CCAI receives Honourable Mention (Best Paper) at CHI 2025

Jun Zhao
Last updated on May 19, 2025 1 min read

FamiData Hub: A Speculative Design Exploration with Families on Smart Home Datafication

Dr Ge Wang, led the research on FamiData Hub during her last term in Oxford CCAI. The research investigates how children and families perceive the extensive data harvesting embedded in these smart homes and its manipulative impact on children.

Through innovative co-design activities and speculative interviews with 30 children and 25 parents, the research identified key open challenges faced by families, including

  • The erosion of boundaries in family spaces, loss of control over family norms,
  • The diminished autonomy in data-driven decision-making processes,
  • A normalised experience of smart home technologies in modern family life

The research offers key design recommendations for rethinking smart home technologies to better safeguard children’s data, including

  • Keeping the right balance between “smart” and respect.
  • Creating technologies that help family members work beter together
  • Demanding for technologies that take kids out of their everyday normalisation, by helping them better understand smart home data practices.

This research aligns with our previous research on children’s data autonomy and agency. It has won Honourable Mention (Best Paper) at CHI 2025. Find out more from link.