The document describes a co-creation toolkit designed to improve communication between designers and 8-10 year old children. The toolkit includes activities like drawing, collage creation, and building with instructions to analyze children's reactions. The initial toolkit focused too much on a specific toy topic. It was modified to have more general activities observing emotions and language to better address exploring effective communication techniques. Testing showed children may act differently with unfamiliar people, so establishing trust is important for getting truthful feedback. The goal is for designers to understand children's perspectives to aid co-design projects.

1. PROJECT 3
CO-CREATION TOOLKIT
YIRAN WANG
WENJIE YUAN
2016-06-23
H.HAMOUDA
SOCS-309-SU01

2. ABSTRACT
The purpose of toolkit is to explore the relationship between professional designers
and 8-10 years old young participants. As well, we will also address the importance of
communication and observing skills in co-design situations that involve children. The
design methods that will be used in this project are interviews, prototyping, primary
research, secondary research and case studies. Findings from the toolkit will be collected
to analyze the participant’s physical and emotional reactions. Through these activities, we
hope to improve our design experiences in cooperating with young age participants.
Keywords: co-creation, 8-10 age group, toolkit, prototyping, communication ability,
emotional stage, data analysis

3. DESIGN CONTEXT
During the spring semester of 2015, our Industrial design class was given the
assignment of designing an interactive object for children age 8-10. The two main criteria
of this project were that firstly, the child must be able to interact with the object; secondly,
the object needs to reflect the child’s interest. The biggest difficultly that we encountered
was communicating with our young co-designers. We had a hard time capture the child’s
attention and finding out what they really like. It was also difficult to receive the response
that we expected for our questions because the child didn’t fully understand some word’s
meanings. Therefore, we concluded that as a designer, we need to develop our techniques
in communicating and interacting with young age participants, along with creating short
and exciting activities to prolong the child’s attention span.
A research study by Underwood and Bjornstad studied children’s emotional
experience of peer provocation was very insightful to our project. The research observed
565 children’s behavior, emotions, and expressions during an experimental play session:
by losing at a computer game they were playing for a desirable prize, and by being taunted
by a peer actor (Underwood & Bjornstad, 2001). This report let us understand that it is
critical to observe children in different activities and relationship contexts for both genders.
Furthermore, there will be a slight difference between children’s self-reports and their
actual observed emotions. Thus, we also need to consider this factor during our co-creation
process.

4. RESEARCH QUESTION
From this project, we would like to explore the relationship between professional
designers and 8-10 years old participants, and what kind of communicational techniques
can help the designer to best accomplish the project. The research sub-question is that
through the co-creation process, how can designers use the toolkit activities to capture the
child’s attention and provide constructive feedbacks?
PURPOSE OF THE TOOLKIT
For this topic, our participant is a young boy that cannot fully express his intentions.
Therefore, we as designers need to be very selective with the kinds of questions that we
propose. Thus, the toolkit will be helping us to explore the importance of communication
and what roles does it play in each design stages.

5. DATA ANALYSIS
We sampled the participant by focus on 8-10 years old age group, excluding special
needs groups. We also required the parent’s consent and their cooperation throughout the
whole study. The participant needs to be outgoing and willing to interact with unfamiliar
people.
For coloring activity, after we get the drawing from our participant, we will analyze
the participant’s personalities and aesthetics throughout the color that he used in the blank
drawing. We also can observe how careful is our participant and his attitudes towards the
assigned activities. For collage activity, we will analyze his emotional state and base on
the collage combination. Meanwhile, we will know his most comfortable place and his
relationships with others. For building&interaction activity, we will particularly focus on
the process that our participant express his mind to designer. His communication ability
and logical thinking ability will be recored into our data as well. We will analyze the data
through the way he communicate and the body language that he uses during the instruction.
TOOLKIT INGREDIENTS
- Paper
- Blank drawing
- Markers
- Collage materials
- Legos

