Panel: Broadening the Discussion of Ethics in the Interaction Design and Children Community

Interaction Design and Children (IDC) as an academic field, and as a community, has a responsibility to engage with the many and diverse ethical challenges that arise from work that concerns the creation of digital technology for and with children – both in terms of research and industry contexts. This panel builds on a short history of similar events at previous conferences and aims to foster and strengthen the debate about ethical conduct and moral responsibilities in IDC. In this year’s panel, we seek to broaden the discussion by collecting ethical concerns, issues or dilemmas from within the community to be discussed at the conference. To this end, we will issue an open call for input that will be publicised via the usual channels. The organisers then will synthesise the responses and facilitate the discussion and debate at the panel

Attitudes of Children with Autism towards Robots: An Exploratory Study

In this exploratory study we assessed how attitudes of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) towards robots together with children's autism-related social impairments are linked to indicators of children's preference of an interaction with a robot over an interaction with a person. We found that children with ASD have overall positive attitudes towards robots and that they often prefer interacting with a robot than with a person. Several of children's attitudes were linked to children's longer gazes towards a robot compared to a person. Autism-related social impairments were linked to more repetitive and stereotyped behaviors and to a shorter gaze duration in the interaction with the robot compared to the person. These preliminary results contribute to better understand factors that might help determine sub-groups of children with ASD for whom robots could be particularly useful.Comment: Presented at Interaction Design and Children (IDC-CRI2018) Workshop (arXiv:submit/2277826

Participatory Design of AI with Children: Reflections on IDC Design Challenge

Children growing up in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be most impacted by the technology across their life span. Participatory Design (PD) is widely adopted by the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community, which empowers children to bring their interests, needs, and creativity to the design process of future technologies. While PD has drawn increasing attention to human-centered AI design, it remains largely untapped in facilitating the design process of AI technologies relevant to children and their community. In this paper, we report intriguing children's design ideas on AI technologies resulting from the "Research and Design Challenge" of the 22nd ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC 2023) conference. The diversity of design problems, AI applications and capabilities revealed by the children's design ideas shed light on the potential of engaging children in PD activities for future AI technologies. We discuss opportunities and challenges for accessible and inclusive PD experiences with children in shaping the future of AI-powered society

4th KidRec – What does Good Look Like: From Design, Research, and Practice to Policy

We summarize outcomes from KidRec 2020, the 4th edition of the workshop on International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Children & Recommender and Information Retrieval Systems; which this year was co-located with the ACM Interaction Design and Children conference. In addition to lessons learned from the keynote address by Professor Marcia C. Linn, accepted contributions, and collaborative work during the workshop, we offer insights related to hosting KidRec as a virtual meeting during the COVID-19 pandemic