Using the guidance

How to use the guidance

Organisations vary in how agile, flexible or structured their innovation processes are. They also vary in the resources they can call on – research, expertise, consultation, user testing and more. In the classic Double Diamond model of the innovation process by the UK Design Council⁴, there are four crucial phases – discover, define, develop and delivery. Discover and develop are expansive, opening multiple possibilities. Define and deliver are intensive, focusing these multiple possibilities first on a clear problem definition and design brief and then on a workable solution.

The 11 Child Rights by Design principles have a role to play in each of the four phases⁵. In what follows, we organise our guidance
according to these phases. However, we fully recognise that these phases can be differently labelled in different organisations, and that crucially, the overall process is more complex, messy and iterative in practice than the diagram shows, as innovators often told us. Therefore, we invite product teams in different kinds of organisations to adapt the guidance to suit their ways of working.

There’s a very centralised route for
product development, whereas with
digital development it’s much more
fragmented… With a physical product,
once it’s done, it’s out there … you
can’t iterate it. But with the digital
experience, you can, and so that has
a positive in that you can pull back
certain aspects of it and change
certain aspects of it after launch.

Large toy company

This [diagram] is really good. It’s super
clear and so important for products to
be able to consider all of these points.

Education game start-up