Children and Youth in Living Labs

TIME

Tuesday, 7th September, 11:30 -13:00 CEST

GOAL

The goal of the workshop is to increase inclusion of children and youth in Living Labs by gathering common understanding of how, why and when to include children and youth to Living Lab operations.

CHALLENGE

Children and young people are often underrepresented in decision making and development. It is easy to bypass the young citizens – even when the matters to be dealt with concern directly them. This also quite often applies to Living Labs. Even if we want to involve children more, we first need to address many issues – where to find participants, what methods are age appropriate, and even: what issues are such that children and youth would have something to say about them? The main challenge that we address in this workshop is: how to involve children and youth more in Living Labs.

OBJECTIVE

In order to increase the participation and inclusion of young citizens, we first need to understand why it is important. At this point the children are best at telling us about it, so we let them speak for themselves.

In order to put the idea into practice we need to understand in what kind of matters could children and young people be more involved in. In the workshop we will show examples of development projects with children and young. Together, we raise issues where children and young people could be involved in the participants’ own areas and living labs (co-working session one).

After finding out in what kind of matters we could include the children and young more, we need to understand how the young and the children could be involved. In order to gather understanding on this issue we will ideate solutions together to the matters found and listed in the first co-working session.

In third co-working session we will discuss about matters to consider when working with children and youth.

In the end of the workshop we will leave the participants some time to also discuss and evaluate on how the ideas could be put into practice.

OUTCOMES

VALUE FOR PARTICIPANTS

The participants of the workshop will learn how children and young have been and could be involved more in Living Labs and development projects and why the increase of inclusion is important. From the co-working sessions the participants will gain lots of ideas just waiting to put into practice. After the workshop participants will be able to address matters that suite well to participating children and youth and understand how to engage young participants.

Our aim is to help participants to understand the benefits of participating children and youth in living labs and that way increase the inclusion of the young. From the workshop, the participants will get
– understanding of the type of matters and issues that are suitable for participating children and youth
– ideas of how to include children and youth in practice and
– understanding of different issues to consider when participating with children and youth.

BRIEF OUTLINE / METHODOLOGY

1. Intro
Basic ideas of why inclusion of children and youth is important in Living Labs. In this part we will hear the voice of children and young themselves and hear about example projects that work with children and/or youth.
In this part the participants are asked to introduce themselves to the chat box.
Estimate of time used: 20 minutes

2. Co-working session 1 (Miro platform and discussion of examples)
Main question: What kind of challenges and issues in your own area or in your Living Lab could concern children and young people?
Estimate of time used: 15 minutes (total: 35 minutes)

3. Co-working session 2 (Miro platform and discussion)
Main question: How children and young people could be involved in finding solutions to these challenges?
Estimate of time used: 20 minutes (total: 55 minutes)

4. Co-working session 3 (discussion)
Main question: What do we need to take into consideration when working with children and young people?
Estimate of time used: 20 minutes (total: 75 minutes)

5. End discussion
Main question: Are you ready to put the ideas of the workshop in to practice?
Estimate of time used: 15 minutes (total: 90 minutes)

AUDIENCE

This workshop is for all interested in increasing the participation and inclusion of children and youth in Living Labs.