24181
>> Kori Quinn: I'm pleased to introduce Lana Yarosh from Georgia Tech.
Lana has been working with Gregory Aboud there finishing up her Ph.D.,
and she's here as a candidate, giving a candidate talk for a
post-doctoral position. AJ and I had the pleasure of working with Lana
a couple of years ago where we connected kids with video conferencing
and Lana has probably done more work than anybody building and
deploying video conferencing telepresence systems with kids in family
environments. So I will let her share her work with you.
>> Lana Yarosh: Wow, that was a great introduction. Thank you. So,
yes, my name is Lana, and I'm going to be talking to you mostly about
the share table, which is a system for supporting communications in
separated families.
So I'm currently a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. I'm almost done.
Oh, this is really washed out. Wonder if there's anything we can do
about that.
But my background is in computer science, psychology, and in industrial
design, and I think you'll be able to see how all these fields kind of
combine in my work.
So I've done a bunch of stuff in the past. I'm really only going to be
talking today about supporting parent/child communication, but if you
can read them, there's a bunch of other topics. If you want to ask me
about other times, feel free and I'll let you know what else I've been
doing.
So I'll start off by giving a quick overview of the problem space and a
bit of background, provide some context to my research. I'll talk
about two studies I've done that focus on understanding the needs of
parents and children in separated families.
I'll talk about the system called the share table that I created to
address the challenges faced by these families, and I'll give a bit of
an idea of future directions my work can take.
Okay. So here's how parent/child separation, work portrayed in the
media right now. This is an Oreo commercial.
[Music]
[Kids laughing]
>>: Good night buddy.
>>: Good morning dad.
>> Lana Yarosh: So we saw parent/child separation, right? Well, this
is actually happening in real life. I'll come back to the scenario
later and fill in some of the blanks here.
So why is it even important to support parents and children interacting
remotely. These are just some statistics to give you an understanding
of the potential impact of this work.
As a result of many factors, primarily divorce, about 30 percent of
children in the United States don't live with both of their parents.
And in fact significant portion of these children live in a different
city from one of their parents, which makes continued contact fairly
difficult.
And even families that aren't living apart, parents are spending less
time playing with their children. And since most families live away
from the grandparents nowadays it really isn't that kind of one-on-one
child to adult interaction that's going on. It's becoming more and
more rare. And all in all this is problematic because time together
with a caring adult is a significant predictor of a bunch of outcomes
for kids like academic success, emotional well-being even physical
well-being, all these areas are affected by having contact with caring
adults.
So this is the depressing stuff. And I wanted to get this out of the
way because the rest of my talk is really about hope for the future.
So the good news is that communication technologies can allow us to
reclaim some of that important parenting time. By increasing
opportunities to interact potentially, especially over distance. So
this is a photo from a New York Times article. And it's an article
about commuter families, families where one parent spends the week away
and comes home only over the weekend.
And here a dad is reading a book to his kids over Skype. So this
should be great news. We've been working on communication technologies
well for the office since before I was born. So we should have this
figured out by now, right, communication we should have it figured out.
Well, it's actually not that simple. There's a lot of differences
between communication technologies for work and trying to parent over
distance.
The parent/child relationship is different from other relationships.
Because it's characterized by asymmetry. So usually the parent
provides care and guidance for the child. But not vice versa, and
frequently the motivation to interact is different for parents and
children.
And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. Second, when you're
dealing with children, there's a whole different set of challenges from
dealing with adults. They need help understanding what the separation
means. They need help understanding how to deal with it and frequently
they need logistical help in setting up the means that they might have
for communicating.
Lastly, for grownups, conversation is a good way to stay in touch but
that's not really the way to engage children. Children build closeness
through care and play activities with significant adults in their life.
And that's very different from other types of relationships.
And finally there's just the idea of putting technology in the home,
which introduces its own set of challenges. So, for example, you can't
rely on the kind of Internet connectivity that you may get in the
workplace. You need the technology to be quite robust, because you're
dealing with a whole new set of challenges. Now you have cats chewing
on your cords and three-year-olds trying to climb your system like a
mountain, very different from the office space, usually.
And lastly the home is a very personal space now you have all these
privacy concerns you might not have in the workplace.
Okay. So this is the work that's been done in HCI for developing
technologies to connect parents, to connect family, for family
communication. So I don't actually expect you to like read all this,
but I just want to point out a few things. So asynchronous
communication is fairly well explored. We've been working this space
for a while. And most common topics focus on things like sharing
photos, written notes and calendars. But synchronous communication has
only come into focus more recently. And in fact like the papers that
are highlighted in orange -- I'm sorry I'm sure this is very washed out
you can't see it but you can see the general number of papers.
>>: [inaudible] on your laptop correctly?
stuff.
Notorious for that kind of
>> Lana Yarosh: Because I don't know what set up on my laptop.
see it -- do you know how to fix it?
>>: It's coming through fine on the recording.
projector.
I can
It's just the
>>: Oh really?
>> Lana Yarosh: Yeah. Well, the projectors are hard we'll get to that
later on in the talk. But the papers that are highlighted in orange is
all stuff that's been published in the last two years. As you can see
this has been -- I like to call it the forefront of a Zeitgeist so I
think it's a good place to be.
Now let's launch into what I've actually done. I'll roughly follow the
same sequence in this presentation that I use as a researcher. I go
into a space. I conduct formative investigations to understand what
are some of the problems that I'm addressing in this space. I design
and I evaluate to see whether I was successful or not.
I'll start out by talking about parent/child contact in families
separated by work travel. I figure some people in this room might
identify with that topic because you're researchers and researchers
travel a lot.
Okay. So to find out what happens when families are separated by work,
I conducted hour-long interviews with parents and children where at
least one parent spends a lot of time traveling.
And so I'm not sure if you can see it very well here, but the table is
classified by color based on the kind of work that the parent does. So
the bottom four here are -- I have a pointer. Hold on. There. The
bottom four here are academic travel. Then we have four here that are
military travel and military deployment. And then the top ones here
are all business travel.
