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?