Empowered and Informed: Participation of Children in HCI

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.

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.

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.

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

Interaction Design and Children

It is widely understood within the field of HCI that participation in research and design activities, especially by children, requires careful planning and execution. Whilst the HCI community, and related groups like IDC, have gone some way to ensure aspects such as the selection and participation of children in research and design work is considered carefully, there has not yet been careful consideration, or reporting, of how children get to find out what has happened to the research that they have contributed to. In this paper we describe how we worked with children in overseas contexts and actively reported back to them the outcomes from the work they contributed to. We describe how our desire to report back influenced the planning the analysis of the data to ensure the results could be packaged in a child friendly way. We offer a simple to use checklist for practitioners and researchers to follow and a challenge for the IDC community to incorporate planned or actual feedback into the reporting of studies.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 2018

International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2017

Ethical issues involving young children in research are complex and individual to each child, requiring the researcher to be reflexive and aware of the nature of the child's participation. This paper draws on the experiences of 16 5-to 7-year-old children, transitioning from kindergarten to first grade in Chile as reported by them through visual participatory research. Integral to the ethical principles were the use of a visual participatory design, a listening framework and the child's rights perspective. In order to be faithful to the research design proposed, different ethical guidelines were revised and followed to ensure protection, anonymity, the right to withdraw and privacy to the children deciding to get involved in the research process. Essential to this work was recognising the child as the most knowledgeable agent in her/his own experiences in order to minimise issues of power and increase children's awareness during the data collection process. Findings from the study demonstrate different situations in which the researcher's selfreflexivity can enhance positive outcomes related to ethical issues and young children's ability to understand the research process, communicate meanings and jointly create new meanings through the tools provided and activities proposed. Ethical challenges and implications for future research with children are discussed.

Proceedings of the 31st Australian Conference on Human-Computer-Interaction, 2019

Child participation in design is a central focus of Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research, however, examples of participatory research with children are primarily situated in adult-led contexts (e.g. design lab, classroom, museum) where design objectives, activities and tools are devised and facilitated by adults. In this paper, we contribute to current discussions by describing a participatory study situated within the "child-led nature-play contexts" of nine children (7-11 years). By adapting the role of "least-adult" originally described in the childhood studies literature, we describe how this role can be established to access these exclusive play places and maintained through co-inquiry into each child's unique play practice. This research contributes to current discussions of child participation in CCI by (i) introducing the role of least-adult as an approach to engaging with children through participatory research, (ii) recognising the influence of place in shaping child participation , and (iii) pointing to spatial-temporal contextual factors as an important factor for enabling and shaping participatory research. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Participatory design.

2019

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children – both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar events at previous conferences and aims to foster and strengthen the debate about ethical conduct and moral responsibilities in IDC. In this year’s panel, we seek to broaden the discussion by collecting ethical concerns, issues or dilemmas from within the community to be discussed at the conference. To this end, we will issue an open call for input that will be publicised via the usual channels. The organisers then will synthesise the responses and facilitate the discussion and debate at the panel