And so it's kind of classified by frequency separation versus long-term
separation, so frequent separation is more than five nights a month
apart. And long-term separation is spending more than two months sort
of consecutively apart. The actual reasons for separation included
lots of things like deployment training, immigration, sabbatical,
conference travel and more.
First I was interested in how parents and children responded to the
separation. And it actually turned out that the responses are quite
different. And you know here I'm talking in general. If you read the
paper you can find examples, exceptions to these rules as well. But
this is what generally parents placed emphasis on. They usually placed
emphasis on remaining an active part of the child's life while they
were away. So to do so they tended to be proactive about initiating
synchronous and asynchronous contact with the child such as calling
home every day. When I asked parents for the advice they would give to
other parents who traveled for work they said things similar to: I
guess just try and let your kids know that you're still there. You're
still a part of their lives that you haven't really gone, not to worry
about you.
When they do try to talk remotely parents try to stay an active part in
the child's life and talk about daily events. So, for example, they
might ask about how school's going and try to suggest strategies for
studying for a test. This is actually very different from children.
So children rather than thinking about separation try to choose to
focus on other activities. Spend time with co-located adults who are
around, or think about what will happen once the parent returns.
So when I asked the kids for advice they would give to other children
whose parents travel for work they said things like you should spend
time with your mom when your dad away or spend time with your dad when
your mom's way or maybe not try to think about that, try to think about
other stuff. Sometimes like watching TV gets my mind off of it.
So basically the take-away here is that children and grownups deal with
separation differently. But the majority of families we talked to when
you design a direct communication technology you're implicitly meeting
the supporting the desires of the typical parent over the desires of
the typical child.
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't build direct communication
technologies for families. I'm just saying that it's important to
consider what might happen when you introduce obligations to
communicate that the child may not be willing to meet or when the
parent's expectations for the communication are not met. Just
something to think about.
So additionally I looked at strategies that these families had for
staying in touch, as well as the problematic aspects of these
strategies. I'll just give a brief overview here. There's kind of a
typical way in which remote contact happens. So typically the remote
parent calls the co-located parent or maybe they Skype the co-located
parent. Once they talk the phone is passed around or the kids are
brought in. And the other members in the household get a chance to
talk as well.
It's usually scheduled. And it's usually scheduled by the remote
parent. Now, the main challenge of this approach is that it's not
always easy to get kids to want to talk on a schedule. So it
frequently kind of feels like pulling teeth and getting one-word
answers.
Second, most parents supplemented calling or Skyping with spontaneous
asynchronous communication sending mail, text message and e-mail these
communications were directly between the parent and the child, and
that's what made them so special to the child, just getting something
with your name on it in the mail when you're a kid kind of is really
important.
Most of these messages were also emphatic in nature. They were not
about sharing information but more about conveying emotion. So
18-year-old girl described her e-mails to her mom she said I always
used big letters and say I love you. They take up half of the page I
used to make the smiley faces and put them on there and put on a little
background.
e-mail.
So it's about emotion.
Not about the information in the
The main problem with the strategy is that there's actually very few
systems for asynchronous communication with young children. They don't
often have phones and frequently not mail either. And mail is kind of
painfully slow. Now, the best tool in the toolbox of the remote parent
is the local adult. The adult that's still with the child. They act
as this awesome awareness system so they let you know what's going on
in the life of the child while you're gone. They're also a cheerleader
motivating the child to connect with the parent because we know that's
not typically how children deal with separation.
And then we have video chat, which is hailed as like the savior of all
remote communication. Well, we found that out of the families we
interviewed only five out of the 14 families used it regularly.
First this is because for many families especially military ones the
infrastructure was simply not available. There was simply not high
enough bandwidth to use when they were deployed.
And second this is because the video chat required two somewhat tech
savvy adults to set up the connection and many families just didn't
have that. It was easier to stick with the phone.
Only two of the families we talked to played online games together as a
way of staying in touch. To me this was surprisingly few because I
thought this might be a good way to engage kids but then I considered
what the online games are like if we're talking casual games like
Yahoo! checkers or something like that you can't see the other person.
You can't see what they're looking at. You can't see what they're
doing with their mouse.
And this actually makes it hard to motivate the game for the child.
Children just don't want to play games with their parents because they
like games, they like playing games with their parents because parents
make funny faces when they make a bad roll or they let them win or they
do all these other things.
And you can't really do that with the casual online games right now.
Okay. So as I promised let's return to the Oreo commercial from the
beginning. Turns out that in fact these kind of playful activities
over video chat can happen for families at least for the five out of 14
families that use chat regularly.
I think there's a lot missing from the video so let's fill in details.
So obviously it's the other parent that has to set up the video chat.
And of course it's problematic. So in this case it requires scheduling
ahead of time and a few attempts at connecting before the video and
audio works.
The majority of the interaction is actually between the parents. So
here the mom lets the traveling dad know kind of details of the son's
life in general day-to-day activities.
Okay. Now finally mom goes to get the kid. Of course, he's dealing
with the separation in the way the kids deal with separation. He's
playing video games to distract himself. And, of course, eventually
mom convinces him to go talk to his dad, but it does require that kind
of cheerleading work.
So the conversation starts, and the dad comes to get some details about
what the mom was saying. How was school. And this is the classic
interaction. What did you do in school yesterday? Nothing. And the
dad continues to ask questions hoping he can get more than a single
word response. But it's kind of awkward.
Okay. Finally, it's time to say goodbye. They end with their cute
tradition of eating a Oreo cookie together. But obviously there was a
lot more work that went into that interaction than the Oreo commercial
showed.
Okay. So now that I've made a huge deal about the role of the
co-located parent in remote parent/child interaction what happens when
that's not there. What happens in divorced families?
To learn more about the needs of divorced families I conducted in depth
interviews with members of ten divorced families. We interviewed
children, residential and nonresidential parents.
And I tried to recruit for a variety of visitation structures and
arrangements and custody arrangements.
I also did drawing exercises. Oh man you really can't see those at
all. Well, I won't talk about them. I can show you the drawing
exercises later, how about that?
