A mother and an HCI student: Zainab – HCI for Digital Civics 2015

“Interviewee: Zaineb, a mother for a one-year-old daughter, and a first year phd student.

Zaineb is interested in HCI and Motherhood. Being a mother and having interests in identifying design issues for specific groups, made her interested in merging her interests with her experience as a mom by focusing on designing technologies for specific groups of moms (moms with infants) in order to share their experiences during their babies’ development. According to Zaineb, “new moms” need to share their experiences to learn from each other about babies development stages.

As a student registered in HCI module, she would like to know more about topics related to design issues and considerations for specific groups (in her case; supporting motherhood)

Some challenging areas in HCI she found are tangible computing as it is a “wide area that covers many other areas of computing”. What she also found problematic or confusing is the technical part of HCI and specifically coding, as well as qualitative studies and how to code interviews.

Here I would like to recommend two papers for Zainab to read that might be useful for her to in starting her research

1- I found a similar project here to Zainab’s topic here which is “mightMammiBelli

mightMammiBelli: sharing baby activity levels between expectant mothers and their intimate social groups. BY: Mary Hui et al.o

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2212776.2223687&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=729787010&CFTOKEN=60657298

2- Another project is :

Social networking site use by mothers of young children. By Meredith Ringel Morris

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2531602.2531603&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=729787010&CFTOKEN=60657298

I also found her someone interesting to chat with ; Sheryl Sandberg. A mother and COO of Facebook. Sheryl encourages women to not be balance their lives as mothers and their roles in their jobs and societies. Although she does not talk about infants and sharing mothers’ expertise, but I found her an inspiring model for initiating motherhood related projects

Fainally, I defined a paper for me to read in the future

Hollaback!: the role of storytelling online in a social movement organization. By: Jill P. Dimond et al.

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2441776.2441831&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=729787010&CFTOKEN=60657298

Alexander Wilson says:

November 19, 2015 at 11:10 am

Thanks, Tag, for the interesting report on the conversation you had with Zeinab. It’s clear you both discussed and explored the field that you’ll be entering. The paper suggestions you provided look like interesting insights on the field you plan on exploring.

As a non-computing science graduate, I would advocate for not getting hung up on the technical aspects of HCI/computing, and instead, try and think more theoretically about the direction these themes are taking. Try not to let your knowledge of programming reality-check everything – there is a lot of value in thinking about what might happen if there were no constraints in current technology.

I’m just wondering if more nuance could be bought out through the discussion; what, specifically, would you like to explore further and investigate further during a child’s development stages? I would suggest reading Bardzell & Bardzell’s paper “Towards a Feminist HCI Methodology“, who explore HCI’s move form the workplace and into domestic settings, and encourage researchers reflecting on their own interpretations, and, the social consequences of their contributions.

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