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Bonded Design: Children and Adults in Partnership
Andrew Large, Jamshid Beheshti, Valerie Nesset & Leanne Bowler,
Graduate School of Library & Information Studies,
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Abstract:
Discusses a design methodology, “Bonded Design”, developed by the authors and that utilizes the knowledge and skills of adult designers and young users within an intergenerational team to produce low-tech prototypes of information technology applications. The methodology originated specifically from two intergenerational teams that each worked over around 10 sessions to design two Web portals intended for elementary school students to find information to support class-based project work. These teams included alongside the adult members students from a grade-three elementary school class (aged 8 to 9 years) in one case, and from a grade-six elementary school class (aged 11 to 12 years) in the other case. Bonded Design involves collaborative work while undertaking the following tasks: an initial user needs assessment; evaluation of related technology applications; group discussion; brainstorming; paper prototyping; and consensus building. The paper illustrates the application of Bonded Design with reference to these two cases, and discusses its efficacy as evaluated by the use of working versions of the two prototypes by elementary students. Bonded Design provides a means actively to involve young users in the technology design process from conception to prototype, and can be accomplished with modest resources and over a period of weeks rather than months.
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