Many children are disconnected from nature and have limited understanding of where their food comes from. Noticing nature, through active sensory engagement, is fundamental for children to learn to appreciate and care for it. Yet little is known about the noticing acts of children (3-5 years) in their everyday nature experiences in HCI research. We investigated children's nature engagement in childcare centre settings, with a focus on food gardens and a view to understanding how digital technology might support it. Informed by literature on noticing, we conducted three design activities using prompt cards, an IoT-based camera and a Bee-Bot to analyse children's noticing in food gardens, including: focal noticing of the more-than-human, relational noticing for connection, and temporal noticing through ecological tempos. We synthesise and highlight technology design opportunities that use slow noticing to bridge hidden to noticed, connect part to pattern, and attune from tempo to flow over time.
Children increasingly interact with a myriad of technologies in their everyday lives, yet are seldom invited to envision the future trajectories of these technologies or what futures they want to see. To address this gap, we conducted design futuring workshops with 31 school children in India (ages 10-13 years). Participants imagined future classrooms and the different types of technologies situated within these classrooms. Participants' resultant socio-technical imaginaries reveal an underlying hope to be empowered in the learning process, underscoring the values of empathy, care, inclusion, and empowerment. Their imaginaries also highlight the everyday problems that concern them the most and how they imagine overcoming them, bringing out their fears and concerns regarding privacy and security. Our work contributes to Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research on engaging children in critically designing their digital futures by illustrating the value of design futuring and socio-technical imaginaries, especially created by an under-represented group, Indian children.
In this paper, we use the Child-Centred Ethics framework to critically reflect on the planning, implementation, and impact of twelve (2-4 year) projects with children (ages 2-18 years) in Finland, the UK, India, Japan, and the USA. Our analysis reveals diverse ethical challenges and experiences: adapting materials based on the abilities, interests and agendas of the children, teachers, and schools, considering consent and assent as continuous processes, and exploring impacts beyond the project duration. We also discuss handling data ownership among participants and international collaborators, and managing difficult situations that arise, such as, participants pushing the boundaries of technology and people, technical breakdowns, and in situ negotiations of roles among teachers and researchers. We use our analysis to extend the CCE Framework in two distinct ways; incorporating adult stakeholders and impacts beyond a projects’ lifecycle. Our work contributes to research on ethics in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research, addressing how to plan, implement, and create an impact in CCI projects with children.
Homes overflow with children's artwork, yet domestic technologies emphasize storage (continuity of record) rather than everyday encounters and shared decisions (continuity of relation). We report a mixed-methods study: a survey (N=327), interviews (n=32), and intergenerational co-design workshops with eight families. From eight tensions—visibility, witnessed goodbyes, bounded autonomy and fairness, material aura, meaningful afterlives, time and friction budgets, explainability, and household fit—we derive principles and instantiate four probes: Goodbye, Hello (brief, witnessed retirements that leave a light trace); Magic Frame (explainable resurfacing of digitized art in shared space); Co-Curator (joint parent and child selection with reasons); and New Journeys (named, local afterlives for retired pieces). In workshops, families rehearsed “kit in motion” sequences judged workable within constraints and able to reduce surprise and conflict. We contribute an empirical account of the preservation gap, a reframing from record to relation, a trace from themes to mechanisms, and implications for child-centered, household-fit preservation.
Remix has emerged as a significant form of creativity, enabled by digital tools that allow the reinterpretation of existing cultural artifacts. However, the implications of remix on concepts of authorship remain largely unexamined. Therefore, this study examines children's remix experiences to understand how they develop their understanding of authorship and creativity. We conducted six participatory design sessions with 16 children aged 5–11 using the Cooperative Inquiry method to explore how their remix practices shape our understanding of creativity and authorship. Our findings reveal that children perceive remixing as a negotiated, interpretive process that influences their views on ownership within collaborative, digital spaces. Consequently, we introduce the Creative Agency Framework to help designers recognize ingrained beliefs about creative ownership and reuse in software. We conclude by discussing the significance of these beliefs for developing creativity support systems that empower children and users to identify as both creators and cultural producers.
This study examines how systemic inefficiencies in the Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) constrain care for youth and burden staff. Through 15 semi-structured interviews with DJJ employees and subcontractors, analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and informed by Critical Race Theory, we surface breakdowns in inter-agency coordination, case management processes, and fragmented documentation across tools, all exacerbated by workforce shortages. Participants described how these conditions contribute to misdiagnoses, unsafe placements, delayed responses, and missed opportunities to recognize youth progress, envisioning future Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to mitigate the negative impacts. We situate participants’ cautious hopes for AI within a Human-Centered Responsible AI lens and present researcher-generated design fictions as provocations that imagine advisory tools for pattern detection, trend identification, and documentation support while preserving human judgment. By centering staff experiences and systemic inequities, this work lays the groundwork for the design of future socio-technical interventions in juvenile justice.
With the development of consumer surveillance technologies, monitoring has become increasingly accessible and woven into family life. Prior work has examined parents’ attitudes, privacy concerns, and selected uses of surveillance technologies like smart cameras and location-tracking apps, but offers limited accounts of how parents, as surveillants, configure and experience these technologies themselves in daily parenting. We address this gap by focusing on baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) as a high-salience context during a sensitive stage of family life. Using inductive thematic analysis of Reddit discussions, we examine how parents engage with BMTs in practice. Our findings revealed how parents actively assemble and configure BMTs, navigate and manage their emotions through them, negotiate privacy frictions and boundaries, and safeguard security in their use of such technologies within parenting and caregiving. We conclude by discussing implications for surveillance research and design for monitoring technologies in care.