While Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research frequently reports successful outcomes, challenges and failures in studies conducted in school context are rarely examined in detail. This paper addresses this gap through a collective reflection on when and how research with children in school contexts can be considered successful, and what challenges threaten such success. Based on decades of CCI experience from fifteen researchers across multiple countries, the study used a structured, multi-phase process informed by confessional research and child-centered ethics. The analysis identifies nine aspects of success across three areas (stakeholder experience, data generation, and children’s engagement) alongside fifteen recurring challenges organised into seven areas. We also map the relationships between successes and challenges, revealing ethically consequential tensions often overlooked in published accounts. The paper offers practical guidance, an analytical vocabulary, and a reflective method to foster more transparent and ethical CCI research in school settings.

Even the most comprehensive plans may go awry when working with children and in places such as schools, which results in unexpected challenges or sometimes failures. Yet, research publications seldom report on these failures and events, and meaningful second hand experiences are rarely shared beyond the project or research team, if at all. To break this cycle, we propose a half-day workshop at IDC 2026 for collectively reflecting on project experiences - from (un)fortunate events to failures, to learn and grow as a community. We invite researchers and practitioners, young and experienced, to bring their experiences and to collectively compile a list of lessons for the CCI community. This workshop builds on prior initiatives on learning from failures, with the goal of incorporating regular collective reflections as a practice at IDC.

In this paper, we use the Child-Centred Ethics framework to critically reflect on the planning, implementation, and impact of twelve (2-4 year) projects with children (ages 2-18 years) in Finland, the UK, India, Japan, and the USA. Our analysis reveals diverse ethical challenges and experiences: adapting materials based on the abilities, interests and agendas of the children, teachers, and schools, considering consent and assent as continuous processes, and exploring impacts beyond the project duration. We also discuss handling data ownership among participants and international collaborators, and managing difficult situations that arise, such as, participants pushing the boundaries of technology and people, technical breakdowns, and in situ negotiations of roles among teachers and researchers. We use our analysis to extend the CCE Framework in two distinct ways; incorporating adult stakeholders and impacts beyond a projects’ lifecycle. Our work contributes to research on ethics in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research, addressing how to plan, implement, and create an impact in CCI projects with children.

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.

Maker culture emphasizes informal, networked, self- and peer-led learning, motivated by fun and self-fulfillment, and learning through mistakes. However, studies often describe activities involving a lot of guidance. As guidance may lead to both the process and outcomes influenced by those guiding the activity, it is also important to examine how projects evolve without the supporters' push. We take a nexus analytical approach to explore 1) how teens' background, interactions with others, and available materials and spaces are at play when they shape their ideas and outputs in a collaborative maker project with minimal support, and 2) how these factors can be considered to better support learning in such projects. The work carried out by five teens in a local FabLab was based on peer collaboration within changing apprentice mentor pairs. When they ideated and prototyped for a future school, researchers provided minimal support, mainly online. Without their push, teens quickly modified tasks which both guided and narrowed down their thinking. Their experiences from school environment and the FabLab space served as an inspiration as they designed solutions to overcome current problems in the current school setting or digital fabrication process. When making, they gravitated towards processes they had previous experience of or which they enjoyed, perhaps partly affected by the competing discourses of maker culture and expertise we observed to be present in the FabLab space. While building on existing skillsets, this may leave the potential of novel trajectories and expanding one's skills and competences unexplored. Teens' self-esteem improved as they turned from apprentices to mentors for their peers. This allowed them to process their learning from a different perspective. In general, our results paint a detailed picture of the roles of different participants in a maker project and provide an example of how familiar discourses of education persist in teens' designs. Looking at the project through the lens of Nexus analysis contributes to an increased understanding of the space for action and participants' histories, and interactions on the process, valuable for researchers studying DF and making, and practitioners working in makerspaces and FabLabs with different user groups. On a more practical level, our work contributes to a deeper understanding on how to include teens into non-guided and community-driven maker practices. We provide practical implications on how to support learning in collaborative making projects in informal learning situations, and regarding the role of the different actors and the environment in such situations. We also identify avenues for future research in this area.

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.

