Exploring a Design Framework for Children's Agency through Participatory Design
This addresses a gap in design practice for child-AI interactions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing participatory methods without major breakthroughs.
The paper tackled the problem of designers struggling to understand and operationalize children's agency in digital systems, finding that a participatory design framework helped them articulate agency trade-offs explicitly.
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.