Activity-based interaction
Matthew N. Bonner, Lan Wang, Elizabeth D. Mynatt · 2012
Child Life Specialists (CLS's) are medical professionals who use activities to educate, comfort, entertain and distract children in hospitals. Adapting to a shifting cast of children, context and mediating activities requires CLS's to be experts at a kind of articulation work. This expertise means CLS's are well equipped to help technologists introduce child-facing interventions to the hospital. We conducted participatory design activities with 9 CLS's to develop two mobile systems to explore how CLS-child interactions are shaped by activities. We observed 18 child-CLS pairs using these systems in a hospital setting. By analyzing these encounters, we describe a continuum for classifying activities as either Co-Present or Collaborative. We then introduce a framework, Activity-Based Interaction, to describe structural components of activities that impact their position on this continuum. These concepts suggest new approaches to designing mediating technologies for adults and children.