CAMCAD

Child-Centred AI-Mediated Collaborative Agency by Design workshop at CHI 2026

Call for proposals

The Child-Centred AI-Mediated Collaborative Agency by Design (CAMCAD) at CHI 2026 workshop organisers invite researchers, designers, educators, and practitioners for an afternoon of sharing and exploration of how AI applications could be designed to support children and young people in making informed decisions and enacting them meaningfully.

This workshop builds on previous Child-Centred AI workshops at CHI 2023 and 2024. This year’s theme is collaborative agency. Through this lens, we are interested in how children and young people can be supported in making and acting on decisions not just as individuals, but in collaboration with others, such as peers, teachers, and parents.

Unlike in previous years, there is no additional cost for attending conference workshops at CHI 2026. We are not anticipating to be able to support remote or hybrid attendance, workshops will run only in-person this year. We are expecting to invite approximately 20 participants to attend the workshop.

Topics of Interest

We welcome submissions that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Models and theories that help understand child-centred co-agency.
• Methods for researching and designing for child-centred co-agency.
• Interaction design case studies that demonstrate novel technologies for collaborative learning, play, or communication.
• Empirical studies of co-agency in AI-mediated interactions.
• Evaluation studies of systems designed to support co-agency.
• Ethical and critical perspectives on designing for intergenerational child-centred collaboration.
• Research tools, policy frameworks, or design principles to support child-centred co-agency.

Author Guidelines

We invite applicants to submit posters (large single page) or short pictorials (visual extended abstracts up to 4 pages; see DIS 2026 and IDC 2026 pages for an explanation and examples of pictorials).

This workshop is suitable for work-in-progress research, speculative ideas, position statements, short case studies, and highlights from completed research. Accepted submissions will be showcased in a poster session at the workshop and will be shared on the conference website.

Submissions will be reviewed by the workshop organisers and academic peers for relevance, originality, and potential to contribute to the discussion. If we receive a high number of submissions, applicants may be asked to review one or two peer submissions. At least one author will be required to register for and attend the workshop for each accepted submission.

The workshop will be followed up by a call for papers in a Special Issue on agency in child-AI interaction in the International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction (IJCCI).

All research conducted with human participants must comply with the ACM Publications Policy on Research Involving Human Participants and Subjects.

Important Dates

• Submissions Open: Thursday, December 18, 2025
• Submission Deadline: Thursday, February 12, 2026 Monday, February 16, 2026 end of day Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time
• Notification of Acceptance: Thursday, February 25, 2026 (one week prior to CHI early bird registration deadline)
• CHI 2026 Conference: 13–17 April, 2026
  • CAMCAD Workshop: 14:15 - 18:00 (CEST) on Thursday 16 April, 2026

Acknowledgments

The workshop is organised by the University of Oxford Child-Centred AI Design Lab team and colleagues from University College London, University of Oulu, Raspberry Pi Foundation, and University of Edinburgh.

This work is supported by the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Cross Research Council Responsive Mode projects CHAILD - Children’s Agency In the age of AI: Leveraging InterDisciplinarity (MR/Z505882/1) and GRASPING DATA: Co-creating Physicalizations to Empower Young Children to Interact with, Understand, and Benefit from Their Personal Data (MR/Z505602/1) and the Research Council of Finland funded project Critical DataLit: Cultivating justice-oriented data literacies among GenZ (Grant #354445).

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.