Okay. So I wanted to know about the communication goes of each of the
family members. So here's a quick overview of the findings. The goals
that are highlighted in orange might be in tension with the other
goals.
So first I want to point out that the major things the parents and
children have in common they want to interact by doing stuff together.
They want to play games. They want to do daily routines like eating
dinner together, bedtime. And just in general doing stuff together
rather than nobody said we just want to sit across from each other and
talk.
We found that both the residential and nonresidential parents actually
had the same goals. But they may disagree on how to achieve those
goals.
They both wanted to have the necessary information and power to act on
the child's best interests and they both wanted to maintain a strong
emotional connection with the child. But this was actually really hard
for the nonresidential parent. We also noticed that it seemed to be
important to both parents to minimize attention between households. So
mostly the way they did this is by accepting this kind of mom's house,
mom's rules, dad's house dad's rules arrangement. And this also led to
the schedule not to interrupt the routines at the other household.
This may be a problem because what we know about children they're kind
of in the moment creatures. They want attention and support in the
moment. By the time the scheduled conduct occurs they may have
forgotten what they wanted to share.
Now, one of the things that surprised us in the study was the children
were much more sensitive to the tension between their parents than
their parents thought. So I talked to one of the moms. I asked: Is
your son aware of all the tension between you and your ex. No, we
never even talk in front of him. If I'm talking on the phone, I'm
always in a different room. We never raise our voices in front of him,
I don't think he knows.
This is what the boy said: My mom has a way to make her voice sound
like she doesn't care, but at the same time he knows it's not true, it
really hurts to hear that voice every time I want to call my dad she
always uses: Oh, so you're calling him?
So this leads some children to keep one contact from one parent as
private from the other parent as possible. They're really aware of
that competition over their time and affection.
I also talk about technology use with these families. And the
telephone was still the primary way for the families to stay in touch
but both parents and children seem to dislike it. It was hard to keep
the child engaged and find topics to talk about. Short calls were
common and several parents describe the exchange of how is it going,
good; what's going on? Nothing. Seemed to be the typical
conversation. The telephone is extra difficult for young children,
still developing the communicational competencies to understand the
finer points of language.
Like ironing, humor, fantasy. In person, they're aided by visual cues,
but over the phone, things get more difficult. As one parent
described, you can't really even joke with him unless you say I'm
kidding or I got a good one for you. A lot is lost.
And so then we have video conferencing. But it's still a long way off
from being used routinely. One problem is that the system is still too
complex for children to use on their own. So it usually requires them
to get help. But it's really awkward to go to mom and ask her to
connect you with dad. That's what we found from the interviews.
So if video conferencing is set up it's usually for a special occasion.
The parents set it up and the kid can use it at that point.
So basically any video conferencing sessions that we saw in these
interviews, they were always scheduled ahead of time and we never heard
of one being initiated by a child.
However, both ->>: Can you explain [inaudible] I came a little late.
>> Lana Yarosh: So the children that I interviewed were always between
the ages of seven and 11. I think in this interview study we had one
as old as 14, though.
But they also had younger siblings frequently.
the parents' view how it worked --
So we could sort of get
>>: The timeout, they're getting called 30, 40 days, they're Skyping
with each other, it's becoming a lot easier for them to start doing
some of these things.
>> Lana Yarosh: Yeah I have witnessed -- so I think once the child is
around 13 or 14, that definitely happens. But I think there's still
this issue where sometimes the Skype is like on a family computer and
it's still something that's kind of awkward for the child to do without
what they feel is pressure from the other parent.
>>: Why did you time require scheduling. The other party Skype calling
and make a phone call. That's what I do.
>> Lana Yarosh: Most of these families did not keep a computer with
Skype logged in at all times. Usually Skype was something turned on
when they were about to make a call.
>>: It's a mistake that people keep their computers on at all times
most people turn them off.
>>: I see.
>> Lana Yarosh: That's what we found as well. However, both video
conferencing and phones suffer from the same common problem. It's that
sitting and talking is just not the common way or the natural way for
parents and children to interact.
So many parents complain that talks on the phone and video were short.
Well, this is not surprising. Even in person, children spend less than
one hour a week in participating in household conversations, this is
from times study T with co-located family members. So it doesn't
really make any sense to expect them to spend more time being engaged
with somebody who doesn't live with them.
>>: At what age does that begin to change?
>> Lana Yarosh:
At what age do they start having more conversations?
>>: Yes.
>> Lana Yarosh: I think the time study was like the one I saw was just
like children under 11 I believe. If you want to shoot me an e-mail
question I can actually give you a time study. I think that might give
you a bit more -- on that.
So it's problematic right now. Basically remember the five strategies
I had for work separated families. It's hard enough for work separated
families. But even more challenges for divorced families. So, yeah,
you get scheduled synchronous contact. But you don't really get it
with the entire household. You get it with the kid only and you don't
have the other parent acting as this awesome awareness system. You
don't have them acting as a cheerleader frequently. If you do get
asynchronous communication -- some families are more open to
spontaneous stuff but usually custody agreements frown on spontaneous
agreements you want everything laid out ahead of time.
You may use video chat together you may play video games online but
without another adult there to help set that all up on the other side
it's probably not happening. So it's extra problematic for divorced
families.
And that's kind of why I wanted to focus more on divorced families in
my work. I see there's more potential for impact here. Okay. So now
we'll get to the shared table system. I'll talk a little bit about the
design process, a bit about the implementation, basically as much as I
can fit into the remaining time about the evaluation. So I wasn't
going to try to solve all the challenges with one system but I
identified what seemed to be the most important issues for
communication system for divorced families. So it should provide
visual channels for communication not just audio. It should be really
easy to initiate so that the children can do it spontaneously and
without having to ask an adult for help. And most importantly the
system should provide parents and children with ways of doing stuff
together rather than just talking.
So one of the things that I acquired in grad school is training in
industrial design. So this frequently means I think through sketches.
None of which you can see here. All of which I can show to you later,
how about that?
