This paper introduces the Techno-Biographical Reflexive Atelier (TeBRA), a collaborative autoethnographic method designed to explore how personal narratives intersect with sociotechnical systems over time. Drawing on three editions involving eleven participants, we examine how the method supports situated reflection, creative expression, and collective sense-making around lived technological experiences. TeBRA combines four interconnected elements: techno-biographical narratives, multimodal self-expression activities, retelling of others’ narratives, and collective reflection distributed across four sessions. Using participants’ reflections on artificial intelligence as an illustrative case, we argue that TeBRA supports collective reflection and can serve as a safe space for participants to share concerns, negotiate perspectives, and critically engage with contemporary sociotechnical transformations. We contribute a first-person methodological approach for HCI that expands collaborative autoethnographic inquiry through relational interpretation, multimodal expression, and reflexive engagement with the socio-cultural conditions shaping people’s relationships with technology.

Children’s independent mobility has proved to have a tremendous positive impact on their well-being, social and cognitive development, and spatial understanding. However, children’s independent mobility is declining in several countries although the increasing number of investments in urban mobility and the incentives for sustainable adoption of public transport and shared mobility. Concurrently, ownership of mobile devices is growing, opening up compelling opportunities for location- and map-based applications and services designed for and with children. This article investigates the needs and concerns in the design of child-targeted locative systems addressing children’s independent mobility while considering caregivers’ approval and fears. We present a study with seven families (nine children, 8-13-year-old, and seven adults) by taking an interdisciplinary approach. Inspired by scenario-based design, we invited the participants to imagine themselves in independent mobility scenarios (e.g., daughter and father negotiating a school path) and tell what design choices they would make. Our results indicate that the design of a child-targeted locative system should enhance physical safety on the road and enhance online safety.

In this paper, we present design implications for the creation of digital maps in the context of wayfinding systems for children. In the process, we engaged 70 children in drawing the cognitive maps of their journey from home to school. Conducted in 2017, the study involved fifth-grade students (9-12 years old), at three different public schools in Funchal, Portugal. This paper offers reflections on their drawings and the resulting implications for the design of geographic technologies for children. Our contribution consists in highlighting ten types of landmarks extracted from children's 'maps' clustered into four categories, namely: Newness, Cultural personalization, Infrastructure, and Natural Landscapes.

Inspired by HCI research advocating for the inclusion of children in the design process, this pictorial provides a qualitative case study on children's perceptions of urban landscapes. Our goal is to create digital maps in the context of locative systems and wayfinding for children. For this purpose, we engaged 70 students from the city of Funchal (Portugal) in the drawing of a cognitive map of their journey from home to school in the Fall of 2017. These children (9-12 years old) also replied to a brief survey, and 31 out of 70 responded to a face-to-face interview in the Spring of 2018. This pictorial offers an analysis of the drawings as well as providing highlights of the children's own account of their maps. Our work generates a set of 10 themes related to landmarks and design ideas for the creation of digital maps for children.

This pictorial summarizes a qualitative study of children's perceptions of mobility through their own cognitive map drawings of the journey from home to school. We engaged 27 sixth-grade students (11 to 12 year-old) from Lisbon, Portugal, and analyze their drawings extracting 12 different design recommendations. We use these recommendations to provide design suggestions in terms of i) existing functionalities of mapping applications (that can be re-used); ii) improvements for existing map and wayfinding systems; iii) children's original design suggestions. The qualitative study reported here provides contributions that could help promote sustainable mobility for children in particular, with regards to innovation but also autonomy and supervision by caregivers.