Children's Creativity Lab: Creating a 'Pen of the Future'

Technology is changing the way we acquire new skills and proficiencies and handwriting is no exception to this. However, while some technological advances exist in this area, the question of how we can digitally enhance the process of learning handwriting remains under-explored. Being immersed in this process on an everyday basis, we believe that school aged children can provide valuable ideas and insights into the design of future writing tools for learners developing their (hand)writing skills. As end-users of the proposed technology, we explore including children in a form of informed participatory design during a Creativity Lab where we invited 12 children, aged 11--12, to put themselves into the shoes of a product designer and create a Pen of the Future using prototyping materials. In this paper we describe our methodology and discuss the design ideas that children came up with and how these may inform the design of future writing tools.