From Record to Relation: Co-Designing Child-Centered Digital Preservation for Children’s Artwork

Homes overflow with children’s artwork, yet domestic technologies emphasize storage (continuity of record) rather than everyday encounters and shared decisions (continuity of relation). We report a mixed-methods study: a survey (N=327), interviews (n=32), and intergenerational co-design workshops with eight families. From eight tensions—visibility, witnessed goodbyes, bounded autonomy and fairness, material aura, meaningful afterlives, time and friction budgets, explainability, and household fit—we derive principles and instantiate four probes: Goodbye, Hello (brief, witnessed retirements that leave a light trace); Magic Frame (explainable resurfacing of digitized art in shared space); Co-Curator (joint parent and child selection with reasons); and New Journeys (named, local afterlives for retired pieces). In workshops, families rehearsed “kit in motion” sequences judged workable within constraints and able to reduce surprise and conflict. We contribute an empirical account of the preservation gap, a reframing from record to relation, a trace from themes to mechanisms, and implications for child-centered, household-fit preservation.