Social imaginaries as a lens on co-designing environmental sustainability

Social imaginaries are a way of envisioning how people maintain society, and of understanding what is valued within that society. In this project, we worked with children on environmentally sustainable solutions for the future using co-design, a common methodology in child–computer interaction. We apply a social imaginary lens to five co-design case studies, from different geographic regions around the world, to describe and analyze variations in design practices as well as in design artifacts, and examine the ways in which children demonstrated a shared understanding of a pro-social world. The primary contribution of this paper is an illustration of the use of social imaginaries for interpreting and organizing co-design around environmental sustainability.