Week 3 -interviews

Interview with John Zimmerman

We had the opportunity to talk with John Zimmerman — an interaction designer and researcher with a joint appointment as an Associate Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and at the School of Design. He has had core research in ‘Designing for the Self’ where he has investigated on value creation and emotional attachment to material possessions. His work looks at how to make things that help people become the person they desire to be; how a product can help a person feel they are moving towards their idealized self in a specific role. He has also worked on creating sleep solutions that harbor independence in children.

Meeting him and getting his insights on value creation and family sleep optimization helped us to create a way forward with our research and concepts. Some of the learnings from the interview :

• How do you address a profitable need?
• When creating solutions, focus on what do the parents want — keep the parent’s goal as starting focus.
• Parents associate children bedtime as a very involved system — the desire to impart values comes into strong play.
• Parents of growing children, take ‘celebration’ as a tool for progress. Celebrating an achievement, let’s say the transition from sleeping in a crib to a big kid bed, helps reinforce a sense of growth and independence.
• Parents associate bedtime routines with emotional bonds in objects — they tend to keep a storybook that they read to their child forever. A kindle would not hold that much emotional value to them. How do you create a product that uses this emotional value?
• Creating consistent routines are important for child sleep. A child usually always wants to read the same stories that he is used to.
• Think of memories as emotional bonds. Can revival of memory in a visual format help create storylines for children?

Interview with Families

Case Study One

Richa and Madhan are both working professionals. They have a 4 and a half-year-old daughter, Anvi. Anvi is an energetic, happy and curiosity filled child. She has day school (pre-school) which she goes for from 9 to 3. There is usually a dedicated nap time during school. After school, she comes home with her nanny and has a schedule of play time. Once her parents come back from office, between 5–7pm, she likes to interact with them. They sometimes like to go on walks together in the evening. This helps tire Anvi for sleep. Richa starts mentioning bedtime to Anvi at around 8:30–9pm. Anvi loves to negotiate at this point, trying to extend her activities. She tries to talk more about watching television or playing with her toys. But Richa starts talking about getting ready for bed on her own. Anvi and she usually start getting ready for bed together — they wash their hands, feet and face, brush their teeth and change into their sleep clothes. This routine of getting ready together is important for the mother and daughter, as it’s a bonding period, where they talk about their day and share stories. Once Anvi is ready to go to bed, she usually requests a story and her favorite pillow. The stories are all familiar with her and the books are kept next to her bed. Anvi selects the story and her mother reads her to sleep. These days Anvi is having a few night terrors, but they have been tackling that by saying prayers before sleep as well as having a night light within the room — giving Anvi some reassurance.

Insights

• Anvi has had a regular sleep routine since she was 13 months old.
• Because of the familiarity of the schedule, she does not fight it, or try to delay it.
• Her parents have a strict control on her diet and avoid giving her any sugary food before sleep time.
• She has a bond with the pillow and needs it every night to sleep — value base. She also requests stories from books she knows. The introduction of new books takes time and she usually always goes back to the old ones.
• Her mother stresses importance on being actively involved in the whole routine. The connection shared between them in these moments are important to both of them.

Talking about concepts to Richa, she likes the idea of having an interactive story time, but not at the cost of it being too visually stimulating. Audio books do help in calming Anvi. When asked about dreams and we can create visualizations for kids dreams by letting they draw them out, she was interested in the scenario but mentioned concern again about it being too stimulating for Anvi. As Anvi is not too attached to any soft toy — the concept of having a ‘sleep buddy’ did not seem like a good fit. However, if the toy did have night light as a part of its function as well as monitoring/data storing technology, it would be of value. 
The concept where we talked of a medium to create negotiating sleep times was preferred. The idea of incorporating independence into the schedule and giving the child a sense of control, but not too much, was 
appreciated.

Case Study Two

Observation With a Family

Ganggang is a 9-year-old boy who goes to school as a fourth grade student. His dad is a surgeon working at UPMC and his mom is a professor at University of Pittsburgh. The observation took place on the 15th; it started at 19:30 and ended at 23:30. The mom was not at home during the entire observation period. And there were another pair of parents with their two boys in the house till 22:00 because the observation day was in fact a festival for family union in Chinese culture (mid-autumn festival).

(8:00 — 16:00 school time

16:00 — 17:00 piano class)

• 19:30–20:00 play time

The kids were mainly playing Minecraft on TV. Occasionally the kids would pick up nurf guns to start an imaginative war in the living room.

• 20:00–21:00 dinner time

When eating, the dad constantly said “No” to certain bad behaviors that his child was performing, such as eating too loud or grabbing too much food. However, he rarely give any explanation to the kid of why he thought that’s inappropriate. The kid just fought back with a even more dramatic version of the same behavior.

• 21:00–22:00 play time

During this time period the adults were performing all the chores and the kids were playing even more wildly. Ganggang asked his dad about a promise the dad made a week ago: “dad you said last week that I can have ice cream today, can I have some now?” The dad refused it and said “We’ll talk about this some other time.” The kid was really upset about this.

• 22:00–22:30 homework time
• 22:30–23:00 bedtime

The kid started to ask for food and beverages. When all his wishes are fulfilled, he went to upstairs and stayed near the fence of the second floor. He tried to have a dialogue with his dad who was watching him from the first floor: “What are you doing?” The dad answered “What are you doing?” Then the kid said: “I’m not doing anything. What? What are you doing?” After all those nonsense, Ganggang started to take a tour of every single room on the second floor. When he eventually went back to his own bedroom, he started to walk back and forth around the bed with wails and sighs. The dad did not respond to any of these; he just lied on the couch reading things on his cell phone. Eventually the kid started brushing his teeth and went on to the bed all by himself.

• 23:00–23:30 chat with the dad

On the way back to my lived place, I asked about his thoughts about bedtime routine. He answered the following:

“Establishing a bedtime routine is not just about how to get kids to go to bed; it is about teaching them not to go across the line and to survive in the society. They need to learn that when they are little, so that in the future they would unconsciously follow the rules in any setting. For example in teamwork, people need to control their behaviors and work together in order to reach to a long-term goal.”