From drills to laptops: designing modern childhood imaginaries

Abstract

We introduce two case studies that illuminate a particular way of conceptualizing childhood and technology: the East Bay Fixit Clinic and the One Laptop Per Child project. Both cases borrow ideologies of childhood from contemporary American culture and ideas of technological potential from computer cultures. The developers and organizers in these two groups ground the resulting narrative in their own childhood experiences and their desire to provide the same kinds of experiences to children today. We highlight some of the dimensions of this narrative as well as some of its limitations in appealing to, and re-creating, a particular kind of child that resembles the organizers themselves: technically inclined, often oppositional, and often male. These cases highlight both the prevalence and limitations of using childhood ideologies in the design process by showing how these particular versions of childhood are enlisted to frame technological development and the social programs that promote it.

Keywords:

• design studies
• technology and childhood
• technology and education
• One Laptop Per Child
• maker culture
• hacker culture

Acknowledgements

This research was made possible by the gracious assistance of our participants. We also thank Fred Turner, Lilly Irani, and Megan Finn for their feedback on both of our projects, as well as the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Program (HPDTRP) at Stanford for funding research at the Fixit Clinic.

Notes on contributors

Morgan G. Ames is a postdoctoral scholar at the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing at UC Irvine. She examines dominant narratives in computer science cultures and their interactions with educational reform, development projects, and everyday life. [email: [email protected]]

Daniela K. Rosner has a PhD in Information Science from UC Berkeley and is an assistant professor in Human-Centered Design and Engineering at University of Washington. Through fieldwork and design, she reveals and creates surprising connections between technology and handwork. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Despite the similar name, Seymour Papert's ‘constructionism’ is distinct from social constructionist theories in the social sciences.

2. Constructionism has also had a powerful legacy beyond OLPC: it is regularly cited in research on ‘unschooling/deschooling’ (Selwyn, 2010) and ‘lifelong kindergarten’ (Resnick, 1998), has migrated into curricula on design and human–computer interaction, and is featured at conferences focused on technology in education such as Digital Media and Learning (DML) and Interaction Design and Children (IDC). One of its first test cases, the LOGO programming language, was tried nationwide in the 1980s and has been tested in other settings. Though the results of these trials were lackluster at best (Pea, 1987; Shea & Koschmann, 1997), constructionism remains popular.