Child-Computer Interaction in times of a pandemic.

Abstract

The increasing presence of interactive technologies in children’s lives poses critical ethical questions for researchers and designers. Discourse specific to these intersecting topics is nascent, spread across communities and largely developed retrospectively. In a series of workshops and panels at the annual ACM Interaction Design for Children (ACM IDC) conference, a small group from the community has aimed to provide a central space and continuity for this discourse. The most recent of these spaces was the ACM IDC 2020 workshop entitled, “Emergent, Situated and Prospective Ethics for Child–Computer Interaction Research” that brought together a small group of researchers interested in sharing and discussing ethical issues arising when researching, designing, and deploying technologies for children [1]. When we, as the two main organizers of the workshop, wrote the workshop proposal we were particularly interested in how the ethical challenges in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) were changing in the face of a rapidly changing world. At that time, it was completely unknown to us how different the world would be when we conducted the workshop. When the participants eventually met online for this workshop in late June 2020, a global pandemic had changed public life as we knew it and social justice issues, as manifested in the Black Lives Matter movement, were causing widespread unrest. Layered on these immediate challenges was the looming climate crisis that poses one of the most existential threats to humans yet. When we ran the workshop, we decided to focus our discussions on sharing thoughts and experiences of what these monumental shifts might mean for our community. The question, which we put onto the virtual floor was: How is the ethics of your research changing in the face of the Covid-19 Pandemic and recent social justice issues, as manifested in the Black Live Matters movement? What followed was a rich and thoughtful discussion. Every participant was affected by the pandemic in different ways, both personally and professionally. In the 45 min session we had reserved for this part of the workshop, we were all not only connected via video link, but also collaboratively worked on a shared virtual whiteboard at the same time. In a very productive mix of show and tell, we collected sticky notes, online resources, quotes and other bits of information; all the while making connections and categorizations. Later, we, as the two main organizers, discussed our observations from the workshop, and then reviewed the data and our own notes to informally look for themes related to our original question. We wrote up the themes individually, and worked collaboratively to refine, clarify, and contextualize them. From this exercise, four main themes emerged, which all included perceived challenges as well as the participants’ recommendations for how these concerns might be addressed moving forward. The following briefly summarizes these themes.