What I Did on my Summer
Vacation: Online Kidsteam
Greg Walsh (@gxwalsh)
HCIL Symposium
May 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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Participatory Design
Co-Design
Cooperative
Inquiry
(Druin, 1997)
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Kidsteam
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Kidsteam
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(Guha, 2004)
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Distributed Design
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(Walsh, Brown, Druin, 2011)
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ICDL
Limitations of Current Methods
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Asynchronous Limitations (Druin, et al., 2009)
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Travel expenses

Time delays between iterations

Limited co-design techniques
Existing On-line Systems (Walsh, 2010)
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Synchronous only (Whiteboards)
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Adult-focused (Google Docs)
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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 Design
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Mixed Methods
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Research by Design


Researchers 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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References
Bodker, 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 codesign 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
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