Empowered and Informed: Participation of Children in HCI

CHI 2013, 2013

When working with children in participatory design activities ethical questions arise that are not always considered in a standard ethics review. This paper highlights five challenges around the ethics of the value of design and the ethics of the children's participation and presents a new tool, CHECk that deals with three of these challenges by virtue of two checklists that are designed to challenge researchers in CCI and HCI to critically consider the reasons for involving children in design projects and to examine how best to describe design activities in order that children can better consent to participate.

Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Child Computer Interaction is concerned with the research, design, and evaluation of interactive technologies for children. Working with children in HCI is rewarding and fun but managing that work so that children are kept comfortable and can participate in meaningful ways is not always easy. This course is based on over 20 years' experience of working with children in research, design, and evaluation. It will provide attendees with practical tips to organise sessions with children, with signposts to methods for research, design, and evaluation, and will specifically consider the ethics of children's participation with checklists to support us in doing our most ethical work possible. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design; Interaction design process and methods.

Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children

Designing technology for and with children comes with unique ethical challenges and responsibilities, related both to the inclusion of children in the research and design processes and to the outcomes of that work. With this panel, our intention is to create a forum for critical reflection and debate about best practices, underlying drivers and persistent or emergent ethical challenges. As a starting point, this panel aims to focus on questions around the involvement of children in our research and we aim to hear from designers and researchers in this community with different backgrounds and perspectives to reflect the diversity of work being done and cultures in which they are conducted.

Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This SIG will provide child-computer interaction researchers and practitioners, as well as other interested CHI attendees, an opportunity to discuss topics related to developing participatory methods to consider the ethics of emerging technologies for children. While Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

2014

This short paper presents several important ethical considerations for designers and researchers working with children as technology design partners. Involving children in the design process gives them a voice in the design of technologies intended to be used by them. One important ethical consideration is to ensure there are benefits to the users – in our case that there are benefits to the children as they participate in the design process. Other ethical considerations are discussed.

Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference

This workshop will convene researchers and stakeholders to share their work on and discuss participatory approaches to the ethics of emerging technologies for children. The workshop builds on prior discussions in the community, which have identified significant challenges in addressing ethical issues related to emerging technologies given that they are still under development, and it is difficult to predict how they may be used. Our goal is to build on the familiarity the community has with participatory methods and apply them to considering the ethics of emerging technologies, thus giving stakeholders, including children, a voice in these considerations. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); • Social and professional topics → User characteristics; Age; Children.

To encourage ethical practices in participatory design with children the CHECk tool was created. This paper reports on an expert review of the CHECk tool and a validating case study. Four main challenges to the CHECk tool are identified: (1) how to inform children on the research and their role herein, (2) distinguishing between project values and designer or researcher's personal values, (3) accounting for the dynamic nature and social constructedness of values in design, and (4) the emergence of values in all stakeholders including child design partners. We advocate complementing CHECk with interactive storytelling and show how this narrative can be used to not only inform participation and achieve ethical symmetry, but also to negotiate values with child design partners.

Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference: Extended Abstracts

The increasing presence of interactive technologies in children's lives poses critical ethical questions for researchers and designers. Discourse specific to these intersecting topics is nascent, but is spread across communities and largely developed retrospectively. This workshop brings together those interested in ethical issues arising when researching, designing, and deploying technologies for children. The focus is on exploring approaches that are emergent and situated, arising during research or after deployment. Workshop activities will include: exploring ethical themes emerging in HCI research for children; synthesizing and adapting current applicable ethical guidance; identifying gaps; and developing preliminary methods and guidance to address these gaps. Outcomes will extend current best practices in ethics in ways that promote children's protection, empowerment and wellbeing.

Interaction Design and Children

In this workshop, we invite researchers, practitioners and designers to reflect on ethical issues arising from Distributed Participatory Design (DPD) research with children. As participatory design research practices require rethinking and innovative adaptation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, distributed, asynchronous and online (D)PD approaches may provide solutions to participation barriers. However, in light of this adaptation, additional ethical complexities may arise. Ongoing collaborative discussion is required to identify and address the different types of ethical issues which may arise when planning and conducting DPD projects with children. This workshop builds on previous workshops held at IDC 2021 and 2020, which provided insights into developing a protocol for a world-wide DPD project with children.

Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Interaction Design and Children