Research reveals that managing mobile device use during family time can be a source of stress for parents. In particular, it can create conflict in their relationships. As such, there is a need to understand how these problematic experiences might be addressed by new approaches to technology design. This paper presents a study in which 14 parents were prompted to reflect on how their experiences and relationships could be improved by four design proposals. These proposals resulted from ideation workshops involving 12 professional designers, and were presented as scenario-based storyboards during interviews. Our interviews revealed three design approaches that appealed to parents. We describe seven benefits that parents imagined these approaches would have, and discuss ways in which they should be further explored. Thus, we contribute to a more complete understanding of how technology design might better support parents’ aspirations for how devices are used within the family.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517501
Emotion-related parent-child interactions during early childhood play a crucial role in the development of emotion regulation, a fundamental life skill central to well-being. However, limited work in HCI has explored how technology could support parents in adopting supportive emotion socialisation practices. In this paper, we explore how an embodied, in-situ intervention in the form of a smart toy can impact emotion-related parent-child interactions in the home. We draw on (1) interviews with 29 parents of young children who had the smart toy for at least 1 month; (2) co-design workshops with 12 parents and 8 parenting course facilitators. We discuss how the smart toy impacted parent-child interactions around emotions for a subset of families, and draw on workshop data to explore how this could be designed for directly. Finally, we propose a set of design directions for technology-enabled systems aiming to elicit and scaffold specific parent-child interactions over time.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502130
Despite its benefits for children's skill development and parent-child bonding, many parents do not often engage in interactive storytelling by having story-related dialogues with their child due to limited availability or challenges in coming up with appropriate questions. While recent advances made AI generation of questions from stories possible, the fully-automated approach excludes parent involvement, disregards educational goals, and underoptimizes for child engagement. Informed by need-finding interviews and participatory design (PD) results, we developed StoryBuddy, an AI-enabled system for parents to create interactive storytelling experiences. StoryBuddy's design highlighted the need for accommodating dynamic user needs between the desire for parent involvement and parent-child bonding and the goal of minimizing parent intervention when busy. The PD revealed varied assessment and educational goals of parents, which StoryBuddy addressed by supporting configuring question types and tracking child progress. A user study validated StoryBuddy's usability and suggested design insights for future parent-AI collaboration systems.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517479
To acquire language, children need rich language input. However, many parents find it difficult to provide children with sufficient language input, which risks delaying their language development. To aid these parents, we design Captivate!, the first system that provides contextual language guidance to parents during play. Our system tracks both visual and spoken language cues to infer targets of joint attention, enabling the real-time suggestion of situation-relevant phrases for the parent. We design our system through a user-centered process with immigrant families---a highly vulnerable yet understudied population---as well as professional speech language therapists. Next, we evaluate Captivate! on parents with children aged 1--3 to observe improvements in responsive language use. We share insights into developing contextual guidance technology for linguistically diverse families.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501865