Balanced!: Turning Tomorrow into Critical Futures Play for Sustainability 

This student project was carried out in the ‘Digital Design Thinking and Making’ (DDTM) module, UCL IOE’s Education and Technology MA. Written by the UCL Knowledge Lab PhD students: Yihan Dong, Zoe Wei, Wenyun Deng, Nikolas Kunesch. 

The project was created for the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) 2026 conference Research & Design Challenge and has been conditionally accepted. Balanced! is a hybrid physical-digital board game that helps children reflect on the complexity of sustainable futures through collective play. It combines idea cards based on children’s own ideas, a shared budgeting mechanism, and multi-dimensional impact routes to support critical reflection across Individuals, Society, and Environment. 
 
The project began with 40 ideas submitted by children across countries for the IDC challenge. Their ideas were imaginative, hopeful, and often ambitious, proposing technologies to clean oceans and rivers, generate solar energy, protect wildlife, improve safety, and support communities. Looking across these submissions, we were struck by children’s strong sustainability values and their emphasis on care, justice, and collective responsibility. At the same time, many ideas imagined technological interventions as straightforwardly positive, with limited attention to trade-offs or unequal impacts. 
 
Rather than viewing the 40 ideas as isolated inventions, we analyzed them to identify recurring patterns in how sustainable futures were being envisioned. Many are centred around waste, pollution, renewable energy, social care, safety, and wildlife protection. We also noticed how often children turned to robots, AI, and automated systems. This led us to an important design direction that, instead of proposing another solution, we wanted to use children’s own ideas as a launch pad for developing critical and systems thinking around sustainable futures.

Left: Poly Hydro Cleaner (#1): a child-designed machine that sucks plastic from the ocean and turns it into fuel, helping to clean the water while reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Right: 40 Collected IDC Children’s Ideas 

This led to Balanced!. In the game, players act as public investors deciding which future ideas to support. They work with a shared budget and move across three routes: Individuals, Society, and Environment. Each child’s idea appears as a card with a short description, a cost, and possible impacts across the three dimensions. Players discuss which idea to invest in, spend from the shared budget, and reveal the card’s effects. In this way, the game makes trade-offs, balance, and uncertainty more tangible. 

For instance, after discussion, children may decide to invest in Wildlife Protection, a system of AI robots 
including ground robots, drones, and underwater robots that detect poachers, protect animals, and remove pollutions, reasoning that it could improve the safety of wild animals. They spend the coins, turn the card over, and reveal its effects. A die roll may then alter the outcome. In one possible scenario, the AI system achieves its intended goals by protecting animals and the environment, contributing to biodiversity preservation and improved ecological conditions. For individuals, reduced pollution can improve personal wellbeing, including both physical and mental health. To society, the system may contribute to safer and more sustainable public environments, supporting conservation efforts. In another scenario, however, the AI fails to achieve these goals and instead produces unintended consequences. For instance, the development and maintenance of the AI system may generate significant pollution, while its effectiveness in protecting animals remains limited, with a low success rate in preventing poaching. As a result, it may have a negative impact on the environment, which in turn affects individual and societal well-being, leading to distrust or a false sense of security. 
 
Early playtesting with children aged 10-14 showed that some ideas needed further simplification and highlighted both the strengths and limits of balance as a metaphor for sustainability. Overall, Balanced! explores how children’s own ideas can serve not only as inspiration for design, but also as material for developing critical and systems thinking through play.