Social Change
Meaningful Play: Designing for Child Protagonism.
Project
Master’s Graduation Project, Singapore
Year
2022 - 2023
The Background.
With the increasingly fast-paced lives in cities and evident decline in mental health and well- being, social evils like child maltreatment, negligence or abuse, are becoming highly prevalent in many homes. Occurring within domestic spaces and closed doors, the consequences of child maltreatment leave its victims helpless thereby distorting their image of adults in whom they can place their trust.
This isolates them further and curbs their ability to speak up for their safety or find solace in any “authority”/adult figures in their lives. The issue stems from society’s justification of certain actions through a smokescreen of culture.
The Problem
The functioning of society is designed to cater to adults, pushing children into the blind spot reducing them to voiceless passive participants.
Why is this a problem?
Lack of expression
The world we live in today is designed especially for grown-ups who can communicate and make sense of social cues but ignores children and their ability to speak up during times of trouble and harm. The social issue that this project revolves around is timely, prevalent and highly exigent even in today’s context. Not only doesn’t it affect these children’s lives in the future but further affects society, its representation, and what it means to be humanly inclusive.
Fear of repurcussion
Children who undergo such maltreatment often do not realise what they go through and fearing the repercussions, they often do not flag situations especially if the abuser in question is their parent. Words often fall short for these young children adding to the difficulty, especially in speaking up about such grievous issues. The existence of child maltreatment and all its forms only ensures a decline of mental well-being in children and wreaks havoc well into their adult lives.
How might we understand this better and draw insights?
Interviews and workshops with children, teachers, parents and child psychologists
Design for Research & Design through Research
Volunteering
In order to design something that is truly effective and relatable to children, it became imperative to spend time with them through volunteering at child care centres to form bonds and start understanding how the express themselves and their feelings.
Running workshops
Activities like interaction with clay, picture writing and origami were facilitated to understand the effect it had on children. This was done with the non-profit organisations like Glyph and CDAC and as an ad-hoc activity.
Gathering known-knowledge
It was important to conduct expert interviews, understand concepts like cultural semiotics, humanity centred design and social capital by conducting a thorough literature review and forming a research strategy. This involved formulating research questions.
Prototyping and testing
To verify the first part of the hypothesis and prove that children express themselves better with drawings and imagery than they can verbally. Secondly, it was to study children’s interactive patterns and engagement levels with various media and kinds of activities to judge what works best as a model to be taken forward in the design development phase.
Understanding mental models of meaning-making through image making
With the designs being interactive and child-friendly in terms of visual, there was no need for facilitation: the kits were fairly intuitive. The visual cues in the layouts of the worksheets needed no further explanation, the kids were able to follow and take lead rather than being led. The use of colours helped in expressing their creativity and meaning-making; wherein they coded colours to emotions. This in turn proves the hypothesis right.
Insights drawn through readings, interviews and simply playing with children
Children often code into drawings what they fail to express in words.
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Children often code into drawings what they fail to express in words. This can be used as a research tool to gather insights from children who have undergone trauma when they are unable to express their feelings or experiences through words. Children enforce their individual meaning-making coloured by the culturally structured coding process that they imbibe while growing up. These become building blocks of their semiosis.
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It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
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Child Protagonism, which is the empowerment of children to take an active role in society by being expressive and courageous, can help to foster social capital. By approaching the problem with system design insights and fostering a co-design environment, this study, which is being performed in Singapore with the involvement of the target audience (children) and various stakeholders, will assure effective, efficient, and long-lasting solutions.
Making sense of the insights for a new system
In the preliminary testing phase, it was observed that children’s articulation through imagery and tangible media is far more effective and easy than written and spoken activities. there was a need for icebreakers and conversational activities for the children to become more participatory and open.
An emerging approach in the institution of child psychology is Gestalt Play Therapy, a process-focused, experiential therapy that prioritises the integration of the senses, the body, the emotions, and the intellect.
Identifying areas of opportunity
Children have Superpowers.
