Intermediate-Level Knowledge in Child-Computer Interaction: A Call for Action

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Based on an analysis of all papers at IDC from 2003 to 2016 this paper urges the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) field to start formulating intermediate-level knowledge, in the form of e.g. strong concepts. Our analysis showed that 40% of all papers at the Interaction Design and Children conference presents the design of an artefact accompanied by an evaluation (to which we will refer as 'artefact-centered' papers). While exploring the design space in the form of artefacts is important and valuable, it can be argued that those artefact-centered papers generally make a smaller contribution to the field as a whole, which is also visible in the number of citations to such papers in comparison to the number of citations to other kinds of papers. As a first step towards more intermediate-level knowledge, we have thus attempted to formulate and ground three suggestions for strong concepts in CCI, namely Head-up gaming, Collective storytelling and Remote sensing. We based these concepts on an analysis of a set of relatively often-cited artefact-centered papers from the IDC conference proceedings. The three strong concepts we present here aim to show that the artefact-centered papers presented at the IDC conference over the last 15 years potentially contain useful knowledge that should be capitalized upon. The contribution of this paper is to initiate a discussion in the CCI community on the need for intermediate-level knowledge and how this knowledge, such as strong concepts, should be generated.