This half day workshop focuses on refining Participatory Design (PD) methods for engaging young children. Through discussions and transparent sharing of experiences, we will explore challenges, successes, failures, and practical insights for enhancing PD practices tailored to children's needs and cognitive development. Milestones for the workshop's discussion are the following questions: How can we increase children's motivation and engagement during the process? How do we balance scaffolding according to the children's level of autonomy?

Attendees will gain new perspectives and methods to advance more inclusive and engaging designs aligned with young children's unique perspectives, fostering a collaborative space for refining child-centric PD approaches. The workshop will wrap up with a reflective summary, providing an overview of ideas and perspectives acquired during the workshop. 

This workshop is a call to practitioners, developers, designers, psychologists, educators, parents, and CCI researchers to seize the chance to share their PD experiences and to start exchanges to gather best practices and recommendations for implementation. We will facilitate discussion to address methods, resources, and tactics for promoting inclusion and scaffolding in PD processes with children. 

We invite participants to write short papers of 2-4 pages as position papers, initial studies, or case studies, covering one of the following topics:

(1) PD approaches with children, methods, and strategies

(2) Challenges and failures when doing PD with children

(3) Social and ethical implications in PD

Papers will be peer-reviewed by the workshop organizers. We will select papers describing diverse backgrounds and experiences. 

To broaden our audience and enable a more transdisciplinary discussion, we also invite individuals with diverse backgrounds, such as educators or parents. We will require a brief statement expressing their interest and motivation in participating in the workshop.

Submissions:

Papers and motivation statements should be submitted to katharina.buckmayer@tecnico.ulisboa.pt by April 15, 2024. The notification of acceptance will be sent out on May 1, 2024. 

At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop. All workshop participants must register for both the workshop and the main conference ( https://idc.acm.org/2024/ ).