#childcomputerinteraction

For the next edition of Basement Talks hosted by the Meaningful Interactions Lab (Mintlab, KU Leuven - imec), we’re welcoming two doctoral candidates who will speak about their innovative research in Child-Computer Interaction: Gökçe Elif Baykal (Koç University, Istanbul) and Yvonne Vezzoli (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice).

WHERE: Designroom, Mintlab (Parkstraat 45, 3000 Leuven)

WHEN: Thursday the 16th of March from 1:00 to 2:30 pm

Basement Talks are open to the public, but please confirm your attendance via email to maarten.vanmechelen[at]kuleuven.be before March 16.

Making use of Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) to facilitate preschoolers’ spatial learning: A child-centered and evidence-based design approach

Gökçe Elif Baykal is a PhD candidate and research assistant in the Design, Technology & Society Program at Koç University in Istanbul. Elif carries out research on evidence-based interaction design to facilitate preschoolers’ spatial skills (i.e., mental rotation). She investigates the scaffolding effects of storytelling on young children’s mental rotation skills while playing with manipulatives (i.e., physical geometrical objects).

In her talk, Elif will discuss the theoretical background of her PhD research for which she relied on learning theories such as constructionism. She will furthermore present empirical results of two user studies conducted with children between 26 and 43 months old. In both studies, children interacted with different types of manipulatives – tangram and Fröbel Gifts – to gain insight in their rotation action patterns, important for spatial learning. In the first study, children played freely with these manipulatives and in the second study they were guided by narratives. Elif will discuss the results and design implications for tangible system design and how such systems can scaffold children’s spatial learning.

Elif holds a BA in Sociology from Marmara University and an MA in Visual Arts from Sabancı University. Her interest in children’s media goes back to her experience in the children’s television industry. For six years, she worked as a freelance screenwriter for TRT Çocuk (National Broadcasting Channel in Turkey for children) television series for children such as Nane ile Limon (Mint and Lemon) and Bulmaca Kulesi (Riddle Tower). She is currently a member of Happern (Interactive Information Design Research Group), along with the Language and Cognition Lab at Koç University.

Re-designing educational technologies for young people with dyslexia: What can we learn from interactions with multimodal social network sites?

Yvonne Vezzoli is a PhD student in Educational Sciences (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice). Her research interests lie in the intersection among Educational Technologies, Human-Computer Interaction and Special Education. For her PhD, Yvonne studies dyslexic young people’s cognitive and learning potentials to re-design inclusive, digital multimodal educational materials, and assessments.

In her talk, Yvonne will present an exploratory study that she carried out in collaboration with UCL Knowledge Lab (University College London) during the past few months. She conducted a qualitative investigation of the practices employed by young people with literacy-based difficulties aged 14-16 on social network sites. The goal of the study is to understand if and how social network sites promote multimodal literacies, how these are spontaneously practiced through social network sites’ modalities of expression (e.g. images, videos), and if and how these practices provide new opportunities for inclusive participation. She will conclude her talk by discussing how young people’s visual thinking skills and perspectives on ‘disability’ and ‘literacy’ can provide a new lens to design Educational Technologies.

The 2nd edition of the Co-Design Toolkit which I developed as part of my PhD research is now available online via Meaningful Interactions Lab (mintlab, KU Leuven - imec) and Mediawijs

The first part of the toolkit presents CoDeT (Collaborative Design Thinking), a co-design procedure that builds on the theoretical models of Social Interdependence Theory and Design Thinking. With the CoDeT procedure, design researchers prepare and conduct co-design activities with children that account for challenging group dynamics. The procedure is especially useful for high child-to-adult ratios (1 adult for 15 to 20 children) such as in a school context. CoDeT is unique in how it structures sufficient work-group features and strengthens children’s Design Thinking abilities in co-design activities. In the toolkit, the different steps of the procedure are presented in a ‘what why how’ structure, offering concrete instructions as well as in-depth information about why these steps are important. CoDeT is therefore a flexible procedure that can be used in a broad range of design contexts. 

The second part of the toolkit presents GLID (Grounding, Listing, Interpreting, Distilling), a method that relies on a values-led approach to PD, Multimodality, and Means-end Theory. GLID identifies children’s underlying values embedded in co-design outcomes resulting from CoDeT. With GLID, value conflicts between children and other stakeholders can be accounted for, shifting the focus to what endures beyond interaction, that is, the outcomes and lasting impacts of technology. Another characteristic of GLID is its thorough consideration of different modes (tangible, visual, textual, et cetera), which are analyzed for similarities and differences. As with the CoDeT procedure, the toolkit presents GLID in a ‘what why how’ structure. The method provides detailed guidelines for design researchers to analyze co-design outcomes in a transparent and coherent way, beyond the surface level of children’s ideas.

