Our co-design experience with the young coaches

The co-design process comes in many different shapes and forms. Terms like user-centred design, cooperative design and participatory design are often used to describe subtly different approaches to better understand and incorporate the needs, interests and limitation of individuals that will ultimately be using our products in the future. There are countless different activities and ways in which we can engage with children across the life-span of the design process. Children can provide feedback, or one-off evaluations, of a product toward its final stages of design. On the other end of the spectrum, children can become design partners and be involved across the multiple stages of the product idea/conceptualisation, product prototyping, and evaluation of product iterations. Of course, this is often easier said than done!

The organisation of the young coaches group is something of a rarity in co-design research with children. Generally, co-designing with children involves creating and maintaining networks with schools, teachers and contacts in organisations that work with children. This can be very costly and time consuming, and sadly often results in skipping the co-design process entirely. Having had the opportunity to work alongside our young coaches group, we wanted to share our approach and experience in the co-design process of our product trove.

In planning out our co-design activities with the young coaches for the first workshop we had a relatively firm product idea/conceptualisation: A physical kit that will contain a collection of precious objects and allow the child to record stories, songs, messages to an object using RFID technology. We constructed our co-design activity around two main goals: 1) better understand how this concept fit in with the way the young coaches viewed and collected precious objects, 2) allow them to take charge of the prototyping process with minimal ‘contamination’ or leading ideas from the team. We briefly described our idea to the group and asked them to consider a few of their most precious objects. With the concept of the kit and their precious objects in mind, each child was asked to build a prototype of the kit from a large assortment of art supplies (boxes, containers, construction paper, glue, markers, etc.). This hands-on prototyping activity provided a concrete way for the children to think about features important to them and how they would use the kit to fit their needs. Afterwards, each child got the chance to show the group their kit and explain its features – there were some very imaginative designs (see ‘Secret Compartments’ post)! We were able to use the design features that the young coaches viewed as important (e.g. security, compartments for curating objects, size/mobility of kit, customisation, etc.) to create a first prototype of trove. 

In the second design session with our young coaches we wanted to get a more in-depth evaluation of the initial prototype kit and to further refine the design. Each of the young coaches were given a trove kit and customisation accessories to take home a week before the session. They were asked to collect and record stories about their precious objects and document their experience of using the kit with a disposable camera.  Each child brought their kit into the design session and told us a bit more about the objects they chose, how they found the experience of recording (in this case writing down in a small notebook) stories about the objects, how they customised the kit, and what they would change about it. Then came the real fun! The young coaches got to try out the newest iteration of the prototype which included the audio technology and RFID tags, testing out recording stories to the objects they brought in (as you can imagine, RFID tags were stuck everywhere).

Together, these activities with the young coaches have been invaluable in better understanding how these kits would actually be used and repurposed in a child’s own environment, as well as working out how to incorporate the recording technology in an intuitive way and with the appropriate capabilities. From this we can continue to feed the imaginative insight from potential users into advanced prototypes of trove. At the very least, I have a new appreciation of how much fun RFID tags can be!