PLAY & DIGITAL GAMES

Alongside undertaking research I also write about play, digital games and experimental research methods that combine art and design practices with those from the social sciences. I publish reports for industry, peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and blog posts.

NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT US

What does it mean to be inclusive when working with kids in research?

‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ is the title of a chapter in Costanza-Chock’s (2020) book ‘Design Justice’. The chapter starts by outlining the controversy that followed a Google employee sharing a memo called ‘echo chamber’ that suggested the company, like most tech companies, had limited diversity and thus the products being designed within them were not inclusive. In the children’s tech and digital play industry, there is a similar lack of diversity in the workers developing products for younger audiences. Bringing a more diverse workforce onboard is one aspect that needs addressing; making sure we are connected to diverse groups of children and families is another part of the equation. They are connected. Working with diverse groups of children during the research and development phases of design means children from under represented groups are much more likely to see a place for themselves in our industry as they grow up.

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ARTICLE

Yamada-Rice, D. (2021) Children’s interactive storytelling in Virtual Reality, Multimodality & Society, Vol. 1 (1), p.48-67.

DO EMERGING FORMS OF DIGITAL PLAY REQUIRE NEW MEANS FOR ANALYSING DATA?

Drawing: Dylan Yamada-Rice

It’s fascinating and fun to observe a child at play. Even more fascinating, though, is the underlying engagement and learning that can be uncovered through emerging means of transcribing and analyzing data.

Increasingly, research with children in an industry context uses big data from online surveys or harvests data directly from the technology young people are using. Working as a Senior Research Manager at Dubit and a Senior Tutor in Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, I too collect and analyse data around children’s play, to guide the design of new digital products.

Still, I remain an advocate of the smaller-scale qualitative insights gained from visual and experimental methods. While more resource intensive, observing and talking to children about their use of digital content can provide very rich accounts of what engages them, that may be obscured in quantitative data alone.

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CAN MAKING A HEADSET TEACH CHILDREN HOW VR WORKS?

For three years, Dubit has been engaged in research around children and virtual reality. Beyond basic questions of health and safety, engagement and enjoyment, UI and UX, it’s critical with this emerging medium to ask how children can learn to critique VR content. As with any medium, we should want young people across cultures to be critically literate — choosing and engaging thoughtfully across diverse VR content, but also to be content creators themselves.

Making builds an active connection between thinking and knowing. Anthropologist Tim Ingold (2013)* wrote that humans have forever learned about the world through our hands.

While VR content creation is still a complex process, perhaps enabling young people to design their own VR headsets, with an eye toward enhancing the immersive experience, would spark critical thinking about how VR works. I tested this idea in my role as a Senior Tutor at London’s Royal College of Art, with postgraduate students, building from key findings in Dubit’s Children and Virtual Reality study.

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