Introducing a Practice Toolkit for Understanding and Shaping Children's Digitalized Everyday Life: Case children and public displays

Abstract

Children of today live increasingly digitalized lives. Child computer interaction (CCI) research has a strong agenda to empower children in the digital age through participation in new digital technology design. While children's role in digital technology design has been studied from various perspectives, existing research is limited in understanding and approaching children's continuously evolving digital lives and practices. In this paper, we scrutinize a practice toolkit method for making sense and shaping children's digitalized everyday life and practice. We concretize its use through an analysis of children's and their families’ engagement with an interactive public display infrastructure, providing zoom-in and zoom-out analyses of emergent practices around the infrastructure. We show various kinds of creative and collaborative accomplishments, the importance of the material world and the relationship of the practices to media discourses and discuss how these practices can be used to inspire and shape further digital technology development. We demonstrate the value of the practice toolkit and emergent practices for CCI research and practice.