And the final system didn't really like pop into my head fully formed
but rather this was an outcome of several cycles of generating ideas,
getting feedback from families and these are some of the sketches from
that process.
Maybe -- almost. It's just enough to entice you to ask me for them
later. So the final outcome of all this work is the shared table
system. This is what it looks like. So basically a parent and child
each have a shared table in the home. The table's connected via
broadband and system connects a dedicated connection so it's as easy to
turn on as a phone. Basically if you want to start a conversation you
open a set of cabinet doors.
And it calls the other table. It rings on the other side like a phone
would. If somebody opens on the other side the connection is
initiated.
To end the connection, you just close the set of cabinet doors.
it. There's no mouse, keyboard, button, anything like that.
That's
The monitors basically your face to face video, that's where you see
the other person full screen video conferencing. You can hear them
through the speakers. But the tabletop provides a shared space for
activities.
So basically there's a camera and a projector above the table.
Anything you do over the table surface captured by the camera sent to
the other table and projected on top. The two projections are aligned.
If I put my paper board game down on my side of the table, you can see
it on your side with along with things like my hand, as long as we have
things to use as tokens and dice, once you put the tokens on the right
spot on the projected board game they appear projected on my board
game. Let me give you a quick video of how this would look, if we used
it. My table rings. I open it to initiate the connection. It starts
up and I say hi to my friend Seneca.
Please excuse our amateurish camera work. We do our best. So I put a
book on my side of the table. And, again, this is not like a special
book it's just a regular book.
And now it's visible on the other side of the table. Additionally, if
we want to do something like draw together, that's really easy. You
just use dry erase markers on the surface of the table. You may notice
that the frame rate of the table surface is not great. We prioritized
resolution of the table surface over frame rate because usually things
you put on the table doesn't necessarily move that much but it's
important to see it if there's small font.
So I drew my fish and now my friend Seneca can contribute by drawing on
her side of the table as well, and I can see it on mine. So that's
basically how it works.
So the idea of the shared table is actually really simple. But there
are a lot of technical challenges to be solved in order to get it to
work. I won't talk about all of these, but I'd be glad to answer any
questions about them. This is basically just to highlight that I have
skills as a maker. This doesn't even include the carpentry. So the
carpentry was a big part of this project as well.
I started out by running lab-based evaluations in share table with
certain parent/child pairs. Basically they did a variety of tasks such
as a worksheet together, playing a board game together. This is to
allow us to compare the share table with just video conferencing. Not
going to talk about the results in detail, but basically it was
encouraging. It showed us that parents and kids really got the system
could use it and it led us to actually deploy it in the home.
So we put the system in the home of divorced families in the Atlanta
area. And I really wanted to highlight how the shared table was
different from their previous practices. So we did a two-week
predeployment part of the study where we asked them to keep
communication diaries. Anytime they communicated remotely. We asked
them to fill out two validated questionnaires so we compare, to compare
relationships before and after the use of the system as well as compare
the different technologies.
And while -- then the system was deployed for four weeks. While it was
deployed, they kept a similar documentation process so they kept
communication diaries, and we kept doing weekly interviews with them.
But we also collected sort of text logs the system used and also video
logs of whenever the system was in use.
So this is the example of what the communication diaries look like. So
the kids basically had one where they could just circle something or
draw something. And this is an example of why it was important to also
interview, because if I hadn't interviewed I would have never known
that this says excited. Creative way of spelling it. The parents
could basically just write on a piece of paper, and I was looking for
when you talk, what medium did you use to talk, how did you feel after
talking, what did you talk about, that kind of information.
Additionally, as sort of like a brief side note, I mentioned that we
used the validated questionnaire to evaluate certain aspects of the
system. So developing and validating this questionnaire was one of the
contributions of my thesis work. I'm not going to go into too much
depth about it. But basically the A BBC T, that's the questionnaire,
measures the emotional benefits and the emotional costs of a
communication technology. So emotional benefits might include
something like opportunity to provide social support and emotional cost
might include something like introducing unwanted obligations to
communicate.
So I validated this questionnaire with both adults and children.
you want to use it it's freely available so just let me know.
If
Okay. So let's talk about my participants. Usually this is really
easy slide in the talk participants, but this is kind of complicated so
I'll try to go slow.
In family set one, we had Matt and Nadia who were married, a kid named
Simon, seven at the time of the study. They got divorced and now live
in different houses. Matt remarried to Mary who already had a
three-year-old son named Jeffrey, and Nadia remarried to Rod. By the
end of the study Simon actually got a half brother, but we didn't
actually interact with the baby, so he's not in the picture.
So the second family we have David and Kelly who were married and had
two kids. They had Taylor and Kennedy. Taylor is a boy and he's 11
and Kennedy is a girl seven years old at the time of the study.
They got divorced. And Taylor usually lives with his dad. Kennedy
usually lives with her mom. The kids spend all the weekends together.
So basically there's always somebody getting shuttled every weekend
it's the question of which parent gets them both on that particular
weekend.
David also has another girl named Casey, who is two, from another
relationship. And Casey doesn't live like alone. So don't call like
Child Protective Services. We just never interacted with Casey's mom.
She is not on the slide. She lives in a different house. He sees her
every other weekend. Kelly remarried to Jason. The people in red are
the people participants enrolled in the study. The people in gray are
people we interacted with, who interacted with the system but not
people we had weekly interviews with.
Okay. So here it is. It was deployed in these four homes. So both
the moms. This picture is A and C, decided to put it in the kids'
rooms. The dad from the first family put it in the living room where
the cat was actually a big user of the system because it generated a
lot of heat.
And then in the last family, the dad put it sort of the man den of the
house which is a shrine to the University of Georgia. If any of you
follow football you'll understand the irony there.
Jumping into the results. How was the share table used? So I'm
actually only going to talk about three of these ways today because I
only have time I think for three of the ways but feel free to ask me
questions about the other stuff as well. So we see a lot of activities
like drawing together and playing together. We saw kind of more
instrumental parental activities as well helping with homework
supporting helping do math problems on the table, for example.
