Critical design in interaction design and children

Abstract

During past years, an increasing interest has been placed on critical design in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and design research communities. Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research community, however, has remained quite silent about these recent developments. There are no studies explicitly addressing critical design for, with and by children nor studies explicitly embracing critical research tradition. Yet, there are some works that clearly still can be linked with critical research and design traditions. Those works can be seen to represent seeds of critical design already evident in the CCI community. This paper introduces critical design discourse into CCI research. First critical research and design traditions are presented, after which existing developments in CCI research that can be linked with critical research and design are identified. The paper ends up by proposing a research agenda for future critical CCI research and by discussing associated benefits and challenges.