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ABSTRACT
Although researchers and designers have paid attention to children’s empowerment in Participatory Design (PD) processes, there is a lacuna in research into manifestations of empowerment in and as a result of PD processes concerned with the building of dynamic infrastructures. In a response, we conducted a case study in which 10–12-year-olds participated in designing prototypes related to a local nature area and reconsidered existing views on empowerment. The findings resulted in (1) a broad operationalisation of the critical form of empowerment; (2) a mapping of the possibilities for empowerment in informal time frames next to traditional, project-related time frames; and (3) an extended analytical framework for the span of activities considered to be empowering in PD processes. The contribution of this study is a comprehensive understanding and lingua franca to consider children’s empowerment in relation to infrastructuring. This infrastructural view on empowerment allows to include notions of active citizenship and empowerment-in-use in the discourse and analysis on children’s empowerment, placing design participation in a holistic context, beyond the formal participation in the design process.
Acknowledgments
We thank the children and their parents for their participation. Prior to the study, ethical approval was obtained from KU Leuven’s Social and Societal Ethics Committee (No. G-2018 01 1092).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.