Workshop at IDC 2025: Grasping Data: Exploring interdisciplinary approaches for investigating children’s interactions with their personal data
On Monday, June 23, 2025, Cooney Center Post Doctoral Fellow for Co-Design Liza Gak will participate in a hybrid workshop at IDC.
Unlike any previous generation, children’s lives are now highly datafied, tracked, and digitally monitored. They are increasingly vulnerable to data collection from seemingly innocuous toys and devices with cameras, sensors, voice recognition, and geolocation. Yet, children typically lack awareness or control over these data exchanges, as consent is usually given by adult caregivers (who may also lack data literacy). Despite regulatory improvements, interdisciplinary approaches remain crucial to empowering children to understand, value, and manage their personal data. How can the IDC community involve children in designing and using their personal data? This workshop unites experts to explore current practices.
Despite a growing public awareness of technology’s accelerating capacity to capture, process and exploit personal data, this has not been matched by efforts to promote understanding of the myriad ways in which our information is harvested. Children and young people in particular are increasingly exposed to risks through their use of apparently innocuous toys and devices that can generate data from everyday interactions. What methods are being used across IDC to explore children’s understanding of personal data? What steps can we as a community take to ensure children are kept safe and yet have agency over their data?
The goals of this workshop are:
1) to create an explorative visual mapping of the methods and mindsets currently used by the IDC community around children and personal data and in which contexts.
2) to understand where and how children are being included in research and design concerning their personal data.
3) to converge on a set of principles or a manifesto for the design community to follow on best practice in such contexts.
