Marginalization, oppression, and injustice remain deep-rooted challenges facing the world today. Information Systems (IS) scholars could make a difference and try to make the world a better place; however, there is a lack of design methods dedicated for that. Design methods deriving inspiration from critical research tradition hold great potential in this respect. We have examined how to embed values of critical research tradition, particularly such addressing collective empowerment, into the design process in a design research project in which we explored in collaboration with children critical design methods for the purpose of addressing a wicked societal problem of bullying. For this study, we analysed four design methods we experimented with from the viewpoint of values of the critical research tradition, particularly collective empowerment, embedded in and advocated by the methods. We identify variety in the methods in terms of critical values included, collective empowerment addressed, emergent factors identified, and extent of criticality advocated. We contribute to IS literature by offering insights on how IS research, practice and education can embed critical research tradition values, particularly addressing empowerment in the critical and collective senses, more strongly into the design process. We call for wild methods in terms of criticality and propose an initial set of design principles for their development.

School children increasingly engage in designing and making activities, with the aim to promote creativity, increase peer collaboration, and engage with novel technologies. However, there is limited exploration of the impact of these activities. This study inquires what kinds of identities children (co)produce during design and making and how they evolve. Nexus analysis is used as a research strategy, drawing on multimodal research materials accumulated and gathered during a design and making project conducted with 11–12-year-old pupils. The research lens views social action as an intersection of participants’ histories, their mutual interaction orders, and discourses in place. The analysis entails scrutinizing the detailed aspects of identity production that are bound with wider discourses and interactions. Our findings show how identities of a maker, designer, change agent, performer, leader, content producer, and empathizer emerged, and how the competing orientations of being pupils and engaging in design and making that invite diverse types of identity production among the pupils, at the same time gaining agency as designers and makers, and ownership of their designs.

We suggest transformative agency is brought to the forefront of Participatory Design (PD) in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research to scaffold children's active engagement in matters related to digital technology and its effects on society. Based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory we define children's transformative agency as their ability to actively change their own matters, their shared matters, or even societal matters for the better and more just society. We report on a framework for analyzing PD research with children and demonstrate how PD can support transformative agency of children through vignettes from two PD projects with children. Based on the vignettes, we provide a set of additional PD aims to consider when integrating the scaffolding of transformative agency explicitly in PD with children. A focus on children's transformative agency will contribute significantly to the maturing field of Computational Empowerment in CCI as an extension of the current PD work with children.

Bullying is a problem concerning us all, especially our children. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has invited children to tackle this problem through design and technology. However, yet there is limited research including critical engagement with the topic, even if the critical agenda is arousing increasing interest in HCI. Design fiction has shown potential in addressing critical concerns. However, albeit design fiction has entered HCI method repertoire already some time ago, it is an ambiguous concept with multiple meanings and usages. We map and articulate some of this variety: fascinating, future-oriented, and provocative studies are identified, while also a lack of critical design fiction, aiming at empowerment of the power-weak. We contribute by exploring such kind of design fiction in collaboration with children to tackle the problem of bullying. We scrutinize our participatory and empowering design fiction process and outcomes and discuss their implications for HCI research and design fiction practice.