Impact of Apartment Management Security System on Children
Probing into the apartment management system to understand its implications of security features on children’s mindset
Team: 10 Hills | Siddarth Sreekumar, Vijay Chaitanya, Vishnuprasad Jahagirdar, Yelumalai S
Objective:
- Understanding the aspects of apartment management system dealing with child security.
- Studying the behavioral change in children and teenagers occurred due to the system’s security functions and how it affects their relationship with parents and peers.
- Capturing repercussive emotional change due to these situations which affect their personal lives and routine.
Progress so far:
- After initial sessions of brainstorming, mind mapping and understanding of the apartment management system (refer https://medium.com/gigs-service-systems-platforms-and-design/impact-of-apartment-management-security-system-on-children-24e8f33dc57f), a series of interactive sessions were conducted with kids to understand their mindset and thought process. These activities took place in gated communities and in the context of a secured residential space where they were bound by restrictions and protocols.
Product Semantics Activity
This activity was conducted to see what they like, dislike and why. A deck of cards was presented to them which had to be sorted. The cards had contradicting images like children playing indoors vs children playing outdoors, dogs with leash vs dogs which aren’t tied to a leash. It was interesting to note their explanations.
Visual representation of emotions.
The second activity was to understand how do they feel about a particular scenario and how do they perceive it. A set of four cards which had the following questions were given to them where they were asked to draw/write and assign emoticon stickers against the questions.
The activities were conducted among 35 children belonging to different age groups (8–15 and 16–20), few of their responses are as below:
There were questionnaires which were prepared by the team for parents and kids which acted as our reference for the interviews. Between the activities, the kids were asked question-related to the apartment management system and how they feel about it. The parents were asked questions about the security features of the system and how is it different compared to before the security systems were in place. Both children and parents were asked about situations where the system has caused issues for them.
The data recorded was mapped on a graph to understand what kind of emotions were the once which get affected majorly because of the system and an empathy map was derived to understanding their feelings and thoughts around these scenarios.
Learnings
- Children are more open when interviewed away from the parent’s supervision.
- Children like when they are given the freedom to decide and their emotions are valued instead of being overlooked.
- Some of the kids try their ways around the system to bring their friends inside.
- Children prefer to do what they feel and don’t like it when monitored a lot or stopped at exit gates for security reasons.
- Given a scenario, each child has a distinct interpretation as compared to the rest.
Based on the analysis and mapping done so far our way ahead would be to reflect these observations and communicate them through an interactive video. In the process, we would be building different scenarios and personas derived from our research. We plan to look at the different actors involved in the system.
Our objective is to demonstrate how the security services and the system along with the actors involved can cause drastic changes in the child’s thought process.
