by
Ron Livay
Design Management and Innovation track
Mentor —
Hadas Zemer Ben-Ari
In processes of planning and constructing educational institutions there is a clear need to attend to the preferences of the main users – the children. However, despite the growing tendency of planning using co-design methods, children’s inherent difficulty of thinking in terms of future planning poses a methodological difficulty for planners, preventing them from engaging their main target audience.
The project focuses on developing a tool to review children’s needs for the purpose of planning educational institutions. Using a digital game based on psychology and psychotherapy methodologies in a sandbox, children will create virtual scenes subject to changing guidelines that will allow producing a trends report and provide recommendations for practice.
The study combined in-depth interviews and focus groups with questions from the UX design field for children with gamification. It was found that a digital platform can enable children to take part in the characterization process in a rapid horizontal way, bridging the gaps between their own and the planners’ professional language.
The study contributes to the understanding that communities and public entities can use this information to ensure higher quality of life for children, and hence for society as a whole.
Ron is an industrial designer and artist. He has managed research and product development in the fields of healthcare, education, and retail. With an experience of 15 years in painting and five years in teaching painting, his design approach is characterized by a combination of attention to small details and a broad perspective, unrestricted by medium or format. His achievements include presenting a research and design work at the Israel Museum and winning the international Sanofi design award. Ron is a graduate of the honors undergraduate program in industrial design and holds an M.Des in industrial design from Bezalel.