And co-parenting, which is co-parenting is that thing where your
parents gang up on you to get you to do something. We saw a lot of
that especially around room cleaning activities, because now the remote
parent could actually see the state of the local room. So they could
encourage the child to clean their room.
We saw sharing of physical items, and something we labeled kind of
sharing the moment. For example, we got to see Christmas morning over
the shared table. That was pretty exciting. And we saw emotional care
activity as well.
So drawing together was probably the most popular activity for parents
and children using the shared table. It provided a context for the
conversation, and it made the whole interaction feel more like hanging
out. So sometime around sort of minute two of talking to a child, like
you run out of questions and it gets really awkward so then you say I
love you, goodbye. So what happened instead of with the shared table
at this point they switched to an activity. They would draw together
something. And this provided enough of a context that they didn't have
to say goodbye right away. Usually came up with other things to talk
about later.
So in this video you'll see Simon. He'll be drawing on this table.
And his dad, Matt and stepbrother Jeffrey are going to be on the other
side watching making suggestions. The video quality wasn't great it
was so dark in the room. He's anonymized so it isn't you his face is
in fact blurry, but I think you'll get the idea.
>>: Look at what I drew.
>>: What is that?
>>: No.
Is that DNA?
It's like -- oh, wait.
It kind of does look like DNA.
>>: That's what I say. It looks like DNA. Except there's no
[inaudible] wait one second, it's almost done.
>>: Focus in red.
>>: I think you're going to be left-handed.
>>: He's left-handed.
>>: He keeps holding it with his left hand.
DNA.
>>: Wait.
Okay.
There you go.
That's the
There's DNA.
>>: Yep.
>>: You like it?
>>: It's a very good drawing.
>> Lana Yarosh: So the other thing about being a child in a divorced
family is that you have two homes. And all your stuff is divided
between two houses. Including your mail. So mail was one of the big
sort of physical artifacts that parents and kids shared in the share
table. So here David, the dad from the second family, puts a gaming
magazine on the table so that his son Taylor and his friend can look
through it and chat about the games. And this is kind of a time
sensitive issue because Christmas was coming up so the dad really
wanted some feedback about which games he might want to get the kid for
Christmas.
>>: [inaudible].
>>: That's it.
>> Yeah. Do you have Modern Warfare.
>>: Yes, sir.
>>: Why don't I ever see you on line?
>>: I don't know. What's your gamer's tag you never added me see I
don't have you guys.
>>: That's Mass Effect.
>>: Hang on. Let me write on here and I can write down my gamer tag.
Wait, if you write on here can he see it?
>>: [inaudible].
>>: So far.
>>: Here's my gamer tag.
>>: So I like the casual, yeah, of course you can see it. It was only
like two years of work. But...the thing to note here is that Taylor,
the kid, was able to introduce a friend from mom's house to his dad, a
friend his dad otherwise wouldn't have met. We have other
introductions of the shared table. Simon the kid from the first family
had members of his immediate family, people he considered his close
family members, who had never met.
So his stepbrother, Jeffrey had never met his step dad Rod that's an
introduction we saw over the shared table. Otherwise those two
probably would never have gotten a chance to meet.
Okay. But perhaps the most powerful thing about the shared table was
the opportunities that it provided for emotional care. So in this
video Taylor's on the other side and he's sick. So Kelly, who is his
mom and Kennedy his sister are calling him. So just note the use of
metaphorical touch to create feeling and closeness.
>>: [inaudible].
>> Lana Yarosh:
Can't real see it.
>>: [inaudible].
>>: Forever and ever.
>>: She's holding his hand on the table.
She's stroking him.
>>: Do you see my hand is holding on to your hand.
>>: Yes, I do.
>>: I love you, baby.
>>: Love you, too, mom.
>>: Hi Bubba.
>>: Here's my hand.
>>: Keep your hands and we're going to do a family handshake, okay.
>>: Okay.
>>: I love ->> Lana Yarosh: So this was kind of cool to see. And that's why I
think this technology is really powerful in the home space. Okay. But
for those who like numbers better, here's some concrete ways that the
shared table improved parent/child communication. The average time
that the parent and child spend communicating remotely doubled for most
families. Additionally it was encouraging to see the children were
initiating some of the connections rather than having the parent call.
So I think this could have been even higher in family one, but because
of the specific arrangements they had around using the shared table it
wasn't. So the rule in the first family was that Simon had to go to
his mom and ask her for permission to use the share table. Even if she
said yes 100 percent of the time just the fact that he had to go to her
to ask for permission probably reduced the number of times that he did
it.
And the second family that wasn't the case, and in fact children
initiated more than half of the conversations over the system. So I
talked, when I talked to Taylor, I asked him what was different about
if the share table. It was more like yeah, he wanted to do it.
>>: Did he have any awareness, I opened it up do I have any awareness
if dad is even at the other end?
>> Lana Yarosh: It rings on the other side. It's like a phone it
rings. If nobody answers it in time it stops ringing and it tells you
nobody is home or whatever. There's no awareness. It's something that
I think would be really important for the sort of system to succeed in
the long run.
Though the questions about what kind of awareness would be acceptable
in a house that's not yours and the people who don't consider you their
immediate family anymore it's a different question.
So these are the results of the affected benefits and cross showing the
ratings from the previous technologies used by families versus the
shared table.
So both of the families said they had tried video conferencing but
neither had used it in the two weeks prior to the study, the two weeks
of baseline data. So we have the phone to compare to video
conferencing.
So overall the shared table introduced sort of additional benefits,
particularly it was more emotionally expressive. That's to be
expected. There's video here rather than just the audio.
It had this great essence of presence and absence. Which is when you
feel close to a person even outside of your actual immediate
communication with them. So feeling close to the person even outside
of that phone call or the shared table session.
It also seemed to encourage more kind of engagement and playfulness.
It did introduce additional thrusts to privacy but it didn't seem to
introduce any additional obligations or unmet expectations.
