DiGiRi/ Digital Rights Initiative - Strengthening the rights of the child in social planning

The innovation idea "DiGiRi" wants to contribute to a sustainable development within community building processes with a focus on the equal participation of children and young people.

DiGiRi aims to develop an interactive digital game that ensures quality in the processes from a children´s rights perspective. The game aims to engage both professionals in social building, but also aims to engage children.

Despite the fact that the group of children makes up 20% of the population, the target group is largely invisible when decisions are made about how public environments should be planned and designed.

The challenges are about a lack of knowledge on the part of planners about the rights of the child, but also about how these rights and perspectives can be concretely applied.

But it is also about difficulties in actually "getting at" and understanding the child´s perspective and how children with different conditions experience moving in public environments.Citizen dialogues with children are often experienced as both complicated and diffuse and tend to become all too symbolic, something that can be compared to "child-washing" (equivalent to "green-washing").

The exclusion of the child´s perspective is not only a problem for the individual child, it works against equal access to the public space and thus a socially sustainable society. That planners have access to different perspectives also often means a generally higher quality. What is good for children is often good for all and not bad for anyone.

Since 2020, there is also new legislation (the children´s rights convention ) that city planners must deal with in a concrete way.

Here there is a great need to make it easier for decision-makers to connect the rights the child has according to law with the decisions that are made.New technologies can provide new opportunities for perspective shifts, which can have great significance for the egalitarian society. In recent years, technology development has created completely new conditions for digital meetings.

These new technologies need to be used in the design of the egalitarian society and the physical environment.The purpose of DiGiRi is to contribute to a sustainable development within community building processes with a focus on the equal participation of children and young people.

This means that within the project period we will:Increase understanding of the child´s rightsDevelop a prototype into a tool (game) for its practical application within the community building process.Concretize the connection to the new legislation that exists today through the Children´s Rights Convention The project name "DiGiRi" is short for "Digital Rights Initiative".

By combining the term "Digital" with "Rights Initiative", the name emphasizes the project´s objective - to increase equality in the social planning process through digital solutions and thereby promote the rights of the child as part of an equal and sustainable society.On an overall level, the expected benefit is to raise the quality of the community building processes in which children participate.

The rights of the child are made concrete and applicable where more people have the opportunity to participate.

A digitally scalable tool makes it easier to include the child´s perspective and contributes to a more efficient planning process.In addition, the game can serve as a tool to increase children´s awareness of their own rights and their role in society.Concretely, the project provides a prototype and a knowledge base for the development of an interactive, scalable digital game that both simplifies and ensures the quality of citizen influence from children.The project group´s composition of experts in both architecture, visualisation, urban planning, digital technology and children´s rights provides the conditions to correctly identify needs and develop a concrete and applicable tool.

In the project organization, there is also a close dialogue with the owners of needs/urban pla