Breaking point: a need for persuasion?

Image: Kellscraft

One of the most surprising outcomes of the project so far is this (excerpt from a paper that I am writing):

Once separated from their traveling parent, the children seem to handle being apart well. The parents describe their children as being “busy” and in their “own little world”. Only occasionally the children specifically ask for their parents. The traveling parent, on the other hand, seems to handle the separation less well - having a guilty conscience is common.

This project started out as an attempt to design a system for young children of traveling business men and women. My intention was to make it easier for these children to stay in touch with their traveling parent, who I assumed they were missing. However, as the project has evolved, I have come to realize that my assumptions were unfounded and wrong. Really, the main concern in this context is not the children but the parent. Basically, what my task ended up being is to make a system that helps parents stay in touch with their occupied preschoolers by designing an interface that entices the child to interact with them. I am aware of the ethical complications that this new approach brings to the table; I am basically proposing to design an interactive lure by applying persuasive elements. In addition, the approach does not at all agree with one of my key starting points (excerpt from my thesis proposal):

First, when we think of parent-child awareness we tend to see it from the parents’ point of view. Parents want to monitor their children and make sure that they are safe, but what about the children? Do they feel a similar need to be aware of and feel connected to their parents?

However, one could also choose to look at the approach from a more positive (naive?) point of view; my main goal is still to construct an interface that is enjoyable and usable for preschoolers. Thus, the focus lies on the children. If this interface, in addition, can help traveling parents feel closer to their children, then that is a big plus.

In order to understand the negative and positive implications of persuasive technology (captology), I am currently looking into the work conducted by the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab.

First feedback

Somewhat belated: a copy of an email (sent Nov 15) including an overview of the first feedback I got from my readers, along with my follow-up comments and questions:

----------------

Roz, Bill, Chris, and Rana,

I want to thank you all for the extensive and useful feedback that you all have provided. I have now read through your comments and questions carefully, and I am in the process of analyzing and implementing them in my thesis proposal. You can see a summary of the most fundamental comments, along with my questions and comments, below. Any comments/answers/questions to these would be highly appreciated:

Goal/motivation

• Why do you use the term child-parent "awareness" did you mean communication or connection or even bonding? I don't know what awareness means here. Sentence of "are they not interested in knowing ..." I think there are three things here that are worth mentioning or highlighting.
  
  
• On that topic, it is unclear that 'presence' is the right way to characterise the objective of this system. In the abstract, the purpose of the system is explained as improving 'the experience of remote interaction and awareness between children and their parents', and a footnote adds that this is 'also referred to as telepresence'. I don't think so - the strong definition of telepresence refers to the feeling of actually being someplace you're not, and I don't think this system is, or ought to be, aimed at that.
  
  
• I am skeptical that this research will produce 'a clear explanation...of the factors that are most crucial' for systems connecting children emotionally with their parents, and don't think this should be the goal in the first place. It is early days for this sort of research, and unlikely that the project will elucidate all the factors much less determine which are most important in any or all circumstances. It would be better to scope this as a case study in which a successful design will allow factors that _are_ important _in this domain_ to be identified.
  
  
• It was unclear from the statement whether you'll actually get round to constructing something - is this left vague on purpose?... I suggest you reword the thesis statement to emphasize this participatory approach to designing and prototyping something.
  
  Comment/question: I guess what I am trying to achieve here is giving distributed children and parents the possibility of feeling more connected by using a system that makes it easier (by combining different - in many cases already existing - features in one application) for them to exchange media content and other information. I am not sure what the right word for that would be. For me "awareness" means being aware of each other's presence, location and availability etc. (many different high-level factors), e.g. by using continuous, ambient communication applications. "Presence" is thus one aspect of awareness.
  
  Based on my proposal, do you view the system I am proposing as an awareness-system at all or do you view it as something different? In general, I feel like I am floating between describing the system as a child-focused "get to know the world"/educational system, and an awareness system that both children and their parents benefit from. I think I have to make a more explicit decision; which approach am I aiming for? They are not mutually exclusive, so, ideally, I could achieve both, but I still have to focus on one in my goal statement, I believe. What do you think?
  

Potential impact of system

• I am concerned that the parent will still be in charge of making it [the system/interaction] work, and the current proposal is not detailed enough to make me confident it will really be a joy to use.
  
  Question: More concretely, what aspects/features should be addressed to make the system more convincing? Which features would make it a more child-focused system? Does "make it work" here refer to the technical parts (how to use the interface etc.) or does it refer to more fundamental incentives to use the system (who is more eager to use the system).