Okay. So I really believe in looking at both what worked and didn't
work when I valued technology. I think I touched on all the points on
the left. So let's talk a bit about what didn't work. So the number
one technical problem with the shared table is that the surface was
simply not high enough resolution for all the tasks that the families
wanted to do, especially the tasks of the 11-year-old who at this point
read sort of regular font sized books rather than picture books with
big words and big pictures.
Basically there was just not enough bandwidth to do all we wanted to
do. Sometimes the whole system was such a bandwidth hog that even the
face-to-face video would get choppy that was problematic to the
families. This is despite the fact that we gave them business class
Comcast, business class Comcast connectivity for the duration of the
study.
So the upload speeds are still a bit restrictive we couldn't get the
kind of resolution we wanted. Now it will be interesting to do is
partner with say like one of the new gigabit studies that are popping
up, where essentially the bandwidth wouldn't really be a problem, to
see how that technology could be used in that sort of space.
The other issue was privacy. So Nadia, the mom from the first family,
had the most privacy concerns about the use of a system. In
particular, she was really uncomfortable with feeling like she was
invading her ex-'s privacy. So he had it set up in the living room in
his house and she really didn't like it that she could see like his new
wife walking around in the background. She felt she was intruding on
his space.
Additionally, she didn't like the speakerphone quality of the system.
So when you talk everybody hears you and you hear everybody. Based on
her feedback we actually provided headphones for the second family for
them to be able to choose not to have that happen. They didn't use it
but I think in the first family if we had provided it the mom would
have.
Unfortunately, the shared table did also introduce a new source of
conflict for the families as they tried to figure out appropriate
practices around its use.
In particular, in family one, Nadia sort of, the mom, tightly
controlled Matt's use of the share table. He had to call ahead or text
ahead anytime he was going to use it and she had to say yes ahead of
time before he could use it. Frequently we saw in the videos there
were times when she would say yes he would end up calling and she would
say no we're busy right now it's not a good time reduced to
communication and led to frustration on his part.
>>: Do you have any theory around why they limited access that way, the
parents, with that particular parent?
>> Lana Yarosh: Well, so I think she didn't want things to change. So
before the way that the dad would communicate with the kid, the kid
didn't have a phone of his own. So he would call the mom and she would
pass the phone back to the kid. She was the gateway through which he
communicated. She wanted things to stay the same.
I don't think she saw it as being problematic. She just saw it as
like, oh, well it's a courtesy for him to call me if he's going to use
the share table later. But I think it really did reduce the
communication.
In family two, it's actually the opposite. So the dad, David, used the
share table frequently and spontaneously. And that was frustrating for
the mom because it disrupted the routines in the house. So in one of
the videos we see him calling at 8:00 a.m. just to say hi. She's like
it's 8:00 a.m. like having breakfast as a family. We need to eat and
get out the door, why are you calling right now? Call at a regular
time. So I'd say that neither arrangement was really ideal.
But the strength of the communication technology like this one is that
the custody arrangements the families agree on with the help of an
actual professional can help them decide on these things. They can
actually be encoded directly into the system. So if the parents
decided the appropriate practices that the kid is the kid can call at
any time but the parent can only call between six and seven on a week
night they can be encoded in the system and be enforced in the system
itself.
Now, of course, the hard thing is what do you do when you decide to
change those rules, how do you negotiate them and how do you allow the
system to be flexible enough to change the rules on the fly?
Lastly, we found that both of the moms complained that it wasn't easy
to find uninterrupted time to spend in front of the system. They
frequently used the weekends when the kids were away to catch up on
errands and catch up on work, so they weren't at home in front of the
system to be able to use it.
Nadia said I can pick up the phone in a grocery store wherever but I
had to sit down in front of the share table to use it. And a lot of
times that's not going to happen.
This really points to potential for future works on mobile versions of
the system. And I think particularly powerful perhaps asymmetric
interface is where the parents have a mobile version they can use when
they're on the go but the child may still have something like the share
table which provides them with the opportunities of being able to show
physical things and this kind of more natural system to use.
Okay. So the main point of my thesis is that communication technology
is powerful. And it can increase participation in a child's life from
significant adults.
And I think that that really has much bigger potential than just
communication in the home. So let me just sketch out a scenario that
touches on some of these ideas. So imagine that you walk into a
preschool classroom and in the afternoon the children get an
opportunity for free play.
So a few of them wander over to the share table in the corner of the
classroom. Teacher turns on each station. And with a remote looks
into one of several connections she or he had already arranged.
So these kids already know that Mr. Dapper from the local retirement
village is going to be there to continue reading about the latest
adventures of Captain Underpants the boys gather around the station.
They know he can see them and hear them as well. They can point to the
page and talk about the picture. They interrupt with their own
stories.
And it's more of a conversation rather than just having a book read to
them. Now, this table has actually been on all day. On the other
side, the girl has been joining it and lessons, despite the fact she's
been at a local hospital the past week. Now it's time to join in the
play as well.
Her and her friend have set-up toy cups basically having a tea party
together.
On the third table the teacher has arranged the connection with
preschool for deaf children. So he's planning on connecting more with
this group in the future but for now he just wants to give the children
some time to meet each other and play together informally.
Kelly and Alex are on the other side and they have already set up their
board table. With tokens anybody can join. Nick looks a little unsure
but I think he's up for the adventure.
So I'm really just using the share table as an example here. I really
go into each specific context and try to come up with a technology that
actually addresses the needs of that context. And so the specifics of
the technology involved might be different. The bottom line is that
there's lots of places where this kind of technology can be useful,
communication, healthcare, education, all of these can really be, can
benefit from a technology like this.
Okay. So if you are asleep now is a good time to wake up. The three
sentences that I want you to take away from this talk. The first thing
is that the parent/child relationship is really a unique communication
context. And the circumstances of the separation, you know, I
investigated work separated families and divorced families but there's
other circumstances of separation.
These circumstances really influence the strategies that the families
use and the challenges they face.
The second take-away is looking at kind of at both the benefits that a
system provides and the costs especially in terms of emotion is a good
way of considering and evaluating communication technologies in the
home.
