CCI in the wild: designing for environmental stewardship through children’s nature-play

The recent UN Global Assessment report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services identified human-induced biodiversity loss as one of the greatest threats facing humanity today. Despite this, the field of Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) has so far paid little attention towards how it might directly contribute to biodiversity conservation efforts. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring how digital applications may be designed to support the nature-play experiences known to instill a value for nature and motivate environmental stewardship behavior in children. It describes a co-envisioning process carried out with nine children (7-11 years) within their nature-play contexts to understand how they would appropriate abstract ‘digital functions’ to enhance or support their situated nature-play. The functions envisioned by children are then reinterpreted as five design openings for CCI researchers to pursue to support nature-play opportunities for children. This research provides an initial framework for CCI researchers to contribute to global biodiversity conservation efforts by supporting the nature-play experiences known to promote long-term environmental stewardship in children.