In a recently published book “The Class - Living and Learning in the Digital Age” Sonia Livingstone and Julian Sefton-Green provide a good example of the value of ethnographic research when studying children's digital experiences. One of their conclusions is that we should rethink ‘connection’ in ways that recognizes the interests at stake from the different perspectives of the participants (i.e., teachers, parents, children), including a desire for spaces of privacy and agency. Moreover, they wonder how we can better articulate the opportunities we think the digitalised age could bring for children to find new ways of living and learning. Both questions are highly relevant for the Child-Computer Interaction research community given the generative and future-oriented nature of the questions,  and the community’s rich tradition to take the perspectives and values of different stakeholders into account. 

Who's in?

About 6 years ago I organized my first co-design session in a school in Belgium with a group of 9- to 10-year-old children. The aim of the session was to identify opportunities for arts education for children via mobile technology. I remember being a bit nervous, because I was not trained as an educator and had never collaborated with children before. At the same time, I was excited to find out more about children’s ideas and viewpoints, and how these would challenge my own assumptions. Unfortunately, the co-design session did not go as expected. Whereas some teams were able to collaborate constructively and came up with wonderful suggestions for educational technology, other teams did not seem to understand the design challenge and just played around. Moreover, in some teams children were excluded from the activities resulting in sad faces and even conflicts. It made me wonder whether involving children as design partners was worth the effort. Challenging group dynamics clearly limited children’s participation and hampered their creative abilities.  

When I dived into literature, I could not find much information about group dynamics in co-design processes. To address this gap in research, I took a reflexive approach and identified the most prevalent challenging group dynamics in a case study in which 103 children participated. For example, some co-design teams rushed too quickly towards consensus to safeguard group cohesiveness instead of examining valuable choice alternatives. This dynamic is referred to as groupthink. Besides groupthink I identified five more challenging co-design dynamics: laughing out loud, free riding, unequal power, apart together and destructive conflict. In a short paper presented at IDC 2014 in Aarhus I discuss these dynamics in more detail.

As a next step, I drew from collaboration theories to mitigate these challenging group dynamics. In a paper presented at IDC 2015 in Boston, I explore whether Social Interdependence Theory is a useful theoretical framework. According to this theory, there are five principles that mediate the effectiveness of collaboration: positive interdependence, individual accountability, promotive interaction patterns, adequate interpersonal and small-group skills, and group processing. I discuss how I applied each of these five mediating principles in a case study in which 49 children aged 9 to 10 participated. Afterwards, I present the findings and reflect upon the usefulness of Social Interdependence Theory to empower children in design processes. Whilst this work is contextualized to co-design with children, it can also have application to other collaborative activities with children. The paper can be downloaded on Research Gate: http://bit.ly/2dazbal

My Mintlab (KU Leuven - iMinds) colleague Jan Derboven and I have collaborated intensively during the past two years. Although we are both active in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, our background and expertise are quite different. In his Ph.D. research, Jan combines multimodal analysis with ethnographic techniques to research how people interpret and appropriate technology. In my Ph.D., which I defended last June, I focused on involving children in a meaningful and appropriate way in the early, fuzzy stages of design. One part of my research addresses the analysis of children’s creative contributions resulting from co-design activities. Although children come up with many wonderful suggestions during co-design activities, their ideas for future technologies are often unworkable in computing terms or may conflict with pedagogical goals.

When I looked at existing methods to analyze co-design outcomes, I noticed that, broadly speaking, a distinction can be made between researchers looking for inspiration in the form of specific design ideas and researchers who take a more interpretative stance by looking at the underlying rationale or deeper levels of knowledge embedded in children’s contributions. Especially within the latter category, literature offered little guidance on how to analyze co-design outcomes in a transparent and systematic way. Another tendency, which I found in both types of methods, is that most researchers focus primarily on what children say about their creations, neglecting the visual and tangible dimensions of the produced artifacts. This focus on children’s verbal explanation assumes that co-design artifacts are regarded as a transparent means to access childrens' perspectives. Buckingham (2009) has referred to this stance as naive empiricism, arguing that data from creative research cannot be taken at face value and needs to be analyzed with special attention for these visual dimensions.

To address this gap in research, I discussed my preliminary ideas with Jan. I remember having a first discussion at the coffee machine at Mintlab about two years ago, but eventually we started collaborating more seriously on the topic. We combined our complementary expertise in Participatory Design, Means-end Theory and Multimodality to develop a method that integrates verbal, material and other modes of co-design outcomes in a transparent and systematic analysis. The method, called GLID (Grounding, Listing, Interpreting, Distilling), aims to go beyond the surface level of children’s ideas, by identifying the values embedded in co-design outcomes. This way, potential value conflicts between children and other stakeholders can be accounted for in design, shifting the focus to what endures beyond interaction, that is, the outcomes and lasting impacts of technology.

