Designing for Children’s Participation in Everyday Life: Bridging HCI and Occupational Therapy through Roles and Contexts

Abstract

Designing interactive systems for children has generated substantial work on accessibility, inclusion, and participatory design. Building on this foundation, this workshop introduces an occupational therapy (OT) perspective, where participation is understood as children’s involvement in meaningful life situations. From this perspective, participation emerges through the dynamic interaction between the child, the activities they engage in, the environments they inhabit, and the roles they enact in everyday contexts (e.g., as students, friends, or players). This perspective is complementary to participatory design approaches in HCI, which emphasize children’s involvement in the design process. Here, we focus instead on participation as an outcome of interaction- how children with diverse abilities engage in meaningful activities and roles in their everyday lives. Through interactive and co-creative activities, participants will analyze real-world scenarios, articulate interdisciplinary perspectives, and collaboratively develop participation-centered design concepts. The workshop will generate concrete outcomes, including an interdisciplinary framing of participation for HCI, a set of design strategies, and a research roadmap. By fostering dialogue across disciplines, the workshop aims to advance context-sensitive and participation-centered approaches for designing with and for children with diverse abilities. By foregrounding participation as meaningful engagement in everyday life, this workshop resonates with the NordiCHI theme “Pulse – exploring the energy that drives us,” highlighting how children’s agency and involvement are shaped across roles, contexts, and environments.