Originality

• It could be more clearly stated how it is a leap above existing approaches.Reading this [the thesis statement] should give me an idea of 1) the problem you're addressing, which you've done really well; 2) why it hasn't been solved yet. You mention that a large number of projects have addressed the problems of connecting families with unique approaches and conclusions, and that they all agree on use of technology, which is fine (nothing new or surprising), but [you don't] really tell me what the exact problem is .. if so many people have addressed this, and presumably many of them use technology then why are you working on this too?
  

Question: I'd say that my contribution is two-fold: (1) I intend to address the asymmetry between the needs of the children and the need of the parents, which requires that I understand the viewpoint and need of the children; (2) the goal is not only to develop a system that enables communication and media content exchange per se, but to design the system so that it encourages the users (maybe especially the kids) to engage in and find out more about the other locations (it is a matter of incentives). Do you agree with this, considering what you have read in my proposal?

Review of related work

• Review of related work is ok, but somehow disconnected.. I think you need a paragraph that links all this work together (like are the different approaches - tangible vs. computer-base, sync / async, video / audio / pics / text, tested on what sort of families ( e.g., son moving out is v. different from a young mom w/ a young toddler) and again an iteration of why your approach is different and how you think it would advance the existing stuff.
  
  
• The proposal does a good job of linking with related literature, though of course there's more... It would also be useful to explore the hypothesis that 'staging a story in which a doll is traveling instead of (or together with) a parent may turn out to be a strong... incentive' through the literature. Looking at psychoanalytic literature, and especially some of the work on play therapy by Melanie Klein, might start to give insight about the power of projection such a situation might bring.
  
  Comment: Good points! Were there any related projects that you think I should/could exclude? Should my contributions (what makes my projects unique etc.) be described in the related work section or earlier (in the thesis statement)? Maybe both, but in different ways?
  Anyway, I have now written a short introduction to the related work section, which hopefully will make the section feel more connected.
  

Implementation

• [You are] on the verge of replacing the idea that parents would travel with their kid's real, physical toys with the idea that they would merely have a digital representation thereof. I think this is a big mistake. I suspect that the emotional impact of the system would come through the kid's recognition that their toy - the real thing, the thing they held and played with and smelled and tasted, and the thing that is itself _gone_ (important that) - is somewhere else, somewhere they can see, and that their parent is there too. Replacing that with a digital image is a very paltry imitation, not to be done lightly just because some parents are self-conscious!
  
  
• OK, an idea just occurred to me while reading your description of flat Stanley - how about a Google maps mash up where you have pins and you can double click on it and see where Stanley is (should be v. easy to mockup, but again I don't know how age-appropriate it is)...
  
  Comment/question: Only one reader commented on the physical/virtual aspect, which is something a think a lot about. Any additional comments regarding this aspect? If you are in favor of a more physical/tangible approach, how do you envision the implementation/use of the physical toy/doll?

Evaluation

• The proposed evaluation does not currently address the goal stated in the abstract, that families will "feel more attached and connected than is possible with existing technology". There needs to be a clear control for "existing technology" and also the issues of why they do/don't use the existing technology needs to be addressed in the work. Also I didn't see measures for attached and connected - maybe these are in the two questionnaires mentioned on p. 9? I don't know them. A good method still needs to be found for evaluating the child's experience. I recommend usage for that - give them a choice of things, see which one they use, and see how much they use it when they don't have to use it.

• For this sort of study, the 'rich descriptions' (geertz) of people's interaction can be far more informative than ratings of presence etc...
  
  Comment/question: It sounds like you suggest that I should either do (1) a fully controlled, quantitative study with a clear control-group/base-line/reference, or (2) a purely qualitative study. I am currently interviewing families (parents and children) about their experiences with existing technology but I am not using questionnaires to evaluate these experiences in a quantitative manner. Although I am mentioning questionnaires in the proposal, I guess I somehow appreciate qualitative interviews more - they feel more relevant to me, but the approach may undermine the reliability and validity of the study? What do you think, is it only a matter of choosing either or is one approach better than the other?

Current status

On November 29 and 30, I received the following two emails from our lab-wide MS thesis committee:

Paulina ~ MASCOM has reviewed the comments by your readers as well as the comments provided as a result of your presentation on Crit day -- you have identified a good idea but it is vague and needs more thought. Your proposal should be rewritten once you have honed in on the premise; it would be good for you to consolidate your knowledge from child psychologists into conrete rational and design principles.

------------------

Hi Paulina...

