Design Research II
Goals and Context
Motivated by our own experience of suffering from homesickness, feeling isolated or having communication gap when we can only stay far away from families during the pandemic, our group intends to explore main problems exposed or intensified by the distance amongst family members who cannot meet each other easily. The theme of our project is trying to create a humanized App or an electronic product to narrow the spatial distance and remove the communication barriers. For the sake of better understanding human needs and desires related to our topic, conducting a detailed design research about how family members interact with a particular product or service for connection is requisite.
The population we focused on will be families with separated members, most of which comprise kids going to university in another province or studying abroad, or couples working remotely, or families quarantined in different cities due to the epidemic. Since our target families are dispersed all over the world, a majority of our observation will be carried out in cyberspace, based on chat history, messages, pictures and videos that they post, voice and video calls etc.
Observer
Hong Yang
My observation concentrates on separated families from China mainland since I’m more familiar with the culture and people there, mainly based on WeChat family groups and Moments posted by family members. There are plenty of factors for choosing this platform. Firstly, WeChat, whose coverage rate reaching over 94% in China, is widely used among different generations. Even the elders who cannot type are able to hold to talk with their families, which means chatting via audios. Secondly, almost all families have their own active chat groups in WeChat, which helps to bond with family members faraway. Thirdly, posting Moments have been a daily routine for many WeChat users, through which they can write about everyday feelings as well as share pictures or videos with friends and families. In the first design research, I have chosen two of my friends’ families as the observation objects. One is the family of three (family A) and the other one lives with grandparents (family B). Kids in both family study in another province and thereby cannot return home for the holiday of National Day and Mid-autumn festival as their universities want to ensure security during the epidemic. The first observation was mainly based on the chat history in their family groups, including several conflicts extracted from the conversation, yet lack of necessary details. In research II, I conducted further observation on family A by entering the family chat group and recording the process of a short video call there. Moreover, I traced another family, recorded chat history and observed voice calls among its members.
Findings
Family A
1 Background Information
1.1 The family mainly comprises a father who is a civil servant, a mother who is a middle school Chinese teacher. Both of them lives in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. And a 20- year-old daughter who is a junior student majors in Visual Communication Design in Chang Zhou University, Jiangsu Province.
1.2 Affected by the pandemic, the daughter obtained a short Mid-Autumn-and-National holiday which only lasts 4 days, with strict rules and regulations of leaving school. That’s why she decided not to return home for the holiday.
2 Extracts from the Chat History of the family group (last two weeks)
2.1 Parents asked the child to sleep earlier during the school days, while the child insisted it’s really hard when living a really hectic life in the university.
2.2 The child asked to buy a new cellphone. She hoped it could be an iPhone Xs since it’s supposed to have a bargain now. Yet the father argued that the price of new phone should be under 5000 yuan and suggested to take Huawei into consideration. On the other hand, the mother wanted the child not to purchase a new mobile phone until graduation from university.
2.3 The girl asked to see a live show of her favorite idols, Teens in Times (TNT) or sign up to participate in the production of a TV show about them. Whereas, the parents insisted both activities were money-consuming and a waste of time. The girl should pay more attention in academic performance and settle down in the school to prepare for the art teacher qualification examination.
2.4 The girl was cheated of 3 thousand yuan online on Thursday night. She called the police, providing the last and the first four digits of the scam group’s bank card, hoping to find back the money. Yet the parents warned the girl that the money was possibly transferred overseas, hard to be found. Though both parents were not too mad at her for the loss, the father mocked her for believing others too easily.
2.5 The girl’s 21-year-old birthday will be come on 5th October. When she told her parents that her roommates planned to send her some gifts, the parents required her to invite roommates to a meal or bought a cake and shared with them. The daughter was reluctant to do so since it would be an expensive meal and she have no desire to eat a cake.
2.6 The mother unpacked the parcel that sent to home, which contained gifts that the girl intended to send to her friends. The girl was really mad at mom’s unpacking without her permission, which totally violated her privacy. Yet the mom didn’t think it’s a big deal and the dad claimed if he were in that situation, he would do the same unpacking thing.
2.7 The girl said to her friend that her parents’ jokes sometimes will cross her bottom line, but they never realize it. Take one thing that happened recently as an instance, when she got her pay from tutoring, her parents asked her to send some red packets in the family group. Though the parents always send red packets when they got extra money, the girl was unwilling to do so, as a result of which, her parents jokingly called her white-eyed wolf. Apparently, the joke was unacceptable for the girl, and she never dare to make fun of her parents in such a way.