Superpowers of visual storytelling
Children are often not able to express their feelings and emotions in words but they hold a sueerpower of being excellently expressive through drawings and the art they create. These are often coloured by the culture codes that they are exposed to.
This project further explores the semiosis behind children’s artistic imagery and explores the role of design in children's meaning-making in their ways of depcting something through colours and shapes.
How might we translate our insights into areas of opportunities?
Meaningful Play: a system of solutions that help children with expression.
What is Meaningful Play?
The initiative's purpose is mainly to educate children and adults on how children are potential active agents of society and to inculcate the importance of Child Protagonism in today’s world. Secondly, to engage and help children learn by play and discover their inner voice to articulate their precious thoughts and ideas. And finally, a forum to potentially help them escalate grievances to the appropriate authorities and seek help when needed.
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With the help of the insights gained from the initial testing, research and proposed frameworks, the workshop component of Meaningful Play was designed with facilitation centres like child care centres, here, especially with CDAC Singapore, to come up with intuitive, interactive and engaging activities for children.
These activities not only strengthen meaning-making and expressional qualities in children but also enthuse them to make decisions that positively affect others and their surroundings, creating a precursor for their journey towards Child Protagonism.
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Here, the chapters such as “Me, myself and I”; “Me and my surroundings”; “Me and my dear ones” and “Me and my world”, help translate the conceptual framework proposed earlier into a design solution. This forms the foundational principle of the entire design system, including the main components of the workshop, website & toolkit.
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The modularity of the soltion allows it to be held in schools, child care centres, and even at home.
How Meaningful Play works
Meaningful Play developed a toolkit “My first book of Child Protagonism” to support children's participation to provide them with the necessary skills and knowledge to become effective child protagonists.
The creative decision to make the box modular was taken to reflect the true nature of the initiative itself - modular and generative. It was also to induce a sense of play to discover compartments and elements of surprise.
What the system looks like
my first book of child protagonism
The toolkit.
A fun and empowering learning experience
Understanding the self
This component revolves around teaching self-awareness and self-regulation to children in order to help them express themselves better and deal with big emotions.
Developing communication skills
For child protagonists, communication is a key tool. The toolkit would offer guidance on how to speak properly and effectively and listen actively
Developing self-confidence
Children must believe in their abilities and themselves. The toolkit would include role-playing and public speaking practice exercises that encourage kids to develop self-confidence
Developing critical thinking abilities
Children must be able to assess issues and make recommendations. Activities that encourage critical thinking would be included in the toolkit.
What is the working model?
What impact does Meaningful Play have?
Some of these activities were completely novel experiences for these children while others helped them express themselves bravely and creatively.
Results from Pilot Workshops
The different modes of engagement, ie., via words, paper, clay, pictures and drawings gave them an opportunity to explore different media and was surely instrumental in understanding how they engage with each of these tasks.
Co-Design, collaborations and future scoping
Since the entire Meaningful Play system stems from principles of collaboration and co-design, it allows for seamless and impactful integration of design solutions and collaborations.
Meaningful Play then becomes an avenue for such collaborations and partnerships to take place. Some of the current collaborations include the one with Chinese Development Assistance Council (CDAC), a non-profit organisation that focuses on self-help and doubles as a child-care centre with tuition and workshops for kids across ages. CDAC Punggol had been greatly instrumental in the development of the design solution, by providing the sample pool and premises for conducting tests and workshops. The facilitators and coordinator have provided their insights on the progress of the workshops, observations and how these activities can be designed in a more child-friendly way with their expertise of working with children for many years.
Collaboration with the Take Care project kids
The collaboration took place with a cohort mate whose design solution revolved around sustainable practices in consumption of fashion. With their solution extended to kids, to teach them basic skills of mending clothes etc., It was an appropriate opportunity to collaborate with as a large part of the toolkit revolves around responsibility and caring for the environment. The kit came with simple task cards and necessary tools to carry them out. Meaningful Play incorporated appropriate moral learnings and gamification of learning.
Research and Design process in a nutshell
