In 2020, due to the global pandemic many of us were forced to move to the online space
which put a halt to our work.
Our study title is: The show must go on!In this talk I share our team's
study findings regarding our transition to the online space for our work to go on
Our group name is KidsTeam UW where we work with a group of children aged 7-11 year old
where we co-design new technology FOR children WITH children
While COVID-19 was the reason that forced us to explore online we noticed opportunities to
meet with new children who were not able to come to the in-person session due to
consequences like transportation or mobility issues and the only option was to join online.
When working with children in the online space, many prior work explores the asynchronous space
like in social media sites or three dimensional gaming space.
However, not all children or adults are familiar with working on such sites.
Scholars also have done numerous work on building prototypes for play and devices for telepresence.
But they are not mainstream consumer devices. In our study we were working with the device
we had and was familiar with.
Our research question started with:
How to conduct synchronous participatory design online with children?
Method: We went through a total of 10 co-design sessions conducted on Zoom,
we analyzed video data, interviews and artifacts
produced. We recommend finding more details on the methods in detail.
The majority of the sessions were a total chaos of having days where children turned all their
cameras off, bad internet connection resulting in both frustrated children
and adults. We also had days children co-designing in the car and had their
pet lizard the entire online session. In sum, many things did not go as planned.
We also noticed doing synchronous participatory design online with
children was like go stand-up comedy which needed to interact with the audience.
And going ‘live’ is that you have to deal with what happens in the moment.
Therefore, in making sense of our data, we switched our lens to Improvisation,
making or doing something that is not planned beforehand.
Talented artists often embrace disorder to make the most of any situation.
We use a paper by Kang et al. presented at CHI 2018 which discusses how improvisation
emerges in practice and explains five features of improvisation.
Therefore, for our findings we have created a framework through thematic coding of what to
consider if you plan to conduct synchronous co-design sessions online. Our three
themes were generated by emerging themes in a synchronous online space.
First theme Project Logistic of how the session might be planned and implemented.
Our two sub themes are techniques of how commonly used techniques in-person had
to me modified in the online space and we needed to think about what
digital tools we can use to meet, share, design and collaborate.
Second theme is People and Setting. We state how in the synchronous online
space children were coming from multiple locations
which differed from parents dropping their child off to the lab. Therefore,
children were influenced by the technological infrastructure such as hardware and software
but spectators we had parents, siblings and pets all part as children are rarely alone at home.
In the final point, People’s online interaction we note how it is
important to state how the children’s interpretation and reactions mattered.
For instance, when children muted themselves our researcher assumed that the child was disengaged.
However, when we later interviewed this child he stated how he muted himself as his mom had
the dishwasher on. From this quote we learn it is more difficult to know how children are feeling as
we have fewer cues and that children have more Autonomy and Freedom to just log off.
In the paper we share a conceptual model of how the three themes influence each other
and connect them to Kang et al’s 5 points. The model centers on users’ interactions and
moves beyond the dependence of technology. In a synchronous session, regardless of how well
prepared the researcher is there are moments for improvisation. We encourage our framework and
research to be used in adding more references to the unexpectedness to be ready for improvisation.
Thank you for listening.