Emergent, Situated and Prospective Ethics for Child-Computer Interaction Research

Overview of IDC 2020 Full Day Workshop

NOTE: This workshop will now be held online due to COVID-19 concerns. 

The increasing presence of interactive technologies in children’s lives poses critical ethical questions for researchers and designers. Discourse specific to these intersecting topics is nascent, but is spread across communities and largely developed retrospectively. This workshop brings together those interested in ethical issues arising when researching, designing, and deploying technologies for children. The focus is on exploring approaches that are emergent and situated, arising during research or after deployment. Workshop activities will include: exploring ethical themes emerging in HCI research for children; synthesizing and adapting current applicable ethical guidance; identifying gaps; and developing preliminary methods and guidance to address these gaps.

Workshop outcomes will extend current best practices in ethics in ways that promote children’s protection, empowerment and wellbeing. Workshop outcomes will include a revised annotated bibliography with statements of best practices and a research agenda for the community. The workshop serves to create a preliminary working group and a network for attendees to access when ethical issues arise in future work. Follow-up action items include identification of opportunities for a symposium to address unanswered questions raised in the workshop. Outcomes for the broader community will include a plain language report hosted on the website. The organizers will work with the editorial board of the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (Organizers Antle, Frauenberger and Landoni are on the Editorial Board) to create a special issue on ethics in HCI for children and youth. In addition we will create a forum for ACM Interactions similar to [2,15].

References

2. Alissa N. Antle. 2017. The ethics of doing research with vulnerable populations. Interactions 24, 6: 74–77.

15. Hourcade, Juan Pablo, Anthony, L., Fails, J., Iversen, O.S., Rubegni, E., Skov, M., Slovak, P., Walsh, G., and Zeising, A. 2018. SIG Report back to the community: Child computer interaction, ubiquitous technologies and big data. ACM Interactions, November + December.