The key worry by your reviewers is that while your idea is interesting, you do not provide an empirically-derived rationale suggesting that it will actually work. You give two examples, in the written version, of the movie Amelie and the Flat Stanley project, and the interview method you propose may provide some anecdotal evidence, but there is a vast literature out there on child psychology and child-parent relationships that was not yet considered in the design. As it stands, the written proposal cites only one reference -- Piaget -- to provide any rationale.

Your reviewers are hoping for either a justification that your idea is a good one, based on psychological studies, or a refocusing of your work on discovering those principles....

Accordingly, it seems that what is needed is either good rationale from the literature to justify the design choices you are making, or a re-focusing of your work on the empirical exploration of which factors are of importance. One possibility is that if you focus on the latter, you will discover the principles of designing such a system.

Drastic focus on a concrete, take-to-the-bank subpart of the project would make it a major success.

After a rather long discussion via email, in which I tried to explain to my committee members that I was already in the process of collecting the required rationale by conducting interview-based user studies, the committee partly changed their minds and told me that writing an addendum including conclusions from the interviews and a more accurate literature study would be enough. I did just that, and a little bit more.

The new proposal has now been accepted by two of my three readers. I am currently waiting to hear back from the third reader.

More reflections

Other comments that I have received:

• It is important not to give the child a false sense of control. For example, you don't want to give the child the impression that he or she can get in touch with mom or dad at any moment in time through the new application if that is not the case. Thus, seen from that point of view, it may be better to have a system that let's the child be the consumer of information/content that is being sent by the remote parent and implement a notification system to alert the child when something new has been uploaded.
  
  My comment: I personally don't believe in developing an application that doesn't allow children to interact and influence the interaction. Children are usually active and curious. I'd rather create a system that clearly indicates when mum or dad is available or not. For example, an image/video of your sleeping mum/dad, a sleeping avatar, or a picture of a moon may be used for that purpose.
  

• Children tend to like to revisit experiences, e.g. to re-experience emotions, so you should probably consider designing an application that stores content.
  
  My comment: I absolutely agree. Again, this links back to the first topic regarding control. Letting children revisit pictures, audio messages etc. when they miss their mum or dad feels like a very important feature.
  
  
• You should maybe focus on a certain age group since children develop a lot over the years. Maybe even focus on a specific gender.
  
  My comment: Based on my initial studies, I've chosen to focus on preschoolers (2-5 years). Mainly because it seem like this is when children (1) do not appreciate talking on the phone, (2) have a hard time understanding the concept of traveling and remote locations, (3) appreciate interacting with and through transitional objects the most.
  
  When my advisor Chris' son was about 3 years old he used to love when his dad brought a stuffed animal on one of his trips and sent back pictures of it. When they talked on the phone, Chris' son only wanted to talk to the stuffed animal (Chris had to distort his voice). One of my colleagues had a similar experience with his three-year-old son.
  
  Gender, however, is a much more complicated issue that could turn into a thesis topic of it's on. Thus, since I have decided to focus on toddlers and preschoolers, I will make the simplified assumption that children behave more or less the same irrespective of gender. (Personally, my impression is that the way children interact with their parents is more dependent on personality and the relationship they have with the specific parent, than on gender.)
  
  
• A thought: do you think kids would rather be w/ mom, or have mom be w/ them .. In other words, do you think kids would rather see what mom is up to, or just be able to show what they’re up to? (so kid would have the doll, which mom eyejacks into)
  
  My comment: Based on the families and parents that I have interviewed and talked to, it seems like children often feel left behind when the parent travels. They want to go be with the parent and experience the same things. Again, children are curious and active beings. Here is an example:

  ...only last week I took a day train to [A] and I thought [J] wouldn’t mind since I wont spend the night away, but she got really upset – when we spoke about it later she said she wanted to ride the train too and see the sand/sea .. (so she felt she was missing out on some fun) .. anyways, I had to explain that in fact, I was in meetings all day.

  Besides, my initial goal was to design an application for children to experience what their parents are experiencing (there are already so many child surveillance systems out there). So, my answer to that question is: I want to design a system that (first and foremost) helps children "be together" with their remote parents, and I believe that children would enjoy such an approach. However, my hope is that parents will enjoy and benefit from using the application too.
  

Dale Hubert on The Flat Stanley Project

Image: the Flat Stanley project

Yesterday, I talked to the founder of the Flat Stanley Project, Dale Hubert, over the phone. Dale is a Canadian Grade 3 teacher who started the project back in 1995. Since then, the project has grown and is being used in schools all over the world.

