Design and Technology education is a compulsory course in schools in many countries and it offers a methodological training in concepts of design and technology through practical application of real life problems and use of standardized design methods. Design in Indian schools is predominantly considered ‘visual’ and is learnt as a part of art education comprising of artistic skills and not acquiring skills such as problem-solving for creating value, divergent thinking, empathy, etc. The Design and Technology education acknowledges the difference between professional designers’ design thinking and aims and objectives of novice school children learning design (Anning et al. 1996). Unfortunately, and in spite of considerable evidence to the contrary, a rigid, linear approach to designing still predominates in school’s design and technology education which is highly influenced by methods designed for adult design professionals. Current practitioners of collaborative design education follow certain distributed models for teaching design to children, but none of these models focus on organization of groups.The aim of this thesis is to design effective collaborative structures and guidelines for design task with instructions suitable for children in Indian middle (municipal) schools. The thesis tests the hypothesis whether group composition (when and how the groups are formed) effects idea generation of novice school children in a design problem-solving session. We tested four different collaborative conditions based on the composition of dyad groups, with students in the age group 11-14 and measured the effect of group organization on design output and communication. Game designing and group size of two were found to be the most promising conditions for collaboration resulting in flexibility of ideas. Two final design trials were conducted with the students in a longitudinal study where the second design trial served as a validation to the findings of the first design trial. We used a mixed method analysis to investigate differences in design output as well as design process. A ranking was generated based on the scores of these four factors. This was followed by a thorough communication analysis of the videos of groups solving the design problem. The four collaborative conditions were also evaluated on gender differences by comparing same gender groups with mixed gender groups. Differences were found in performance of children groups under different collaborative conditions. Insights on problem-solving strategies, group communication, attitudes of team members resulting in positive and negative social-interdependence are discussed in conclusions of the thesis.

Today, information and communication technologies (ICTs) are reaching the hands of people. in the remotest corners of the world, from mobile phones and PCs to handheld tablets. If we consider mobile phones, as of 2014, there were 6.9 billion accounts in the world, and 78% of the subscribers lived in developing countries. However, just having access to ICTs does not mean being able to use them to one’s advantage. There might be various mediating factors that impact the use of these devices—low literacy, language barriers, lack of technology experience, lack of ICT maintenance infrastructure, etc. In this thesis, we start by focusing on one of the factors—low textual literacy. About 775 million people in the world are completely illiterate, and even more are able to read only with great difficulty and effort. Many of these users avoid complicated functions and only use phones for synchronous voice communication. There is a significant body of previous work that looks at UI design for low-literate users, focusing on graphical and voice UIs to help low-literate users overcome the need to read text. While some of this work shows that low-literate users prefer non-textual interfaces, there are still cognitive challenges that impede UI use. They are text-free and do not require any reading. One of these challenges, as suggested by anecdotes in related literature and our own previous work, is the navigation of hierarchical UIs. Another challenge is transferring what you learn from instructional videos and applying it to actual practice.

In this thesis, we investigate how to facilitate the transfer of video-based learning skills through the presentation of instructional videos and how navigation of ICT UIs can be enabled through appropriate information architecture design, even where the UIs are text-free. We focus on first-year usage scenarios with minimal training. We conduct controlled usability studies of variations of instructional videos with first-time, low-literate users from urban slum communities in Bangalore, India. This is in the context of training for the use of a vacuum cleaner. We will follow this up. Controlled usability studies comparing different information architecture designs of graphical UIs—a list design and a shallow and deep hierarchy—are presented once more on a PC and mobile phone. with first-time, low-literate users from the same communities. Our second and third experiments were conducted in the context of finding 40 familiar household items.