Customizing Developmentally Situated Design (DSD) Cards: Informing Designers about Preschoolers’ Spatial Learning G¨ okc ¸e Elif Baykal Design, Technology and Society Koc ¸ University, Istanbul, Turkey gbaykal13@ku.edu.tr Tilbe G¨ oksun Department of Psychology Koc ¸ University, Istanbul, Turkey tgoksun@ku.edu.tr Asım Evren Yantac ¸ Arc ¸elik Research Center for Creative Industries Koc ¸ University, Istanbul, Turkey eyantac@ku.edu.tr ABSTRACT To date, developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account at the early stages of technology design. Bekker and Antle [6] cre- ated developmentally situated design (DSD) cards as a design tool to inform children’s technology designers about children’s development starting from 5 years of age. In this paper, we describe how we customized DSD cards for a specific develop- mental skill (i.e., spatial learning) of children between 2- and 4-year-olds for tangible interaction design. The cards were evaluated after a user study in which 19 participants from dif- ferent backgrounds used the cards in three design workshops. Our analysis of observational notes and online survey identify and discuss how specific card features support or limit use by our participants. We draw on our findings to set forth design considerations and possible refinements that make age specific knowledge about very young children’s spatial learning to inform technologies based on tangible interaction. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI): Miscellaneous; D.2.2 [Design Tools and Techniques]: Object- oriented design methods. Author Keywords Design tools; design methods; child development; child-computer interaction. INTRODUCTION This paper describes the customization of a card-based design tool to support interdisciplinary design team in taking into ac- count very young children’s spatial abilities and skills during the early design stage of a tangible system for learning. It has long been highlighted in design approaches such as partici- patory design [25] and child-centered design [13, 10] that, in early design, designers should involve children as participants Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. CHI 2018, April 21-26, 2018, Montreal, QC, Canada © 2018 ACM ISBN/978-1-4503-5620-6/18/04$15.00. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174166 of a design process or they need to use analytical methods and tools to elicit evidence-based knowledge about children’s abilities and needs to inform the design [6]. When it comes to designing with and for children younger than 4 years old there are only a few methods or tools found in the child-computer interaction (CCI) field that involve these very young people to inform interaction design choices [16, 21, 19]. It is mostly very difficult to elicit verbal feedback from this age group to inform the design [16]. In CCI, informing age- appropriate technologies responsive to very young children’s learning process remains as a wicked design space. Despite the challenges, techniques such as Wizard of Oz [21], or hands-on tools such as intervention with manipulatives [21, 5, 4] began to be adapted to observe on-task behaviors of children under 4 years old. Still, those studies reported that even 4-year-old children have difficulty in involving participatory techniques such as using drawing [4], Fictional Inquiry or Comicboarding [18] to generate and communicate a design idea, or Wizard of Oz to finish the tasks which need precise toy movements [21]. There is also a wealth of emerging theoretical knowledge about the early cognitive developmental abilities and skills of the intended age group. Then, how can we make this age specific knowledge in cognitive developmental studies readily accessible to designers? Based on a similar quest, Bekker and Antle [6] created Devel- opmentally Situated Design (DSD) cards that make informa- tion about children’s developmental stages, ages, and abilities available throughout the design process [6]. Other studies also evaluated card-based design tools and reported their useful- ness in particular at early design stage [9, 12, 7]. Still, none of these approaches have focused on delivering knowledge about the developmental abilities of children younger than 4 years old. By targeting this age group, this study contributes to the evaluation and further development of the DSD cards to be applied in wicked design problems. The contribution of this paper consists in the customization of the content of DSD cards relying on; (1) incorporating the literature review in a specific learning domain in cognitive development field (i.e., spatial learning), which is found critical in particular between 2 and 4 years old [20], along with (2) supporting the content with concrete examples and empirical results elicited from our observational case study which we have conducted with 2- to 4-year-old children to gain in-depth insight into their spa-