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Prioritizing children’s empowerment in and through design has been on the agenda of child–computer interaction (CCI) research for a long time. Recently, the notion of the computational empowerment of children has received attention. However, there are still open issues in our understanding and advocacy of it. A related development is the recent interest in the longer-term impacts of our work. Fast and furious participation of children in design sessions is considered inadequate. We should advocate for longer-term trajectories and possibilities for children to make changes that will influence our world. However, the literature is limited in addressing longer-term impacts. This study taps into these two research gaps and showcases how we have addressed the computational empowerment of children in a project tackling bullying at school through critical design and making. In this paper, we examine in detail the children’s designs and their trajectories from the viewpoint of empowerment and impact: whether and how these children’s designs show potential for the empowerment of those bullied and whether and how their designs have had an impact in the realm of digital technology development. Our study has interesting conceptual and methodological implications for CCI research and practice on the computational empowerment of children and on our design research practice.

Mobile applications have thoroughly pervaded the lives of today’s children, who live and learn through and with them. However, limited research has been conducted on children designing such apps and not only using those designed by adults. Inviting children to design such apps is the focus of our study. Moreover, in contemporary society, it is emphasized that children should be empowered to take civic action and engage in making the world a better place. In the literature, however, less emphasis has been placed on how children can be invited to do so through the means of digital technology, particularly mobile application design. In this study, 13–15-year-old children are invited to take civic action to address the serious societal problem of bullying through the design of mobile apps. We discussed the design process and analyzed the applications the children designed from the viewpoint of how they aim to tackle bullying. We examined how their app designs aim at empowering other children in the context of bullying, and thus considered what kinds of opportunities emerge for children to learn skills related to the prevention or management of bullying in the apps they have designed. We showed that the children’s app designs informed us of the seriousness of bullying in children’s lives and that they advocate for the empowerment of other children in different ways. Hence, we have increased our understanding of how smart, interactive technologies designed by children address the learning and empowerment of other children, i.e., application users. We also studied the children’s learning from both their and their teachers’ perspectives. This study showcases an alternative way educators can integrate digital technologies and apps in school settings to educate children on important societal matters and digital technology.

Maker culture celebrates mistakes as an essential part of the process — reflecting on our failures promotes learning and understanding of the processes we work with. As researchers and practitioners organizing digital fabrication and making activities with children, we all know even the best laid plans can fail, or at least there is a chance that things do not go as expected. However, when reporting our activities, we tend to focus on success stories. As success is often built on learning from our mistakes, it is important to embrace and reflect on them as a community. In this workshop we invite researchers and practitioners to discuss the fortunate accidents made when working with children in digital fabrication and making projects, and to compile a set of short papers including lessons learned that are geared towards the researcher or practitioner entering the FabLearn community.

Children of today live increasingly digitalized lives. Child computer interaction (CCI) research has a strong agenda to empower children in the digital age through participation in new digital technology design. While children’s role in digital technology design has been studied from various perspectives, existing research is limited in understanding and approaching children’s continuously evolving digital lives and practices. In this paper, we scrutinize a practice toolkit method for making sense and shaping children’s digitalized everyday life and practice. We concretize its use through an analysis of children’s and their families’ engagement with an interactive public display infrastructure, providing zoom-in and zoom-out analyses of emergent practices around the infrastructure. We show various kinds of creative and collaborative accomplishments, the importance of the material world and the relationship of the practices to media discourses and discuss how these practices can be used to inspire and shape further digital technology development. We demonstrate the value of the practice toolkit and emergent practices for CCI research and practice.

As our relationship with digital technology radically changes during this pandemic, it becomes imperative to reimagine new ways of interactions and collaborations. It is also important for children grow from passive consumers of digital technology to active designers and Makers. Typical research approaches for inquiring or probing children’s digital technology identities include interview-, reflection-, and hands-on creative-types of methods. But how will these methods fare in a future that is online or hybrid? In this paper, we present the outcomes of a workshop that employed critical design fiction with Child-Computer Interaction experts to speculate on how such methods can be applied in the future, in online or limited access scenarios, to study children’s designer and Maker identities. We focused on approaches that are empowering, albeit provocative. We call for researchers working with children to reconsider and expand their methods repertoire to keep in tune with the changing times.

2020 marks the beginning of a new era as the pandemic catapulted us into new digital and virtual ways of everyday life. As the world changes, we reimagine empowering, equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive digital futures, through a series of projects and workshops with a diverse set of participants — children in schools and Child Computer Interaction researchers. We conducted one long-term project with two schools in Finland and two one-day workshops with an international set of participants. Through an analysis of participants’ experiences and outcomes in the project and workshops, we build a case for diversity and inclusion through design fiction in the context of children’s education. In addition, through an analysis of the process we as researchers took for developing the project and workshops, we showcase the support of diversity and inclusion in design fiction.

