Technology’s Role in Families Navigating the COVID-19 Context
The COVID-19 situation is unlike any that we have faced in the last century. Families today have been undergoing a significant amount of stress as many transition to a world of social distancing, attempt to maintain children’s schooling at home, lose access to childcare, and manage working from home or working in essential jobs supporting the health and safety of their neighborhoods. Interactive technology is and will continue to play an important role in this transition, and it is our hope to understand how the way that technology is designed is either supporting or hindering families. Our work will inform the design of these technologies to make them better work for families in times of disruption.
We are a group of researchers at the University of Washington with expertise in human-centered design, information science, learning sciences, and interaction design & children. We have spent many years studying the design of interactive technology and how it impacts the lives of families and youth. Several of us are also parents ourselves and are personally experiencing both the highs and lows of this time. We want to systematically understand the experiences of families to collect stories, generate knowledge, and inform the design of interactive technologies for families. We are grateful to have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation’s RAPID program to embark on this research.
With this research, we aim to understand technology’s role in how families with children between the ages of 3 and 13 navigate this situation. How are current designs supporting or hindering families during this time? How are they helping families connect? Are diverse families being impacted in different ways? How can technology be better designed?
We will be recruiting 30 diverse families with children between the ages of 3 and 13 to participate remotely in an online platform over an 8–10 week period. We will be collecting stories and experiences, asking families to review and rate technology, and inviting families to help us co-design better technologies that would support their needs and situations. We expect that families will contribute approximately 20–30 minutes per week toward the project. If you’re interested in participating in our study, please complete our screener survey and we will contact you if you are eligible to participate. We expect that families participating in our study will be able to share and reflect on their experiences and meet and learn from others who are in a similar situation.
We also invite parents, caregivers, children, extended family, technology designers, and researchers to follow along as our study unfolds and we share stories and experiences. Our longer-term goal will be to produce scientific manuscripts, but our immediate goal is to share our findings as we learn them to help as many families as possible learn from and immediately apply our findings to their own situations.
Feel free to follow our research along or various social media channels:
We will soon be also adding accounts to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
