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Children's Participation in the Design of Digital Artifacts: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations

Published: 18 October 2021 Publication History

Abstract

In user-centered design processes of digital artifacts, representatives of the target users are invited to participate, because they have knowledge of the problems to be solved by these artifacts. However, generally, the inclusion of these potential users into the process does not entail genuine participation. The aim in these cases is obtaining information that these users can provide for designers to make decisions about the product. When these potential users are children, participation restrictions are often even greater, because children are often seen as unable to make valid contributions. Participation with power balance between designers and representatives of the target users in decision-making in design projects is one of the ethical motivations of Participatory Design (PD), and much has been studied about the inclusion of children in projects that apply PD. However, PD projects could further benefit from theories on child participation. Aiming to contribute to bridge this gap, this paper presents a discussion relating child participation theories to participatory design processes of digital artifacts.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
IHC '21: Proceedings of the XX Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems
October 2021
523 pages
ISBN:9781450386173
DOI:10.1145/3472301
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 18 October 2021

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  1. Children's Participation
  2. Participatory Design

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IHC '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 77 submissions, 38%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 331 of 973 submissions, 34%

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