How an app is bringing children and grandparents closer together

How a Swedish interaction designer is bringing children and grandparents together with her latest app.

From Finance to Interaction Design

Rozina Sidhu Koskela, developer of Titta

My name is Rozina Sidhu Koskela. I currently live in the south of Sweden in a town called Malmö, where I am studying my Interaction Design masters. My interest is in researching for design, and particularly designing for children. My previous experience lies in Finance, Project Management, and Business Analysis. After having worked in Finance for 6 years, it was time for a change: I was looking for a bigger challenge and I wanted this challenge to extend beyond the realm of Finance because I craved creativity which didn’t just involve analysing numbers on an Excel sheet. Moreover, with Design being such a new area I was curious as to how far I could push my boundaries within this new field. I have always had an interest in trying to get closer to the “user” in order to understand their needs and then design for them. My Interaction Design programme allows me to do exactly that.

The creation of Titta

This concept (Titta; which means ‘to look’ in Swedish) stemmed from the initial work on a project at university where I worked on a concept to create a unique experience between a parent and child, through engaging them in role-play. This role-play was enabled through a digital medium with the use of Microsoft’s Kinect technology.

Children playing with Titta

Soon after I created Titta, I entered a competition in which it was chosen to be part of a 3-week accelerator process, with help from business development coaching to visualization to preparation for market. During this process we were able to extend the concept into an iPad based game. The research process helped us realize that there was a need for creating a communicative platform between children and their grandparents, living apart. The iPad application offers a storytelling platform where both are able to communicate via video and audio, whilst interacting with objects and characters on the screen. The aim is to create, an interactive collaborative environment, which moves away from “traditional” Skype-type conversations.

Prototyping and user testing

The first working prototype called “Titta” was developed and tested in Unity. I am currently working with a developer, and we are working with new interactions and mechanics. In the near future we hope to release a second prototype. The plan is to go to market, after a few more iterations and after a clever solution is found in synchronising video and sound.

“…Tell a story, listen to the sound of interactions, play together and watch the story unfold”

With the first prototype of ‘Titta’ we tested it with 2 sets of grandparents and their grandchildren. The children were curious to interact with the characters that were controlled by their grandparents and quickly became aware of these interactions. The grandparents tended to naturally tell a story whilst interacting with the characters and the children were engaged in the interactions. From observations and from speaking to the users the children were interested in putting together different objects and characters to see what might happen as a result. They weren’t necessarily only interested in the conventional combinations such as the fact that when you put the unicorn close to the princess, the princess sits on the unicorn. The children were curious to form unusual combinations which didn’t however exist in the first prototype. For the second prototype an endless number of combinations are being looked at. The children were very fast in navigating around the space in which the narrative was set and this navigable setting was restricted in the first prototype. The second prototype will be set in a larger navigable space with a background which will move from the left to the right, as the character moves across the screen.

“Skype for children”

Why interaction design is so crucial

I am continuously researching ways to make my design ideas better and would be interested in any good input that people might have. At the moment I am looking into different storytelling techniques and am in the process of writing a scientific paper into how players make sense of the device through storytelling and play, and how it is that these sense-giving practices take place. I think Interaction Design is important for game designers when we start to think about the user experience in the game environment. The interactions which occur in the gaming world are based on the information gathered and the decisions made. Interaction design can contribute to the way in which the information is conveyed, through asking questions such as what, how and why and understanding the environment from the users perspective.