What are the issues that should be addressed when having children participate in design activities? In this paper, Mazzone et al. report on the planning, executing, and analysis of specific design activities with children. The design objective was a musical device that would interest children. The children involved in this research attended schools in England and Finland. The authors’ principal goal was to create “a useful framework for meaningful design activities” that involve children.

An effective introduction presents an overview of key concepts from the literature and declares the main evaluation criteria of this research: “1) the capacity of the design methods employed to produce useful results for design, and 2) the suitability of the design methods to engage and involve children as active participants.” The general context is given in the next section, followed by a careful presentation of three design activities for the children. A careful discussion follows, focusing on the general issues of context, content, management of the process, and engagement of the children. A large table is given that summarizes the findings based on the three design activities. The conclusion is a useful summary of lessons learned.

The paper is written and organized quite well, and the presentation and results should be of interest to anyone considering participatory design with children, for applications of interest to children. The authors made progress toward their goal, but some key questions related to the application and measurement of evaluation criteria remain.