Sustainable Care: Designing Technologies That Support Children's Long-Term Engagement with Social Issues
🤖 AI Summary
This work proposes a “sustainable care” design perspective as a foundational principle in child–technology interaction, addressing how digital technologies often frame social issues in ways that provoke anxiety, leading children to experience helplessness, empathy fatigue, and disengagement. By integrating approaches from child–computer interaction, educational game design, and digital mental health, the project emphasizes supporting children’s long-term, meaningful, and psychologically sustainable engagement with societal challenges while mitigating the risk of empathic exhaustion. Through collaborative workshops involving multidisciplinary experts, the research formulates an innovative agenda and practical framework to foster resilient digital citizenship among children, ensuring their participation remains both impactful and emotionally viable over time.
Application Category
📝 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.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
sustainable care
children's engagement
social issues
empathic distress
digital technologies
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
sustainable care
child-computer interaction
empathic distress
civic engagement
design lens
🔎 Similar Papers
No similar papers found.
