The emancipatory potential of child-computer interaction
Child-computer interaction has the ability to bring the emancipatory possibilities of HCI to an audience much in need of it: children.
In 1981 the UTOPIA project [PDF] saw the light of day in Stockholm, Sweden. In it, a research team composed of graphic workers and computer and social scientists collaborated with the Scandinavian graphic workers union in a research project on trade union based design of computer systems. The goal of the project was to support the union in its “struggle for influence on technology, training and organization of work.” The project, which ran for four years, were in many aspects a success, as expressed by Robert Howard in the conclusion to his article about the project for MIT Technology Review:
So the impact of UTOPIA is continuing to expand, and the idea that workers and their unions have an important role to play in the design of new technology is reaching a wider and wider audience.
In her 2010 paper Feminist HCI: Taking Stock and Outlining an Agenda for Design [PDF], Shaowen Bardzell provides a number of examples of how human-computer interaction (HCI) can empower people in isolated communities and increase quality of life for low-literate people in rural communities. Three years later, Joshua Tanenbaum and co-authors described how DIY and Maker culture is resulting in technology and design being made available and democratized, causing the traditional conception of users as consumers to be shifted to that of users as appropriators. In 2019 researchers Andre Henney and William Tucker, together with the NGO Deaf Community of Cape Town, developed a prototype of a mobile web application that enabled Deaf people to communicate more easily with hearing people, in an attempt to offset the disadvantage often faced by Deaf people in situations such as hospital visits.
These emancipatory and democratizing aspects are not incidental: they are very intentionally and tightly coupled to HCI as a field. When barriers of entry are lowered — a goal at the very core of HCI — more people are enabled to use technology, giving them the possibility of using that technology to improve their lives.
Before children were human
There are almost two billion children under the age of 15 in the world today [PDF]. Of course, all of them have their own thoughts, ideas, feelings, likes, and dislikes. However, it cannot be denied that they share some common features that set children as a group apart from adults as a group. Some of these differences will, inevitably, transform into differences in the ability to interact with the world and digital artifacts in it. If these differences are not taken into consideration when designing new technology, this group — nearly a third of all of humanity — will be excluded from the promised benefits of HCI. And, as UX designer Per Axbom has described, the “double diamond” process — one of the most commonly used frameworks for design — by its very nature makes it all too easy to avoid taking the needs of people in the outskirts into consideration.
In her paper Children as Economic Agents [PDF] economics professor Deborah Levison describes how children’s interests historically have been overlooked because of their lack of power vis-à-vis adults. She does so in the context of economic theory, but it is not particularly difficult to imagine that this holds true in society as a whole as well as in HCI specifically. Sociologist Jens Qvortrup noted in his introduction to the book Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics that
the adult world does not recognize children’s praxis, because competence is defined merely in relation to adults’ praxis — a suggestion which is all the more powerful since adults are in a sovereign position to define competence.
Unfortunately, this is a sentiment that certainly holds true in HCI. As Janet Read & Mathilde Bekker detailed in their paper The Nature of Child Computer Interaction [PDF], despite the works of pioneers like Seymour Papert, it was not until the end of the 20th century and the influential work of Allison Druin that the HCI community started taking children into serious consideration, giving birth to the field of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI).
A new paradigm
The power of CCI is its ability to take the emancipatory possibilities that HCI provides and bring them to an audience both much in need of it and sorely lacking attention in the main field. Children are able to be creative appropriators and shapers of technology, and to use technology to influence and better their lives, just as well as adults are — as long as appropriate consideration is taken to the children’s wants, needs, and abilities in the design of the technology. Doing this is, actually, not very complicated. In fact, it goes back to the most fundamental principle of design: know your users. Know them as full, complicated, diverse, humans. If they are children, know them as children. As legendary industrial designer Dieter Rams said:
Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design.
Getting to know your child users might seem daunting, but in reality it does not differ majorly from how you get to know your adult users. Yes, special consideration might be needed when involving young people in your design process, but there are a number of great resources out there on how to adapt your activities to better accommodate children, including a number of articles from the Nielsen Norman Group and this fantastic collection of methods and practices by the Designing for Children’s Rights Association. And in case you are worried that involving children will be a waste of your precious and limited time budget, Katie Sherwin and Jakob Nielsen assure us that we do not need to “discard what [we] already know about usable design and how to simplify designs” and that many of the things that improve usability for children are just as beneficial to adults, and vice versa.
A call to action for designers
As William Gibson famously said: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The same holds true for the enormous potential for democratizing technology present in HCI. Children, of course, are not the only ones having a hard time reaping the benefits. WebAIM’s report from early 2019 that almost 98% of the top one million websites in the world had computer detectable accessibility issues, painted a stark picture of the state of web accessibility. Furthermore, as Joy Buolamwini and the Algorithmic Justice League have repeatedly shown, facial recognition algorithms keep failing to recognize people — especially women — of color. As designers, we need to start asking ourselves not only whether we can design the future, but what kind of future we want to design. How can we create systems that bring forward the perspectives and voices of the disenfranchised and vulnerable in our society? Can we use design to facilitate a shift in the adult world’s recognition of children’s praxis? Is it possible to use technology in order to enable children to define competence on their own terms rather than in relation to adults?
Mike Monteiro reminds us in The Designer’s Code of Ethics that “a designer is responsible for the work they put into the world.” This means that when we design something we are responsible for any harm that might come to children as a result of us failing to consider their perspective. However, it also means that when we honor UTOPIA’s legacy by including our users no matter who they are, when we consider children as full and equal participants in our design, when we allow them to define their own praxis and elevate them to a level our society usually reserves for adults — then we are allowed to feel very proud.
