Enabling children to design for others with expanded proxy design

2020. Oussama Metatla, Janet Read & Matthew Horton
Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference.

Abstract

We explore the question of how child designers can provide design ideas for technology that might reduce the marginalisation that can be experienced by some of their peers. To do this, we introduce the idea of Expanded Proxy Design that moves beyond the notion of "proxies as people" in design, to guide methods for engaging children into thinking about design ideas for a group that exists at some distance from their own experience. We outline three case studies where we made use of such methods. First, we consider expanded proxies in the context of technology and newly immigrant children who are unable to speak in English. Second, we consider the case of designing technology for children with and without visual impairments. Finally, we consider designing playful experiences for children with different temperaments. We reflect on the extent to which this expanded notion of proxies can be used as a meaningful vehicle for overcoming marginalisation and exclusion when children with different abilities design for each other. And we suggest ways to characterise, develop and refine expanded proxy design methods in this broader sense.

Read the full paper here ›

Citation

Metatla, O., Read, J. C., & Horton, M. (2020). Enabling children to design for others with expanded proxy design. Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference (pp. 184–197). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3392063.3394431, doi:10.1145/3392063.3394431

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3392063.3394431,
author = {Metatla, Oussama and Read, Janet C and Horton, Matthew},
title = {Enabling children to design for others with expanded proxy design},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450379816},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3392063.3394431},
doi = {10.1145/3392063.3394431},
abstract = {We explore the question of how child designers can provide design ideas for technology that might reduce the marginalisation that can be experienced by some of their peers. To do this, we introduce the idea of Expanded Proxy Design that moves beyond the notion of "proxies as people" in design, to guide methods for engaging children into thinking about design ideas for a group that exists at some distance from their own experience. We outline three case studies where we made use of such methods. First, we consider expanded proxies in the context of technology and newly immigrant children who are unable to speak in English. Second, we consider the case of designing technology for children with and without visual impairments. Finally, we consider designing playful experiences for children with different temperaments. We reflect on the extent to which this expanded notion of proxies can be used as a meaningful vehicle for overcoming marginalisation and exclusion when children with different abilities design for each other. And we suggest ways to characterise, develop and refine expanded proxy design methods in this broader sense.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Interaction Design and Children Conference},
pages = {184–197},
numpages = {14},
keywords = {co-design, exclusion, inclusion, marginalisation, proxies},
location = {London, United Kingdom},
series = {IDC '20}
}