The Role of Music in the Design Process with Children

Music and other art based methods should play a significant role in the HCI field when designing with children, taking the developmental stage of the children into consideration. Music has been neglected in the design process in HCI research, while there is a lot of meaningful research in social and educational studies. HCI research has concentrated more on technological products and technological needs of special education, bringing up music as an important part of media too. In this paper we emphasize the versatile role of music during the design process with preschool children. We describe three different workshops identifying three different roles for music: a contextual role, music as a trigger and music as content. The roles demonstrate numerous possibilities for using music in design workshops and show the usefulness of music in collaborative design with children. HCI research should utilize music in more varied forms during design.