Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
children's agency
designers
ethical AI
participatory design
design framework
Exploring a Design Framework for Children's Agency through Participatory Design
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the persistent challenge designers face in understanding and operationalizing children’s agency within child–AI interaction design, a domain lacking dedicated support tools. To bridge this gap, the work proposes the first design framework explicitly centered on children’s agency. Developed through participatory workshops integrating qualitative analysis and design thinking methods, the framework enables designers to surface and articulate their implicit assumptions about agency and systematically navigate complex design trade-offs. By making tacit judgments explicit and structuring ethical deliberation, the framework not only fills a critical practical void in ethical child–AI design but also demonstrably enhances designers’ conceptual understanding of children’s agency, offering a concrete, actionable pathway for embedding ethical considerations into complex AI systems for young users.
📝 Abstract
Children's agency plays a critical role in shaping children's autonomy, participation, and well-being in their interactions with digital systems, particularly in emerging child-AI contexts. However, how designers currently understand and reason about children's agency in practice remains underexplored. In this paper, we examine designers's engagement with children's agency through a participatory workshop in which we introduce a design-for-agency framework that supports designers externalising the consideration of agency in their design contexts. We find that while participants are committed to implementing ethical AI systems for children, they often struggle to understand why agency matters and how it can be operationalised in practice. Our agency design framework provided designers with a structured way to translate implicit, experience-based judgments into explicit articulation of agency trade-offs while acknowledging the associated design complexity. We conclude by offering initial insights into supporting designers' reasoning about children's agency and outlining directions for future research.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
children's agency
participatory design
design framework
ethical AI
design for agency
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