Festival2012/Submit/Designing Creative Technology Playgrounds for Families

Designing Creative Technology Playgrounds for Families

• Title of the session: Designing Creative Technology Playgrounds for Families
• Your name and affiliation: Members of MIT Scratch Team, MIT Media Lab (organized by: Ricarose Roque)
• Session format: Design Challenge

What will your session or activity allow people to make, learn or do?

In this session, we invite participants to discuss and design ways to expand the participation of hackerspaces to children and their families.

Hackerspaces and makerspaces have enabled people with common interests to create, connect, and collaborate on projects in shared, community-operated spaces. However, these hackerspaces are often the domains of adults and already enthusiastic inventors of all trades, such as artists, designers, engineers, and hobbyists. How can we design a community space, like playgrounds, to be accessible to children, their families, and community members who are less familiar with the tools, activities, and, at times, implicit social norms that come with these spaces?

How do you see that working?

• Short introduction at the beginning to frame the problem and generate questions to think about through the design challenge session. For example, some questions we can consider are: What kinds of activities and resources will be needed to support children and members who are less familiar with the tools available? How might these spaces connect to local learning communities and community organizations, like schools, libraries, and museums?
• Break up into groups to discuss ideas, designs, and challenges to develop these spaces
• Share thoughts and design ideas with the whole group
• Discuss next steps to continue discussion and sharing of experiences

How will you deal with 5, 15, 50 participants?

The organization of the session will be the same regardless of the number of participants. Once the session and ideas are introduced, much of the session relies on the attendees to drive the discussion and development of the ideas. The more the merrier!

How long within your session before someone else can teach this?

As mentioned in the previous section, once the session and challenges are framed in the introduction, session attendees will drive the rest of the session and future efforts.

What do you see as outcomes after the festival?

• Generation of ideas, challenges, and directions to pursue
• Document and share online ideas, questions, and designs
• Build a network of people interested in designing spaces for children and families to create, build, and design together