Methods that support children’s participation in the design of digital technologies are central to Child-Computer Interaction (CCI), yet most accounts are situated in adult-led institutional contexts. Far fewer methods address participation within informal free time settings, where play is self-directed, relational, and sensitive to adult intervention. This paper presents PlayScape, a participatory design method developed to support child-led participation in nature-play contexts during children’s free time. Derived from action research with 15 children (7-11 years) in neighbourhood nature-play settings, PlayScape integrates theory from Environmental Psychology with approaches from Participatory Design and Design Anthropology detailing how relational activities, the least-adult role, and place-based co-learning and imagining can be applied to preserve children’s agency and play rhythm through design. PlayScape contributes to CCI by offering methodological guidance for participatory work in informal play settings, demonstrating how emplaced, child-led participation can enable children to envision digital possibilities grounded in their everyday play practices.

Addressing current and future environment and climate-related challenges relies on coordinated efforts from all levels of research, industry, government, and community. Despite this, the potential for the IDC community to contribute to, and lead efforts is yet to be adequately explored. This workshop begins to address this issue by inviting researchers engaged in research involving children, emerging technology, and environmental sustainability to map the research currently going on in this area, the gaps, and pathways for child-computer interaction research to play an active role in net zero and the transition towards environmental sustainability.

Multiple HCI projects have demonstrated the potential of digitally-enhanced, synchronous telephony platforms for use with and by resource-limited communities. However, these platforms were each designed to only facilitate a single archetype of community engagement, limiting their capacity for adaptation when contextual or stakeholder requirements change. This paper builds upon these projects to introduce a design vocabulary, grounded in a formal ontology describing the core components necessary to run adaptable, structured engagements through synchronous group telephony. Through a series of scenarios, we present how this design vocabulary can be used to: help design and communicate different models of synchronous audio engagements, describe existing technologies, and highlight other novel ways in which such platforms could be used. We discuss how while under-explored to this point, synchronous telephony platforms can be designed to orchestrate stakeholder engagements with a degree of flexibility previously impossible in remote, offline contexts.

The rise of gig economy platforms has highlighted the impact platform and algorithm design can have upon workers’ experiences. This paper reports on an extended series of collaborative design engagements with a private company and an international non-government organisation during the production of an Interactive Voice Response component for a gig economy platform. We present the findings of a design ethnography undertaken during this process, and discuss how design decisions reflect how each party’s values, motivations and assumptions are embedded within the final technology. There exists a need for simple methods to assist practitioners to surface and critically engage with the disparate values, priorities and assumptions held by the system’s stakeholders. We demonstrate that this can be done during the production of real-world systems through the application of constrained design as a values lever, and discuss how constraint-based values levers can support critical reflection, even in resource-constrained commercial development contexts.

The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent closure of schools forced families across the globe to transition to school at home. This unprecedented context is likely to have a lasting impact on the practice of schooling and the role of online, digital platforms within school contexts. In this paper we present a contextual inquiry of an ‘emergency home school context’, detailing how nine young families in Melbourne, Australia adapted to the unexpected introduction of school to the home following the government-directed closure of schools. Through an online interview and photo-journal study, we develop an emplaced understanding of the context detailing how the relations between people and places around the home evolved over time. We present five design considerations for digital platforms to support the emergency home school context, placing focus on the fluid roles, relationships and evolving sense of place.

The recent UN Global Assessment report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services identified human-induced biodiversity loss as one of the greatest threats facing humanity today. Despite this, the field of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) has so far paid little attention towards how it might directly contribute to biodiversity conservation efforts. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring how digital applications may be designed to support the nature-play experiences known to instill a value for nature and motivate environmental stewardship behavior in children. It describes a co-envisioning process carried out with nine children (7-11 years) within their nature-play contexts to understand how they would appropriate abstract 'digital functions' to enhance or support their situated nature-play. The functions envisioned by children are then reinterpreted as five design openings for CCI researchers to pursue to support nature-play opportunities for children. This research provides an initial framework for CCI researchers to contribute to global biodiversity conservation efforts by supporting the nature-play experiences known to promote long-term environmental stewardship in children.

Regular interactions with nature are vital for the development and wellbeing of children and also to build attachment and value for natural environments that potentially promote proenvironmental behaviour in later life. In this paper, we report on a study designed to identify opportunities for digital technology to support children's connectedness to the natural environment, thereby encouraging positive environmental attitudes in children, as well as healthy physical play. Through participatory engagement with a group of 15 Danish children (aged 812) and their parents, using focus groups and follow up interviews, we explore what motivates children to undertake everyday recreational activities, focusing on activities undertaken in nature, and how these interactions influence meaning associated with their local natural place. The contribution of this paper is a deeper understanding of what motivates children to interact with nature, and a discussion of how technology may enhance this interaction.