Understanding how technology can support social-emotional learning of children: a dyadic trauma-informed participatory design with proxies

Trauma-informed design is an important yet challenging area due to required expertise for careful engagement with the vulnerable and traumatized person, particularly with children. While technologies have the potential to generate value for the person with experience of trauma, the risk of exposing them to additional trauma due to research and design has ethical implications. We explore this space by engaging with therapists and social workers as dyads of proxies for parents and children with a history of trauma. We conducted a study as a participatory workshop with proxies to understand how technology could support parents in coaching social-emotional learning during episodes of high intensity emotion and difficult behavior by the child. Our findings identified design qualities to embed in SEL technology, and three roles that parents can play in implementing SEL strategies at home. We contribute a set of seven methodological guidelines for dyadic trauma-informed participatory design with proxies.