PhD Courses in Denmark

Child-Centred Design Research Methods
- understanding children’s perspectives through play 

Teachers

• Karen Feder, Associate Professor, LAB for Play Design, Kolding School of Design
• Line Gad Christiansen, Assistant Professor, LAB for Social Design, Kolding School of Design
• Louise Aagaard, Assistant Professor, LAB for Play Design, Kolding School of Design

Course description

In both research and practice, there is a tendency to assume that adults know best when it comes to children. With the best intentions, we use our intellectual knowledge, our practical experience, and inherited culture to research, design for, and communicate to children — but how do we ensure that children themselves have a genuine voice in this process?

This course challenges our immediate adult assumptions about children and childhood by proposing a child-centred design approach, focusing on researching, designing, and communicating with children in their everyday lives, on their own terms, and from their own perspectives. Drawing on the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and child-centred design research methods such as Child-centred Consent Forms, Internship as a Child, Play Probes, Co-create the Life of a Child, and Visual Reflection Cards, play is used as an entry point for understanding children’s lives and perspectives.

The aim of the PhD course is to provide participants with playful approaches and methods for ensuring that children’s voices are included in their research through a nuanced understanding of children’s perspectives, motivations, and lived experiences. The course is aimed at PhD students within design, architecture, city planning and other related fields, but researchers from other disciplines are welcome if they find the course relevant to their own research interests.

The course will address ethical considerations involved in working with children, but it will not cover the various rules and laws that apply in different countries, knowledge institutions, or research disciplines.

Course format

The course will be conducted online via Microsoft Teams in Central European Summer Time and in English. The course includes shared lectures and presentations on Day 1 and Day 3, as well as online individual supervision on Day 2. Participants are expected to actively engage with the methods in practice between Day 1 and Day 3. Familiarisation with the selected articles is expected in preparation for the course. 

Programme

• Day 1: Theoretical foundations of the child-centred design approach; introduction to child-centred research methods; ideation on participants’ own child-centred design research processes
  • In between: Plan, conduct, and reflect on your own child-centred design research process; document your reflections throughout the process
     
• Day 2: Individual online supervision sessions
  • In between: Continue planning, conducting, and reflecting on your own child-centred design research process; Write a one-page reflection on your experiences with planning, implementation, and reflection, and send it to the course coordinator no later than December 1, 2026; Prepare slides for a shared presentation of your experiences and reflections

• Day 3: Shared presentations of participants’ experiences with child-centred design methods, followed by a discussion of key learnings and implications for research and design practices, as well as reflection and recommendations for next steps

Sign up

Sign up and submit a one-pager outlining why, and at which stage of your research process you would like to include children in your design research – no later than October 10, 2026. 

There is a maximum of 20 participants, allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Selected articles

• Feder, Karen (2020). "Designing for play with a child-centred design approach". Chapter in the book "Framing Play Design - A hands on guide for Designers, Learners & Innovators", edited by Sune Gudiksen & Helle Marie Skovbjerg.
• Iversen, O. S., Smith, R. C., & Dindler, C. (2017). Child as protagonist: Expanding the role of children in participatory design. In P. Blikstein & D. Abrahamson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’17) (pp. 27–37). Association for Computing Machinery. 
• Feder, Karen (2022). "Internship as a child - what designers can learn through play with children". Proceedings, DRS2022, Bilbao, Spain.
• Christiansen, Line Gad (2022). "Meaningful Participation - Motivating young people's participation through play probes". BUKS - Tidsskrift for Børne- og Ungdomskultur / Designing for Play in New Nordic Childhood. 
• United Nations. (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-rights-child