6. SESSION SCRIPT
Introduction—Introduce each other
Instruction—Go over project’s instruction
Demonstration—Sharing and talking about his toy collection / observation
Activity #1—Drawing
Activity #2—Collages
Activity #3—Building&Interaction
Feedback—Talk about child’s feelings of activities
5 minutes
5 minutes
10 minutes
5 minutes
15 minutes
15 minutes
5 minutes
PATH OF EXPRESSION
Introduction helps the designer and participants to be familiarized with each others and it
can build an initial trust between young participant and designer.
Go over instruction gives young participants a sense of general procedure, it also remains
designer of the following steps.
Demonstration is the second step to build trust between participant and designer. Through
this session, designer could better learn about his/her participant’s preference and this step
can be seen as a warm-up for the activities.
Activity #1 is a drawing activity that relates to sensitizing the participant. Young participant
will be required to color one blank drawing with markers.

7. Activity #2 is a collage activity that will recall the memories of the participant. We will
provide collage materials and the participants will create a setting with pieces.
Activity #3 is an interactive building activity that will test young participant’s
communication ability and logical thinking ability. Designer will build a toy with legos by
following the participant’s instructions.
DESIGN RATIONAL
Our target participant is an eight years old boy. The co-design toolkit will be used at the
beginning of the design process, the research stage. By using the toolkit, it will help us
to build trust with our participant. Also, it gives us an opportunity to communicate and
interact with our participant.
We will have Four activities inside the toolkit: based on the theory Convivial Toolbox,
divided into three parts: Say, Do, Make. The first one will be a questionnaire related to
what they “Say”. The question will help us to understand the basic information of our
participant’s personalities and interests, such as “Who do you willing to talk with?” “Will
you share your toys with others?” “How much do you know about designer?” ,etc.
The second and third activities will relate to “Do” part. For the first one, we will provide
a blank car drawing for our participant to color in. For the second one, we will prepare
some collage material for him to create a space that he likes the most. These two activities
are related to emotional toolkit. The purpose of these two activities are to recall the
participant’s memories from earlier experiences and to evoke inspirations.

8. The forth activity will be related to “Make”and the dolls’ house toolkit. We will prepare
one bag of Legos. The participant will describe his favorite object and teach the designer
how to make it. This activity will build up the participant’s communication skill and it also
gives designer an opportunity to co-create with young age participant.
INITIAL RESPONSE
The first version of our toolkit had very different activities. We initially directed
our activities to focus on the specific topic “Toy car”. Our questionnaire focused mainly on
asking about the participant’s preferred toy, colors, and where do they play with their toys.
For the toolkit, we had participants to use clay to build their favorite toy car and adding
Lego pieces on top of their model. The results are that these activities did not correspond
to our research question “exploring the communication between designers and young
age participants”, they were too specific and case-oriented. Therefore, we modified the
activities to focus on observing the participant’s inner emotion and language skills. We also
want the participant to express his feelings through the activities. The questionnaire was
amended to reveal the participant’s basic daily interests and characteristics, also how they
will react in particular situations.

9. Completing the questionnaire Activity #1 - Coloring Activity #2 - Building clay model
Initial Toolkit includes markers, clay
and legos, drawings, questionnaire
Activity #3 - Assembling legos on
model
Final outcome

10. CONCLUSION
Throughout the observation and data analysis of the age group 8-10, we learned
that typically this age group acts differently in front of unfamiliar people than with their
parents. Their self-reported actions can also vary from real life observations. Most children
do not feel comfortable to express their true emotions under unfamiliar context. Therefore,
as a designer, in order to truly communicate with a young age participant, we need to make
the child feel comfortable during the experiment. By establishing the basic trust, the child
will be willing to share their personal feeling and true thinking with the designer, thus, this
will lead to a successful co-design project.
REFERENCE
Neuman, William Lawrence. Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative
Approaches. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997. Print.
Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N., and Pieter Jan Stappers. Convivial Toolbox: Generative
Research for the Front End of Design. Amsterdam: BIS, 2012. Print.
Underwood, M. K., & Bjornstad, G. J. (2001). Children's emotional experience of peer
provocation: The relation between observed behaviour and self-reports of emotions,
expressions, and social goals. International Journal Of Behavioral Development, 25(4),
320-330. doi:10.1080/01650250143000085