Among other things, I asked Dale what he thinks made the Flat Stanley Project so popular, and a fairly long list of possible reasons. Flat Stanley...

• creates a (global) community - he is a mutual friend that you can communicate "through"
• makes abstract remote communication more graspable
• makes ordinary writing tasks more meaningful
• enables outcome-based education: strong incentives (e.g. honor to be Flat Stanley's host)
  
• adds a level of imagination
  
• generates global experiences
• enables proxy-traveling
  
• makes it easier to discuss sensitive topics like obesity or abuse since you communicate via Flat Stanley (Flat Stanley needs to lose weight...)
• can be used to teach children about traveling both in space (geography) and time (history).
  

Dale Hubert would like to see Flat Stanley being used more in hospitals, in order to comfort children who are too ill to leave their beds. Flat Stanley could, for example, be used as their physical travel-proxy who send home postcards from different cities and countries.

What is a week?

I have now conducted all five interview user studies. I talked to 5 mothers, 2 fathers and 6 children in total . Naturally, the families were all different and I must admit that I am finding it really hard to discern common behaviors and needs.

The first family I interviewed was very experienced and advanced when it comes to both technology and traveling. Not only did the parents travel frequently, they were also fairly experienced geocashers. Thus, it doesn't surprise me that their daughter was very interested in maps and traveling. None of the other children I talked to seemed to share that interest. Rather, their focus (if any) was on:

1. time ("When is mum coming home?")
2. activities ("Why is dad going on this conference? What is a conference? Was his day O.K?")

I would say that time was the one most obvious concern in all families. I already mentioned that the children's limited sense of time was a common concern. In addition, the time difference makes communicating a lot more complicated, since it restricts the families' (already) tight schedules.

I started reading the three books I ordered a while ago, and so far Charlie Hudson's (who apparently is a woman!) book The Parent's guide to business travel has impressed me the most. In the book Charlie dedicates a whole chapter ("How long is a week?") to 0-5 year-old children and their sense of time. I quote her:

Ages Three to Five

The ability to grasp the concept of "trip" is easier in these years, although understanding the passage of time will probably be limited; hence the title of this chapter, "What is a week?" Forging and maintaining a strong communication link during absence is important and can span from low-tech to the latest electronic gadgets - only the means of communication should change as your children advance in age...

The second challenge was keeping in touch with my son and, while I called on a regular basis, a preschooler doesn't have a lot to say during a phone conversation. I would send him cute postcards or greeting cards with a sentence or two, although that first summer I wasn't aware of how meaningful those cards were to him. I missed a couple of weeks due to very heavy workload, and my father said that one day when he went to the mailbox and pulled out some kind of advertisement that was on a colorful card, my son eagerly took it and said, "This is for me from Mommy... My son was too young to care what I wrote, and the messages [on the cards] were essentially all the same, but it didn't matter - he was getting "mail" from me that he could hold in his hand, and that was the important thing for him...

The key point at this age is that, just like the repeated question "Are we there yet?," small children do not distinguish segments of time well. It's crucial to find a method of counting days or weeks they are comfortable with so they can feel confident of when they will see you again. Otherwise, their question, "When are you coming home?" cannot be answered in a way they understand, and it will reinforce the frightening thought that you aren't really going to return.

This is also the age when it may be difficult to distinguish between imagination and reality, and a child may become fearful of something that doesn't occur to you. For example, if you have taken a trip to Arizona, but your child doesn't know where or even what Arizona is, he or she may conjure up disturbing images of you in a terrible place.

Another common feature is that bedtime seemed to be the most cherished and valuable time of the day. All five families mentioned that, if possible, bedtime is when the distributed family members would talk on the phone. The procedure of saying "Goodnight" seemed to be very important.

More on transitional objects

My colleague Cati just posted an entry about transitional objects.

Transitional objects

Image: Wikipedia

Today, I finally found what I have been looking for - a scientific term for the concept of emotionally "charged" objects and toys. Wikipedia says:

Donald Woods Winnicott (1896-1971) introduced the concepts of transitional objects and transitional experience in reference to a particular developmental sequence. With ‘transition’ Winnicott means an intermediate developmental phase between the psychic and external reality. In this ‘transitional space’ we can find the ‘transitional object’.

