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Inclusivity is central to Participatory Design (PD) practice, but despite significant efforts in IDC and beyond, it is still hard to achieve during PD, because of a series of barriers (e.g. access to users, language). Such barriers increase especially when it comes to ensuring and supporting the participation of children with varying or complex needs, or when prospective participants are geographically distributed. This workshop aims to create the basis of a distributed PD (DPD) protocol to provide practical advice in overcoming the challenges of ensuring inclusivity for children with varying or complex needs around the world. The protocol will build on the participants' prior experience and on a live PD design session with children and adults, and be guided by discussions around approaches to address a specific design problem while maximising inclusivity across geographical boundaries and research contexts. It is intended to become a springboard for the world's most inclusive Distributed PD project. more...

In this forum we celebrate research that helps to successfully bring the benefits of computing technologies to children, older adults, people with disabilities, and other populations that are often ignored in the design of mass-marketed products. --- Juan Pablo Hourcade, Editor more...

The global refugee crisis is a significant current challenge affecting millions of children. The process of refugee migration comes with major immediate as well as long-term risks to children's physical and mental health, education, and prospects. Despite the multiple dangers and challenges during migration, most refugee families have access to and make use of interactive technologies, prior to, during, and after migration. This SIG meeting is an opportunity to discuss novel potential roles for technologies to alleviate some of the challenges faced by child refugees. more...

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. more...

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. more...

Within the last decade, mobile devices have become an integral part of society, at home or work, in industrialized and developing countries. For children, these devices have primarily been geared towards communication, information consumption, or individual creative purposes. Prior research indicates social interaction and collaboration are essential to the social and cognitive development of young children. This dissertation research focuses on supporting collaboration among mobile users, specifically children ages 6 to 10 -- while collaboratively reading and creating stories. I developed Mobile Stories, a novel software system for the Windows Mobile platform that supports collaborative story experiences, with special attention to two collocated collaboration experiences: content splitting and space sharing. Content splitting is where interface parts (e.g. words, pictures) are split between two or more devices. Space sharing is where the same content (e.g. a document) is spread or shared across devices. These collocated collaborative configurations help address mobile devices' primary limitation: a small screen. The three research questions addressed are: how does Mobile Stories affect children's collaboration and mobility, what are some appropriate interfaces for collocated mobile collaboration with children, and when are the developed interfaces preferred and why. Mobile Stories was designed and develop using the Cooperative Inquiry design method. Formative studies furthered the design process, and gave insight as to how these collaborative interfaces might be used. A formal, mixed method study was conducted to investigate the relative advantages for each of the collocated collaborative interfaces, as well as to explore mobility and collaboration. The results of the formal study show children were more mobile while creating stories than when reading and sharing them. As for task effectiveness, children read more pages when they were closer, and created more pages more...