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:

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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.

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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.