As we push the boundaries of participatory design (PD) to empower children across the world, barriers to participation for those currently underserved require further attention. This includes neurodiverse individuals at special schools in India, whose day-to-day experiences are heavily influenced by the larger socio-cultural context of the schools comprising diverse stakeholders with diverse agendas and motivations. In this paper, we consider how-to PD at special schools in India. Employing the lenses of genuine participation and cultural translation, we critically examine two design projects with neurodiverse individuals: a gesture-based application to promote joint attention and using a mobile app to promote composting and entrepreneurial skills. We identified several challenges for adapting PD to the context of special schools in India. Reflecting on our experiences and coupled with previous literature on PD with similar contexts, we suggest potential solutions for these challenges. This includes how-to negotiate roles and responsibilities among stakeholders, handle conflicts among stakeholders’ socio-technical aspirations, balance power differentials and censorships, and identify possibilities for long-term real-world impact. Our work paves the way to adapt PD, from a provocation or privilege to a possibility, to empower neurodiverse individuals in all corners of the world.

Bullying is a serious problem concerning us all. The problem has already been tackled within HCI research, including different design and technology-based interventions, some of which strongly advocate human agency, social responsibility, action taking, and ownership for children. Along these lines, we address the problem of bullying in collaboration with children through critical design and Making. Critical and empowering approaches have aroused interest in child computer interaction (CCI) research, while we particularly explore Theatre of the Oppressed as a tool for evaluating design concepts with children and for empowering children to act as agents of change. Different theatre and drama-based methods have been utilized in CCI, while their potential for empowering children remains poorly explored. This study positions Theatre of the Oppressed within critical design and Making process, examines children’s experiences with it and scrutinizes in which sense it can be considered empowering, with implications for CCI research and design.

While the potential of digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education for empowering children and for increasing their abilities to shape the society and our digital future have been acknowledged in the literature, these educational trends have mostly been studied separately in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research. Additionally, while digital fabrication and making have been discussed quite extensively in relation to the role of Design Protagonist in the CCI literature, the relevance of entrepreneurship education on this role remains quite unexplored. We combined digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education in a business innovation project with teenagers at school context. Through our qualitative, interpretive analysis, where we use value co-creation as our theoretical lens, we show what kind of value was expected and gained in this collaborative endeavor. Teachers valued learning new teaching methods and the possibilities of digital fabrication. Teens appreciated the change in scenery and routine and working on digital fabrication. They indicated learning useful things about the project topics during groupwork and experienced feelings of success related to their performance and the group project. We also identify challenges hindering value creation for teachers and students: differing expectations on the roles and responsibilities of adult participants, and difficulty balancing the fun, free making activities with the entrepreneurship aspects of the project. We discuss the implications of business innovation for the Design Protagonist role of children and identify balancing acts needed when supporting children to adopt the role for driving business innovation in the future digitalized society.

Recently, there has been a large body of research exploring the possibilities of digital fabrication and making in school context. To truly embrace the spirit of equity and democracy so essential to the maker movement, more research is needed concerning how these activities can be used to empower marginalized and at-risk groups. In this paper, we introduce preliminary insights from Make4Change project, that aims to strengthen the social inclusion and employability of unemployed, young people and immigrants outside the labor market through digital fabrication and making. We use the criteria for empowerment of participants as a tool to reflect the planning, organization, and execution of learning activities and on improving our process moving forward. We believe that insights from Make4Change will be useful to practitioners and researchers looking to empower underrepresented, marginal, or at-risk populations through making.

Previous literature highlights the importance of teaching children design and Making skills. However, there are fundamental differences in projects engaging children in design and Making, concerning the objects and motives of design. They vary depending on whether one emphasizes participatory design, user centered design, Making philosophy or entrepreneurship education, among others. In the first two, the emphasis is on the appreciation and engagement with the user, who is seen as separable from the designer. The third one often starts with solving one’s own problems while the fourth one prioritizes the customer. In this paper, we analyze the existing literature and three of our own design and Making projects with children. We reveal diversity in the projects reported in the literature and challenges among children in our projects in understanding the design goals and practices, particularly relating to designing for oneself versus designing for others. We propose a categorization for mapping and managing this diversity.

