The relationship between children and extended family members (such as grandparents) is extremely important, providing meaning, knowledge, and enjoyment. However, the distributed nature of our modern society has made it difficult for young children to remain connected with extended family. We conducted a study with young children and their parents, as well as grandparents of young children, to explore their needs and preferences when communicating remotely. Through the use of video prototypes, we found a number of themes related to the types of interactions that devices should afford for young children and grandparents. These include tensions between children’s independence and parental control, the need for child-led bursts of interaction, and considerations on device lifetime and the link to remote family members. In this paper, we detail our methodology and findings to arrive at design values for this particular user group.

Video communication systems work relatively well for family members and friends when they want to converse with each other between their homes. Yet it is much more challenging to share activities using mobile video conferencing in outdoor settings. We explored the design of mobile video conferencing systems that focused on allowing family and friends to participate in outdoor leisure activities together over distance. We created and studied two technology probe setups: shared geocaching and shared bicycling. Both used mobile cameras and streamed audio and video between remote family members or friends as they participated in the activities. Through these design and study explorations, we explore how family and friends make use of mobile video during leisure activities, what elements are important for the design of such systems, and how mobile video for outdoor leisure activities compares and contrasts to video calling in the home and, more generally, while mobile. Our research points to design considerations around camera views, when and how audio and video should be presented, and the privacy concerns of users and how to balance them with the benefit of the technology.

Distance separated grandparents and grandchildren often face challenges in staying connected. To explore this topic, we designed G2G, a shared calendar and video messaging system to connect young children (ages 5-10) with their grandparents over distance. Our design focused on providing grandparents and grandchildren with an awareness of each other's lives to support conversations and design elements to help reduce the need for parent scaffolding. A field study with two grandparent-grandchild pairs over two months showed that systems designed around structured communication can help young children develop a routine around staying in touch with their remote grandparents. Autonomy in maintaining awareness can help children to be engaged more easily. This suggests that designs focusing on connecting young children to their grandparents over distance should be flexible yet structured and designing to reduce parental scaffolding can lead to positive effects and strengthened relationships.

Telepresence attendance at academic conferences is now a reality and allows people who cannot attend in person with the opportunity to still be “present.” This is valuable for people who face accessibility challenges, cost or travel restrictions, or limited time for travel. We have deployed and studied the use of telepresence robots at three ACM conferences, Ubicomp/ISWC 2014, CSCW 2016, and CHI 2016, ranging from remote users having dedicated telepresence robots to users sharing telepresence robots both synchronously and asynchronously. In this article, we report on the telepresence offerings along with the user behaviors, experiences, and the social norms found for remote conference attendance. Our results across the studies focus around three main themes: shared vs. dedicated robot usage, identity presentation and the value and challenges associated with it; and local in-person support through proxies and instant messaging backchannels. These themes point to three different areas of design exploration for telepresence robots, pointing out the limitations of existing design solutions with respect to each theme, areas for future telepresence design work, and the value in considering varied telepresence robot solutions, including both dedicated and shared telepresence robots.

Video chat systems such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime have been widely adopted by family members and friends to connect with one another over distance. We have conducted a corpus of studies that explore how various demographics make use of such video chat systems in which this usage moves beyond the paradigm of conversational support to one in which aspects of everyday life are shared over long periods of time, sometimes in an almost passive manner. We describe and reflect on studies of long-distance couples, teenagers, and major life events, along with design research focused on new video communication systems—the Family Window, Family Portals, and Perch—that explicitly support “always-on video” for awareness and communication. Overall, our findings show that people highly value long-term video connections and have appropriated them in a number of different ways. Designers of future video communication systems need to consider: ways of supporting the sharing of everyday life rather than just conversation, providing different design solutions for different locations and situations, providing appropriate audio control and feedback, and supporting expressions of intimacy over distance.

A variety of systems have been designed to support communication between distance-separated grandparents and grandchildren. Yet there are few studies of the actual conversational routines of these groups as well as the social challenges that might arise as a result of technology usage. To address this gap, we conducted an interview and diary study that explores the conversational practices of distance-separated grandparents and young grandchildren (aged 3-10) from the perspective of the grandparents and parents of the children. Our results describe the focus of grandparent-grandchild conversations and show that grandparent-grandchild communication is not without its challenges: grandparents sometimes feel self-conscious, perceive that parents or children will be annoyed if they ask too many questions, and do not want to interfere too much in their grandchildren's lives. The implication is that designs should attempt to support the conversation routines and needs of grandparents and grandchildren while attempting to mitigate the social challenges.

Telephone calls and videoconferencing are ubiquitous parts of everyday life. As the content of the call may extend beyond just words, people share applications and media using techniques such as screen sharing and email attachments. Little is known about the prevalence of this behavior and the benefits it can provide. We conducted a survey and a lab study to examine media sharing during a video call and found that it can be useful as well as emotionally engaging. Participants indicated that they would be more likely to have more frequent and longer calls if media sharing were easy. Overall, this work demonstrates the importance of exploring communication media that augment and enrich our everyday activities.