dude's magic box &
grandma's lapdesk
One function historically performed by aging
adults (grandparents) in an extended family is that of the care and
nurturing of grandchildren. Clearly, geographical distance disrupts all
forms of this function. Technological support that reconnects the
grandchildren and the grandparents can not only restore this historically
significant function and therefore be of benefit to both parties, it can
also address issues of social isolation.
Dude’s Magic Box provides a means for grandchildren to share artifacts
from their world with their grandparents. The grandchild participates by
placing objects in a box which takes a picture of its contents and then
forwards that image to the grandparents. The grandparents have a LapDesk
that allows them to receive those images, ask questions of the grandchild
about those images by making voice annotations to the images, and share
those images and annotations with their guests. The grandchild interacts
with the box through a touch-sensitive screen located on its top and gets
feedback concerning the grandparent’s use of the sent images through an
entertaining and engaging (in the Tomagachi electronic-pet sense)
on-screen character named Dude. |
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people
Jim Rowan [jrowan@cc.gatech.edu]
Elizabeth Mynatt [mynatt@cc.gatech.edu]
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funding
This project is funded by the Aware Home Research
Initiative. |
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publications
Siio, I., Rowan, J., and Mynatt, E. (2002). "Peek-a-drawer:
Communication by furniture." In
Extended Abstracts of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
(CHI
2002). Minneapolis, Minnesota: ACM Press, pp. 582-583. [pdf] |
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