Redefinition of the Participation Process of the Architecture and the Child Based on Children’s Creative Thinking Abilities

Statement of the Problem: 

Architectural issues have various aspects, and creatively responding to such issues is an important criterion in evaluating the quality of architectural works, thus seeking effective factors on these aspects is of special importance for prompting the quality of responding to architectural issues. Nowadays, participatory architecture is a general approach which focuses on involving individuals and specialists in the process of designing. In this regard, observing children’s civil rights aiming at obtaining a mutual understanding between the child and the designer is considered as the main focus of designers to children in the processes of participatory designing while frequently ignoring the abilities of children’s thinking system in the areas of idea development and designing. Therefore, using the abilities of children’s thinking system in creating architectural works and its conditions is the main issue in this regard.Research Question: How are the theoretical foundations of the effectiveness of the architect-child participation explained in improving the quality of responding to architectural issues?

The current study aims at introducing a new aspect of participation beyond the general perspective of research so far conducted in this area while considering fundamental concepts in the area of children thinking.

This research applies a qualitative, fundamental, and descriptive- analysis based method in addition to seven-step meta-synthesis method by Sandelowski and Barrosos. The study results indicated that "architecture-child participatory thinking" can be introduced as a new "architect-child participation" method. In this new method, the product of participation is developed based on "architecture-child interactive thinking", and the role of children is upgraded from "respondent" to "the main thinker". During the design process, children make "creative comments" alongside the architect and the architect simply "standardizes" the end product.