Reaction paper to the article The Role of Children in the Design of New Technology - Essay Example

Summary and Critique: “The Role of Children in the Design of New Technology" From an overarching perspective the article considers the specific waysthat children can contribute to the design of new technology. The author indicates that at times this can be a challenging situation because children are traditionally situated as subordinates rather than as contributing members of an intellectual community. The central argument then is that the more children’s insights and perspectives can be gained on technology and gaming, the more effective designs can be structured.

The author then advances a specific framework for gaining insights on this process. Is this was Druin proposes three main roles for children in the design process. Specifically these involve: user, tester, informant, and design partner. In this way children are tasked with becoming directly involved in the design process through engaging with the games and providing feedback. At later stages in the development they are tasked with actually giving advice to the designers about how the technology or game could be changed.

The research then gives expansive consideration to the specific processes within these stages. A considerable amount of past research is advanced that considers how child-design interactions have been advanced in the past. Eventually the researchers advance the notion of cooperative inquiry. This aspect of the collaborative framework articulates how the child can best be utilized to gain insights on the design process. During the article’s conclusion the researchers establish a graph that articulates the historical evolution of human-computer interaction (HCI).

This demonstrates that children have increasingly been given the opportunity to provide their insight into the design process. There are a number of considerations related to this article. One of the most prominent considerations is that the divisions the author establishes -- user, tester, informant, design partner – are highly simplistic in nature. In this way they constitute less an innovative framework and more a way of articulating common sense ways of engaging with children. While the author advances a number of research on the subject, in many instances this past research does not form a functional gestalt.

Instead, it merely offers disparate ways that children have been used in the design process. Still, the researcher’s perspective on cooperative inquiry is effective in that it provides a structured process that can be used for a large variety of applications. In this way the researchers argue that the child and adult collaboration process undergo a stage where the traditional roles are renegotiated. During this period the adult abandons the traditional role of supervisor and allows the child increasing independence as a means of establishing a collaborating relationship.

To a large degree, however, there is the recognition that the research speaks of children in as a single body of people rather than considering their differing levels of cognitive development. In this way it may have been more successful if the research framework contained specific ways of interacting with children for their cognitive level. ReferencesDruin, Allison. ‘The Role of Children in the Design of New Technology.’ HCIL Technical Report No. 99-23; http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil