Kids Co-Design the Darndest Things
What happens when designers partner with kids to create experiences? Cue the robots and jetpacks.
When Greg Walsh, Ph.D., was a kid, he loved visiting Epcot. In fact, he wanted to create those experiences for kids at home who couldn’t go to Disney World in person. Now as an adult, Walsh is intensely interested in not only bringing fantastic experiences to kids, but also encouraging kids to design their own experiences.
“My research has been around including kids in the design process of things for them.”
But where did that research start? Entering the University of Maryland’s Ph.D. program, Walsh remembers thinking, “I’m going to create e-learning materials for kids that are as exciting as Pokémon. If kids can memorize all the Pokémon, they can surely remember who signed the Constitution.”
So for Walsh, joining Alison Druin’s Kidsteam was a natural fit. Kidsteam is a co-design collaboration comprising young kids and students from UMD’s Human Computer Interaction Lab. Working together, the kids and university students designed a Wii game to learn history by traveling through time.
But before we go any further, let’s go back to that term co-design, which is related to participatory design. In a nutshell, this approach suggests that results are better when users partner with designers, rather than designers creating something for users. And to be clear, we’re not talking about user-testing here. Co-design involves an active collaboration that values and implements users’ ideas from the get-go.
To encourage these innovative practices, Walsh — now the director of the University of Baltimore’s graduate program for interaction design and information architecture — also created his own co-design group called KidsteamUB, at the Digital Whimsy Lab.
Last semester, Walsh partnered with the kids to see how they might dream up audio experiences, namely, listening to podcasts. Through a series of activities and exercises, the kids came up with awesome ideas to gamify listening and share podcasts with each other. We caught up with Walsh to talk through the importance of partnering with kids.
Interview Highlights
What’s one thing Walsh wants designers to remember? We designers tend to think in terms of user experience and user-centered design. Yet, we should practice user inclusive design to really consider what the user needs.
Explaining co-design, Walsh says, “You have a right to design the things that affect you.” When we designers partner with our users, we learn mistakes early and create a better experience with them, for them.
Read more about Walsh’s KidsteamUB at the Digital Whimsy Lab, and follow him on Twitter.
TRANSCRIPTS
Question 1. Why does co-design work well with kids?
Walsh: So with kids, it’s really interesting, because their whole lives are following others. They’re always in someone else’s power shadow, I guess, so to speak, and there’s a power dynamic all day, right? They go to school, they have teachers, they have to clean their rooms, they have to do this. And participatory design, and co-design, really starts to enable to end user to have a voice. And a lot of times, kids aren’t use to having a voice so explicitly that they do in co-design.
Now, someone did a study in 2005, where they found that about half of the GDP is affected by kids. So, there’s the money kids have — like the bubblegum and action figure money — and then there’s what kids influence decisions on. So, what kind of car you’re going to get, what kind of fridge you’re going to get, and it turns out it’s about half.
So we actually do listen to kids, but it’s not usually very explicitly. We don’t say, “Hey, what do you think we should do in this situation?” So at first, it’s weird for kids [for us] to say, “Hey, what should a classroom look like?” and you have them design a classroom. They think you might want an answer, and you have to really build that trust. That’s why co-design over a period of time works really well with kids.
Question 2. What exercises help get kids thinking?
Walsh: The kidsteam session that I cut my teeth on, and the kind that I run now have four parts to them. And it’s worked really well to elicit feedback from kids.
The first one is there’s always a snack time. And that sounds funny, except that snack time is the time that we sit around the table as peers, right? The kids and the adults start to get used to working together.
What’s cool about it is that you just talk about whatever. You know, “What book are you reading.” “Oh, did you see this movie?” “Oh, that’s funny!” Something that’s on the internet, a YouTube video. We talk about that, and we’re starting to break down the barriers that they are used to during the day with grownups.
After snack time, we move to circle time, which is: all the kids and adults sit on the floor. And that’s nice, because what we do then is all the adults and kids move to the floor, and we sit in a circle, and we have a “question of the day.” So, again, this starts to continue to break down those power structures they’re used to.
