Harnessing children's creativity in contextmapping activities

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mimarlık Fakültesi, Endüstriyel Tasarım Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2010

Öğrenci: ASLI DENİZ ÖZAKAR

Danışman: OWAIN FRANCIS PEDGLEY

Özet:

Recently developed co-design methods ask for users’ creative outcomes all through the design process. Designers are familiar with the creative process but users are not. The heuristic tasks given to users should reveal their creativity and harness it for high-quality outcomes. Contextmapping is a new co-design method following the same need as others; the method involves generative sessions in which users are asked to create artifacts communicating their needs and dreams about future products. Children are taking part in these processes and their involvement requires an understanding about their needs and abilities. Contextmapping with children has many aspects yet to be discovered, one of which is harnessing children’s creativity during generative sessions. This forms the basis for this research. The thesis traces an overview of creativity, co-design with children, contextmapping with children and children’s creativity. The literature review opens a new area for investigation about using competition, which is seen both detrimental and challenging for eliciting creativity from children, as a motivation during contextmapping activities. The empirical study is formed from six sessions aiming to find an answer to the effects of cooperation and competition on children’s creativity during contextmapping sessions in regard to gender differences. The analyzed and discussed findings show that competition is a motivating element and has positive impacts on children’s creativity, it increases children’s motivation towards contextmapping tasks and the outcomes of the sessions are more appropriate to the expectations of the task.