Sustainable Care: Designing Technologies That Support Children's Long-Term Engagement with Social Issues

TL;DR

This paper advocates for a 'sustainable care' design approach in technology to foster children's long-term engagement with social issues, aiming to prevent distress and promote meaningful action.

Contribution

It introduces the 'sustainable care' lens as a novel framework for designing technologies that support children's ongoing social issue engagement without causing burnout.

Findings

Proposes a new design lens called 'sustainable care'

Highlights the need for balanced engagement to prevent distress

Calls for a collaborative research agenda in child-computer interaction

Abstract

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.