This report describes my graduation report for the Master Design for Interaction, part of Industrial Design Engineering at the technical University Delft. The project is in collaboration with both the Play Well Lab and the SWKGroep.

The SWKGroep asked for a child participation toolkit which would help them discover the latent knowledge of the children. In order to be able to go into depth while designing this toolkit, the project is split up into two individual graduation projects. This report describes the first project.

“My design goal is to develop a substantiated and partly tested vision for the development of a child participation Toolkit, which is suitable within the context of the SWKGroep facilities and based on the expectations, wishes, needs and capacity of both the staff members as well as the children.”

The first chapter will introduce the different stakeholders involved in the project. These are the SWKGroep and the Play Well Lab. The chapter will conclude with the relevance of this project for both stakeholders.

The second chapter will describe the research phase, including different interviews, a generative session and an analysis of the results. The chapter will conclude with the discovered problem area and my design focus within this project.
Within the third chapter, an approach for this defined problem area will be defined. The chosen approach will be explained and the chapter concludes with an explanation on why this approach would fit the defined problem area.

After describing this approach, the approach will be elaborated into ideas. This is done in chapter 4, which includes the ideation phase. This chapter will end with a set of 23 ideas/tools which could be used for child participation at the BSO.

The next step, described in chapter 5, is validation of the approach. This is done by testing a selection of the ideas at the BSO to see what the obstacles and enablers are when doing child participation at the BSO. The insights from the user-tests are discussed and this chapter will conclude with a validation of the approach including conditions to be met and an overview of opportunities which were found during the tests.

Chapter 6 will conclude this report with recommendations for the follow-up project and a reflection on this project.

This report is the result of the graduation project of Joris Menting for SWKGroep. The project concludes the master program Design for Interaction at the Delft University of Technology. SWKGroep asked for an innovative child care tool for children of 10-14 years old. The project description offered the designer much freedom. The initial design goal was formulated as follows: “Design a location and time independent form of after school day care for children (10-14 years old) that relieves parents, where children experience both affection and freedom and that adds value for SWKGroep.” The project is divided in three chapters: Orientation/Research, Ideation/Iteration and Evaluation/Demonstration. See Figure 1 for the overview of this project. The first chapter of the project, Orientation/Research, describes the internal and external analysis that gave more insight in the context of after school day care and the rules and regulations by the Dutch government. Interviews with parents and generative research sessions with children gave insights in the latent needs and desires of the users of the product. With the insights of the first chapter the design goal was further specified as follows: “Design a location and time independent form of after school day care for children (10-14 years old) where: children experience affection, freedom and guidance, while it relieves parents during work without losing control, that fits the business operations of SWKGroep and adds value.” In the second chapter, Ideation/Iteration, ideas to reach the design goals where generated. To guide this process two interaction visions are developed. They formed the inspiration for new ideas and used to test whether ideas where still on track of solving the design goal. Two initial design concepts where developed and assessed during a co-creation session with employees of different layers within the organisation of SWKGroep. Together with the analysis of an weighted objectives method the decision is made to develop a chosen concept that uses the strengths of both initial concepts: TEQ TIME Coach. In the last chapter: Evaluation/Demonstration the chosen concept is tested and evaluated with parents and potential coaches. These user tests gave the insights which made it possible to develop the chosen concept into a final design. This design is presented in paragraph 3.2 at page 90. This project can be seen as the first part, research and ideation, of developing an innovative child care tool for children of 10-14 years old. The second part, implementation, will be a project for the future. This project ends with a implementation plan for this second phase.