No Caste, No Crowds, and Robots for All: Children's Values, Hopes, and Fears in the Designs of their Future Classrooms

Children increasingly interact with a myriad of technologies in their everyday lives, yet are seldom invited to envision the future trajectories of these technologies or what futures they want to see. To address this gap, we conducted design futuring workshops with 31 school children in India (ages 10-13 years). Participants imagined future classrooms and the different types of technologies situated within these classrooms. Participants’ resultant socio-technical imaginaries reveal an underlying hope to be empowered in the learning process, underscoring the values of empathy, care, inclusion, and empowerment. Their imaginaries also highlight the everyday problems that concern them the most and how they imagine overcoming them, deliberating also on the role of humans in these futures. Our work contributes to Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research on engaging children to critically envision their digital futures by illustrating the value of design futuring and socio-technical imaginaries, especially created by an under-represented group, Indian children.