I have found a number of interesting books and papers on the topic:

Papers

The Creation of a Shared Space through Fantasy between a Seven Year Old Child and his Therapist: A Case Study (Lydia Cohen-Kreisberger)

Transitional objects and transitional phenomena; a study of the first not-me possession (D.W. Winnicott)

Attachment to a special object at the age of three years: Behavior and temperament characteristics (William Garrison and Felton Earls)

The three-year-old and his attachment to a special soft object (David Boniface and Philip Graham)

Books

Playing and Reality (D.W. Winnicott)

Collected papers, through paediatrics to psycho-analysis (D.W. Winnicott)

Winnicott On the Child (D.W. Winnicott)

11/19/07: Crit Day

I presented my work at our Lab-wide Critique Day last week. Although the presentation didn't go as well as I had hoped (at this stage I should have a more clear idea of the system than I actually do), I got really good feedback. Here are some comments:

I would have hoped to see a better idea of the parental and child interfaces at this point...the UI ideas need to be firmed up quickly. I fear that it will be difficult to examine the psychological impact in the course of a masters project.

Paulina's project is potentially of great benefit and interest. Parents and children have a hard time separating, and travel can be a particularly stressful time for all. While others work on research to reduce the need for travel, it is certainly appropriate for us to be exploring ways to lessen the impact on loved ones.

Using a object intermediary does make this the sort of work that tends to polarize people's opinion of the lab. The "cuteness" of the project is likely to both enthrall the press and attract criticism of triviality. This raises the bar of the work needing to be both innovative engineering and well grounded / well evaluated in terms of the psychological impact.

I think Paulina should narrow to a particular child age range (toddler 2-4?) and get the psychology expertise for this group and start running prototypes by them.

This is a really interesting problem, but I feel that Paulina has not quite articulated accurately enough what the unique novel idea is that she will be exploring in her solution. One suggestion I have is that she goes & talks to some child psychologists, in addition to interviewing a lot of parents & kids...Especially literature on role playing, on connecting/communicating through an object, etc. Maybe by reading some of this literature she would be able to better articulate what the key idea is and why the whole physical object proposal is important/key.

I completely agree with these comments. My concept is too weak and it has to be nailed down as soon as possible.

Logitech avatars

Images: Logitech

A couple of years ago Logitech introduced a face tracking/video effects software for their most advanced chat web cameras. Logitech explains the technology in the following way:

The Video Effects technology uses Face Tracking to determine the location and/or movement of your face. Video Effects uses this tracking information to either map a Face Accessory over your existing video or completely replace your video with a 3D Avatar that moves based on your actions.

Here is a fun homemade video of some of the video effects.

I am currently considering using Logitech's technology in my project since it offers a fairly easy way to make video chatting more fun for children.

X8 embodied webcam

Apparently, a company called X8 makes embodied web cams. The actual camera is neatly hidden in the nose of the stuffed pet.

When kids get to choose

Readings

I just ordered three books on the topic of traveling parents:

Keeping Your Family Close When Frequent Travel Pulls You Apart (1998)

The Business Traveling Parent: How to Stay Close to Your Kids When You're Far Away (2000)

Parent's Guide to Business Travel: Practical Advice and Wisdom for When You Have to Be Away (2003)

In this article Dan Verdick gives the following recommendations:

"I really try to think of things from my children’s perspective and how it will affect them,’’ Verdick says.

Before he leaves, Verdick puts together a detailed itinerary and might ask for one back from his daughter (his son’s not old enough) that will highlight her class schedule and after-school plans so they’ll both always know what the other is doing.

He also uses this opportunity for a geography lesson. "I make the most of the situation by teaching my daughter how to read a map, and then I’ll correspond by mail or e-mail, talk on the phone and have conversations about what I’m seeing,’’ Verdick says.

In another article Charlie Hudson says:

“Millions of parents face family separations and work-related travel on a regular basis,” says Charlie Hudson. “One of the most vital points for successful dealing with the time away is solid, two-way communication that begins at the earliest ages.”

The books mentioned above are all fairly old. So are the articles. I wonder why...

Nokia 6110 Navigator

I am currently waiting for a couple of Nokia 6110 Navigators. Nokia Research has been kind enough to support my project by donating a few to our group. Needless to say, I am very excited.

MIT writing center

I visited the MIT Writing Center to get my thesis proposal reviewed. I can strongly recommend a visit. Especially foreign students, like myself, can get a lot of help when it comes to spelling, grammar, and structure.

It is free and you can book several appointments.

Initial interview study started

I conducted my first user study interview a while ago. A family of four: dad, mum, and two daughters. The interviews were carried out as a semi-structured discussions; I had a fairly structured script but added and removed questions as the interview/conversation proceeded. I interviewed the mother, the traveling father, and the oldest daughter (aged 6) and got some really good feedback.

