Participatory Workshops

Our workshop participants included three children and one parent. Throughout our workshop, our activities let us find out their personality and their needs. The Icebreaker activity let us know whether the person is talkative or not from that, we could somewhat infer how talkative are they at home with family members. They were very open to each other as they are all from single parent families. The role reversal activity let us know what they would expect their parents/children do, which let us know the importance between of they way they think which may affect their relationship. We feel that the child responded in a way that was agreeable with parents judging from our parent participant. Our third activity enabled the participants to create what life they want the most by using magazine clippings from there we concluded that most of them desires more money and luxuries, however, they also showed that they want a happy family. In our last activity we allowed the user build a our product after explaining the basic concept very briefly so as not to make our idea appear concrete and finished. From there we can draw inspirations to improve our product. We found some interesting ideas. A running theme was that people wanted to make the product more anthropomorphic in order for them to be more open letting it in their lives. Ultimately, the workshops were a good way of finding information about the families an even less task-like manner than cultural probes. The participants made valuable suggestions to our product that we will integrate into our final design.