Children of today have been surrounded by digital technology since their birth. However, children of today are not equally equipped for their technology rich future: various kinds of digital divides still prevail in the society and affect the young generation and their digital futures. Schools and education of children should undergo an extensive digital transformation to be able to meet the needs of the young generation and their digitalized future. The COVID-19 pandemic has suddenly and abruptly forced schools and education indeed to engage in such a transformation. In this study we examine the digital transformation initiated by the COVID-19 pandemic in the basic education of the young generation, the variety of digital divides emerging and reinforced, and the possible barriers reported along the way. We argue that information management research should better acknowledge children, their digitalized everyday life and their basic education as significant areas of concern. We should understand them as well as allow them to shape the education we offer in the context of higher education, but we should also aim at influencing the basic education of the young generation — for the purpose of equipping them with important skills and competencies for their digital futures but also for the purpose of arousing their interest in this important field, maybe even as a career option.

Culture is, in many ways, implicated in and shapes technology design and use. Inspired by Stuart Hall’s conception of encoding/decoding, we maintain that technological artefacts reflect the cultural values of their creators, while users, in their encounters with the technological artefacts, may decode those artefacts in various ways that are shaped by the users’ cultural values. In this article, we apply this lens to study a decade-long urban computing project that took place in the wild. We focus on the project’s development team and on how their cultural values shape technology design. We also acknowledge that such an urban computing project involves many other stakeholder groups that affect the course of events. In our analysis, we examine how these stakeholders shaped and interpreted the technology in question. Although the development project had a seemingly generic “for all” ethos, the various stakeholders pulled the focus in different directions. The trajectory of the project can be characterized as reacting to these competing influences—sometimes achieving fit, while other times resulting in conflicts. The contribution of this paper is a structured analysis and reflections on cultural issues in community technology design in the wild, with a focus on the role of the developers’ cultural values and other stakeholders’ technology-related requirements and interpretations. This study has implications for subsequent studies in the wild by framing them as fluid settings of a great variety of stakeholders with a multiplicity of values, requirements, and interpretations.

This thesis concentrates on understanding people’s daily interactions with urban technologies and the role they play in everyday life by investigating use practices for the on urban, multipurpose, public display network in the city of Oulu in northern Finland. The goal is two-fold, namely, to investigate different aspects of emerging urban computing practices and understand the versatility of the contributing factors behind these practices. The work is grounded in practice theory that understands practices as a result of an historical evolution influenced by several forces. On the one hand, the thesis concentrates on the local accomplishment of practices; on the other hand it, seeks to understand the broader connections between these practices as well as their history and evolution. The material comes from three main sources: Users of the public displays, their developers and additional stakeholders involved in the design process, and citizen comments on the display network project on social media. The research is based on empirical qualitative research material; quantitative use statistics are applied to support the findings. The findings reveal that urban computing practices take on influences from several directions including designers and other stakeholders during the design phase, the users’ lives and existing practices, and ongoing societal and communal discourses. The thesis offers increased understanding of the designing and implementation of successful ubiquitous computing projects in a public setting., Tiivistelmä Tämä väitöskirja keskittyy ymmärtämään ihmisten päivittäistä vuorovaikutusta kaupunkiteknolgian kanssa tutkimalla käytäntöjä julkisten näyttöjen verkoston ympärillä. Tavoite on toisaalta tutkia kaupunkiteknologiakäytänteitä eri näkökulmista ja toisaalta ymmärtää monipuolisia osatekijöitä käytäntöjen takana. Työ perustuu käytäntöteoriaan, joka ymmärtää käytäntöjä historiallisen kehityksen seurauksena sekä usean osatekijän tuloksena. Toisaalta tutkielma keskittyy paikallisiin käytäntöihin; toisaalta se yrittää ymmärtää laajempia yhteyksiä käytäntöjen välillä sekä niiden historiaa ja evoluutiota. Materiaali tulee kolmesta päälähteestä: 1) Julkisten näyttöjen verkoston kehittäjiltä ja muilta suunnitteluprosessin sidosryhmiltä, 2) näyttöjen käyttäjiltä sekä 3) kaupunkilaisilta, jotka kommentoivat näyttöverkkoprojektia sosiaalisessa mediassa. Tutkimus perustuu laadulliseen tutkimusaineistoon, jonka lisäksi määrällistä käyttötilastoaineistoa sovelletaan tukemaan laadullisia havaintoja. Havainnot paljastavat, että urbaanin teknologian käytänteisiin vaikuttavat monet tekijät mukaan lukien suunnittelijat ja muut suunnitteluvaiheen sidosryhmät, käyttäjien elämä ja heidän olemassa olevat käytänteensä sekä ajankohtainen yhteiskunnallinen ja yhteisöllinen keskustelu. Tutkielma tarjoaa uudenlaista ymmärrystä jokapaikan tietotekniikka -projektien suunnittelusta ja toteutuksesta julkisissa ympäristöissä.