And the last one is that communication technologies can increase and
more importantly change the nature of remote contact with children when
you design them with considerations for the specific context of the
separation.
All right.
Thank you very much.
[applause].
>>: How long did these families have the devices on the table.
>> Lana Yarosh:
One month.
>>: At the end of the experiment, what were their feelings that they
expressed with regards to having had that technology now going back to
a time where they wouldn't have that technology.
>> Lana Yarosh: I struggled with that a lot in the beginning. So we
are getting them something really potentially good and then taking it
away. The way we framed the technology from the very beginning was
that this is kind of like Mary Poppins, she helps the family, has to
fly away to help the next family. We had a mini design workshop with
the families to give advice to the next family to talk about how to
make the system better and contribute in that way.
I also offered to work with the families to help them set up something
that is a commercially available and see if they could use that and get
some of the benefits of the shared table.
>>: They miss it afterwards?
>> Lana Yarosh: Oh my gosh, yes, I still -- the little girl from the
second family is writing a book report about the shared table. And I
still get e-mails from the mom like we're trying to do something else,
like let's try this other thing. In the first family the dad really
wanted to try mobile video conferencing. He already had a phone that
was enabled. So we actually gave a phone to the kid to see if that
would work.
But that ended up not working for them. I asked him if the man would
have a problem with the kid walking around with video throughout the
house, if that would be a privacy issue. The dad was probably not we
usually do what's best for the kid.
Then when we communicated again two weeks later still using the video
conferencing, and he said: Well, I'd like to but she never keeps the
phone charged. I don't know why. So I think it was problematic. And
that was one of the ways that they ->>: Any other families that maybe go to say an iPad solution or
something like that?
>> Lana Yarosh: So in the second family, I was really hopeful that
they would do some sort of video conferencing, the mom really wanted
to. The dad had a bad experience with video conferencing early on and
that kind of soured him to the whole thing. At one point they tried to
video conference with the grandparents. It took them an hour and a
half to set up, what essentially ended up being a five-minute
conversation. It was like too much of a hassle. And I've been working
with the mom trying to basically get her to set up like remote access
so she can set it up on both sides essentially so the dad doesn't have
to do all that. Like he was on the phone. She was like click the
button to the left but on his computer it's to the right, that kind of
thing.
So that was problematic. But you know the families wanted -- I got a
lot of questions of when can we buy this. And you know I'm not doing a
story -- I can point to them and say there's a better thing, use this,
that kind of thing.
>>: What do you point to?
>> Lana Yarosh:
[inaudible] share.
Come on yes?
>>: Two questions. Can you critique the American Airlines ad of the
discussion between mother and daughter turns out the mother is flying
the plane. You don't know it?
>> Lana Yarosh: No, I don't think I've seen it.
seen all the ads.
I'm sorry, I haven't
>>: Of course it's ideal video conferencing, and the other is what did
they say when you took the machines back?
>> Lana Yarosh: Mostly they didn't want me to take them. But that was
the agreement from the beginning. So they knew that that was going to
have to happen. But I haven't seen that ad. I might have to look it
up.
>>: So what do you think it says about communication in other
situations, other parent/child things, other child/child and even
adult-to-adult communication.
>> Lana Yarosh: Any specific aspect or just how this project in
general reflected on it? So I think one of the things that we forget
as researchers is that sometimes a small barrier to communication can
actually make a big difference. So we don't think about the log-in
screen or the buddy list as a big hurdle to jump through. But that was
basically the difference between using it and not using it in this
case. So the fact that you could just open the doors and they're
there, that made a big difference.
And I actually think that that's the case in a lot of other areas,
including the office, where I think it was much easier to be like one
button talk to your collaborator, rather than when we set this up over
several machines and why isn't this working and all that stuff.
I think that's what makes a difference between using or not using.
I think I saw other questions.
>>: After the fact when they were using the mobile video conferencing,
did they explain why it didn't work? Was it ->>: The mom didn't keep the phone charged.
that was a privacy issue.
And I think -- my theory is
So I thought a lot about mobile versions of the system, this idea of
mobile. And some of the early feedback that I got from divorced
families was that one of the things they really wanted to make sure was
always there is an easy way to see is it on or is it off. If something
is mobile, like if I have an iPad that's using, doing my video
conferencing or something, if it can be left behind the couch and it
can be on. People leave stuff behind the couch all the time. I don't
know why they do, but they do. You're transmitting audio to the other
house without realizing it. That's one of the reasons the shared table
was designed as a piece of furniture so you know how to negotiate your
way around a piece of furniture. You can easily glance around see
whether doors are opened or closed and whether it's on or off.
Wait there's one more question and I'll come back to you.
>>: So one thing I love about this kind of thing, related ones, is just
the very analog nature of the way that it works, which is, it fits very
nicely with some of your other things in that you turn it on and
anything you put under it is by definition transmitted in some sort of
appropriate manner. So it can be used in very imaginative fashion. So
you can put all sorts of fun things under it. What are some of the
creative things you've seen? You showed a couple of things.
>>: You know, I wish -- so one of the pieces of feedback that we get
from the parent is that the deployment wasn't long enough. He was like
after the study I kept coming up with these cool things we should have
done that we didn't do. Oh, my God, why didn't we try Pictionary; that
would have been perfect for it. We saw a couple of things, but I think
all the things -- like the idea of holding hands, the kids came up with
that.
In the beginning, in the first probably like first three or four videos
that we have of parents using the system, they're using it just -- they
don't even pay attention to the tabletop. Like the little girl is
trying to show her mom the painted nails, the mom's not even looking at
them. She's looking at the screen because she's only interacted with
video conferencing before.
In one of the families, in the first family, the mom wouldn't even be
in front of the system as she was using it as a phone, stand to the
side and talk. Unfamiliar way for interacting for the families. I
don't know if they didn't yet or if they didn't -- I can't say that,
oh, this is like, this awesome thing they tried that we haven't thought
of before.
In fact, I think the most creative use of the system we saw in the lab
study deployment where the kids, the dad lay face up on the table and
the kid traced his face. So that was like really creative. Like I
wouldn't have come up with that.
But, yeah, most of the stuff we saw was pretty standard. So it was
like, oh here's my book report. You can see like the grade I got on
it. Here's a drawing, that kind of stuff.
The kids are the only ones to sort of try like playing tag with their
hands or like creating like ->>: [inaudible] the summary that they actually don't really use the
system as you intended it?
>> Lana Yarosh: No, they use it as I intended
I intended. I didn't see anything surprising,
I didn't see any use like whoa they just tried
weird that I wouldn't have thought of before.
spent more time thinking about the system than
person to think about anything. So maybe I've
the possible uses.
it. I'd say too much as
that's what I'm saying.
something completely
But probably because I
is reasonable for any
already anticipated all
>>: Do you have any paper design that would fit in a back pack, in a
handbag, under the airline seat?
>> Lana Yarosh: Yeah, we had some. I wish I could show you the
sketches in a way you could see them. But it's -- let me see if I can
get back to the sketches page here.
Well, you might have to -- I might have to show it to you separately.
But that was one sort of right there. It kind of hinged on having a
short throw projector. None of the parts of the system were stolen but
all were borrowed or begged. This is not really -- we didn't have like
short throw projectors or that kind of stuff to actually play around
with the idea of mobility more. But we did think about it a lot and
wish that it would happen.
>>: Was there any urge for asynchronous communication component to
this?
>> Lana Yarosh: So we actually built something in along those lines.
And so the idea, if you called the other table and nobody answered what
it did is captured a still image of the tabletop and projected it on
your side. The idea is you could leave a quick note on the table or
just draw some pictures on the table and the other person could see it
even if you didn't answer the call.
Nobody used it. And nobody used it not because I don't think
asynchronous is compelling, but because projectors took three minutes
to start up. And so you called and nobody answered, and you went away
by the time the projector started up to show you your still image.
But I think that there's a lot of potential for asynchronous,
especially in this case the families were basically an hour, an hour
and a half drive away from each other. So it's the same time zone and
still saw each other fairly frequently. I think things would be fairly
different if we were talking different states, different countries,
that kind of thing.
>>: Do you have data on how frequently they called and nobody answered?
>> Lana Yarosh:
I --
>>: And who called more, the kids or the parent?
>> Lana Yarosh: I do have how many times they called nobody answered.
But I mean I haven't actually looked at that data. Most of the time
they knew when the other person was going to call, even the spontaneous
stuff. They already knew that the kids were going to be home that day
or whatever. So most of the calls were answered.
>>: Who initiated more?
>> Lana Yarosh:
Who initiated more.
>>: The kids or the adults?
>> Lana Yarosh: I can show that. Hold on. So that I can show actual
data on, if you can see it. So basically the starred ones are the
people who initiated the conversation. In the first family it was like
dad all the way, basically. There was one conversation that the kid
initiated with a shared table. This line divides the predeployment
versus deployment. And the mom initiated one conversation of the
shared table in the first family. In the second family you see the
kids initiating a lot. Taylor is the boy he initiated and Kennedy is
the girl she initiated a lot of the conversation. The starred ones are
the initiated and the green ones are people that participated.
>>: You mentioned that in some families it created new opportunities
for conflict. Did it also in some families do the reverse, brought the
parents closer in some way or maybe improved their relationship?
>> Lana Yarosh: It created opportunities for conflict, but so we gave
this validated questionnaire developed by psychologists that like
measures different aspects of a relationship, and we looked at, okay,
on this questionnaire did they actually report more conflict or not.
So while they reported specific cases of conflict about the share
table, the family treated not have greater conflict overall. It's when
they interacted, had conflict -- they would have had conflict about
something else if it wasn't about the shared table. In the first
family there was greater conflict between the parents.
>>: As a result ->> Lana Yarosh: At least the mom felt that her relationship with her
ex-was less strong after the shared table deployment. I don't know as
a result of it. But certainly some causality there, potentially.
>>: And in the second family, where the kids bounced back and forth
between the different houses, did both adults use it with the kids
remotely?
>> Lana Yarosh:
kids remotely.
Yes, so both adults got a chance to use it with the
>>: So I really like this system. I really think it's compelling
especially to see the interleave of the physical play with the
projection and the camera. One of the things that struck me is for
output you had audio and you had visual in the form of projection. Did
you think at all about doing anything with like physical output, like
optics or widgets that one person could shake something over here if
they're holding on to it like it would move or if they're holding they
could feel what the other person was doing or having some built in
widgets they could compose as a part of the different things they did?
>> Lana Yarosh: We thought about it. We didn't do much more than
think about it. So it was interesting how much of that metaphorical
physical touch they got even without actual touch.
So I think sometimes maybe the symbol is just as powerful as the actual
sense that's being stimulated. I think it would be really interesting
to build in things like warmth, for example, like heat. I think that's
actually probably more indicative of closeness of like vibration. But
it would be cool to have some sort of actors -- we thought about this
idea of having like a playground for your toys where like things, like
if you spun your merry-go-round my merry-go-round would spin for my
toys, if you had a see saw we could put toys on each side and they
would go like that T but we didn't actually make that.
>>: For segmenting the human from the other objects on the table and
portraying stuff about the people or what they were doing at times did
you think at all about using different imaging sources like a video
camera?
>> Lana Yarosh:
For segmenting -- why are we segmenting the human --
>>: Trying to determine what the person's moving around versus the
image that you have so you have this low -- you have this thing where
you have frames that are dropped and you have stuff that you're trying
to show the resolution.
>> Lana Yarosh: No, I think there was a lot of things we could have
done to be more sophisticated in terms of how we handled the video
stuff. But we just didn't get around to it.
Yeah, I think there's a
around, still give high
of resolution. When it
but we didn't do that.
>> Kori Quinn:
coming.
[applause]
Okay.
lot of opportunities for when it's moving
frame rate but you don't need to have that good
stops that's when you upgrade the resolution,
Future work for that.
I'd like to thank Lana.
Thank you very much for