Designing with Children @ MuSo
Focus areas: Design for learning | Generative Design research | Participatory approach
Children with their unique ways of thinking and abundant questions are the most valuable resource of our society but traditionally have been passive recipients of knowledge and values. However, children today are redefining the possibilities of what they can do…so why not create a museum with us?
Hi, I am Aishwarya and I am a product designer from NID (National Institute of Design). I am always fascinated with the interconnected systems around us and aim to explore and navigate the complexity of social issues to create simple, meaningful solutions with the people. Along with product design through my journey in design, I have developed a special interest in participatory design, systems thinking, and design for behavior. I did my graduation project with the Museum of Solutions which explored how design thinking can be introduced to children to encourage a problem-solving attitude and application-based learning. It further evolved into providing facilitators human-centered design (HCD) driven tools and methods to create learning experiences for developing 21st-century skills in children through informal learning environments.
Currently, I am a part of the Design team at MuSo working towards Experience Design for MuSoLab. I bring a design research-led perspective and participatory approach to the process on the team through making tools and methods for creative learning practices. Through my current work at the intersection of design and education, I am exploring the following question — how can design be used to re-imagine learning experiences for children?
Through this article, I will be walking through the uniquely participative approach of MuSo’s design process. It captures my journey of being a designer on a multidisciplinary team of educators, designers, architects, and policy researchers conducting experiential and participatory panels with children and creating design-led ways to bring in voices of children into our process of creating this space.
Why design with children?
The design journey at MuSo begins with its pillars as its guiding principles. We wanted to include the pillars not only in the design of space and programs but also in our process of creating these experiences. Taking from boldly child-led and rooted to reality, we felt a need to bring in the voices of the children in our design process to do complete justice to the vision MuSo intends to stand for — to create meaningful learning experiences for children.
Children inherently are creative thinkers and the best set of individuals to help us think differently about learning and engagement in the space. Who better to tell us what works and how to best design for learning and engagement, than children themselves?
In my academic journey as a designer, I have worked on projects that focused on problem-solving for local communities while trying to understand and address the challenges that revolve around those particular issues. My work in design has given me the opportunity to switch between roles of designer, researcher, and facilitator while exploring topics like education, special needs, juvenile reforms, social change, etc. This made me realize people’s role in the design process is evolving. The people we design for have a lot of intangible insights and background context to offer that may get overlooked when designing for a project of such a scale. It was, therefore, important to bring children to the table who will be the audience of MuSo, as participants.
“participatory design is an approach to design that attempts to actively involve the people who are being served through design in the process to help ensure that the designed product /service meets their needs. A key characteristic of participatory design is the use of physical artifacts as thinking through tools throughout the process.” —
The Convivial Toolbox by Elizabeth Sanders & Pieter Jan Steppers
We started our process with few questions -
- Can we create opportunities for children to feel ownership of the process and later on, the space?
- How can design-led ways of thinking be introduced to children through different tools and methods?
- How can we get an insight into the needs of our audience — beyond what they say they say they want?
- What avenues can we create to encourage the expression of abstract qualities and values?
- What experiments give a fair platform to explore and grow?
How did we create opportunities for children to be a part of our team?
Finding a common language
We started out by figuring out opportunities for children to participate in. Being a product designer having a user-centered design was of utmost importance, and making the process tangible. Designers are good at visual thinking, conducting creative processes, finding missing information, and being able to make connections. We created tangible tools for other stakeholders to use to express themselves creatively. Through tools and methods inspired by design, making and play-based ideologies we created a shared language through which the designers and the stakeholders(children, facilitators and occasional experts on subjects) could visually communicate with each other.
Creating an Expert Panel
We created a panel of 20 children from different backgrounds who met with us every month for testing of different experiences and programs that contributed to the overall design process. These children, in the age group of 10–13 years came from different schools and socio-economic backgrounds in Mumbai, thus bringing in different perspectives and representative groups of the target audience for the Museum. The panel met 1 Saturday every month through a series of experience and learning-driven workshops which were designed to nudge the children to react to the material presented and actively be engaged in critical feedback and development of it.
Crafting tools for participation
The tools and methods created for conducting these panels helped not only get an insight into what the children were thinking but also created opportunities for collaboration and collective ideation.
One of the tools was a simple dodecahedron ball with questions on each face. The session was conducted like a game of catch with facilitators and children standing in a circle as one group. Each person had to answer a question on the face of a dodecahedron facing them — Act like you are in a plastic cube… how do you think plastic in water affects fishes? What would you do if…
The children were really excited to answer the questions with a game of catch, which they would hesitate to answer in a class setting. Furthermore, as the session progressed the conversations turned towards giving new ideas, adding to each other’s answers, and exploring new possibilities, perspectives, and What ifs.
