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Creative ideation is integral to the design process; to be considered creative an idea must be deemed both novel and appropriate. Design examples are often provided to inspire creativity but may also constrain designers’ imaginations (design fixation), a phenomenon observed during children's ideation in participatory design (PD). This paper addresses a gap in the literature by empirically investigating this phenomenon through an exploratory case study of two game narrative design workshops involving 37 children. Children's design ideas from these workshops were systematically coded by two researchers following a deductive content analysis approach and inter-rater reliability was established. Our findings show that utilising design examples can ensure appropriateness (i.e. narrative relevance and coherence), and albeit some design fixation more often facilitates the creative process by enabling existing ideas to be recycled and combined with novel ideas. This research contributes potential methodological adaptations to better foster children's creativity during PD.

The involvement of developmentally diverse children in design has been driven by pragmatic concerns and also an emancipatory aim to give children voice and agency over decisions. However, little attention has been given to how participation and power are performed in the early exploratory phase of design prior to overt decision points. Our research seeks to contribute to this gap with two separate case studies of design involvement, one with dyslexic children and the other with children with cerebral palsy. An analysis of children’s and researchers’ power dynamics during design sessions supports us to understand the contextual factors shaping how the different participants exercised power; the outcomes of this power and to reflect on how these moments shaped the design agenda. Our work identifies a number of challenges and raises new questions that may guide future reflexive participatory practice with developmentally diverse children.

Storytelling at home is typically an oral practice that supports parents and children to make sense of their family identity. Parents play a key role in crafting the story plot and facilitating the child’s participation in the storytelling process. Yet in the context of digital technology, interaction design researchers have tended to focus on children and how digital storytelling tools can support them in their learning. Adopting a “family lens” the aim of this research is to understand the character of oral storytelling practice and identify opportunities for digital storytelling design. The findings outline a co-design workshop that involved a team of designers and parents, who regularly engaged in oral storytelling. Grounded in a systematic video analysis of the workshop alongside a reflection of the design decisions that unfolded, we contribute four new design opportunities centring on the themes of flexibility, shared experience, minimalism, and autobiographical memories. These opportunities can guide interaction design researchers interested in designing new digital oral storytelling tools for families.

Participatory design (PD) has become widely popular within the interaction design community, but to date has had little influence within serious game design processes. We argue that serious game design complicates the notion of involving users as co-designers, as serious game designers must be fluent with both domain content and game design. In this paper, we share our experiences of using PD during the design process of a serious game. We present observations stemming from attempts to apply the existing PD methods of brainstorming and storyboarding. Reflecting on the shortcomings of these methods, we go on to propose a novel PD method that leverages two fundamental qualities of serious games-domain expertise and procedurality-to scaffold players' existing knowledge and make co-design of serious games an attainable goal.

Formed on an analysis of design practices, the behaviour chain model stipulates that social network designer's ultimate aim is to encourage users to adopt the social network site by entering a phase of true commitment. During this phase, social network users are driven to connect to known or unknown others by engaging in instrumental uses that create value and content and involve others, while staying active and loyal by investing time in the site. This paper investigates how designer's intentions, as captured by the behaviour chain model, materialise through users' reported practices in the social network site Facebook. A total of 423 Facebook users from 5 countries answered a questionnaire that allowed us to examine how 2 user characteristics, experience with the site, and culture, shape the nature of true commitment. Our findings show that experience with the site and even more so, culture, have an effect on users' motivations for using Facebook, as well as their instrumental uses and the time they invest on the site. This analysis reifies the behaviour chain model by allowing designers to understand how the features they design are embodied in users' practices.

This paper investigates whether the nature of an online environment can prime users to create avatars that emphasize particular characteristics. Participants created an avatar for one of three contrasting settings: blogging, dating or gaming. For the most part, avatars in blogging were created to accurately reflect their owners' physical appearance, lifestyle and preferences. By contrast, participants in the dating and gaming treatments accentuated certain aspects of their avatar to reflect the tone and perceived expectations of the context. For instance, avatars in dating were made to look more attractive while avatars in gaming were made to look more intellectual. Yet, predominantly, these emphasized avatar attributes drew on participants' self-image, and thus avatars were perceived by their owners as highly similar to themselves. The implications of these results are discussed against current frameworks of online identity and behavior. Most importantly, we use our results to extract design recommendations for improving avatar-driven applications.

This paper examines how users negotiate their self-presentation via an avatar used in social media. Twenty participants customised an avatar while thinking aloud. An analysis of this verbal data revealed three motivating factors that drive self-presentation: (1) avatars were used to accurately reflect their owners' offline self; participants chose to display stable self-attributes or idealised their avatar by concealing or emphasising attributes aligned to imagined social roles, (2) the diversity of customisation options was exploited by some participants who broke free from the social rules governing self-presentation offline; others used the avatar's appearance to emotionally provoke and engage the avatar viewer and finally, (3) avatars were used as proxies; participants designed their online self in order to convey a message to a significant other.

Online offences are generally considered as frequent and intentional acts performed by a member with the aim to deceive others. However, an offence may also be unintentional or exceptional, performed by a benevolent member of the community. This article examines whether a victim's decrease in trust towards an unintentional or occasional offender can be repaired in an online setting, by designing and evaluating systems to support forgiveness. We study which of three systems enable the victim of a trust breakdown to fairly assess this kind of offender. The three systems are: (1) a reputation system, (2) a reputation system with a built-in apology forum that may display the offender's apology to the victim and (3) a reputation system with a built-in apology forum that also includes a ''forgiveness'' component. The ''forgiveness'' component presents the victim with information that demonstrates the offender's trustworthiness as judged by the system. We experimentally observe that systems (2) and (3), endorsing apology and supporting forgiveness, allow victims to recover their trust after online offences. An apology from the offender restores the victim's trust only if the offender cooperates in a future interaction; it does not alleviate the trust breakdown immediately after it occurs. By contrast, the ''forgiveness'' component restores the victim's trust directly after the offence and in a subsequent interaction. The applicability of these findings for extending reputation systems is discussed.