2.8 The group recently discussed about the movie Legend of Deification, the daughter said she really liked Jiang Ziya, yet lots of netizens in Weibo didn’t adore it, maybe because they didn’t understand the true meaning of the movie. Then the mom wanted the girl to share about her detailed comprehension of the movie if she truly grasped the meaning of it. Whereas, the girl didn’t want to share more details with her parents.
3 Process of a Video Call (live)
3.1 Context: The short conversation happened at noon on Saturday via the video call function in their chat group, lasting approximately 5 minutes. The dad and mom were visiting the grandparents’ house and were going to enjoy an abundant lunch there to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. While the girl just got up since she had stayed up late last night chatting with her roommates.
3.2 Content: To begin with, there were some daily greetings and the parents were worried about the girl’s staying up late, afraid that it would change her biological clock. And the dad required the girl to pick up the bangs to let them check the skin condition on the forehead. After staring at the girl up and down, the parents reached a consensus of opinion that the girl was too thin and her face was almost skinny. Then the parents were curious about the content of the girl and her roommates’ conversation last night. Yet the daughter refused to reveal any of the details. So, the parents changed the topic to ask about the content of her lunch and shared the delicious food they were going to have, yet the girl answered that her roommates didn’t even get up now and she was not in a mood of eating anything. Eventually, the dad offered to show the girl the gorgeous orchids which grew in profusion against the wall of grandparents’ house. At that precise moment, the status of network became unstable and grandpa was calling the parents back for lunch. Hence the short video call ended.
3.3 Functions they used: turn on/off the speaker, open/close camera, mute/unmute, floating window
3.4 Problems they met:
3.4.1 The unstable network sometimes breaks up and audio thereby is out of sync, which interrupts the quality of the video call.
3.4.2 When the dad wanted to show around the grandparents’ yard, he didn’t know how to switch from the front camera to the rear camera. Since the resolution of front camera was relatively poor, the orchids couldn’t be seen clearly.
3.4.3 The parents wanted to know more about their daughter through the tiny square window. Yet all the information they can obtain was superficial, like the skin condition or thinness. Provided that the daughter doesn’t want to offer more details of her daily, it is hard for parents to find out something further or psychologically.
1 Background Information
1.1 The family mainly comprise a father who hasn’t been in my observation this time, a mother who was an engineer living in Shenyang, Liaoning. The only child in the family is a daughter majoring in Computer Science in the senior year of National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.
1.2 Affected by the pandemic, the daughter cannot be back to Taiwan until 24th, September. And she is in the period of quarantine for 14 days now in a hotel in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Since she will graduate next summer, now she’s preparing for the application to universities in the United Stated for further education.
Family B
Commonality of 2 families
1 The content of family group chat history is always about everyday life. Parents care a lot about children's health conditions, including meals and sleeping time, but less content is in psychological level.
2 Parents are worried about their children’s health, and the distance that prevent them from seeing their daughters in person just intensified the worries, which leads to the situation that they tend to command the girls to go to sleep earlier or to eat more nutritious food. Yet the command always be neglected or rejected by children deliberately.
3 Parents miss their children so much, but they have no idea of how to indicate their feeling and caring to the girls appropriately. Sometimes the consideration and concern will just cause backfire effect. There remain communication gaps between different generations.
4 Children want their parents to understand their hectic lifestyle in the university and to better notice their true feelings. Yet they don’t know the suitable way to express their emotions and affections to their parents in a nature way, either.
5 The children tend to believe that they have been mature enough to deal with an accumulation of things on their own. Sometimes they are not willing to listen to their parents’ experience, even though they concede that the advices are rational. While the parents tend to always treat their children as unmatured kids. Hence some arguments will be caused for the unequal way of communication.
6 Parents yearn to know more about their kids, yet children often feel uneasy and even violated, tending to defend their own privacy. The distance between parents and them during the pandemic just provide the kids with an opportunity to hide themselves deeper, and the uncertainty of the conditions of the kids can always drive the parents worried.
7 Most families whose members can't see each other easily tend to use chat groups or video/voice calls via Instant Messaging Apps for connection.
8 Family members sometimes feel bothered by the chats from family group (they tend to mute the notifications). Though the online chat group has lots of derivative functions now, families still use certain simple functions like chatting, voice messages or video calls most of the time.
9 The unstable network of one of family members often interrupts or ends up the video calls.
Appendix
Observation notes
Sketches
2 Extracts from the Chat History between mom and daughter (9/29~10/2)
2.1 Most of the daily conversation was initiated by mom, like asking for when was the time for bed or discussion about meals and chores. Sometimes the daughter just skipped several questions or answered briefly.
2.2 The daughter shared about worries with her mom on applying for the Visa. She had planned to participate in a student exchange program to Shanghai Jiao Tong University in the next spring semester, yet she also intended to apply for the Visa in Taiwan to reduce the probability of experiencing Administrative Processing. Due to the unpredictable epidemic, it might take her 28 days to be quarantined, on condition that she sticks to go to Shanghai for the exchange program and be back to Taiwan for the Visa, which seems to be unnecessarily time-consuming. So, her brain has been teeming with a whole tangle of thoughts on whether to give up the opportunity of exchanging or not. Whereas the mom couldn’t provide much help in this aspect with which she was unfamiliar, let alone all the distance between them. All she could do was to console the girl with words like “It’s still a bit early to consider it now”, “Try to keep a good mood and find something appealing to do” or “Take it easy and go to bed earlier”.
2.3 The girl has suffered from homesickness badly during the quarantine and complained to her mom about the expensive hotel fees and undesirable quality of meals provided by the hotel. The mom tried to comfort her by distracting her from comparing the conditions of hotel with other China Mainland students who were quarantined in cheaper hotels.
2.4 They also spend a considerable amount of time discussing the TV series they watched together.
3 Process of a Video Call (recorded)
3.1 Context: The short conversation between mom and daughter happened at noon on Saturday via the video call function of WeChat, lasting approximately 38 minutes. The mom was at home and prepared to wash her hair while the daughter just got up and lying on the bed.
3.2 Content: To begin with, the girl asked about the condition of grandma’s illness, so the mom shared some updates on grandma. Then they talked about the TOEFL scores and applications. After asking the girl to apply for the top ranked universities in Canada and being refused by the girl, the mom wanted the girl to apply for the Stanford University and held the opinion that the university lived up to its great fame, which makes it the best choice for the girl. Whereas, the girl didn’t agree with that and argued that Stanford had nothing appealing to her, and the mom just knew too little about the universities in America. As the disagreements went further, the girl also mentioned the danger of studying abroad now with the unpredictability of the pandemic of COVID-19 and many of her friends changed the original plan of applying for American universities, though the mom still insisted the girl going abroad. When it comes to everyday meals, the girl complained about the undesirable food provided by the hotels again and she really missed the home-made food. Though the mom encouraged the girl to stay positive since it won’t take a long time before the end of her quarantine and she could eat whatever she liked after being back to school. Nevertheless, it was hard to dismiss the depression and homesickness of the girl, she still believed that all the palatable cuisine in Taiwan will pale in comparison of a simple meal at home. The girls also shared her concerns of applying for Visa and also some worries of meeting her new roommate. The mom hoped the girl can be more optimistic about life and encouraged her to visit more places she was fond of in the last semester in Taiwan, yet the girl was unwilling to go anywhere alone, yearning for someone to accompany her. Being faraway in China Mainland, the mom couldn’t provide too much assistance in this aspect, or make much advisable proposal on the Visa issue, so she spent more time listening instead of giving plenty of comments.
3.3 Functions they used: turn on/off the speaker, open/close camera, switch between the voice call and video call
3.4 Problems they met:
3.4.1 The girl got poor internet connection with the unstable Wi-Fi provided by the hotel, and thereby the connection was lost for two or three times during half an hour. Sometimes the girl needed to repeat the same sentence again and again to make up for the intermittent voice that her mom could hear, which really multiplied the difficulties of communication and destroyed the mood of chatting.
3.4.2 It was hard for them to achieve consensus on the girl’s application with all the different factors on their list of priorities respectively. The mom wanted the best for her daughter but had less idea of the universities in America, as a result of which, she preferred to choose the most renowned school for the child. Yet the girl insisted there were numerous universities more appropriate than Stanford.
3.4.3 Words sometimes were too pale and weak to comfort others. The distance blocked the flow of emotions and indication of empathy to some extent, so it’s hard for the mom to cheer up her girl and brighten up her daily life via the video call.