The latest issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing has published Nokia Research Center's IDEA team's paper about their Family Story Play project.
From the abstract:
As part of an investigation on how families communicate, we have developed a number of prototypes to support connected families. In this article we overview our ethnographic research and describe the Family Story Play concept, a design for improving long-distance family togetherness. Story Play is an interactive book-reading system designed for 2-4 year olds that couples video conferencing with paper books and interactive content to support grandparents reading together with their grandchildren over the Internet.
Story Play is designed to improve the amount and quality of interaction between children and distant grandparents by shifting interactions from conversation to shared activities. Recognizing the importance of understanding children's activities within the context of their social environment, in our approach we do not design for a child in isolation. Rather, we design for children within their larger social context, taking into account family dynamics and how parents and others guide and scaffold children’s activities. Ethnographic methods provide a rich understanding of current family practices, and inform our work to support today's families. Our goal is to design technologies to meet the needs of all family members together - the young and the old - as a social group.
For more information, or to purchase a copy of this paper, it is available online from the IEEE Digital Library article page here.
