Sustainable Care: Designing Technologies That Support Children's Long-Term Engagement with Social Issues

Children today encounter social issues—climate change, conflict, inequality—through digital technologies, and the design of that encounter shapes whether young people move toward lasting civic engagement or toward anxiety and withdrawal. Much of the content children see is optimized for attention through fear and urgency, with few pathways toward meaningful action—contributing to rising distress and disengagement among young people who care deeply but feel powerless to act.

This half-day workshop introduces "sustainable care" as a design lens, asking how technology might support children's sustained engagement with social causes without contributing to empathic distress or burnout. The term carries a dual meaning: it encompasses both children's care toward societal issues and our care toward children as designers, educators, and researchers.

We invite researchers and practitioners across child-computer interaction, games, education, and youth mental health to map this landscape together and develop a research agenda for the CCI community.

The workshop is organized around four themes derived from the US Surgeon General's advisory on protecting youth mental health:

1. Bounded responsibility: understanding one's role as part of a collective effort rather than carrying the weight of global problems alone.
2. Actionable pathways: having concrete, age-appropriate ways to contribute that connect awareness to meaningful action.
3. Resilience through community: developing capacities to persist through setbacks and uncertainty without losing hope or motivation.
4. Mental health orientation: recognizing mental health both as a precondition for and a desired outcome of sustainable care.

We invite researchers, designers, and practitioners to join a half-day (morning) workshop on sustainable care—supporting children's lasting engagement with social causes through technology design.

Children today encounter climate change, conflict, and inequality through digital technologies. Much of this content is designed for attention capture rather than constructive engagement, contributing to rising anxiety and disengagement among young people who care deeply but feel powerless. This workshop introduces sustainable care as a design lens and invites participants to map the landscape of technologies that help or harm children's capacity to engage with social issues over time.

We welcome position papers (2–4 pages, ACM SIGCHI format) addressing:

• Empirical findings on how children encounter social issues through technology

• Design cases: technologies that support or undermine sustained engagement

• Perspectives from games, education, mental health, or civic technology (including surprising observations, personal experiences, or lessons from applying these ideas in practice)

• Encore submissions: previously published work with a short statement on its relevance to sustainable care

Submissions will be reviewed for relevance and potential contribution to workshop discussion. We prioritize diversity in disciplinary background and perspective. At least one author of each accepted paper must attend the workshop, and all participants must register for both the workshop and the main conference. Submissions should not be anonymized.

Submission Link: https://forms.gle/6AUXtxp1aFBmCvut6