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.

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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
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article

Identities in Flux—Exploring Children’s Emerging Identities in Design and Making

Leena Ventä-Olkkonen, Netta Iivari, Tonja Molin-Juustila, Essi Lehto et al.
2 citations
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Qualitative Research Methods and Applications
17.85
article

Identities in Flux—Exploring Children’s Emerging Identities in Design and Making

Leena Ventä-Olkkonen, Netta Iivari, Tonja Molin-Juustila, Essi Lehto, Jenni Holappa, Heidi Hartikainen, Leena Kuure, Sumita Sharma
article en
2 citations

Abstract

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.

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVol. 32(5)
Oulu University of Applied Sciences (FI), University of Oulu (FI)
Openalex Percentile: Top 2%
Qualitative Research Methods and Applications
17.85
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Identities in Flux—Exploring Children’s Emerging Identities in Design and Making — Leena Ventä-Olkkonen, Netta Iivari, et al. · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (2025) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS