Abstract

Nurturing children’s competences needed for their digital futures and inviting them to adopt a protagonist role within design process have recently been emphasized in child-computer interaction research. For children to be able to act as design protagonists, they need design capital. We carried out a project with 13‐14‐year-olds and inquired under what circumstances the situated design capital of children emerged, enabling them to act as design protagonists without us deliberately steering them towards that. By employing the theoretical lens of nexus analysis, several factors were discovered that mediated children to utilize their situated design capital, including distributed agency, positive peer pressure, peer learning, and identity positioning. The findings imply that children’s situated capital emanates from interactional phenomena, within which historical trajectories of the place, children, discourses, ideas, and objects intermingle.