Co-designing an Ideal Nature-Related Digital Tool With Children: An Exploratory Study From the Netherlands

Emerging digital technologies have the potential to motivate children’s interaction with nature. However, as the end-users of such tools, children have hardly been involved in their design process. This paper aims to investigate the desired characteristics of digital tools for an ideal interaction with nature from children’s perspective. We conducted an exploratory study, combining an outdoor activity and a co-design workshop, with 23 children from a secondary school in the Netherlands. We used a multimodal approach and the children-nature interaction model as a framework to analyze children’s designs. Findings show that children’s experience of using a nature-related digital tool in nature, and outline the design characteristics, requirements, and intervention functions of children’s on ideal digital tools that can increase their interaction with nature from their perspective.