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Do children use objects to infer the people and actions that created them? We ask how children judge whether designs were socially transmitted (copied), asking if children use a simple perceptual heuristic (more similar = more likely copied), or make a rational, flexible inference (Bayesian inverse planning). We found evidence that children use inverse planning to reason about artifacts’ designs: When children saw two identical designs, they did not always infer copying occurred. Instead, similarity was weaker evidence of copying when an alternative explanation ‘explained away’ the similarity. Thus, children inferred copying had occurred less often when designs were efficient (Exp1, age 7-9; N=52), and when there was a constraint that limited the number of possible designs (Exp2, age 4-5; N=160). When thinking about artifacts, young children go beyond perceptual features and use a process like inverse planning to reason about the generative processes involved in design.
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Play-Based Design: Giving 3- to 4-Year-Old Children a Voice in the Design Process
There has been a dramatic growth in interactive technology use by children under the age of 5 during the past decade. Despite this growth, children under the age of 5 typically participate only as users or testers in the design process in the overwhelming majority of projects targeting this population presented in key child-computer interaction venues. In this paper we introduce play-based design, an age-appropriate design method to give 3-4-year-old children a voice in the design process. More specifically, we contribute a thorough analysis of the use of existing methods to design technologies for children under the age of 5, a summary of the process that resulted in the development of play-based design, a detailed description of play-based design, a qualitative analysis of our experience implementing play-based design with two groups of children, and a discussion of play-based design's place among other methods, its advantages, and limitations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1908476
- PAR ID:
- 10170261
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 14
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376407
