Hello everyone, I am Stuart Gray from the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Bristol. Today I will be talking about trove Towards A Design For Life: Redesigning For Reminiscence With Looked-after Children.
First of all, let me shout out to my team who have done so much great work on this project - even before I came on board
So let me mention Chloe Meineck, Prof. Debbie Watson, Prof Ki Cater, Tom Metcalfe, Rachel Hahn and Dr Keir Williams
To give you the preamble about what we have created - trove: the digital and physical memory box for looked-after and adopted children at the heart of this paper - we need to do some of the groundwork and understand life story work, objects and looked-after children
In the UK, we have increasing numbers of looked-after children. Looked-after children can be classed as children who have spent more than 24 hours under the care of their local authority. And they may go to live with foster parents, in a residential children's home, school or secure unit. There are now more than 75,000 looked-after children in England and that number continues to rise as the numbers of adoptions continue to fall. Both looked-after and adopted children face similar challenges around memories of their former lives - do they remember birth parents, for example? Do they remember people in their lives before they went into care? And also, how they build this understanding of who they are and their identity. Sometimes, when adopted or taken into care from a young age, they have to build it from secondary sources - information and artefacts collected by others. These narratives don't always portray children's stories accurately and can result in difficulty for them to take ownership of their pasts.
In the UK, we use a process called Life Story Work to support children to develop narratives and engender them to reflect in a reassuring environment. Personal objects have been increasingly used as tools within these contexts because they represent portals of memories - of people, of places - and are very powerful. For looked-after and adopted children they are even more powerful because they can sometimes represent all that remains of the past - of these people, places, and memories which they can no longer see or revisit. These objects are sometimes the only constants these children have got. They can assist them by helping them to adapt to change - as something familiar or grounding, but their loss can result in anxiety. It can be devastating and result in grief for the object and what it represents, and the stories they represent can begin to fade.
Developing a strong understanding of our pasts is important because it underpins our sense of self and identity. This kind of narrative identity consists of an evolving, internalised story and the telling and re-telling of stories about who we are, previous events and gives us a temporal understanding of our lives. It helps us to understand exactly who we are and gives us confidence. For looked-after and adopted children it can sometimes be difficult for them to create this narrative and as a result, leave them immensely frustrated. For these children, they sometimes have few enduring attachments and challenges in their lives which means not having an identity is problematic. This is where life story work steps in to play a crucial role.
Life story work is most often supported using life storybooks, which are collated by looked-after children's care providers - like social workers. This often happens when they are submitted to care, where they talk to a child's previous care providers, they collect objects and keepsakes that the children have, and they bring them together with a book which charts that movement into care. And also throughout their care journey, this is something which is added to - people, places, things - they add that to the book as well. But the problem sometimes is that the books are very much translated through the eyes of the social worker and not necessarily from the perspective of the child, and sometimes this means that the ideas within it don't resonate with the child. They can't use it to support their own identity because they don't recognise the story which is being portrayed. So we need to incorporate other people's narratives but ensure that it is the children's narratives that are at the heart of their life story work.
The memory box is a lesser used method within life story work but it recognises the immense power of objects. Within HCI it has been used with older adults with dementia as a way to tap into really powerful memories and to connect them with that identity. For looked-after children, having this temporal account of their life events allows them to revisit and reconstruct narratives from past moments of their lives - maybe to change their perspective or add some additional information. It is proposed as an effective strategy for overcoming trauma - something looked-after children commonly have to overcome.
And this led us to ask, “How can a digital memory box support the life story work of looked-after and adopted children?”
We developed our initial concept in 2014.
This was trove version 1 and it was a digital and physical memory box that allowed children to record stories about objects which had RFID tags on them and then replay the stories when placing them inside the box. It was a secure place to keep some small keepsakes. We have previous publications about that work so I won't go into it in too much detail...
...but we didn't get a chance to work with looked-after or adopted children in the design of trove itself. This was because the design phase was part of an academic and business collaboration programme in which participating children were split over multiple projects.
