As part of a research project that aims to explore the processes of empowering people to design (www.empoweringdesign.net), the research team has occasionally explored different ways for engaging the children of participating families in the design of community spaces. This typically occurs in workshops and open day events where children of adult participants engage in arts-and crafts to express visions and ideas. But a slightly different experiment was conducted recently where children were more on the driving seat of engagement.
The particular experiment focused on the use of a gaming platform called Roblox, which is currently very popular with children, as a way to explore collaborative designing and collaborative making of spaces. More specifically, the objective was to engage primary school children in thinking about the role of their local church as a community place and to support them to collaboratively design a community place.
At the end of the workshop, their creations were shared with their parents in a discussion session that had the objective to encourage adult parents to see the design of these places through the eyes of their children. In this sense, the children were leading the engagement.
The workshop was run with year 5 pupils from St Mark’s Church of England Primary School in North London. The workshop activities were co-designed and co-facilitated with two Year 6 students from two other schools in East London.
The experiment showed that the children valued the opportunity to learn more about the design of places, and to use the gaming platform in a creative way – not to complete a set problem or task, but to imagine and design their own places.
For more information look at the blog https://www.empoweringdesign.net/blog/gaming-as-a-design-engagement-tool
Leave a Reply