This paper explores the project management challenges of involving children as genuine members of an information technology development project team. In a game development project with university students and two children, empirical data from workshops and project records reveal tensions between ideals of participation and practical constraints. The study identifies issues with roles, responsibilities, communication, scheduling, and resource allocation. Findings highlight that children’s limited self-management skills necessitate clearer roles, adapted management practices, and more adult support. The paper offers a rare project management perspective to intergenerational participatory design, emphasizing the need for tailored approaches.

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.

Some level of digital technology design skills and competencies is important in any profession but in their education and work life this is often ignored. We explore the potential of Educational Participatory Design (EPD) in transforming work practices within diverse disciplines. This is done through a transdisciplinary case where EPD was used as an approach for transforming language teacher education seen to respond too slowly to technological advancements in society and work life. Based on our findings, we propose EPD as a useful approach for building the design agency of future professionals with various disciplinary and professional backgrounds. In the context of real-life work practice with students as future workers, EPD invites them to act as 'designers' envisioning novel practices and technologies for their own work, engaging their 'users' in the PD processes. EPD as a novel methodological approach integrates design with work practice learning and education and therefore, we suggest, belongs to the core expertise of CSCW research and design interested in the digital transformation of work practices.

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.

Bullying is a challenge concerning us all, and particularly our children. This has already been acknowledged by CHI, among others. Despite the interest, there is a lack of comprehensive understanding of the state of the art – a critical review is needed, addressing bullying in the lives of children, in the context of and/or by the means of design and technology, covering CHI as well as related computing fields, being inspired by the strong body of knowledge within human sciences. We report on a comprehensive literature review on the topic, with the aim to understand what and how has been done so far to handle this troublesome and widespread phenomenon as well as to indicate how to move the field forward. We report how the topic has been examined and with what kind of means tackled, revealing interesting underlying assumptions about design, technology and human agency.

Maker movement has recently gained worldwide recognition. Educating children in making activities has also become advocated. Studies have reported experiences on engaging children in making activities and the importance of nurturing a maker identity in children has been advocated. This study reveals findings from a case where, in the spirit of genuine participation of children, 10--12-year-old children gained initial experiences in design and making activities within an elective mathematics class as part of their primary school education. The study shows that children adopted multiple subject positions and relied on various discourses when describing their experiences. We argue that none of them developed a designer or a maker identity as such during the project, whereas many of the children reported of having developed some sort of meaningful relationship to design and making. We argue that this is a valuable outcome per se. Implications for HCI research and design are discussed.

Children's participation in information and communication technology (ICT) design is an established interdisciplinary research field. Methods for children's participation have been developed, but a closer link between theory and design has been called for, as well as an examination of various participants influencing children's participation in ICT design. This paper addresses these gaps by introducing the research strategy of nexus analysis as a promising theoretical framework. Especially the concepts of ‘interaction order’ and ‘historical body’ are utilised in the analysis of six empirical studies on ICT design with children. The analysis shows that through the participating children there were also ‘others’ involved, multiple voices to be heard, often invisible but informing design. Some of these ‘others’ have already been acknowledged in literature but the issue has not been examined in depth and common vocabulary for this is lacking. Some practical implications will be offered by illustrating how to consider these concepts in different phases of ICT design: when establishing relationships with children, involving children as participant designers and analysing the results of these participative processes.