The thesis in brief

This MA thesis aims to concept and develop an online service and a web platform to improve the access of Finnish daycare centers to informal educational activities offered by Design Museum.

Design Museum currently offers activities for daycare centers but they happen mostly at the museum's premises. This is a major restriction factor for daycares that are located far from the museum, since it's not practical to take small children on long distance travels.

Goals and objectives

I have two main goals.

Goal one is that Design Museum creates guidelines and materials for informal learning activities which can happen at the daycare centers. These activities do not require the physical presence of the children at the museum at any moment. The objective is to build a website where daycare educators can access these guidelines and materials, which will help them in guiding the children through the learning activities.

This website can be visited at:
http://www.esajaesineet.com


Goal two is that daycare centers share their experiences and materials resulting from the educational activities (such as photos, videos or short stories) with the museum and other daycares by using a set of existing social media services and tools. The objective of sharing information is to generate a dialogue between the museum and daycares and between children and educators in different daycares.

The materials are being shared at:
http://connectedday.com


Design Museum can learn from the experiences of their audiences (daycare educators and children) and improve their services according to the feedback received. Daycares will have a meaningful reason to introduce children to activities involving online digital media tools, and develop their internet media literacy from a very young age.

My research questions

1. How can new media improve the accessibility of Design Museum's educational activities for daycare centers?


2. How can social media improve the level of engagement of daycare centers with Design Museum's online learning resources?


3. What services or platforms can be created to improve the access and engagement of daycare centers with Design Museum's educational activities?
   

Background projects

In the autumn of 2007 a team of researchers and students from the MediaLab of the University of Art and Design (1) and a team of staff from the education service of the Design Museum in Helsinki (2) decided to collaborate together on a project later called The Secret Life of Objects. The project aimed at finding new ways to discuss design objects with different groups of visitors, using several types of media.

(1) From MediaLab TaiK, Andrea Botero, Mariana Salgado and Diana de Sousa
(2) From Design Museum, Hanna Kapanen, Mirjam Kraft, Anna Louhelainen and Leena Svinhufvud


One focus of this project was to find new methods to discuss design objects with five year-old children, introducing them at the same time to digital media tools. The teams created a pilot workshop format initially intended to happen at the daycare centers' premises and to be conducted by the museum's guides.

A series of five different workshops were produced and tested. They were named Esa ja Esineet, or in English, Esa and the Objects. Esa is a puppet that dreams about mysterious objects, as you can see from the video bellow.




Later we agreed to turn Esa ja Esineet into a service that uses online media to provide daycare centers from all Finland with educational activities from Design Museum: instead of having the museum guides traveling to daycare centers, the daycare educators would be given enough materials and information to conduct the activities themselves.

As I got more involved in the conception of this final format, it also became the topic for my MA thesis.