The types of drawings that young children produce in response to design tasks

This article comes from the author’s research into young children’s use of drawing to support their design thinking. Part of that process was to sort and classify several hundred design drawings produced by children aged five to nine years over a three year period. The issues underlying asking children of this age to commit their design ideas to paper are discussed before the classification system is described. It must be stressed there is no sense of ‘levels’ or ‘age norms’ attached to these. They are simply a classification system. However, they do divide into two main groups, which are classed as ‘static’ and ‘travelling’ depending on whether the child perceived the usefulness of drawing as clarifying the task criteria or moving design ideas forward, which relate to the authors understanding of design drawings as both containers for ideas and conceptual journeys