Working with young people at the margins of society to design hybrid physical/digital objects to portray their experiences of support services

Burnett, Daniel John and Coulton, Paul (2017) Working with young people at the margins of society to design hybrid physical/digital objects to portray their experiences of support services. The Design Journal, 20 (Suppl.). S3620-S3629. ISSN 1460-6925

Abstract

Telling the stories of people that have come through the care system is an important task, not only to let the wider public understand the issues that these people face but to help those on their way into the care system as well. These transformative stories written and researched by those same young people that have traversed the care system, required a novel method of portrayal. To that end the young people were given tools that enabled them to help in the design of physical/digital hybrid objects that would allow people to truly interact with the stories. This paper discusses how the research team approached giving the young people those tools and the outputs that those people then produced. By enabling the young people as co-researchers a further depth of discovery was achieved that wouldn’t have been possible without that same input.