Developed in collaboration with Canadian and Dutch researchers, the Developmentally Situated Design (DSD) card set aids designers working on interactive devices for children. Illustration and design: Alissa Antle, Allen Bevans, Saba Nowroozi, Ying Deng

Many designers working on interactive technologies for children lack an understanding of children’s needs and developmental abilities. It’s a knowledge gap that Dr. Alissa Antle, Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Art + Technology, is aiming to change.

Working with a collaborator in the Netherlands, Dr. Antle has developed colourfully illustrated cards – called the Developmentally Situated Design (DSD) card set – to make age-specific information about children’s developing cognitive, physical, social, and emotional abilities readily accessible to designers.

An expert in interactive design for children, Dr. Antle is the co-leader of GRAND’s KIDZ project focused on the study, design, and evaluation of technologies for child-computer interaction. Before returning to academia, she spent eight years developing digital media content and interfaces for children.

“When I was working in industry I saw a real need to make academic knowledge about child development accessible to designers of children’s media,” said Dr. Antle. “And that’s one of the reasons why I decided to take an academic position.”

Through the initial support of SSHRC’s International Opportunities Fund, the DSD cards project grew out of collaboration with Dr. Tilde Bekker, an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The researchers – both specialists in interaction design for children – had started collaborating on a book for global publisher CRC Press.

“We decided that what was needed was not another academic textbook on designing for children,” said Dr. Antle. “Rather we needed a way to make dense theoretical knowledge accessible and readily available to designers, design students and researchers in practice.”

The pair developed the first version of the cards based on interviews with design practitioners and students. Their analysis revealed how the cards' characteristics enabled different kinds of uses including framing, orienting, inspiring, informing, integrating and constraining. The researchers published their work at the 2011 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Dr. Antle continued with the project in Canada and worked with a team of SFU students, funded by GRAND, to refine, redesign and re-evaluate the cards. The work culminated in a completely redesigned second set of DSD cards.  Dr. Bekker then had the second set professionally produced in limited quantities in The Netherlands.

In October 2013, the card set was selected for a DEVICE (DEsign for Vulnerable generatIons: Children and Elderly) Best Practice Award. The European-based award recognizes design targeted at vulnerable generations: children and the elderly.

DEVICE is part of the Erasmus Multilateral Projects funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme. The project aims at providing designers with the appropriate tools and knowledge needed to design for children and older adults.

The DSD card set was selected from numerous cases of research and education activities collected by the DEVICE project. The selection committee provided the following motivation for its decision:

“The DSD [card] is a tool that transforms a wealth of theory, not really accessible for practitioners, into a readily accessible tool for designers. The tool is highly suitable in teaching and training [developing] designers in the art of designing for and with children.”

An award ceremony is set to take place in Reggio Emilia, Italy, March 7, 2014, where Dr. Antle and Dr. Bekker have been invited to present their work.

-30-

GRAND Contact

Spencer Rose
Communications Officer
GRAND NCE