Identities in Flux—Exploring Children’s Emerging Identities in Design and Making
School children increasingly engage in designing and making activities, with the aim to promote creativity, increase peer collaboration, and engage with novel technologies. However, there is limited exploration of the impact of these activities. This study inquires what kinds of identities children (co)produce during design and making and how they evolve. Nexus analysis is used as a research strategy, drawing on multimodal research materials accumulated and gathered during a design and making project conducted with 11–12-year-old pupils. The research lens views social action as an intersection of participants’ histories, their mutual interaction orders, and discourses in place. The analysis entails scrutinizing the detailed aspects of identity production that are bound with wider discourses and interactions. Our findings show how identities of a maker, designer, change agent, performer, leader, content producer, and empathizer emerged, and how the competing orientations of being pupils and engaging in design and making that invite diverse types of identity production among the pupils, at the same time gaining agency as designers and makers, and ownership of their designs.
Authors
- Leena Ventä-Olkkonen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8349-3119)
- Netta Iivari (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7420-2890)
- Tonja Molin-Juustila (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6494-134X)
- Essi Lehto (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6985-8780)
- Jenni Holappa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2278-7495)
- Heidi Hartikainen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1215-6745)
- Leena Kuure (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8929-5789)
- Sumita Sharma (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1267-282X)
Institutions
- Oulu University of Applied Sciences (FI)
- University of Oulu (FI)
Publication Details
- Journal
- ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
- Published
- 2025-04-15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3729425
- Citations
- 2
- Primary Topic
- Qualitative Research Methods and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 17.85