Bio

Her research interests are in participatory design and innovation methods, especially photo-elicitation. She is currently working in a preschool redesign project and explore children’s self-made photos as ways to articulate young children’s experience of place. She is also researching how to create ambiguous spaces to support emergent innovation cultures in organisations by using photographs, images and probes. She works as a researcher and Head of Division of Information Design at the School of Innovation, Design and Engineering at Mälardalen University in Sweden.

Project

The project I will focus on during my stay at Faber Residency is the research project Norm-aware pre-schools with focus on how photo-based conversations with young children might articulate their perspectives in a participatory design process. The overall aim of the study Norm-aware pre-schools (2016-2019) is to (re)innovate pre-school premises from a norm-aware perspective on gender and play. The study I will work on included 27 children, 3-5 years old, from three preschools in a mid-Swedish town who used an iPad to record and reflect over places in their preschool as a part of the first phase of the project. The children explored places they liked, did not like or rarely visited. The process explored the possibilities of engaging children as experts of their own environments offering them the technique of photo-elicitation to generate data that would influence the design of their future preschool premises.