CHI 2026
Pringles, Prangles, or Prongles? Negotiating Creative Authorship in Children's Remix Practices
Role
Co-author
Authors
Michele Newman, Daeun Yoo, Runhua Zhao, Emily Tuy, Hannah Yi, Darae Kim, Jin Ha Lee, Jason Yip
Overview
Remix is how children create today: reusing, recombining, and reinterpreting existing cultural artifacts with digital tools. But the implications of remix for authorship remain largely unexamined — what does ownership mean to a child whose creation started as someone else's drawing, song, or meme?
We conducted six participatory design sessions with 16 children ages 5–11, moving from physical collage remixing to digital tools, to trace how children develop their understanding of authorship and creativity — and how the medium itself shapes those beliefs.
6
design sessions
16
child co-designers
3 mo
study duration
Method
Six 90-minute Cooperative Inquiry design sessions over three months (February–April 2025), each combining snack time, circle time, group design, and discussion.
From physical to digital
Early sessions explored remix with physical media (layered collage on paper); later sessions moved to digital remixing and the design of creativity-support tools, letting us compare how each medium shaped children's reasoning.
Authorship and ethics by design
Final sessions had children design their own remix tools — like a 'Portable Remixer' — surfacing what permission, credit, and control should look like from a child's perspective.
Findings
Children treated remixing as a negotiated, interpretive process — not copying. Three threads ran through their practices:
Authorship as interpretation
Children remixed with three interpretive priorities — personal expression, respect for the original creator, and communication — making remix a site of ethical reasoning, not just production.
Authorship as mediation
The medium changed the experience of ownership: digital media's easy copying and permanence made creative acts feel more visible and consequential than physical collage, and software norms carried their own assumptions about creativity and control.
Authorship as ownership
Children voiced strong beliefs about permission — 'you should ask the person who created it' — yet their actual practices diverged, revealing a tension between stated values and what tools make easy.
Contribution
We introduce the Creative Agency Framework: three pathways tracing how remix agency emerges through interpretation and mediation.
Three pathways of creative agency
Each pathway pairs a form of agency with an authorship concept — assertive agency with the author, dialogic agency with the co-creator, and facilitative agency with the steward — along with the 'myths' about creativity that software makes feel natural.
Rebalancing creativity support
Most creativity-support tools privilege the expressive, sole-author pathway. We argue for tools that also recognize negotiated and stewardship forms of creativity, so children can see themselves as both creators and cultural producers.