Gökçe Elif Baykal
Please Note
4 records found
1
Children in 2077
Designing children's technologies in the age of transhumanism
What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces can clearly be defined as transhumanist, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's lives by using the power of design fiction. Thus, main contribution of this paper is to create diverse presentation of provocative research ideas that will foster the discussion on the transhumanist technologies impacting the lives of children in the future.
Despite the Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) community's rapid growth in the past two decades, there has traditionally been less focus on developing a curriculum to teach CCI to students. This entails a risk for a gap between the accumulation of knowledge and the transfer of this knowledge to new generations of researchers and designers. Building on previous workshops organized at IDC 2011 and 2014, the goal of this workshop is to gauge the current state of teaching CCI to undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. More specifically, the workshop aims to re-evaluate previous lessons learned, stimulate reflection on best practices, facilitate an exchange of knowledge, and provide a forum for international collaboration. The envisioned outcome is a blueprint for a CCI curriculum that can be taught anywhere in the world.
Designing with and for preschoolers
A method to observe tangible interactions with spatial manipulatives
To date, the developmental needs and abilities of children under 4 years old have been insufficiently taken into account in the early stages of interaction design. This paper addresses this gap in the research by exploring how children between the ages of 26 and 43 months interact with spatial manipulatives. To this end, we modified intervention techniques for early spatial learning found in cognitive developmental studies and combined these with design methods used in Child-Tangible Interaction (CTI). From the former we borrowed the Preschool Embedded Figures Test (PEFT), and from the latter a storytelling approach incorporated into structured tasks with hands-on tools. In this paper, we first discuss related work on early spatial learning and CTI methods. Then, we describe a case study conducted with 14 parent-child dyads. Finally, we present the results, which offer insight into young children’s mental rotation skills, different rotation action strategies and parental input requirements. Our findings contribute to design methods to elicit age specific knowledge about young children’s hands-on learning, and set forth techniques and design considerations for evidence-based CTI to scaffold early spatial thinking skills.
Analyzing children's contributions and experiences in co-design activities
Synthesizing productive practices
Today, it has been broadly acknowledged in the CCI community that children are not only active learners and users of technology, but can also actively participate in the design process. However, it remains challenging to analyze children's experiences and creative contributions resulting from co-design activities (e.g. stories, paper prototypes, enacted ideas). This workshop will explore different ways to analyze children's (0 to 18 years) experiences and contributions in co-design activities, the perceived benefits and challenges of these approaches, and will serve as a venue for synthesizing productive practices that will move the CCI community forward.