Marianne Kinnula

University of Oulu · INTERACT Research Unit

Relatively little attention has been paid to discussing what it means when children's participation in technology design is genuine, even though the importance of their participation is emphasized in the literature. School as a context presents multiple challenges but also numerous benefits for working with children. We examine five projects carrie...

Pdf of the paper in: https://mkinnula.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/molin-juustila-et-al-2015.pdf Children's participation in information and communication technology (ICT) design is an established interdisciplinary research field. Methods for children's participation have been developed, but a closer link between theory and design has been called f...

Pdf of the paper in: https://mkinnula.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/iivari-et-al-2014.pdf This paper examines video diaries gathered from 10—11-year-old pupils with the aim of inquiring children's technology use in their everyday life. A discourse lens is utilized to provide novel insights into the nature and use of videos and diaries in Human Compu...

We contribute in this study a first step in theory-based understanding on how creativity in collaborative design sessions relates to the elements that are present in a creative act. These elements include group composition, objects present, practices used, and previous knowledge of the participants. The context of this study was our search for ligh...

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have truly entered our everyday life, both work and leisure. This applies especially to the lives of our children: the children of today have been surrounded by ICT from their birth – personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, video games, and social media have been an integral part of their ev...

Purpose There are increasing expectations for educators to include sustainability as part of higher education Information and Communication Technology (ICT) curricula, but we still lack concrete ways how to integrate it into teaching. To be able to create meaningful learning experiences we need to understand how our students approach sustainabilit...

As children's everyday interaction with emerging technologies increases, they need to develop criticality to navigate ethical impacts of technology and when imagining futures with technology. We explore how design futuring can facilitate children's criticality through four different workshops with children from India, Finland, and the USA. Particip...

As the need for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) professionals increases, higher education institutions create education outreach programs to attract students to study ICT majors, including Information Systems. For the outreach programs to be successful, it is important to take the target audience and their needs and expectations into...

The integration of AI technologies in all domains of life raises ethical debates. Children and young people are not exempt from these discussions since AI is also an increasing part of their lives. This study explores teenagers’ (aged 13 to 16 years) views on AI with a focus on ethical thinking. This is a retrospective empirical study in which data...

Digitalization has permeated and transformed all aspects of our everyday life, also that of the children of today. In studies on digitalization, it is pivotal to focus on the young generation, as they will for sure be living their life intimately intermingled with digital technology. For their future, it is central to ensure they have access to dig...

Information Systems (IS) among other Information Technology (IT) disciplines has been concerned with student recruitment while students in secondary education have little knowledge of the field and few end up choosing it as their career. We piloted an IS-oriented entrepreneurship course in a Finnish secondary school (aged 16-19) to examine how we c...

Digital fabrication laboratories (Fab Labs) are accessible to the public, including children and families. However, a variety of technical skills, tools, and expertise are needed in these spaces, and Fab Lab staff—instructors working there—are in a key role in helping Fab Lab users. There is, however, a lack of research on how these instructors can...

There is a shortage of employees in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field, including Information Systems (IS). Student recruitment is a challenge in IS in many countries despite different student marketing efforts and extensive research on the topic. We conducted a survey with first year students in a Finnish university to unders...

Some level of digital technology design skills and competencies is important in any profession but in their education and work life this is often ignored. We explore the potential of Educational Participatory Design (EPD) in transforming work practices within diverse disciplines. This is done through a transdisciplinary case where EPD was used as a...

Children increasingly use applications utilizing Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML). Given the propensity of such applications to propagate existing social, gender, and racial biases, it becomes imperative to consider designing and developing child-centered AI applications for children. Furthermore, children should have opportunitie...

It has been acknowledged that the Information Systems (IS) discipline needs to pay attention to policymaking. However, the IS field has not yet sufficiently acknowledged complexities of policymaking and the resulting ambiguity. We present two worldviews that underlie how IS research has approached policymaking and, indirectly, policy ambiguity. In...

Methods in practice: Studying children and youth online Kotilainen, Sirkku (Ed.) Erstveröffentlichung / Primary Publication Sammelwerk / collection Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Kotilainen, S. (Ed.). (2022). Methods in practice: Studying children and youth online. Hamburg: Leibniz-Institut für Medienforschung | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HB...

Digital twins (DTs) are one form of datafication. They are virtual reflections of physical world entities, of objects and phenomena, and are rapidly becoming an asset for innovation. There is a growing body of literature on DTs in various technology-related fields. A critical thread has emerged within this body, warning on the danger to forget that...

