Opportunity
American families with working parents often struggle to balance and prioritize between family time, work, and other daily tasks. We interviewed the parents of young families all across the United States to try and identify the main constraints on the quantity and quality of "family time," which we defined as: |
1) being co-present, and
2) creating memorable experiences.
Solution
In the spirit of personal informatics, we proposed a system (comprised of a mobile app and table-top device) that serves as a means of data collection and reflection for daily family activities. Where and when did family members do activities together? And with whom? Research After conducting multiple interviews with parents across the United States, our team organized a participatory design session where we asked potential users to map out their ideal and least ideal perceptions of family time. |
We assigned family role-playing to each of the other project groups in our class. Then, we distributed identical sets of icons and symbols that we printed and cut up. With these materials, we asked each "family" to map out an ideal family experience as well as a recent family experience that did not go so well.
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From a personal informatics approach, the first crucial step for enacting a behavior change is to set clear and concise goals and actions. Fam.ly starts with this in the onboarding process.
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These visualizations are realtime and represent the user's fam.ly's "togetherness" and "co-presence." The goal is to reveal how close family members are to each other throughout the given time period.
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Togetherness is defined by how close each user's relationship is to each other.
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Co-presence is defined by how geographically close the users are, since proximity is a factor in family closeness.
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According to Li's "A staged-based model of personal informatics systems" (2010), enacting behavior change almost always requires intermittent periods of reflection on the user's progress towards a goal. To illustrate this concept, below are example screens shown to each member of the fam.ly as they rate the quality of their recent family times:
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The final stage of the cycle to affect behavior change is to setup subsequent behaviors at regular frequencies. To make this action as easy as possible, the app reveals and predicts potential and upcoming fam.ly times based on previous fam.ly time data from the orbitals. This calendar can be shown as a TV channel on the fam.ly's TV, or on a tabletop device such as the fam.ly picture frame.
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