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Growing Up in a Complex World: Engaging Children in Socio-Cultural Matters Through Speculative Installations

The interaction design community has a long history of design and research for and with children, including designing installations for public spaces. This paper explores children's engagement in socio-cultural issues through speculative installations exhibited in a cultural institution. Over the past ten years, we explored the boundaries between technology, play, learning, and mastery through more than forty interaction design student projects collaborating with various cultural institutions. Although only a portion of projects focused on time-relevant socio-cultural issues such as pollution, refugee crises, or climate change, they opened for reflections on possible ways of including children in dialogues concerning contemporary challenges. The paper contributes a framework for designing and analyzing speculative installations for children based on the ‘darkness scale’ (reflecting the seriousness and complexity of the context), scaffolding engagement, age-appropriate speculative pointers, and linking the present with a desirable future. We showcase two installations and use the framework to discuss them.