While the potential of digital fabrication, making, and entrepreneurship education for empowering children and for increasing their abilities to shape the society and our digital future have been acknowledged in the literature, these educational trends have mostly been studied separately in Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research. Additionally, w...

There is a shortage of employees in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field, including Information Systems (IS). Student recruitment is a challenge in IS in many countries despite different student marketing efforts and extensive research on the topic. We conducted a survey with first year students in a Finnish university to unders...

As we push the boundaries of participatory design (PD) to empower children across the world, barriers to participation for those currently underserved require further attention. This includes neurodiverse individuals at special schools in India, whose day-to-day experiences are heavily influenced by the larger socio-cultural context of the schools...

This editorial summarizes the background and findings of the First Mini-Conference on Transdisciplinary Research and Design (TRaD 2022) held in Oulu. We describe the aim and vision of the conference, the conference theme, the articles presented and published in the conference proceedings, and the history of the research groups organizing the confer...

Sustainability is a major theme in today's discourses across disciplines, including Information Systems (IS). Creating a more sustainable world is considered an interdisciplinary effort and IS an inherently interdisciplinary field. Working with complex problems benefits from deeper disciplinary understanding than can be obtained by researchers oper...

Despite the increasing demand for non-formal science learning activities, few studies report on practitioners' perspectives and experiences with designing and implementing such activities worldwide. This paper focuses on their challenges by drawing upon twenty-two interviews with practitioners involved in diverse science learning activities in vari...

2020 marks the beginning of a new era as the pandemic catapulted us into new digital and virtual ways of everyday life. As the world changes, we reimagine empowering, equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive digital futures, through a series of projects and workshops with a diverse set of participants - children in schools and Child Computer I...

The importance of child empowerment in and through design and making has been acknowledged. The notion of "child as a Design Protagonist" concerning technology has recently been introduced. We conducted a narrative literature review to examine the current understanding of what it requires from children to become a Protagonist in design. The main ob...

We articulate in this paper what participation at its best entails in the context of digital technology design with children, forming a theoretical framework for genuine participation of children in digital technology design and making. We integrate in the framework a set of conditions for the meaningful and effective participation of children and...

Public controversies around the unethical use of personal data are increasing, spotlighting data ethics as an increasingly important field of study. MyData is a related emerging vision that emphasizes individuals’ control of their personal data. In this paper, we investigated people’s perceptions of various data management scenarios by measuring th...

The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging for Fab Labs and makerspaces where the use of digital fabrication machines and working with physical materials in collaboration with others are at the heart of the activities. We have been actively promoting children’s technology education both by training local teachers and by working with children themselves....

In this exploratory study into the world of 8-17-year-old children’s non-formal technology education, two different types of technology education with varying levels of non-formality were investigated to see how participants find fun in these situations as it is apparent that if something is non-mandatory to attend to, there should be some type of...

Cultivating children’s Maker mindset by facilitating their involvement in Makerspaces is recognized by researchers around the world as a topic worth investigating. Previous studies have revealed several different roles for the adults involved; however, there is little elaboration on the characteristics and strategies associated with these roles. Th...

Educators and researchers with varied backgrounds and expertise share a common vision of helping children expand their horizons and capabilities through learning design, digital fabrication, and making skills. We highlight the collaborative and transdisciplinary nature of these endeavors, underlining the perspective of value co-creation where value...

Despite an abundance of research on collaboration between participants with different disciplinary backgrounds, there is less research available on researchers’ reflections on their working process. This study sheds light on the interdisciplinary work of a research group in the context of a Making project involving design and digital fabrication at...

Purpose-The low number of women in the information technology (IT) field is a concern. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors behind the exclusion of girls from the IT field. Design/methodology/approach-The present work includes a narrative literature review and an exploratory interview study with ten girls and six study guidance cou...

Information Systems (IS) among other Information Technology (IT) disciplines has been concerned with student recruitment, while high school students have little knowledge of what the field can offer. We piloted an IS oriented entrepreneurship course in a Finnish high school, with 24 students and their teacher. The purpose was to examine how we can...

Digital transformation has become a central construct in information systems (IS) research. Current conceptualizations largely attribute transformation to intentionality, focus on transformation within a single organization, or assign technology the role of a disruptive agent of change. Likewise, “digital” tends to be a general category of technolo...

