Participatory Design in ECHOES

ECHOES II aims to develop an adventurous technology-enhanced learning environment in which both typically developing children and children with Asperger Syndrome can explore and improve social interaction and collaboration skills (More...).

Participatory Design?

We believe that the design of such an environment needs to be informed by a deep understanding of the children's world. This is why we make children our partners in designing this environment. This means that we work with children in different settings such as after-school clubs or workshops to find out about what they enjoy, what is fun, safe and motivating and what we have to consider when we define our learning activities. 

What exactly?

We develop design activities with specific questions in mind that address aspects of the environment we want to create. These questions can be quite broad like "How do children engage with objects in a virtual space?" or very specific "What colour should this building block be?". Simply asking children rarely produces reliable information, which is why we develop activities in which we seek to elicit this information in a playful and engaging way.

The settings of these activities can be very different and depends on the routine of the school and their offers (after-school care, holiday clubs etc). Our highest priority is not to cause unnecessary disruption, but engage with schools, teachers, parents and the children in a partnership with mutual benefits. Besides the design activities we conduct with children, we also seek the expertise and experience of the adult peers. To this end, we form focus groups in which we discuss ideas and get the views from people who are the most important peers to the children.

For an example design activity, read more about the Treasure Chest.

Examples

Here some examples of environments that we build on. Foremost, this is ReactiveColours:

We are also thinking about sound games which might be a good way of engaging children while emphasising temporal structures and repetition. A first sketch of this idea is also shown below as a video: 

In later stages of this the project we are exploring how to use virtual reality techniques to build learning environments. This is an example of how this could look like: