The project aimed to develop comprehensive, visually engaging toolkits to empower designers as proficient co-creation facilitators. Divided into teams, we delved into the domain of co-creating with children to design engaging historical museum experiences.
Introduction: What is Design for Co-Creation?
A co-creation kit is a powerful tool that enables participants to engage deeply with the present while imagining future possibilities. It provides structured activities and resources that guide users in identifying the level of detail required for impactful service design. Tailored for in-depth exploration of specific topics, the kit acts as a springboard for innovative service concepts, offering fresh perspectives in service design innovation.
When children are invited to be collaborators, co-creation takes on a deeper significance—empowerment through involvement. In a world where adults often dictate young people’s narratives, co-creation offers a way to shift the balance, giving children a voice and an active role in shaping experiences.
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The ‘Making History Fun Again’ Toolkit
Project Information
Communication for Co-Creation
Role
Ethnographic Research, Participtory Research, Workshop Design
Team
Tom van Wijiland, Siqi Zhang
The Making History Fun Again Toolkit
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Children, with their boundless creativity and unfiltered perspectives, see possibilities that adults often overlook. But how can we harness this creativity effectively? How can we inspire and channel it toward a shared goal? Over four weeks, we explored how children’s creativity could enhance historic museums. The result is a toolkit designed for museum professionals, enabling them to collaborate with children in designing engaging spaces and exhibitions.
What is the “The Making History Fun Again Toolkit”?
Historical museums serve a crucial role in narrating the past through exhibitions comprising text, artefacts, media, and more. They do this through exhibitions that contain text, artefacts, media and more.
In order to engage children into these tales of past time, we asked ourselves the questions:
What stories ignite children’s interest?
How do children understand stories?
How do children tell stories?
ToolKit Development
To evaluate the initial workshop design, we conducted a trial run with adult participants from our design school. Although not the intended audience, this exercise provided valuable insights into the practical execution of the activities. Through this testing phase, we identified areas for potential improvement:
Using crafting materials for activities requires clear input and direction. Participants found it challenging to be inspired without a strong historical context. To address this, the new workshop incorporates more immersive play to introduce the topic. We also recommend providing children with some form of historical context before the workshop, such as exploring a relevant exhibition space.
Creating a collage on the topic of 'How do you learn History?' may be too abstract for children and not hands-on enough. However, conducting this activity with adults yielded interesting stories about the role of history and museums in their early lives.
AI technology, such as ChatGPT4's text and image generation software, proved useful for quickly creating specific texts and images to enrich the workshop experience for participants.
Preparing the collaging activity (left) Telling a story to inspire the crafting session using AI generated cartoons (middle) a participant making a drum kit out of simple materials (right)
Illustration Galore
A key aspect of putting the methods into a cohesive and understandable toolkit was to put them into an illustrated format. Many people, perhaps designers in particular, find it hard to read through steps and execute them properly when they are written down in plain text. Visualising methods might help people get a good sense of what is supposed to happen in the activity that is described after just taking a glance at the illustrations. This resulted in a toolkit that is clear, looks fun, and is tempting to try out.