And the “question of the day” usually has something to do with what we’re going to design. So, if we’re designing, again, a school of the future, we might say, you know, “What’s your favorite classroom?” or “What’s your favorite class in school?” And when it’s your turn to answer, you say your name, your age, and maybe how long you’ve been with Kidsteam, if that’s what you’re doing — if it’s kids who have been around for a while.
And by saying your age, adults and kids, that blows their minds. Because, first of all, you say your name is “Greg,” right, or, “Libby.” You don’t say, “I’m Mr. Greg,” or “Miss Libby,” or “I’m Dr. Walsh,” or whoever. I’m “Greg” with the kids. So, that’s different for them a lot of times. And then, when I say my age of 42, they’re like, “What? You’re 42? That’s so old!” Right? And they get a kick out of it. Having most of the adults there to talk about their age and talk about their name just in and of itself breaks things down.
And then you say what your [own] favorite class is, or what was your [own] favorite class in school? And you talk about what you remember from being a kid, or what today you do. And that’s also interesting because you’re talking to them like they’re peers, and they usually react really well to that.
After circle time, we start designing. So, we have lots of different activities — “techniques” we call them — that we use for that. We have something called “bags of stuff” where it’s a lot of low-tech prototyping materials, a.k.a. craft supplies. And that’s great for creating low fidelity but really fun prototypes that kids can talk about.
We do something called “layered elaboration,” which is where we put down, maybe, a drawing, or we have some kids draw. Then we put down a clear piece of material, then we let another set of kids draw. Then another piece of clear material, then let another set of kids draw. And they build on this idea.
And what’s cool about that, is that, if I just gave one piece of paper and had the kids keep passing that paper around, sometimes kids get a little iffy about drawing on someone else’s drawing. Or, one kid might not want to share their drawing because they’re afraid someone else is going to destroy it. So those clear pieces of acetate are great for that, because they can do it, and they’re not going to destroy anyone else’s stuff.
And we have just a lot of stuff in between — things that go from very blue-sky design where there’s nothing in place, to very evaluative where you might use sticky notes to come up with likes, dislikes and design ideas, which is really fun because that’s something that has been well-developed and the kids can give feedback. Then you take all the likes, dislikes and design ideas, you put them on a board, you arrange them thematically.
You start to see, oh, color’s really important, or they like how this is fun, or they like that this area is loud, or it should be quieter. A design idea might be: I can use it in the car. So that works really well, too.
At the end, after the design time, we do what we call “big ideas.” And that’s where we take all the prototypes, all the things we found, sit in a circle, and use a big whiteboard and highlight those. Those become the themes of what the next level of design will be. They’re the marching orders for the designers. The designers are able to take that and build the next prototype, because we like to fail early and fail often, as Tim Brown says.
Question 3. How can designers interpret kids’ unconventional ideas?
Walsh: It’s interesting because a lot of times, when people are against user-centered design, or including the users in the design process — like, Apple is very big, very clear in saying, “We don’t ask users what they want. They don’t know what they want.”
People always throw the Henry Ford quote, “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would’ve wanted a faster horse.” And the thing is, yeah, they would’ve wanted the faster horse, but as the designer, it’s your job to listen to them, and to take their ideas, and convert that into something else.
So, with kids, they will often talk about — there’s certain icons that they use for everything. There’s always robots, eight? There’s always robot assistants, there’s always jetpacks, always these different things. And what you end up doing, you have to abstract them down into: what is that representing for these kids?
If you want to create an app around sharing stories of some kind, and you have them build a story-sharing device, you’re going to get some crazy stuff. But all of the things they’ve attached to their machine — the microphone, the camera that they can see the other kids, the screen where they can read this, a voice that talks like this, the robot legs that follow you around — are actually things that you can somehow work into just even a flat app.
Because the theme that they’re looking for is they want to be able to communicate, they want to see the other kids, they want to have freedom. The jetpack usually represents some type of freedom. They’re never used to traveling on their own, so that’s kind of cool around that.
The robots usually are some type of autonomy that works with them, like some type of assistant. That, again, you can create but you have to listen to them, and you have to really think about what that means. And that’s where the challenge and the fun usually is.
Question 4. How did your team of kids prototype podcast listening?
