My name is Sofia Lundmark and I am a Senior lecturer in Media Technology at Södertörn
university in Sweden, and I have written this paper together with my colleague Martin Jonsson,
also at Södertörn University. We are presenting the paper:
Becoming a Designer at the Design Lab: Empowerment and participation in children’s design activities.
The paper draws on a study that is centered around an organisation
and a physical space called Design Lab S. Design lab S is a publicly funded organisation
that engages children between the ages 9 to 13 years old
in design activities together with professional designers and artists.
The S in the name stands for Skärholmen, which is a suburb of Stockholm where the lab is situated.
Skärholmen is a socioeconomically vulnerable area, struggling with
issues related to unemployment and integration. The study of the design lab was performed in 2018
and 2019, just when it was clear that the lab lost its funding and that the lab had to shut down.
The study is based on interviews with five children, observations of a few design activities
and meetings at the lab, and analysis of online materials and online forums related to the lab.
The interviews with the children focused to a large extent on what the Design Lab had meant
for them in their daily lives, and how they perceived and
valued the activities in the lab. From the interviews, in combination with
observations and analysis of online materials, we identified a number of factors related to how
the lab was organized, that we believe have had a particular impact on the participating children.
These empowering functions are: The creative laboratory, Community
participation, and playful apprenticeship We will now go through these one by one.
The first empowering function we want to highlight we call the creative laboratory.
Here we want to highlight how the framing of a lab or laboratory fostered an open atmosphere,
allowing for exploration, not only in design activities, but also of
new identities and ways of being different,
thus filling an important role in in the children’s personal development.
The second empowering function concerns community participation.
The Design lab had a strong connection to the Skärholmen suburb, through its name,
its location in the center of the suburb, and most importantly through the design activities,
which were often aimed at discussing, problematizing,
or improving aspects of life in this particular suburb.
The design activities thus allowed the children to challenge both themselves as well as their
surroundings to form new understandings of for example what it means to be a child in the suburb.
The third empowering function we call playful apprenticeship,
and concerns the relationship between the children and the professional designer staff in the lab.
At the design lab the notion of colleagues is important, both in the design lab’s
official communication as well as in the accounts from the participating children.
The children highlight that they are all equals that are involved in the
design inquiry on equal terms. This peer culture differs from
typical master-apprentice relationships, as the teacher or facilitator guidance is integrated
in playful explorations with recurrent dialogues that encourage self-reflection.
As demonstrated in the study, the children’s participation in the design activities
at the design lab provides different means for an increased influence over their own situation.
The design activities can be seen as resources for the children’s identity formation,
as well as for actually changing and affecting their own situation and their local environment.
The study also shows that empowerment through design does not only mean
that the design activities serve as a scaffolding to support “useful” subject matters,
but that the creative explorations may be empowering in themselves, by for example
providing means for experimentations with personal expressions and developing a designer identity.
Thank you for listening to us