Mobile stereoscopic 3D (S3D) user experience (UX) design has not yet been widely studied. Stereoscopy in today's products is used for visual design purposes, whilst the potential for holistic interaction design and utilitarian aspects have been neglected. In this paper we introduce the design, implementation and evaluation of a mobile S3D phonebook application. In the application stereoscopy was used to augment the 2D user interface (UI) design to provide information related to the time when the last call with each phonebook contact was made. We describe the results of the pilot study charting the design directions, laboratory study of first impressions, and results of a field trial, where 21 participants used the application for a few days. The S3D UI design provoked first impressions related to entertainment and 2D UI to practical qualities, whereas the field study showed that our S3D phonebook design successfully demonstrated that utilitarian value can be incorporated to the design.

In the future, transparent displays can be utilized as information and communication channels in our everyday environments. Home windows form an interesting, yet unexplored platform, which could be utilized in the future e.g. as a mixed reality display or a personal or family communication channel. We explored the early user perceptions of an augmented home window through two user studies. In the first study 21 participants from 12 households commented our concept ideas and created their own. In the second study (12 households, 12 participants), developed concept ideas were assessed in a diary and a user study based on probes. The probes were used as experiential probes to gather perceptions of an augmented home window concept. Based on the studies, we present four communication modes for the augmented home window. The detailed findings reveal that contextual relevance of the content is highly important in the augmented home window, and that pragmatic use cases were valued, whereas social features were less appreciated.

In this paper, we present our co-creation work on a digital 3D city model, where school children were asked create drawings for the city landscape of their hometown. Altogether 40 drawings were then integrated into the 3D virtual world model to form a decorated 3D view of the city square and the main street. Our work presents a novel use case in using the local 3D city model as a creativity platform for children, opening a new viewpoint on how virtual world presentations can be used with e.g. to facilitate the perception of the local community.

Mobile user interfaces (UIs) utilizing stereoscopic 3D have so far been driven predominantly by visual design, and when interaction design has been considered, the focus has been on single user use cases. In this paper, we introduce a novel way to utilize stereoscopy in a mobile user interface in a collaborative task. We define a shared space, appearing below the screen level, which is used in a collaborative task of sharing mobile phone photos. Two users are able to share content by moving items between the private layer, at zero parallax, and shared layer, at positive parallax. We developed the application through an iterative design process including two user studies (n=27, n=19). We report positive evaluation results especially in regard of the utilitarian aspects of the UI design.

In our research, we explore the possibilities for combining digital 3D city representation with a wellness application, and introduce our demo that aims to make running in a gym more inspiring and motivating. We present a prototype, where the running exercise on a treadmill is converted to a distance on the local city map, and visualized in a 3D mirror world presentation of the city. The user leaves a personalized tag on the spot reached, and in addition to his achievement, is able to see the performance of other runners on the streets of the virtual world. We evaluated the system in the gym, where 32 people tried out the prototype. The application was perceived entertaining and interesting, and especially the ability to compare the results with earlier runners was perceived motivating.

During recent years public displays relying on new types of display technologies have made their way to the city scene. In this paper, we present a concept that combines tangible interfaces with such ubiquitous urban interaction. We set out to create a tangible connection between different cities and employed an experience-driven design process towards our concept called 'Who's There?'. We evaluated the concept by using a cardboard prototype with a group of fifteen users in a busy market square, where it generated considerable engagement and discussion with members of the public.

In this paper, we focus on charting future ubiquitous computing use cases utilizing mixed reality (MR) in domestic environments, which has so far been an unexplored domain for MR. We describe our early user research, where during one week participants from 12 households were asked to brainstorm and assess their perceptions of imaginary mixed reality in their homes. During the one-week period this resulted in 167 user generated concept ideas. We focus on the thematic findings that emerged from the collected material, and describe how people most often related the potential of MR concepts with applications related to wellbeing, home-related information, communication and entertainment.

During recent years augmented reality services have become commonly known. To ensure the acceptance of these services, their development should be based on the users' expectations and needs. In this paper, we investigate the initial user perceptions of service content in a mobile mixed reality (MMR) application through a two-phase user study, where early concept ideas were charted. We conducted a field study with 35 participants, and an online survey filled out by 111 people. Our findings provide indication of desired content types and differences between local and visiting people.