Emotional-Storyboarding: A Participatory Method for Emotional Designing for Children

Emotional-storyboarding is a participatory design method that engages children to tell stories by drawing emotional expressions. This method provides insights into the children’s emotion and overcomes two challenges in participatory design for children—access and verbal communication. We illustrate this method by presenting a case study designing a coloring book about overcoming fear and anger with surprise and happiness. In three hours, we engaged 70 children to express their emotions using emotional-storyboarding. We also present four guidelines for using emotional-storyboarding to design with children: 1. Face-to-Face crowdsource at children’s events 2. Make storyboarding creative and active 3. Engage children one-on-one to give them the confidence to express their stories and 4. Publicly praise children’s stories. This case study demonstrates that emotional-storyboarding can inform meaningful design for children while simultaneously providing children with an immediate positive emotional experience.