Abstract
There is a revitalized interest in power and politics around design and technology in the Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) field. Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) research community has also shown arousing interest towards the topic. However, despite this emerging interest, the CCI research community has remained quite silent about the potential of a critical agenda for CCI. Few studies have explicitly addressed critical research or critical design. This study introduces the notion of a critical agenda for CCI research and identifies CCI studies that are linked with the critical agenda, revealing that there are CCI studies showing emerging interests and seeds for addressing the critical agenda. Overall, this study explores the state-of-the-art critical research tradition in CCI and explicates the potential of this tradition for making the world a better place through design and technology in collaboration with children.
Highlights
There is a revitalized interest in power and politics around design and technology in the Human– Computer Interaction (HCI) field
We focused on the premier CCI outlets, including five conferences: (1) Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC), (2) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), (3) Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing Conference (CSCW), (4) Participatory Design Conference (PDC), and (5) Nordic Conference on Human–Computer Interaction (NordiCHI) and three journals: (1) International Journal on Child– Computer Interaction (IJCCI), (2) Transactions in Computer– Human Interaction (TOCHI), and (3) Co-design: International Journal of Co-Creation in Design and the Arts
Overall, this study contributed by explicating what is meant by the critical agenda for CCI research by revealing the state-ofthe-art of critical research tradition in CCI and identifying many opportunities for future CCI studies addressing the critical agenda
Summary
We consider as key elements in critical research: (1) providing critique of the status quo and (2) accomplishing transformative redefinition of the current situation (Alvesson & Deetz, 2011). The atmosphere has been fertile for this discussion, and the field has been explored by some authors under different labels, such as critical play (Flanagan, 2009), socially responsive design (Thorpe & Gamman, 2011), associative, and speculative design (Malpass, 2017), and adversarial and tactical design (DiSalvo, 2018). Besides this lineage, there has been an older thread of innate criticism within the design profession and design research directed against the willingness of design to help businesses advance consumerism. We explore the state-of-the-art of critical research and critical design in CCI with these conceptual distinctions
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