The family was very tech-savvy and used both cell-phones and computers (IM without video) to stay in touch remotely. The traveling father sometimes sent home photos and videos via email. He also geo-tagged and uploaded some of them to Google Earth in order to connect the photos to a certain location.

The family also used a world map, attached to the wall, to mark out future and passed destinations with pins. Each family member has a unique pin-color.

The most important tool, however, was the family calendar. The parents use drawings to indicate upcoming events and activities - a plane means traveling. As soon as a day has passed, it is crossed over. Thus, the girls have a fairly good idea of what is happening.

To conclude, the most important and interesting observations were:

• The daughter was clearly interested in her father's trips. Whereas her mother mostly wants to find out if her husband is alright, the daughter wants to hear about her dad's current location and activities.
• Maps are being used to map out future or ongoing trips both in real-life and online.
• The current system works fine for one destination, but doesn't really support mapping out a whole sequence of destinations (with time- and order information).
  
• Icons/drawings/symbols are important since the daughter can't yet read.
• The father mostly sends photos via email (to the mother), but the mother sometimes forgets to show them to their daughters.
• The daughter likes to watch old photos and videos to "remember" passed events.
• The daughter usually talks to her dad and watches his photos to feel his presence, but likes to do those two things separately.
  

Committee offically approved

Today, I received an email saying:

Congratulations! Thesis proposals and committee members have been approved...Committee members have been notified. Students/advisors will receive an
email once the reader completes his/her review in the database.

Sweet!

Flat marine

Chris just sent me a link to a Boston.com article about a marine, Brett Davis who "meets his flat twin", Flat Brett, during a seven-month deployment to Iraq earlier this year. The article says:

"Flat Brett" is a small cardboard cutout doll of Lance Cpl. Brett Davis, made by one of his mother's co-workers at Basic Systems Inc., an engineering and automation firm.

Carman Friday said she got the idea after learning that local schools were participating in the "Flat Stanley" project in which students mail around a paper doll and keep a journal of its travels.

In a similar vein, Flat Brett was photographed as he went around to family functions and was taken along on a business trip to Texas.

For those of you who haven't yet read my thesis proposal, the thesis project that I am proposing is, similarly to Flat Brett, directly influenced by the Flat Stanley Project, as well as by the Traveling Gnome Prank. The basic concept is to make children more engaged in their parent's trip by staging a story in which a doll is traveling instead of, or together with, the parent.

Let's just hope it works.

First draft

I just submitted the first draft of my thesis proposal today. I also announced my three readers and thesis committee members: Dr. William (Bill) Gaver, Dr. Rosalind (Roz) Picard , and last but not least my advisor, Principal Research Scientist Chris Schmandt.

Abstract

In recent decades, families in the Western world have become more geographically distributed, making it more difficult for family members to achieve and maintain a feeling of connectedness. Different time zones and contexts and a limited awareness of the other family members’ availability and mood are some of many factors that make “being together” more challenging when physically apart. Modern communication technologies, such as phones, Instant Messenger (IM) clients, and text messaging, improve communication, but seldom achieve the same level of connectedness and awareness that face-to-face communication does. In addition, when it comes to young children, these communication technologies may not even be an option. As a result, many families simply accept the fact that being apart leads to fragmented, or even non-existent, interaction.

For this thesis, I propose to design and evaluate a system that improves the experience of remote interaction and awareness between children and their parents. The main goal of the project is to develop a system that makes geographically distributed families feel more attached and connected than is possible with existing technology. Although I aim to enhance the experience for both parties, the child and the parent, the system will first and foremost be designed with young children’s perception of the world in mind.

The thesis project will consist of two main parts. I will start by exploring the realm of family telepresence by interviewing a number of families that consist of both young children and frequently traveling parents. The exact layout of the system will then be designed on the basis of the initial results. The main questions are:

(1) What content and information about the remote location is useful to children?,

(2) How should that information be presented?,

and, last but not least,

(3) How should the system be designed in order to encourage bi-directional communication and continuity?

A final user-study will be conducted at the end of the project.

Globetoddler is finally live

Globetoddler is the official name of my current Master of Sciences thesis, conducted at the MIT Media Lab. It is also the name of this blog, which I decided to create in order to keep track of and get feedback on my thoughts and progress, as the project proceeds.

So, if you have any comments or questions regarding the things I publish here, please don't hesitate to comment the blog post, or send an email to paulina [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu.