The project

“(...) the secret to interface design: make it go away.” (Nicholas Negroponte, 1996 pg.93)

This research project aims to investigate Social Signifiers and how they can contribute for providing young children more intuitive and engaging ways of interacting and communicating with people using the Internet. The primary objective of this project to minimize communication restrictions caused by physical distance between children and distant members of their family. The relevance of conducting such research lies on the constant necessity of providing simpler user interfaces for people with reduced or computer skills.

The Hypothesis
Making use of social signifiers (Donald Norman) it is possible to provide young children more intuitive experience when communicating remotely.

What?
A toy aimed to enable young children to remotely communicate with family members using the internet in a secure and entertaining way.

Why?
Digital media is everywhere and it plays an important role in people's lives. Although anyone can benefit from digital information, elderly people and young children are hardly considered as target user for most digital systems. There seems to be a lack of adequate computer interfaces for these age groups. Situations where family members do not live in the same surroundings are not unusual. The Internet has given people remarkable opportunities of keeping in touch with each other regardless their physical locations. Nonetheless, communication through internet is a privilege of determined user groups. There is an urgency for simplification of user interfaces in order to allow people to execute tasks more efficiently, according to their intellectual, physical, emotional and social skills.

Why Children?
Users are in the centre of digital universe. Pure digital data has no value unless it can be processed by people who are able to do something meaningful with it. In order to map the future of computer interactions, it is necessary to consider a very special user group, children. Today's youngsters are the future power users. Thus, the primary target was defined as young children, whose ages vary between 3-5 years-old.

User Groups
User group 1: 3-5 year-old children.
User group 2: Relatives who are not located near the child's residence, such as grandparents, uncles and aunts, divorced parents.

Usage Scenario
In order to illustrate the applicability of such system, some scenarios between young children and their relatives include traveling parents, divorced parents, relatives who live abroad, relatives who live in the same city, relatives who live in a distant city, relative who live in a nearby city. Home and school constitute the main usage spaces.

Research methods
Researches involving young children (ages 4 and younger) tend to use methods of observation primarily because communication and writing skills are still a limitation. (Druin, 2002).