Research Philosophies in Interaction Design and Children Introduction to the session

Research is an interesting activity and an interesting word. Research can be defined inseveral ways and each definition allows for a different take on what is good research andwhat is essential for research. One definition of research is that it is ‘the systematic studyof a phenomenon (or several phenomena) that results in new understanding, newmeaning, or new knowledge’. When I began as a researcher, I ‘assumed’ I knew how to do research. I constructed whatI thought were fair ‘experiments’ pitting one set of situations against another andmeasuring what I could. For instance, I let children of several different ages use a rangeof different text input techniques and, using counterbalancing to minimize learningeffects and so on, created a ‘nice’ experiment. In 2001 I spent a week teaching in Finland and met Scott MacKenzie from Toronto, atext input research specialist. During an interesting week, we often chatted about research and specifically about the research that I was doing. He asked me questions like‘How old were the kids?’, ‘What sort of text were they inputting?’, ‘What did you measure?’, ‘How smart were the kids?’ and so on..... The detail of all the questions heposed to me during that period have been lost over time but one enduring commentremains ‘Too many variables!’ ‘Too many variables’ is a major problem in empirical research with children and much ofthis variability is a direct result of the variability of the child. More homogenous groupsof individuals (for instance, 16 undergraduate computing students) pose much less of aproblem for the empirical researcher than, say, 16 five to six year olds. The more variables there are in a research study, the more subjects are needed, the more subjectsare needed, the more lengthy / costly the study. In our IDC field there is an uneasy understanding of empirical research. Far too oftenpapers report what seem to be ‘partially constructed experiments’ with tiny samples of children. Some commentators would ‘forgive’’ this behaviour, pointing to the invariabledisclaimers in the write up that say things like ‘given the small sample used in this studyit is not possible to generalize the results’. Another weakness in our field is in theinterpretation of results ‘the results show that there is a difference between the twoconditions, although that difference is not significant’. This sort of research design and research reporting is bad and it is a direct result of a poorunderstanding of experimental design and statistical interpretation. As a community, wedo ourselves no favours publishing this sort of work. Either we ‘learn’ how to do itproperly or we quit doing empirical research all together as there will always be ‘toomany variables’ to deal with. Is Child-Computer Interaction a Distinct ResearchDiscipline? A socio-cultural activity theory approach to CCI Ole Sejer Iversen, University of [email protected]/~sejer Ole Sejer Iversen holds a position as an AssociateProfessor at the Department of Information andMedia Studies, University of Aarhus. His main areaof research is interaction design with an emphasison spatial IT concepts for new interactive schoolenvironments. The development of these newinteractive school environments is inspired by theScandinavian Participatory Design tradition with aspecial emphasis on the involvement of teachers,experts and students throughout the design process.Ole Sejer Iversen has published at the Interaction Design & Children conference since 2002. In this panel session, I want to introduce my research philosophy by asking the question:Is Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) a distinct research discipline within HCI? I have a background in Scandinavian Participatory Design with a Socio-Cultural ActivityTheory foundation. For several years I have conducted research in Participatory Designfor work practices in industry. In 2000, I became interested in the possibilities ofinvolving non-professionals in participatory design processes. In a research-through-design process, I wanted to investigate the consequences of engaging non-professional and under aged users in the design of future technology. My hypothesis was thatparticipatory design needed an entirely new toolbox for conducting collaborative designsessions with children. I was wrong. I discovered that design with children can benefitfrom most conventional participatory design methods, tools and techniques. Moreover, designing with children does not need more preparation or more special treatment than designing with other communities of practices such as doctors, teachers, plant operators,etc. Socio cultural activity theory provides the theoretical basis for understandingchildren as participants in communities of practice and thereby provides the argumentsfor including them as authentic stakeholders in participatory design processes. Socio Cultural Activity Theory: Children are authentic stakeholders in designTo some extent, CCI research is rooted on the Piagetean scheme theory emphasizing thatchildren lack knowledge and experience and have fundamentally different experiencesand understanding of the world compared to adults. According to the work of Piaget,children are in a cognitive developmental process in which cognitive skills areaccommodated and assimilated in the process that leads to the ultimate goal of adulthood.An alternative view in Socio-cultural theory (as presented by the Russian scholarsVygotsky and Leontjev) acknowledges the work of Piaget but voices the need for a moresocio-cultural frame for understanding children’s development. According to Leontjev,personal development takes place through participation in social practice and isdependent on the condition these practices give for a person’s participation in specificactivities. Different phases in children’s development can be related to the qualitativechanges in institutional practice. Leontjev introduces the notion of appropriation toemphasize the social nature of children’s development and learning. According toLeontjev, the child’s appropriation of culturally devised tools comes about throughinvolvement in culturally organized activities in which the tool plays a role. Leontjevtreats human development as primarily driven by the social and cultural expectations ofthe individual, when engaged in cultural practices. Thus, with this point of departure, weembrace a focus on children as technically competent, resourceful partners with a distinctsocial practice, able to make key decisions in the design process on the same terms as anyother stakeholder. Thus, from this perspective there is no reason why children should notbe admitted into the participatory design process as authentic stakeholders and be seen asa resource in design on equal terms with any other partners. So is CCI a distinct research discipline within HCI? I have my doubts. In the words ofToni Downes, once the adult assumption of superiority based on age and cognitivematurity is put aside, researchers can build on the techniques that field workers long agodeveloped. This in not to say that there isn’t a need for CCI research. On the contrary, Ienvision CCI as an HCI outpost through which new tools and techniques can be added tothe existing Participatory Design toolbox. ____________________________ The Socio Cultural Activity Theory approach to CCI is further developed in Iversen, O.S., & Brodersen, C.(2007): Bridging the Gap between users and children A socio-cultural approach to designing withchildren, selected for inclusion in Springer's journal Cognition, Technology and Work for the special issueon Child-Computer Interaction: Methodological Research.