Series
01
AI Beside the Child: What Should Be Left for the Child to Do?
When AI responds from beside a child, what should remain for the child to do? Following imagination and agency, the labor of meaning-making, ambiguity, and strangeness, this series explores how AI for children might support rather than replace their work of making meaning.
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- Will Imaginary Friends Disappear in the Age of AI? Contrasting AI's immediate answers with the waiting left by imaginary friends, this essay asks what children gain from imagining and making meaning for themselves.
- The Reasons Why I Want to Study HCI Beginning with typically developing children growing up alongside AI, this essay frames imagination and agency as the HCI questions I want to pursue.
- Children in CHI 2026 Paper Review A review of child-focused work at CHI 2026 clarifies a research gap around imagination and agency among typically developing children under thirteen.
- What Art Gifted Education Taught Me Lessons from art gifted education suggest an AI that does not complete expression for children, but helps them learn to read their own thinking.
- Designing Child-Safe Conversational AI: Three Dilemmas for Responsible Design Paper Review Three tensions—safety versus engagement, personalization versus privacy, and protection versus autonomy—define the dilemmas of conversational AI for children.
- The Magic of Story-Driven Games Through story-driven games, this essay argues that agency comes less from the number of choices than from effort being recognized and returned by the world.
- Agency: A Sense or a Labor? Paper Review Starting from a contradiction—the previous principle also justifies the AI the first essay warned against—this essay splits the feeling of agency from the labor of making meaning.
- In the Name of Interpretation Treating ambiguity as a relationship rather than an object, this essay asks how interaction can leave children with permission to interpret.
- Whence Returns the Strangeness? Confronting how repetition wears strangeness away, this essay searches for the position of a witness that can reopen the gap.