Ethical dilemmas experienced by students in Child–Computer Interaction—A case study

Journal article, 2021

Although there is an increased focus on the ethical responsibilities of designers when designing children's technologies, there are few academic examples of what it entails to teach this to design students. We have therefore set out to explore the most common ethical dilemmas experienced by design students in Child–Computer Interaction (CCI) when interacting with children in the field. This case study article reports on an analysis of the situated ethical experiences from 45 international master students in interaction design during their projects to design children's technologies. The main research question for this paper is what common ethical dilemmas students in CCI experience when involving children in their design process. The dilemmas we present stem from the written home exams of the students in our course and have been clustered under three temporally relevant themes: Selection of participants, Informed Consent, and Working with children. These situational ethical dilemmas can be used by teachers in the field to complement the formal ethical guidelines provided to students and have a discussion on how to deal with them in their own practice.