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What I Did on my Summer Vacation: Online Kidsteam

Greg Walsh (@gxwalsh)HCIL SymposiumMay 22nd, 2012

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Children

• Important Demographic

• Interesting Demographic

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Children

• Important Demographic

– “Children are the world’s most valuable resource and its best hope for the future” (Kennedy, 1963)

– Children are often overlooked in design (Druin, 2002)

– Children (<12) see the world differently (Nardini et al, 2010)

– Academic interest (IDC, SIGCHI)

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Children

• Interesting Demographic

– Developmentally• 7-11 Think logically but very concrete

• Visual vs verbal

– Financially• Children (4-12) spent $2B in 1960

• Children (4-12) spent (est) $40B+ in 2005

• In 2005, children under 14 influenced 47% of household spending = $700B (Taylor 1999, Economist 2006)

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Fun!

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Participatory Design Research

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Co-Design

CooperativeInquiry(Druin, 1997)

Participatory Design

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Kidsteam

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Kidsteam

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@gxwalsh (Guha, 2004)

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Distributed Design

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Limitations of Current Methods

Asynchronous Limitations (Druin, et al., 2009)

Travel expenses Time delays between iterations Limited co-design techniques

Existing On-line Systems (Walsh, 2010)

Synchronous only (Whiteboards) Adult-focused (Google Docs) Management of iterations (e-mail)

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Online Kidsteam

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Research Goals

[Q1] How can co-located cooperative design with children be translated to an online distributed environment?

[Q2] What are the experiences of children who participate in Online Kidsteam?

[Q3] What are the tools and technologies necessary to successfully support distributed co-design with children?

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Research Approach

Descriptive study to understand the phenomenon and identify a process.Research by DesignMixed Methods

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Research by DesignResearchers design and build prototypes as a

contribution (Zimmerman, et al, 2007)

Create the right thing.

Include children as partners in the design

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Participants

• 12 Children

• 7-11 Years Old

• All members of Kidsteam or siblings of members

• Geographically distributed (residence or vacation)

• 8 Adults

• All members of Kidsteam

• Geographically distributed (work or vacation)

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Environment• Online Kidsteam

• Mimics In-person Kidsteam• Snack Time

• Circle Time

• Design Time

• Big Ideas

• Drupal-based tool• Authentication

• Communication

• Existing tools modified to work within Drupal

• Iteratively developed throughout

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Iterative Development

• Avatars throughout environment

• Audio Recording

• Flash -> HTML 5

• Co-located multiuser logon

• iOS browser based

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Co-Located vs Online Kidsteam

Segment Co-located Online

Snack Time Snacks at a table Persistent asynchronous chat

Circle Time On floor, in circle Message Board w/avatars

Design Time Bags of Stuff, Layered Elab, etc

DisCo

Big Ideas White Board Web page

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Success

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High-level Results

• [Q1] Segments of Cooperative Inquiry sessions focus the design parameters

• [Q1] Similarly, online tools need to focus but not in the same structured way

• [Q2] The child participants didn’t feel like they were part of a team

• [Q2] Ad hoc intergenerational design teams

– Distributed co-design environments need to support the addition of family members

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High-level Results

• [Q2] Children had higher expectations of their own ability to draw with a computer than w/ paper

• [Q3] Direct communication with designers

• [Q3] Distributed co-design requires an ecology

– Mobile devices for media gathering

– Desktop computers for typing

– Blend of synchronous and asynchronous

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Take Aways

• Plan design activities in a way that earlier tasks build to later tasks.

• When designing for children at home, plan to incorporate parents/siblings/caregivers in the process.

• Create multiple entry points into your activities to include the most participation as possible.

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Thank You!Questions?

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gwalsh@umd.edu

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Why UB?

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“Information Arts and Technologies”

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Faculty mix

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Departmental Interest in increasing research

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Admiration of graduates

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Coursework

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University’s Strategic Plan

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Summary

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ReferencesBodker, S., Ehn, P., Sjögren, D., & Sundblad, Y. (2000). Co-operative Design—perspectives on 20 years with `the Scandinavian IT Design Model’. Proceedings of NordiCHI (Vol. 2000, p. 22–24).

Druin, A., Stewart, J., Proft, D., Bederson, B. B., & Hollan, J. (1997). KidPad: a design collaboration between children, technologists, and educators. Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI ’97 (p. 463–470). New York, NY, USA: ACM. Doi:10.1145/258549.258866

Druin, A., Bederson, B. B., Rose, A., & Weeks, A. (2009). From New Zealand to Mongolia: Co-Designing and Deploying a Digital Library for the World’s Children*. Children, Youth and Environments, 19, 1.

Guha, M. L., Druin, A., Chipman, G., Fails, J. A., Simms, S., & Farber, A. (2004). Mixing ideas: a new technique for working with young children as design partners. Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Interaction design and children: building a community (p. 35–42).

Kensing, F., & Blomberg, J. (1998). Participatory design: Issues and concerns. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 7(3), 167–185.

Walsh, G., Druin, A., Guha, M. L., Foss, E., Golub, E., Hatley, L., Bonsignore, E., et al. (2010). Layered elaboration: a new technique for co-design with children. Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Human factors in computing systems, CHI ’10 (p. 1237–1240). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1753326.1753512

Walsh, G. (2010). Developing DisCo: A distributed co-design, on-line tool (Technical Report No. HCIL-2010-18). Human-Computer Interaction Lab: University of Maryland.

Walsh, G., Brown, Q., Druin, A. (2011). Social Networking as a Vehicle to Foster Cross-Culture Awareness. In press.

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Research by Design Add’l Notes

• Process

• Novelty

• Relevance

• Generality

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Frequency of results for “Participatory Design” or “Cooperative Design”1990-2010

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Academic contributions

[C1] The first version of a geographically distributed, asynchronous, intergenerational

design guidelines will be available for future design research projects.

[C2] The experiences of an online, intergenerational design team will be identified.

[C3] New co-located co-design techniques will be possible.

[C4] Support for high-tech prototyping in the traditional low-tech prototype realm of

participatory design.

[C5] New techniques for working and designing with children will be identified.

Global contributions

[C5] Underserved and hard-to-serve populations will be able to participate in the co-

design process giving a voice to those who, frequently, cannot participate in co-design

sessions.

[C6] True international co-design projects will be possible.

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Agenda

• Background

• Participatory Design Research

• Design of Energy House

• Development of DisCo

• Future Work & UB

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Background