Children with chronic conditions face evolving challenges in daily activities, peer relationships, and clinical care. Younger children often rely on parental support, while older ones seek independence. Prior studies on chronic conditions explored proxy-based, family-centered, and playful approaches to support children’s health, but most technologies treat children as a homogeneous group rather than adapting to their developmental differences. To address this gap, we conducted four co-design workshops with 69 children with congenital heart disease (CHD) at a medically supported camp, spanning elementary, middle, and high school groups. Our analysis reveals distinct coping strategies: elementary children relied on comfort objects and reassurance, middle schoolers used mediated communication and selective disclosure, and high schoolers emphasized agency and direct engagement with peers and providers. Through child-centered participatory design, we contribute empirical insights into how children’s management of chronic conditions evolves and propose design implications for pediatric health technologies that adapt across developmental trajectories.

International students in emerging adulthood face unique challenges as they navigate life transitions and adapt to new environments. These challenges significantly affect their mental well-being. While previous HRI studies have explored robotic solutions to address anxiety through therapeutic guidance, positive psychology, and mood recognition, little is known about design features tailored to the challenges of transition. By deploying co-design probes with 18 international students experiencing mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, we investigate their lived experiences and coping strategies and translate these insights into design implications for social robots. Our findings indicate that participants envisioned robots that create a welcoming living environment through seamless design and provide a sense of agency through achievable tasks. These features were seen as particularly helpful in relieving day-to-day tension in effortless ways. Based on these findings, we discuss how social robots can better support transitions in emerging adulthood.

During product development, it is common to elicit feedback from various stakeholders, especially during prototype testing. This iterative “build and test” practice enables designers to reframe problem spaces, define stakeholder needs, and implement design changes. Toy prototypes are unique in that they require input from children (often the end-users), parents/guardians (often the consumer), and experts in the field. In a unique client-sponsored product innovation course, 10 cross-functional design teams collaborated to research, ideate, prototype, and evaluate toy prototypes across a span of 16 weeks through three main checkpoints. With the first and second checkpoints of prototyping activities completed, this ongoing study outlines the data collection methods and learnings of the complexities in engaging design students and stakeholders, including children as the end users, in the design process. The study has implications for stakeholder engagement in design pedagogy and ways for researchers to explore the interactions between designers and stakeholders in the classroom.

This paper describes the design of an interactive artifact--The SEL Transition Wheel-created to support social-emotional learning (SEL) in children ages three to six. The SEL Transition Wheel focuses on helping young children learn emotional self-regulation and labeling of one's emotions while encouraging caregiver mediation of the SEL process during transition times. The final prototype presented in this paper demonstrates how a set of heuristics, identified through the design process, can be used to create interactive SEL artifacts for young children. We also discuss how the process of designing for SEL supported a multidisciplinary collaboration.

Design is widely considered to be the central or distinguishing activity of engineering and yet it remains an insufficiently researched and understood topic. From the perspective of engineering education, where a "disconnect" between professional engineering practices and university-based practices is an oft-discussed limitation, the sparseness of research on professional engineering design is noteworthy. Specific representations of real engineering practices are necessary to inform attempts to prepare future engineers. The present study attends to the location of engineering design in different organizational settings, as a way of examining the nature of purported "disconnects" between professional engineering design practices and those taking place in the undergraduate curriculum. Our core methodology is that of cognitive ethnography, which examines how cognitive tasks, in our case design, are accomplished within "functional systems" constituted of heterogeneous elements, both human and nonhuman. Our focus is on "how the work of the organization" gets done through the process of design. This work in progress (WIP) paper explores the spatiotemporal organization of activity as a key aspect of the situatedness and heterogeneity of design work, and reports preliminary findings regarding important differences in how design is organized in different design settings.