Digital technology design and making skills are seen as important ‘twenty-first century skills’ that children need to learn to become future changemakers, i.e., to manage and master in the current and future technology-rich everyday life. Fab labs (digital fabrication laboratories) are one example of non-formal learning environments where schooltea...

Children provide innovative insights and perspectives when designing and evaluating prospective technologies and interaction methods. However, working with children as design informants requires careful consideration of the methodologies used in different steps of the design process. In this paper, we present our insights on a case-study of a desig...

Girls’ disinterest in Information Technology (IT) careers is a persisting problem. We wanted to examine girls’ perceptions of the IT field as well as factors shaping their career choices, to find ways girls might see IT/Information Systems careers as more interesting. For this purpose, we interviewed Finnish senior high school students, as senior h...

There is a growing number of informal and non-formal learning activities worldwide related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) curricular subject areas—particularly those involving coding and making. To better understand the general aim and content of such activities, we conducted a survey addressing highly experienced instructi...

Women remain underrepresented in IT-related fields, including IS. To address this issue, we need to listen to the women and girls making their career choice. We used a discourse lens to analyse qualitative interview data collected in Finland with 12 high school girls, 14 university students in IT, and 3 women in IT occupations. This selection of pa...

The commercial launch of 6G communications systems and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, UN SDGs, are both targeted for 2030. 6G communications is expected to boost global growth and productivity, create new business models and transform many aspects of society. The UN SDGs are a way of framing opportunities and challenges of a desirabl...

Developing products, services and vertical applications for the future digitized society in the 6G era requires a multidisciplinary approach and a re-definition of how we create, deliver and consume network resources, data and services for both communications and sensing purposes. This development will change and disrupt the traditional business mo...

The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been acknowledged. In this literature review, we examine the complex social action of children, aged from 7 to 17 (K-12), engaging in technology Making activities as it is seen in the extant literature. The included papers contain empirical data from...

The importance of familiarizing children with the Maker Movement, Makerspaces and Maker mindset has been acknowledged. In this literature review, we examine the complex social action of children, aged from 7 to 17 (K-12), engaging in technology Making activities as it is seen in the extant literature. The included papers contain empirical data from...

Ever younger children have their personal life online and there are worries of their online safety. To understand how children engage with and perceive online safety education targeted at them we arranged workshops with 11–12-year-old children who engaged with three existing educational packages for online safety targeted at children and brainstorm...

It is an enduring problem that girls are not interested in careers in Information Technology (IT). Our aim is to understand girls’ perceptions and understanding of the IT field as well as factors shaping them, to find ways to get more girls interested in IT/Information Systems careers. As senior high school is the last opportunity to influence girl...

Inspired by the Maker Movement and attempts of integrating Making into formal education of children, we have examined how practice-oriented the research on Making and education is in Child-Computer Interaction field. Our results show that despite the growing interest practice-orientation is still weak. Making efforts rarely aim for longitudinal dur...

Information Systems (IS) researchers have become increasingly interested in policy. Government policy enables and constrains the range of technologies operating on the market. In the spirit of enabling innovation, governments around the world have moved to the principle of technological neutrality: regulating goals instead of specific technologies....

The low number of women in the Information Technology (IT) field is a concern of European Information Systems (IS) research, among other disciplines. Despite a vast body of research generated during decades, the problem still persists. That is a challenge for the society and detrimental from the viewpoint of IS workforce. It is an issue that needs...

There is a growing number of informal and non-formal learning activities worldwide related to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subject areas – particularly, those related to coding and making. To understand the general aim and content of such activities, we conducted a survey addressing highly experienced instructional designers...

This paper scrutinizes how children can be empowered to make a change through acquiring skills in digital technology design. We propose a framework that integrates theoretical understanding from literature on nexus analysis, values, and value as well as empowerment and genuine participation of children, and a related tool for educators and research...

In this paper, we examine collaborative design projects in school contexts with many different stakeholders. We look at the value created for and by different stakeholders, focusing on value as a benefit, which is experienced – perceived and determined – by the beneficiaries themselves in the value co-creation process. As our focus is in “value-in-...

Inviting children to adopt a Protagonist role regarding technology has recently become advocated. Such a role embraces the original political participatory design (PD) agenda and aims at empowerment of children through design and making. However, so far the literature is limited in exploring the adoption of this role by children. While studies have...