New Technologies to Help Families Love

Over half of the grandparents in North America live over 200 miles from their grandchildren, but today's communication tools fail for the young and old. In this talk, I discuss a large-scale qualitative study of families in the San Francisco Bay Area, and talk about the implications of that study for video-based communication in the future. I'll discuss a variety of prototypes of new technologies and interfaces developed in conjunction with Sesame Workshop, including Family Story Play and StoryVisit, projects designed for young children ages 3-5 and their adult loved ones. Our results show that connected reading can dramatically improve distant family members' sense of family togetherness, and suggest some interesting directions for future work around technology, videochat, and love.