step of this readings stage.

A overvalued codesign

"When I was sixteen I was the ecstatic recipient of a model remote-control car for Christmas. It was the Bigwig model from the popular car kit manufacturer Tamiya and required me to build the car myself from the box of springs, sprockets, wires, servos and other bits that would finally form the model car. The model took me over two months to build (and rebuild after driving a partially built prototype into my parent’s radiator) but was finally ready. My pride in the car was immense and I proudly presented it to my parents, my friends and my relatives; my pride far outweighed what I would have felt if I’d instead received a pre-built, professionally-built version of the same model. The question is was my car actually a better end product or was it just my perception of its value that was different?"  (PM Davies, design-thinkers)

In the blog design-thinkers, <http://www.design-thinkers.co.uk>, PM Davies told us about the experience of Dan Ariely, behavioural economist at Duke University, to test until the end user tends to overvalue products that have participated in its creation as codesigner. A group of participants were asked to build an origami object from instructions and then asked to bid an amount they were willing to pay for their creation. On average, the creators of the objects said they’d be willing to pay 23 cents. However, when people outside of the experiment were asked to similarly bid on the paper creations the average bid was 5 cents.  In an extension to the study origami experts were asked to create the same models and again external people were asked to bid how much they would pay for the creation. In this case the average bid rose to 27 cents. Then from his research he concludes that  "people involved in the process of creation had a substantial bias when evaluating   their own work".   Finally PM Davies tells us that "bringing people into the process will make them more favourable to the proposal, but it doesn't mean actually make the proposal better.So as a persuasion  technique co-design is a valid tool, but it may not produce a better outcome."

Based on this study, if by one hand for the general market codesign may prove to be not so interesting because in some cases do not produce products with such quality as one composed entirely by a specialist; when it comes to the specific groups codesign can be a great tool for attraction,  causing the participants involved and be captivated in a much more efficient the process of creation and the end result.
Since the goal of this project is make that the kids are more involved and participating in the creative process co-design fits as an ideal tool to achieve the success of the new proposal.

Co-design

Co-design is the process where the designer encourage and guide users to develop solutions for themselves.
Is a term, short for collaborative design, that means a community centred methodology that designers use to develop a partnership with a product or service’s end users, in order to make their solution more effective. ( From the Design Council, Design Glossary)
The co-design has its roots in the Kant's book Critique of Pure Reason, that says "to ask a question, you need to have some information or knowledge."

According PM Davies, co-design is the process of involving people in the design process with the aim of creating a better product or solution.

The videos above can give a session of co-design posted by Joel Snowden and an animation made ​​by thinkpublic telling the story of the co-design.