Laughing is Scary, but Farting is Cute: A Conceptual Model of Children's Perspectives of Creepy Technologies
Abstract
In HCI, adult concerns about technologies for children have been studied extensively. However, less is known about what children themselves find concerning in everyday technologies. We examine children's technology-related fears by probing their use of the colloquial term "creepy." To understand children's perceptions of "creepy technologies," we conducted four participatory design sessions with children (ages 7 - 11) to design and evaluate creepy technologies, followed by interviews with the same children. We found that children's fear reactions emphasized physical harm and threats to their relationships (particularly with attachment figures). The creepy signals from technology the children described include: deception, lack of control, mimicry, ominous physical appearance, and unpredictability. Children acknowledged trusted adults will mediate the relationship between creepy technology signals and fear responses. Our work contributes a close examination of what children mean when they say a technology is "creepy." By treating these concerns as principal design considerations, developers can build systems that are more transparent about the risks they produce and more sensitive to the fears they may unintentionally raise.
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The authors did not measure intercoder reliability in line with similar qualitative and participatory design papers, following justification in [9].
“We did not measure intercoder reliability in line with similar qualitative and participatory design papers [25, 69, 99], following the justification presented in [9].”
From The Promise and Peril of ChatGPT in Higher Education: Opportunities, Challenges, and Design Implications (2024) · cites this paper as [99]
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“By working Much of the research in HCI on security and privacy for children and families has focused on parental fears around technologies [16, 18, 36, 94, 100] and strategies to protect children [24, 55, 58, 59, 66].”
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“This model expands prior work documenting the technologies adults fnd concerning [16, 18, 36, 45, 58, 84, 94, 100], and other work documenting children’s fears [20, 30, 42, 43, 71, 72, 79].”
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Self-citationExperiential Qualities of Whispering with Voice Assistants
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“CI has proven valuable in studying various aspects of children’s experiences, including their perceptions of security and privacy [45, 100], studies on gender and sexuality [52], examinations of family finances [97], and investigations into the role of creativity [2].”
Self-citation
- Authors
- Yip, J. C., Sobel, K., Gao, X., Hishikawa, A. M., Lim, A., Meng, L., Ofiana, R. F., Park, J., & Hiniker, A.
- Affiliations
- University of Washingaton, Seattle, WA, USA
- University of Washington (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-05-02
- Pages
- 1-15
- OpenAlex
- W2942216755
- Cited by
- 88
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 17 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 19 · 2021: 14 · 2020: 3
- FWCI
- 7.29
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Innovative Human-Technology Interaction
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Social Robot Interaction and HRI
- Social Sciences › Education › Child Development and Digital Technology
- Keywords
- fear response, deception, lack of control, mimicry, unpredictability, attachment figures, trusted adults
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