Children in the information technology design process: A review of theories and their applications <s> Informant design <s> In the 1980's a major transformation took place in the computing world: attention was finally being paid to making computers easier-to-use. You know the history: in the 1970's folks at Xerox were exploring so-called personal computers and developing graphical, point-and-click interfaces. The goal was to make using computers less cognitively taxing, there- by permitting the user to focus more mental cycles on getting the job done. For some time people had recognized that there would be benefits if users could interact with computers using visual cues and motor movements instead of testu- al/linguistic strings. However, computer cycles were costly; they could hardly be wasted on supporting a non-textual interface. There was barely enough zorch (i.e., computer power, measured in your favorite unit) to simply calculate the payroll. <s> BIB001 </s> Children in the information technology design process: A review of theories and their applications <s> Informant design <s> The value of involving people as ‘users’ or ‘participants’ in the design process is increasingly becoming a point of debate. In this paper we describe a new framework, called ‘informant design’, which advocates efficiency of input from different people: maximizing the value of contributions tlom various informants and design team members at different stages of the design process. To illustrate how this can be achieved we describe a project that uses children and teachers as informants at difTerent stages to help us design an interactive learning environment for teaching ecology. <s> BIB002
Developed by Scaife and his colleagues at Sussex University in England, ''informant design'' was introduced to address some of the perceived problems with user-centered and participatory design techniques when working with children. In conventional user-centered design, users are involved only as evaluators or testers at the end of the design process, and therefore their feedback is based on reaction rather than initiation. Furthermore, in usercentered design, it is up to the designers to translate and interpret the users' reactions and this can be an inaccurate practice. The perceived problem with participatory design is its promotion of equality for all team members. Scaife considers this approach to be effective for a team composed of adult users who can view each other as peers but infeasible when dealing with children. He does not believe that children have the time, knowledge, or expertise to participate fully in the collaborative participatory design model BIB002 . For these reasons, Scaife chooses to take a position in between the user-centered and participatory design perspectives, and he calls his participants (children and teachers) ''native informants'' because they ''are aware of aspects of learning/teaching practices that we are not and which we need to be told of. . .. So, by 'informant design' we mean an interplay between privileged observations from potential users and ourselves with another set of skills'' (Scaife et al., 1997, p. 344) . Rather than using the low-tech creative tools of PD, Scaife uses a blend of different low-and high-tech methods, with careful consideration of how best to use lowtech materials when involving children. In this approach, ''each informant provides different inputs to the design at various phases of the project using different methods.'' As with PD and cooperative inquiry, iteration is crucial to this design approach. The framework of informant design is structured in three phases with the first phase emphasizing learning goals and identifying strengths and weaknesses of current teaching practices within the domain. Teachers and children are involved separately as informants at this stage since their perspectives are so different. The designers examine the informants' input and then draft a list of problems. These problems are turned into functionality specifications in the second phase. In Phase 3, the specifications are used to design lowtech prototypes that are used by the child informants to suggest designs that are motivating for them. This input is used by design professionals to develop high-tech prototypes. The child informants and teachers then test these prototypes and the design undergoes further iterations, if necessary. Although he finds it very useful, Scaife admits that there are problems with the approach because not all children are able or willing to be informants BIB002 . Informant design is an approach that attempts to maximize the input of the participants at various stages of the design process. Scaife believes that informants can help the researchers ''. . .discover what we did not know rather than try to confirm what we thought we already knew. Such a philosophy is often overlooked by designers following a user-centered design approach in the excitement of demonstrating their own creative designs to users'' (Scaife & Rogers, 1999, p. 31 ). Scaife and his team advocate the use of a diversity of informants (e.g., teachers and children) to maximize the variety of suggestions. The designer tries to elicit suggestions from the children and then lets them know if it is possible to incorporate them into the working design. Scaife refers to earlier findings by Wong that rough sketches of interfaces are often much more appropriate prototypes for eliciting responses from users than more finished interfaces because they prevent users getting too fixated on low-level issues rather than asking more general questions. Moreover, if informants are asked to evaluate a piece of software that is already designed by a user (child or adult), they are immediately limited to a lower level of detail in which to make suggestions  BIB002 . In informant design, each informant shapes the design at different points; at the beginning of the process, it is to help ''problematize the domain'' in the middle to test and reflect upon the ''cognitive and design assumptions, and at the end to evaluate the prototypes' 'real-world contexts''' (Scaife et al., 1997, p. 350) . BIB002 consider informant design as an alternative to User-centered design or participatory design and believe it to be the best method ''for the design of interactive software for non-typical users or those who cannot be equal partners (e.g., children)'' (Scaife et al., 1997, p. 346) . Its basic assumption is that in the design process, children are most helpful at suggesting ideas for motivational and fun aspects of educational software. BIB001 , expanding upon the idea that the long-term goal of computing is to make people smarter, decided that the HCI community needed to move from the traditional ''user-centered'' design to what they term learner-centered design. This approach assumes that everyone is a learner, whether a professional or a student. In fact, Soloway et al. describe professionals as ''students who happen to learn outside of a classroom'' (p. 39). Therefore, the main focus of learner-centered design is to ensure that the interface design is adapted to the interests, knowledge, and styles of the learners who use the software. BIB001 believe in the educational philosophy of ''learning by doing.'' For them, ''when learning is divorced from doing a meaningful task . . . then learning becomes just another chore . . .'' (p. 40). The three issues addressed by user-centered design are tasks (what does the software need to do?), tools (what tools are provided to handle these tasks?), and interfaces (what is the interface to these tools?). The issues at the heart of learner-centered design are understanding (how will the learner learn the practice?), motivation (how can software motivate a learner?), diversity (every learner is different-what kind of software can be developed that supports this?), and growth (the learner changes but the software does not).