Sustainable Care: Designing Technologies That Support Children's Long-Term Engagement with Social Issues
For researchers and practitioners in child-computer interaction, this workshop addresses the problem of designing technology that fosters sustained civic engagement in children without causing distress.
This workshop proposes 'sustainable care' as a design lens to help children maintain long-term engagement with social issues without anxiety or burnout, aiming to develop a research agenda for the child-computer interaction community.
Children today encounter social issues -- climate change, conflict, inequality -- through digital technologies, and the design of that encounter shapes whether young people move toward lasting civic engagement or toward anxiety and withdrawal. Much of the content children see is optimized for attention through fear and urgency, with few pathways toward meaningful action -- contributing to rising distress and disengagement among young people who care deeply but feel powerless to act. This full-day workshop introduces ``sustainable care'' as a design lens, asking how technology might support children's sustained engagement with social causes without contributing to empathic distress or burnout. We invite researchers and practitioners across child-computer interaction, games, education, and youth mental health to map this landscape together and develop a research agenda for the CCI community.