Paulina L. Modlitba
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. Besides, when it comes to preschool children, existing communication technologies, such as phones and computers, 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. In this paper we describe initial work on a tangible system, Globetoddler, which aims to make remote interaction between preschool children and their traveling parents easy and enjoyable. The paper describes the process of defining design principles for this system, as well as the content and implications of these principles.
- Bly, S. A., Harrison, S. R., and Irwin, S. (1993). Media Spaces: Bringing People Together in a Video, Audio and Computing Environment. Communications of the ACM, 36(1): 28--47. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Bonanni, L., Vaucelle, C., Lieberman, J. and Zuckerman, O. (2006). PlayPals: tangible interfaces for remote communication and play. In '06, CHI (ed.), Montréal, Québec, Canada, pp. 574--579. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cohen-Kreisberger, L. (2005). The Creation of a Shared Space Through Fantasy Between a. Seven Year Old Child and his Therapist: A Case Study. In Clinical Social Work Journal, 33(3): 259--270.Google ScholarCross Ref
- The Flat Stanley Project. Available at http://flatstanley.enoreo.on.ca (10/15/2007).Google Scholar
- Hindus, D., Mainwaring, S. D., Leduc, N., Hagström, A. E., and Bayley, Oliver. (2001). Casablanca: designing social communication devices for the home. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '01), pp. 325--332. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hubert, D. Phone interview conducted on November 28 2007.Google Scholar
- Hudson, C. (2003). The parent's guide to business travel. Capital Books, Inc., Sterling, Virginia.Google Scholar
- Keller, I., van der Hoog, W., Stappers, P. .J. (2004). Gust of me: Reconnecting mother and son. In IEEE Pervasive Computing, 3 (1): 22--28. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Plane Tracker. Available at http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/interaction/projects.php? page=curious_home (10/15/2007).Google Scholar
- Romero, N., Markopoulos, P., van Baren, J., de Ruyter, B., Ijsselsteijn. W., and Farshchian, B. (2007). Connecting the family with awareness systems. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11(4): 299--213. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Saslis-Lagoudakis, G., Cheverst, K., Dix, A., Fitton, D., and Rouncefield, M. (2006). Hermes@Home: supporting awareness and intimacy between distant family members. In Proceedings of the 20th conference of the computer-human interaction special interest group (CHISIG) of Australia on Computer-human interaction: design: activities, artefacts and environments, pp 23--30. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Silin M. W. and Stewart, H. M. (2003). Mother Bear: A Relational Approach to Child Therapy. In Clinical Social Work Journal, 31(3): 235--247.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Singer, J. L. and Singer, D. G. (2006). Preschoolers' imaginative play as precursor of narrative consciousness. In Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 25 (2): 97--117.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Travel Industry Association (TIA). Available at http://www.tia.org/index.html (12/012007).Google Scholar
- Winnicott, D. W. (reprinted in 1982). Playing and Reality. Routledge Classics, London & NY.Google Scholar
- Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena - a study of the first not-me possession. In International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34(2): 89--97.Google Scholar
- Zuckerman, O. and Maes, P. (2005). Awareness system for children in distributed families. Presented at the 4th International Conference for Interaction Design and Children (IDC '05), Boulder, CO.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Globetoddler: designing for remote interaction between preschoolers and their traveling parents
Recommendations
Designing technology for and with developmentally diverse children: a systematic literature review
IDC '15: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and ChildrenThis paper presents the results of a systematic literature review of research papers on the involvement of developmentally diverse children in design. The review shows that there is a growing tendency to include developmentally diverse children in the ...
t-words: playing with sounds and creating narratives
ACE'12: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Advances in Computer EntertainmentWe present t-words an interface for children to playful explore sounds, words and sentences while developing pre-literate skills. The interface consists of rectangular blocks in which children can record and then play the recorded audio. Additionally ...
Toys keeping in touch: technologies for distance play
TEI '10: Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interactionCollaborative pretend play is significant in the emotional and social development of young children yet traditional remote communication systems do not support this type of interaction. This paper introduces a remote communication system designed to ...
Comments