Having a participatory design approach in this process really helped us create exercises that can tap into — expressing interests, imagining the future, encouraging visualization, making connections, etc. The interaction of children with these activities gave insights into their behavior, thinking, choices, etc, and prompts on how these can be better formed for future scenarios. . For eg: Through different variations of tools developed, making or DIY was a method that always generated major excitement and engagement for the longest duration. The tangibility of materials to play with, opportunities to create and re-create, the malleability of the process, and just having conversations through the medium of their outcome was something everyone connected to. Another interesting aspect was children were most curious about their link to a topic — How is this related to me? How am I getting affected? What can I do about it? These points played a big role in the further part of our process as we started designing interactions for experiences in the museum.
The educators on the team helped make the process richer by providing a deeper understanding of children as users and adding a layer of reflection and introspection after every activity. The reflection sessions themselves turned out to be a space for many ‘Aha…’ moments.
A walk through the children's panels
These panels were conducted in person for over 10 months from 2019 until the pandemic in 2020.
Each panel was a session of 3 or 4 activities around a topic through different tools and interactions and the agenda was to have conversations with children through different mediums. Does this topic evoke interest? Does this method of engagement actually interest children? What are some biases we have as adults/ designers?etc.
Multiple tools and methods were used and developed throughout the panels to encourage creative thinking, critical thinking, collaboration, etc. through multiple short-duration workshops. The panel also provided an opportunity to observe the evolution of thought, perspective, and change in behavior over time. Interaction with children on a constant basis and preparation behind it gave a hands-on understanding of how to design for meaningful engagement, approaches to take to introduce complexities and difficult /boring topics, and make the process fun but also close to reality in terms of problem-solving, etc.
We saw that children were visual thinkers and doers. Through mediums like board games, quizzes, challenge -led narratives they were very fast at understanding the process (faster than adults) and quick on foot navigating those. Talking about complex issues, scenarios for strategic decision making, and empathizing were a smooth sail through these mediums. This led us to understand that we need to communicate in the language they best relate to.
The panels provided a platform to create a mini prototype of the Museum itself.
Through a lot of hits and misses along the process, there were learnings on how we present /prototype experiences, communicate through media and language, create avenues for meaningful interaction and feedback.
One of the major challenges through the process was to find the simplest ways of communicating with children. Many times we would end up giving a completely blank canvas for an activity leading to confusion or structure a workshop too tight leaving no room for creative divergence. It took us a lot of trial and error to actually be able to create a good mix of learning and creating experiences. As designers shaping the participatory process we took a lot of things for granted initially — what does a particular term mean? — “create a prototype?”, how to make connections, making the steps intuitive, etc. Facing these challenges early on in the process made us aware of the areas and details we needed to start addressing as we took steps towards designing the space.
Constant feedback from children, a progression of insights into pointers for framing workshops across phases led to the emergence of common patterns that worked across the workshops with the group. The panels helped me better understand who we were designing for. It challenged our assumptions of what children like, what would they enjoy, etc.
What did I learn working with children?
The intent of using a participatory approach was to create a societal and experience value for MuSo early on — therefore design exploration and use of co-creation — in the initial phase to tackle broader questions and align space to our audience and invite future users to be a part of the development process now.
Overall it was a learning journey for me embarked with a group representing the core stakeholders (children, experts, facilitators, etc) of the space ahead.
Working on a project of such a scale and variety brought to the forefront the importance of collaboration in the design process for me. Not only working with stakeholders but working with a team of diverse experts made the process richer, faster and we could scale up the execution at every stage which gave better insights.
Being a part of a small multi-disciplinary team I had the opportunity to play different roles in the process. Along with being a designer playing the role of facilitator and volunteer was a major learning experience. The composition of our team also gave me a lot of freedom as a designer to pitch and try new things especially in workshops with children and how the panels were conducted, take design decisions, etc
Towards co-creation for experience
The participatory panels started with having children onboard as user testers for experiences, ideas, and methodologies and moved towards children being co-creators and ideators. These panels opened us to a lot of feedback and new points of exploration that would have been otherwise overlooked in a linear process. We realized co-creation is a slow process and we need to learn and unlearn a lot of things as we bring collaborators in our process moving forward. The need for ‘something different’ for every session helped us push boundaries of what was possible and integrate versions of that idea to our design process now, as we go from ideating to making.
As we move further in our journey of Design@MuSo, the upcoming set of blogs will be sharing how the role of children moved towards being a co-creator with us and how our role as designers developed with that.
Thanks for reading!
Visit us on www.museumofsolutions.in