Walsh: So, a lot of times when we think about audio, we often think about listening to it in the car. At least, that’s where I came from. So, my biases were definitely old school — you listen to radio in the car. Podcasts are not something that my family does a lot of, because we live in a city. We travel in the car very infrequently. We have so many other things going on. Podcasts really just don’t play very often into it.
So, when the kids [team] started designing it, it was interesting because the kids had no concept of a podcast. They had heard the word, but they didn’t really know what it was. And they were having a really hard time discerning between anything on the radio and this program for them. And that was something that was super surprising from the beginning, right, because they kept wanting to talk about music. And to them, things on the radio were always music.
And they were kids who — I’ve talked to their parents, and I know they listen to things like NPR, and they listen to non-musical audio programming. But [the parents] didn’t as kids. So, that was interesting. So, domain knowledge becomes kind of an issue sometimes when you’re designing with kids, is that they might now have any — their worldview, their input’s going to be great on it, but their worldview might not even have included that thing.
When you start designing with the kids for something like this, and they want to gamify it, that’s pretty common, as well. That goes along with robots and jetpacks: everything should have a game on it. And if you listen to them, like, why they wanted the gamification, it wasn’t necessarily to make the thing better. That’s what was so interesting; it just was something more to do.
Because the idea again — and I think it’s important to think about this when you’re coming up with design challenges with kids, and you’re trying to answer some questions — is the idea of just an audio-only programming for them was, again, not only was it foreign, but that idea just wasn’t something they seemed very inclined to do.
They also shared a lot. That was the other thing that came out of that one, was a lot of sharing pieces. And, I thought that was really fun, in that if you think of — our group is usually [ages] seven to eleven — that age is really nice for concrete thinkers. So, when they say that it should be like this, it should be a jetpack, they truly mean a jetpack; they’re not talking abstract.
Which is cool, but they don’t — seven to eleven — didn’t have a lot of experience with social media. So, the idea of sharing something on social media, they knew what their parents did. But [the kids] tokenize a lot of stuff. So, they literally built tokens that would be a podcast, and you could hand it to another kid, and say, “Here’s this podcast. It’s awesome!” And the kid would take their token.
And it was neat to make something physical that is very not physical, right? Audio is never physical. Radio is very rarely physical, but to sort of embody it into something was really cool. And, again, that was something that the kids came up with, and we ran with.
Question 5. How might we introduce more kids and parents to podcasts?
Walsh: As a parent, you know that there are awful programs for kids that are kid-focused, and they’re terribly annoying to you. And that’s one of the problems that happens when sometimes people try to create media for kids. They make it either not too silly, but they are just making something that is kind of annoying for parents, or the parents have no true interest in it.
And I think as program creators, that’s a hard balance to strike: something that’s really fun for the parents and the kids. That’s the challenge in anything — “The Lego Movie,” “Absolutely Mindy” on SiriusXM, Disney World itself, whatever the things is — how do you strike that balance between kids and adults, that both are interested? As an audio producer, I think that’s where the balance strikes from the content perspective.
But from the culture perspective of how do you introduce this [listening behavior] in, I think it comes back to devices, in a weird way. In that, most of the devices that we as grownups are used to using are personal devices. So, when we listen to podcasts, often we’re going to listen to them on a phone. We’re going to listen to them through some type of app.
Whereas, kids are used to listening to things as groups, and that’s not something that, again, parents have really been doing for a long time, right? The idea of listening to a record with your friends is totally foreign to us at this point in time. Whereas, maybe thirty years ago, that might be something that adults still did, you know. Or, you watch those old movies where people stand around a piano and sing, you know? So, how do you — what’s the device that people would listen to? And things like Alexa, like the Amazon Echo, are actually cool like that because you have this thing. And my kids interact with it. NPR has the NPR Blast on it — they call is the News Blast — and so, somebody comes on and talks from NPR. And it’s quick, and it’s short, and not necessarily kid-appropriate. But those are the kind of things that if you could integrate more into, then I think, actually that’s a really great idea, (laughs) if I do say so myself! Get some type of kid programming on something like an Alexa.
I think that there’s a lot in the future of voice-activated things with family media with audio programming. Because, in a way, when we converse with people, it’s audio programming. That’s the craziest part. We talk so much and it’s audio-only, and so when you converse with this machine back and forth, it would make sense to have audio programming come through it.
