Pre-schoolers’ Stewardship – Embracing Higgledy-piggledy Behaviours through Participatory Plaything

Child-centred design acknowledges the significance of a child's input during collaborative design processes, allowing the potential residing in their imagination and experiences to come forth. However, when younger pre-schoolers —3–6-year-olds—are involved in participatory research, it is difficult for design researchers to connect diverse children towards collaborating on fruitful design outcomes while accepting pre-schoolers’ own-initiated play expressions. This paper argues that by incorporating enjoyment of construction play, pre-schoolers can provide distinctive insights concerning key co-design themes: participation, design activities and material exploration. This study proposes a plaything with intent methodology that scaffolds serious exploratory design process embracing the pre-schoolers’ unpredictable higgledy-piggledy behaviour. Results demonstrate that this methodology enables the empowerment of pre-schoolers as self-reliant stewards while (a) capturing their voice of self-expression effectively, and (b) achieving a self-determined specific design concept. As further outcome, a dialogue tool that enables reflexivity concerning participant experiences within participatory inquiries was produced.