Metadesigning for Children

(An overview of a project in progress)
See a list of all meetings and notes

Who?

1. The project was initiated byHyaesook Yang, Dan Griner and John Wood in October 2021.
2. We did not start with a specific plan but wanted to work with metadesign.

Why?

1. Humans are monkeys who increasingly depend on the tools they design.
2. We have inadvertently created the Anthropocene (an increasingly unstable and hostile environment for us)
3. Although future citizens will need to think more holistically our brains evolved to think locally.
4. We are unaccustomed to the scale and gravity of our responsibility (from the micro-local to the macro).
5. Unfortunately, some people are turned off by jargon - or by theory that is needlessly-complex or pretentious.
6. We asked ourselves whether children would have the same difficulties (biases?) in understanding the challenge.

Children

1. Would children understand our Metadesign publications?
2. If not - what would we need to do to make metadesign itself accessible and useable?
3. We decided not to make arbitrary decisions about the age group until we had conducted some experiments.

Key Questions

1. We wanted to know how to enable adults to learn more from children and how they ask questions and reason.
2. We wanted to know how adults might help children to think about, and to address, important issues more effectively.