Although we did evaluate trove with looked-after and adopted groups, we did wonder how it would have been if they had been part of the initial design process, using a participatory approach with those groups. So we embarked upon a redesign process where we wanted to redesign trove based on children's experiences within those contexts.
We wanted to begin by challenging some of the key assumptions made for the design of trove v1. First of all, we thought about audio. We had only allowed children to record in audio but there was no reason why they couldn't tell stories using other media as well - something done in therapeutic contexts as it is hard to initially vocalise a story that is traumatic. So we wanted to think about the other ways we could facilitate storytelling. And then we thought about how children would keep their objects in what can be transient, volatile environments so that they remain safe. And finally, the stories - how would they document these stories to generate this temporal approach and understanding of their identity.
To do this we undertook 3 x 60-minute workshops (and an additional wrapping up session) with 4 looked-after children aged 11-13 years from a residential school. These kids represent some of the most vulnerable in the country. Quite frequently they have experienced trauma, they require individual support during school activities, and they quite often struggle with basic literacy, attention, and emotional regulatory skills. It was only advisable (due to a lack of experience working with these children) to work with some of the more mature children at the school. We had to take an extended approach to ethics because of the context.
In terms of the workshop methods, we had to strike a balance between granting children autonomy and supporting their educational needs. The sessions to place in a comfortable, familiar environment; we always had staff from the school on hand to support each child; everyone at the table undertook the same activities; and to make sure they were super engaged, we prioritised fun and engagement through role-play and games.
In the first workshop, we asked the first research question – “how do looked-after children tell stories associated with their meaningful objects? It involved the researchers sharing stories about their own personal objects to try and break down that trust barrier. Everyone present in the workshop was then asked to create a meaningful object – from Lego or plasticine - which they could use as a symbol of our work together during the upcoming sessions, before constructing a story about what it was using a media of their choice. The children used a selection of media. Some of the objects they made were actually based on objects they owned. Some of the more sensitive stories were not recorded using audio. One particular child preferred to write the story down and let others read it, without vocalising it initially - until trust was established.
In the second workshop, we asked, "how would looked-after children keep their objects?" In the workshop we undertook a time machine role-playing game using wigs and fake beards to simulate the children as their older selves, to help them consider whether the ways they kept their objects would change over time. We also did Lego and plasticine prototyping. The common insights that came out of this was that reminiscing over objects was most likely at bedtime where soft, huggable materials appeared to afford comfort. The visibility of meaningful objects may be contextually specific – sometimes visible but on other occasions needing to be concealed. It also emerged that some objects had many stories associated with it, whereas others had only one – sometimes fact, sometimes fiction, and sometimes fantasy inspired by real-life experiences.
In our final workshop, we looked at safety. We did a questionnaire boardgame on the theme of securing secret information and espionage, and then we further ideated over the prototypes from the previous session. We found out that concealing story content can be done physically and digitally - physically obscuring someone from seeing and also digitally through passwords and encryption. They felt that affording them greater security and trust would result in the development of more personally meaningful narratives.
And this led us to develop trove version 2 - at the heart of the paper.
And here is the new trove. It is now more of a bag based design that a box. It has a grey felt exterior which can be discrete in volatile environments where it can be easily obscured, but the bag's interior opens up to show its bright blue branding which can be used as a staging for storytelling. It's also a cushion for children to lie on while interacting with trove. There is a security hood which unfolds to encapsulate the user as they tell or review their stories. And there is a handle which makes it far more portable than the previous design
trove v2 retains the tangible connection between objects and stories at the core of its interaction but there is now a touchscreen-based interface to control its functionality and to allow for the recording and playback of multimedia stories - video, picture, audio, written. It now uses NFC sticker on the objects of interest can link them with the stories, allowing for playback by placing them on the contact pad within the bag.
Following some of the ideas from the children in the workshop, trove now has increased security provisions. We have an object-based passcode (shown in the top-middle image) - which allows for a child-friendly security protocol. Also, the stories are now sent to the cloud, where they are encrypted and password protected - only allowing registered trove users to access their own stories.
I'd like to stop now and say thank you for listening. If you would like to find out more about trove and how it has evolved from the workshop process into the product you see now, please read our paper. Thank you very much.