Designs on Narrative: A Design-Based Method to Elicit Young People’s Narratives About Electronic Image-Sharing Issues and Interventions

Abstract

Young people’s perspectives on their electronic image-sharing practices, its consequences and ‘solutions’, are needed to create effective and sustainable interventions to address negative outcomes of this behaviour, such as when images are used to facilitate cyberbullying. The aim of this chapter is to describe and reflect upon the structure and process of a qualitative design-based narrative knowledge production method piloted as part of a larger mixed-methods investigation into young people’s electronic image-sharing experiences. The method: Sixty-eight Year 8/9 students in Perth, Australia, worked in groups to complete an adapted Design Thinking process, designing mobile apps that embodied their recommendations for addressing the electronic image-sharing issues they deemed most important. While the scale of the project demanded expertise in terms of structuring, training and implementation, the narrative structure innate to the Design Thinking process offered an integrated picture of electronic image-sharing problems and their related solutions from young people’s perspectives.