We presented a first version of the GLID method at the CHI conference in Seoul in 2015. Afterwards, we further refined the method, which eventually resulted in a paper in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies that was recently published. In this paper, we discuss GLID’s theoretical groundings and present a case study with primary school children. This case study demonstrates how the different stages of the GLID method can be applied in practice. Based on the case study, we reflect on how GLID contributes to a holistic, situated and more empathic understanding in co-design practices.

The paper can be found here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1071581916301070

Last week, iMinds-CUO was strongly present at the 14th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. The IDC conference’s mission is to bring together researchers, designers and educators to explore new forms of technology, design and engaged learning among children. IDC offers a wide-ranging program, supporting and facilitating the exchange of ideas within and between all of these communities. The theme for this year was Empowering Children to Create. Two iMinds-CUO submissions were accepted for the competitive papers track, which has an acceptance rate of 23%. Furthermore, one short paper in the form of a poster and two workshop contributions were presented. Here is the full list of accepted papers, short papers and workshop contributions from iMinds-CUO.

Before the actual conference, iMinds-CUO colleague Marije Nouwen and I presented our work at a workshop hosted by UX researchers at Google. The workshop was about balancing the needs of children and adults in the design of technology for children. Marije presented her contribution Exploring Stakeholder Requirements for Parental Mediation Software (co-author: Bieke Zaman) and I talked about Child Empowerment by Design to increase transparency and child-friendliness in the Terms of Use of websites for children (co-authors: Veronica Donoso, Valerie Verdoodt, Karin Slegers). On the first conference day, I furthermore presented the paper Challenging Group Dynamics in Participatory Design with Children: Lessons from Social Interdependence Theory (co-authors: Ann Laenen, Bieke Zaman, Vero Vanden Abeele). This paper explores whether Social Interdependence Theory (SIT) is a useful theoretical framework to anticipate on challenging intragroup dynamics in co-design with children. The study is part of my ongoing PhD research and describes a case study conducted within the IWT project EMSOC.

On the second day, iMinds-SMIT researcher Lizzy Bleumers presented the paper Sensitivity to Parental Play Beliefs and Mediation in Young Children’s Hybrid Play Activities (co-authors: Karen Mouws, Jonathan Huyghe, Maarten Van Mechelen, Ilse Mariën, Bieke Zaman). The paper describes parental beliefs and mediation practices regarding children’s facilitated play in hybrid (mixed digital/physical) environments and how they can be taken into account through design. This study is part of the ongoing iMinds project WOOPI. During the poster session later that day, Marije presented the short paper A Value Sensitive Design Approach to Parental Software for Young Children (co-authors: Maarten Van Mechelen, Bieke Zaman). This paper presents an explorative inquiry into stakeholder values related to parental software for young children, using a Value Sensitive Design approach. The study was part of the iMinds project Ragasi.

In general, reactions were very positive and especially the reflective stance in all three papers was much appreciated by the audience. Some reactions on Twitter:

Participatory design has urged us to consider ‘users’ as co-designers of their technology and of the practices that may be reified in that technology. Within the area of Child Computer Interaction (CCI) children have participated in the design of technology for over two decades using a variety of established methods. Generative techniques such as ‘co-design’ are often used in Participatory Design with children. The basic principle behind co-design is to let people make designerly artifacts and tell a story about what they have made.

Co-design artifacts should not be regarded as a neutral means of accessing children’s perspectives. They are always ‘constructed’ and therefore do not give access to the ‘voices’ or even the ‘inner lives’ of participants in a direct and unmediated way. Design researchers, however, often limit themselves to a descriptive analysis of co-design artifacts or rely exclusively on what participants say or write about their creations. Buckingham (2009) refers to this approach as ‘naïve empiricism’, arguing that data from creative research cannot be taken at face value: these data need to be analyzed with special attention for its visual dimensions.

Besides this ‘celebration of representation’, there is a tendency to analyze co-design artifacts solely in ‘computing terms’, that is, on a functional or attribute level. However, the values that are implicitly expressed in co-design artifacts are often more interesting than the design ideas as products per se. Focusing on the underlying motives behind design choices can reveal why specific design attributes are important and how they serve children’s values. Climbing up the ‘value ladder’ enables researchers to reach out into the ‘opportunity spaces’, rather than being limited to problem solving right from the onset. Moreover, making values explicit opens up possibilities for a re-alignment of values between adults and children, as well as across groups of children working together.

Since values are dynamic in nature, we cannot simply identify them, and design for them. Participatory Design, in its authentic sense, aims at reformulating values and transcending possible value conflicts. These ’negotiated values', in turn, provide designers with a well-grounded starting point for design. 

Want to read more?

Inter Alia, the blog of my sparring partner and CUO | Social Spaces colleague Jan Derboven.

Buckingham, D. (2009). ‘Creative’ visual methods in media research: possibilities, problems and proposals. Media, Culture and Society, 31, 633-652.