Transformative agency – the next step towards children's computational empowerment

Abstract

We suggest transformative agency is brought to the forefront of Participatory Design (PD) in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research to scaffold children's active engagement in matters related to digital technology and its effects on society. Based on Cultural-Historical Activity Theory we define children's transformative agency as their ability to actively change their own matters, their shared matters, or even societal matters for the better and more just society. We report on a framework for analyzing PD research with children and demonstrate how PD can support transformative agency of children through vignettes from two PD projects with children. Based on the vignettes, we provide a set of additional PD aims to consider when integrating the scaffolding of transformative agency explicitly in PD with children. A focus on children's transformative agency will contribute significantly to the maturing field of Computational Empowerment in CCI as an extension of the current PD work with children.

This research has been funded by the Research Council of Finland (Grant #324685 Make-a-Difference; Grant #340603 Participatory AI with Schoolchildren; Grant #351584 Making sense of ‘technology protagonism’). In addition, this work was developed in research grant (#28831) VILLUM FONDEN. The analysis provided was supported by the National Research Center for Technology Comprehension supported Novo Nordisk Foundation (Grant number NNF23SA0082894), Villum Foundation (Grant number 54607) and Lundbeck Foundation (grant number R419-2022-1261).