Exploring a Design Framework for Children's Agency through Participatory Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces a participatory design framework to help designers better understand and operationalize children's agency in digital systems, emphasizing ethical AI considerations.

Contribution

It presents a novel agency design framework that supports explicit reasoning about children's agency in design processes, addressing current understanding gaps.

Findings

Designers are committed to ethical AI but struggle to operationalize agency.

The framework helps translate implicit judgments into explicit agency considerations.

Initial insights support designers' reasoning about children's agency.

Abstract

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.