Understanding Children’s Contributions during Informant Design

In this paper we describe the analysis of the outcomes of a design session with children. Designing with children is often considered an inspirational activity mainly useful for the designers to get first hand insights of the users’ world. For this study we attempt an analytical approach to the results of a specific design session where children used low-tech prototyping to design the content of an interactive interface for a museum context. This analysis helped to inform the design of the specific product but was also useful to investigate methods of interpreting qualitative data of this kind. The analysis showed that the design method employed enabled the children to consider design features but also demonstrated that in some areas the children had only a limited understanding. Results from this work will be used to improve, and describe future design sessions.