Layered Elaboration: A New Technique for Co-design with Children

Abstract

As technology for children becomes more mobile, social, and distributed, our design methods and techniques must evolve to better explore these new directions. This paper reports on “Layered Elaboration,” a co-design technique developed over the past year. Layered Elaboration allows design teams to generate ideas through an iterative process in which each version leaves prior ideas intact while extending concepts. Layered Elaboration is a useful technique as it enables co-design to take place asynchronously and does not require much space or many resources. Our intergenerational team used the technique to design a prototype of an instructional game about energy conservation