Children have participated in the design of technologies intended to be used by children with varying degrees of involvement, using diverse methods, and in differing contexts. This participation can be characterized as involving children as users, testers, informants, or design partners. It is only relatively recent that researchers around the world have begun to work more substantively with children to design technologies for children. This monograph synthesizes prior work involving children as informants and design partners, and describes the emergence of participatory design methods and techniques for children. We consider the various roles children have played in the design process, with a focus on those that integrally involve children throughout the process. We summarize and provide a pragmatic foundation for fellow researchers and practitioners to use several methods and techniques for designing technologies with and for children. In this monograph we relate the techniques to the design goals they help fulfill. The monograph concludes with a consideration of working with children in technology design processes as we move into the twenty-first century.

Finding patterns of events over time is important in searching patient histories, Web logs, news stories, and criminal activities. This paper presents PatternFinder, an integrated interface for query and result-set visualization for search and discovery of temporal patterns within multivariate and categorical data sets. We define temporal patterns as sequences of events with inter-event time spans. PatternFinder allows users to specify the attributes of events and time spans to produce powerful pattern queries that are difficult to express with other formalisms. We characterize the range of queries PatternFinder supports as users vary the specificity at which events and time spans are defined. Pattern Finder's query capabilities together with coupled ball-and-chain and tabular visualizations enable users to effectively query, explore and analyze event patterns both within and across data entities (e.g. patient histories, terrorist groups, Web logs, etc.)

As the rates of lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease continue to rise, the development of effective tools that can help people adopt and sustain healthier habits is becoming ever more important. Mobile computing holds great promise for providing effective support for helping people manage their health in everyday life. Yet, for this promise to be realized, mobile wellness systems need to be well designed, not only in terms of how they implement specific behavior-change techniques but also, among other factors, in terms of how much burden they put on the user, how well they integrate into the user’s daily life, and how they address the user’s privacy concerns. Designing for all of these constraints is difficult, and it is often not clear what tradeoffs particular design decisions have on how a wellness application is experienced and used. In this monograph, we provide an account of different design approaches to common features of mobile wellness applications and we discuss the tradeoffs inherent in those approaches. We also outline the key challenges that HCI researchers and designers will need to address to move the state of the art for mobile wellness technologies forward.

Children are among the most frequent users of the Internet, yet searching and browsing the web can present many challenges. Studies over the past two decades on how children search were conducted with finite and pre-determined content found in CD-ROM applications, online digital libraries, and web directories. However, with the current popularity of the open Internet and keyword-based interfaces for searching it, more critical analysis of the challenges children face today is needed. This paper presents the findings of our initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home. Our research has revealed that although today's children have been exposed to computers for most of their lives, spelling, typing, query formulation, and deciphering results are all still potential barriers to finding the information they need.