Applying children’s rights to digital products: Exploring competing priorities in design

Despite efforts to promote children’s rights in digital environments, a gap remains between principles and practice. To understand this gap and identify possible solutions, we examine whether and how designers embed children’s rights when developing digital products and services. Using the child rights-informed ‘Playful by Design’ (PbD) principles and associated card pack as discussion probes in workshops with 30 designers from diverse companies, we identify designers’ understanding of children’s rights, their workplace requirements for implementing them, and the competing professional and commercial priorities they face in designing for children’s play. The findings reveal the challenges of embedding rights-based principles into product design. Notably, designers may believe that children’s rights are sufficiently realised by protecting children from risk, without balancing protection with rights to provision and participation. Further, designers also require a compelling rationale and practical means of addressing the challenges of implementing children’s rights in commercial design settings.