Co-Design with Children: A KidsTeam Toolkit for Librarians

Abstract

This exploratory study aims to create a draft of a standalone KidsTeam toolkit (Toolkit v.1) to support public librarians when they plan, implement and facilitate KidsTeam collaborative design (co-design) sessions with their youth patrons in their library branches. My research is rooted in the work of Dr. Allison Druin’s research on and formation of KidsTeam, an intergenerational design team in which children and adults co-design technologies for children together, and Dr. Greg Walsh’s adaptation of this KidsTeam model for public libraries, specifically, his KidsTeam Project Repository, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA). A Research through Design (RtD) approach informed my three-stage research design as I explore the format and function of Toolkit v.1 with a narrow participant pool of 3 public librarians who have past experience co-facilitating KidsTeam co-design sessions in their libraries. Stage 1 explored participants’ past experience as co- facilitators and the format for Toolkit v.1. Stage 2 consisted of iteratively analyzing and synthesizing the data from Stage 1 to inform the design artifact (Toolkit v.1). Stage 2’s results dictated the research design for Stage 3, in which I conducted a usability assessment and follow-up interviews. From this data analysis, I offer recommendations for Toolkit v.2 and suggested paths for future research.