We have two papers being presented at the CHI2026 conference in Barcelona.
Extending the Child-Centered Ethics Framework: Researchers’ Reflections on Multiple Projects with Children and Teenagers
In this paper, we use the Child-Centred Ethics framework to critically reflect on the planning, implementation, and impact of twelve (2-4 year) projects with children (ages 2-18 years) in Finland, the UK, India, Japan, and the USA. Our analysis reveals diverse ethical challenges and experiences: adapting materials based on the abilities, interests and agendas of the children, teachers, and schools, considering consent and assent as continuous processes, and exploring impacts beyond the project duration. We also discuss handling data ownership among participants and international collaborators, and managing difficult situations that arise, such as, participants pushing the boundaries of technology and people, technical breakdowns, and in situ negotiations of roles among teachers and researchers. We use our analysis to extend the CCE Framework in two distinct ways; incorporating adult stakeholders and impacts beyond a projects’ lifecycle. Our work contributes to research on ethics in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research, addressing how to plan, implement, and create an impact in CCI projects with children.
Feeling the Flavour: Exploring Children’s Touch–Taste Correspondences and Willingness to Try Unknown Foods for Child–Food Interaction Design
How can we leverage taste expectations to create novel food-based experiences for children? Eating is an embodied process that jointly engages with multiple senses. Cross-sensory correspondences may offer educational and recreational opportunities to design interactive applications that encourage diversifying encounters with food. We present a study with 64 children (ages 10–11) who explored eight textured materials hidden inside mystery “food” boxes and reported both their expected tastes and willingness to eat. Our findings provide evidence of touch–taste cross-sensory correspondences in children — sweetness with weak-hard-brittle and strong-soft-brittle materials, and saltiness with a weak-soft brittle material — and how these mappings influenced children’s openness to unknown foods. These results provide empirical grounding for cross-sensory interaction design with children, demonstrating how texture could scaffold curiosity and learning. We outline design implications for cross-sensory food interfaces, non-edible public exhibits, and playful educational technologies that could broaden eating experiences and enable new forms of virtual food interaction.
Lo, P. Y., Roberts-Morgan, T., Horton, M., Read, J., & Metatla, O. (2026, March). Feeling the Flavour: Exploring Children’s Touch–Taste Correspondences and Willingness to Try Unknown Foods for Child–Food Interaction Design. In ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2026. Association for Computing Machinery.