Capturing the perspectives and experiences of young children remains a persistent methodological challenge. Children in early developmental stages cannot reliably express themselves through traditional methods such as interviews, and their responses are highly sensitive to context and timing. Existing participatory research methods often rely on abilities such as verbal reflection, abstract reasoning, fine motor skills, and sustained attentionācapacities that develop later in childhood. As a result, children under the age of seven are frequently excluded from research that aims to capture first-person experiences. To address this, researchers increasingly adopt creative participatory approaches, including design and cultural probes, which enable children to express themselves through creative forms: drawings, photographs, and narratives. Across the 4TU federation, these methods are applied in diverse domains, such as eHealth intervention design for picky eating (UT), understanding the perspectives of children on sustainable food choices (WUR), and understanding childrenās perceptions and expectations of search and recommender systems (TU Delft). While these approaches generate rich qualitative data, they also introduce a shared challenge: the absence of systematic, transparent, and comparable methods for collecting and analysing multimodal creative data. At TU Delft, complementary expertise exists in structuring and analysing complex childrenās data logs to inform the development of information access systems. This creates a clear opportunity for 4TU to connect researchers and jointly develop shared tools and methodological foundations for the systematic collection and analysis of creative data to capture the lived experiences of young children.Ā
This project aims to initiate and strengthen a 4TU-wide community focused on participatory and creative research methodologies for young children. The central goal is collaboratively develop design guidelines for an ICT tool that support the collection and systematic analysis of creative data.Ā
Team: Juliet Haarman (UT), Sterre van Arum (UT), Siyuan Huang (UT), Lotte Pater (WUR), Sole Pera (TU Delft), Hrishita Chakrabarti (TU Delft)