Category Archives: Building Stuff

Cross-Cultural Parenting and Technology

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My parents had two primary sources for parenting advice: my grandparents and the Dr. Spock book. If you are a parent today, you know that this is no longer the case! Millions of sources in printed literature, online, and in your local community all have opinions on how you should parent! How do parents manage so many diverse opinions? What happens when the values of the parents conflict with their community, with other family members, or even with each other? We thought that cross-cultural families (where the two parents are from different cultures or who are raising their child in a different culture from their own) may have a particularly salient perspective to offer on these important questions.

The idea for this project grew out of a workshop on family technologies. Over the last two years, I’ve had the honor of working with three great collaborators — Sarita Schoenebeck, Shreya Kothaneth, and Liz Bales — to try to understand cross-cultural parenting and to find opportunities for technology to help. All four of us are members of cross-cultural families (in one way or another) and we wanted to learn more about this fascinating phenomenon, so we interviewed parents from 18 cross-cultural families all around the United States. We investigated how these families respond to conflicts while integrating diverse cultural views, as well as how they utilize the wealth of parenting resources available online in navigating their lives. In our upcoming CHI 2016 paper (available as a pre-print here), we share what these parents told us about how these families find and evaluate advice, connect with social support, resolve intra-family tensions, incorporate multicultural practices, and seek out diverse views. But, what I want to share here are three design ideas for new technology that were inspired by these interviews. We think that they may not only be good for cross-cultural families but may help all kinds of families better integrate multiple cultures into everyday life. We show some very preliminary sketches of these ideas below:

Some ideas for new technology inspired by our interviews with cross-cultural families!

Some ideas for new technology inspired by our interviews with cross-cultural families!

For me personally, this project was fascinating because I got to talk to so many interesting families. It was gratifying to think that maybe cross-cultural families could inspire ideas that could help all families and bring us all a little closer. What do you think, would you use any of the ideas we suggested in the paper if we went ahead and built it? Let us know below!

Designing Technology for Major Life Events Workshop

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High emotional impact and the value of the journey are two big aspects of designing tech for major life events.

High emotional impact and the value of the journey are two big aspects of designing tech for major life events.

While at CHI, I got the wonderful opportunity to help organize the workshop on Designing Technology for Major Life Events along with Mike Massimi, Madeline Smith, and Jofish Kaye. We had a great group of HCI researchers with a diverse range of topics: gender transition, becoming a parent, dealing with a major diagnosis, bereavement, and more. My own interest in the topic grew from my experience designing technology for divorce and technology for recovery from addiction. In one of the breakout groups, we discussed the challenges of designing technology in this space and some of the ways we’ve dealt with these challenges in our work. In this post, I want to highlight a few of these:

Building Tech is Risky. Building a system requires the designer to commit to specific choices and it’s easy to find something that wasn’t adequately considered after the fact. In tech for major life events, this challenge can be exacerbated because the consequences of a failed design might have big emotional repercussions (e.g., tech messing up some aspect of a wedding). Sometimes, it is a big question of whether we even should try to bring tech into a given context.

Ethics of Limited Access. Building technology to support a major life event may mean excluding those without the financial means, skills, motivation, language, etc. to use the provided intervention. Additionally, we frequently stop supporting a prototype technology at the end of the study which can be really problematic if it was providing ongoing benefits to the participants. Again, because of the high stakes involved, issues of ethics of access to technology may be exacerbated when designing for major life events.

Tension Between Building Your Own and Leveraging Existing. Many systems we build require some critical mass of adoption before they are really useful. This is particularly important with tech for major life events because there may be relatively few people facing a particular relevant context at any point in time. One of the ways to deal with this is to piggyback on existing systems (e.g., building a Facebook app instead of a new SNS), but this may cause problems when the underlying technology makes changes outside of the researcher’s control (e.g., privacy policies change, APIs stop being supported, etc.).

Asking the Right Questions about the System You Built. The final challenge is understanding what kinds of questions to ask during the system evaluation. On one hand, it is important to go into the evaluation with some understanding of what it would mean for the system to be successful and the claims you hope to make about its use. On the other hand, it is valuable to be open to seeing and measuring unintended side effects and appropriations of the technology.

I think my two major take-aways from this discussion were a greater appreciation of how difficult it is to actually build something helpful in this space and the insight that many of these problems can be partially addressed by getting away for the type of study that focuses on evaluating a single system design using a small number of metrics. The risks of committing to a specific design solution can be mitigated by providing multiple versions of the intervention, either to be tested side-by-side or to let participants play around until they decide which solution is a better option for them. The ethics of access can be ameliorated by providing low-tech and no-tech means of achieving the same goals that your high-tech approach may support (e.g., Robin Brewer built a system to let the elderly check email using their landline phones). Planning for multiple solutions when building using others’ APIs can lead to a much more stable final system (e.g., the ShareTable we could easily switch from the Skype API to the TokBox API for the face-to-face video). And lastly, the problem of figuring out what to ask during and after a system deployment can be addressed by combining quantitative methods that measure specific predicted changes with qualitative methods of interviewing and observation that are more open to on-the-fly redirection during the course of the study. Overall, diversity of offered solutions, flexibility under the hood of your systems, and diversity of methods used in the evaluation lead to a stronger study and understanding of the target space.

Cross-Cultural Parenting Advice

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At CHI 2013, I attended and helped organize a workshop on Designing for Diverse Families. I’ve been meaning to blog about it for the past two months and recently reconnecting with one of the other organizers has given me the push that I needed. I want to tell you about one discussion that we are hoping to turn into an actual project. I also want to invite both workshop participants and readers who find this to be a compelling idea to potentially join in on this project.

The goal of the workshop was to better understand our own assumptions about what constitutes a “family,” understand the gaps in our own work, and see how we can be more inclusive as a community. The variety of projects presented really highlighted how different families can be in terms of structure, practices, values, and culture. While this diversity can make it very difficult to design for families, it is also an incredible resource. At a time when many parents experience a great deal of anxiety about “parenting right” and face conflicting seemingly authoritative sources on doing it this way or that way, it can be valuable to show that there are many ways to be a parent. Things that are assumed to be true in one culture, can be unheard of in another, but nonetheless children grow up and succeed. My favorite idea that came out this workshop is that getting a perspective from a different culture on specific parenting questions can be of benefit to many families. Basically, we want a parent to be able to ask “how do other families do this?” when faced with everyday worries such as when to introduce particular foods, how to sleep train a child, how to deal with an unruly teenager, etc. Presenting these answers in the context of their originating geography can help bring home the idea that there is no single right way of dealing with most of these questions, but rather many approaches that can be successful.

So, a few of us would actually like to make this happen! Here’s the basic sketch of a plan:

  • We populate the initial list of questions and answers using Yahoo answers
  • We continue getting answers to common questions by selectively using Mechanical Turk, tracking the geographic locations of the Turkers
  • We allow users to ask questions of the community and see a selection of answers from different parts of the world displayed on a map
  • Users are encouraged to give their own answer to another question when they see answers to their own

Obviously, it’s fairly rough at this stage, which is why I’m reaching out to y’all. So for the parents out there, would this be useful for you? For the builders out there, would you be interested in getting involved in making this happen? For the researchers out there, would you be interested in getting on board or just giving advice? If you are interested in being a co-investigator, please fill out this survey to let us know what you’d like to do and we can start getting a plan together!

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