Reflections on Online Child-Centric Participatory Design Approaches: Two Case Studies with Children and Early Adolescents

Abstract

Given that participatory design is a powerful tool to understand target users’ perspectives, HCI researchers employ a range of participatory design methods in child-centric technology design. While participatory design is traditionally conducted in co-located settings, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers had to shift to an online setting, adapting virtual tools to facilitate online participatory design activities. In this paper, we present our experiences of conducting two online participatory design studies during the pandemic. The first study involved children of age 7-11 years in the design and evaluation of a child-centric tutorial authoring tool for digital art. The second study involved early adolescents (11-14 years) in a participatory design study to understand how they envision tech-based solutions to support disengagement from excessive use of technology. We reflect on the study methods employed in both studies as well as the challenges and opportunities when conducting online participatory design studies with younger populations from different countries.

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Citation

Ananta Chowdhury and Andrea Bunt. 2023. Reflections on Online Child-Centric Participatory Design Approaches: Two Case Studies with Children and Early Adolescents. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2023 Workshop on Bridging Distances for Global Participation: Conducting and Theorizing Participatory Design and Research in Hybrid Contexts, April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany.