Designing technologies with families through exchanging positions
How do you talk about intimate family topics in a research context? How do you create an environment of trust so participants feel confident to share their stories and experiences with the researcher?
The main objectives of this research were to understand the dynamics of the relationship between parents and adult children after children left home and to move towards technology designs that contributed to this relationship. After having conducted individual interviews with parents and adult children, we found that they were assuming the positions that the other had in their relationship.
Then, we set out to meet a parent and a child at the same time and to talk about their relationship. We decided to use co-design methods to create a playful and dynamic workshop where we would have different activities that allowed us to talk about their relationship.
Card Sort for Me & You: This method aimed to facilitate discussion about the technologies that participants used, and about how their relationship was mediated by their technology usage. Each participant was given a set of cards that showed different social media and communication tools, such as Snapchat or Skype. They were asked to sort them by order of preference, and we started a conversation to find commonalities and differences, and the communication practices of them and the rest of the family.
Would I Lie to You?: Inspired by the homonymous TV show and the idea of deliberately lying to the other, this method focuses on talking about the daily lives and preferences of the participants. For each topic that was raised during this activity, we fostered a discussion about how participants shared. Prior to the workshop session, participants were asked to send five true and five false facts about themselves. These facts were related to their preferences, tastes, and activities they liked to do. Participants were told that the other should not easily guess if the phrases were true or false. After each reply, we led a conversation about the potential interactions that were linked to the phrase.
A Magic Machine for You: The aim of this method was to create Magic Machines for the other, a lo-fi fictional technology, following a design brief created by the other, imagining the world from the perspective of the other. During the previous methods, we took notes on some highlights of the relationship that might be potential topics for building a Magic Machine for enriching the relationship. Parent and child defined a topic, or design brief, that defined their desired technology. Then, we asked the participants to build a Magic Machine, following the other’s brief and putting themselves in the position of the other, in other words, the parent built the Machine that the child wanted, imagining they were standing in the child’s shoes, and vice versa. Participants were asked to show and explain how the Machine was used, and then the other party was asked if their expectations were fulfilled by the Machine, and if they would add something to it.
The full PDF of our paper is available at these links:
From the ACM Digital Library (if this link does not work, please try the link below)
From QUT ePrints
