Archives of Design Research

According to Korea Media Panel Survey Statistics, as of 2020, Korea has had a fairly high smartphone retention rate of 91% and has been active since the outbreak of COVID-19 with the introduction of a smartphone-based notification function. Smart Communication Service for Childcare (SCSC) refers to an application that provides services such as back and forth management, notices, and photo albums based on interactions between parents and teachers who send their children to daycare centers (Lim, 2016). According to domestic and international studies, both teachers and parents felt the need for SCSC in order to provide a smooth interaction between teachers and parents. As such, parents suggested using smartphone applications in parent/teacher communities (Seo & Seo, 2018; Thompson et al. 2015). Previous studies on SCSC have mainly dealt with differences in perception between teachers and parents about SCSC and differences in perception between infants and infant classes (Can, 2016; Kang & Kim, 2017; Kim & Hang, 2019; Seo & Seo, 2018). Additionally, studies on mobile notification sites have mainly focused on the convenience of notifications, teacher stress or workload, and technical issues encountered by parents. In these studies, teachers and parents were interviewed about their views on the benefits and drawbacks of mobile notification sites. Currently, no research has been found to indicate whether teachers' and parents' views on smart notification services have been actively incorporated into these platforms.

In this study, SCSC is treated as an important mesosystem. Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System Theory presented the effects of various social systems surrounding children directly or indirectly on their growth as an ecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Among them, the importance of micro-system interactions such as parents and teachers directly involved in childcare, that is, smooth exchanges and interactions in the intermediate system, can contribute to promoting a child's growth and development. SCSC is a project with various stakeholders including parents, teachers, children, developers, educational experts, and designers. It needs a careful approach as it recognizes the preferred future as a key social task among many feasible futures that apply new technologies. This serves as the main reason for incorporating participatory design and future-oriented design fiction into the design process.

The term design fiction was introduced by science fiction author Bruce Sterling. Following this, Bleecker defined it as a "prototyping technique tailored to facilitating conversations about the near future (3-5 years)" that is about "creative provocation, raising questions, innovation, and exploration" (Bleecker, 2009). Design fiction has been applied as a communication tool that provides inspiration and motivation for design (Tanenbaum, 2014). The participatory design community has long recognized design fictions as ideal for participatory activities (Knutz & Markussen, 2014), elevating participatory design toward being playful and forward-thinking. It also acts as a discussion tool in workshops with users and stakeholders (Lyckvi et al., 2018) to enable participants to share their ideas, become exposed to others' ideas, and generate new ones (Forlano & Mathew, 2014). Despite the effort to increase the understanding of design fiction as a research method and approach (Lindley, 2015; Knutz & Markussen, 2014), there has been a lack of a framework about how and when to incorporate design fiction into the participatory design process.

Moreover, in practice, participatory design is not an easy or seamless process for collaboration because it generates tension and friction between diverse stakeholders (Forlano & Mathew, 2014). One reason for this is because everyone envisions the future differently; thus, friction over such scenes is bound to arise. In that respect, design fiction can be a suitable means to comprehensively imagine a future with multiple possibilities such as probable, plausible, and possible futures, rather than a scenario as a concrete solution. This study believes that design fiction could serve as a divergent tool for imagining these various futures from a broad perspective through participatory activities. In addition, it is suggested that friction on problem definition could be converged by empathizing with the problematic situations found by different stakeholders in the initial design stage by implementing them as design fiction.

During the first stage of design thinking, it was discovered that teachers, parents, and children all had different viewpoints on childcare issues. We conducted a semi-structured interview with two children (age 5) and their parents, followed by a conversation with two teachers at a childcare center. Teachers have an overwhelming number of children to care for in comparison to their actual employment, which adds to their burden and produces a great deal of stress. Furthermore, the lack of information on children's activities in childcare facilities and the lack of communication with teachers lowers parents' satisfaction with educational institutions. Additionally, these concerns indicate that children are more likely to have sporadic interactions with teachers and are much more likely to be exposed to the danger of safety hazards.

A group of researchers - three are based in design and four are based in child and family studies - applied the “5 Whys” technique to the identified issues and were able to identify the root cause by continuously asking and answering questions about the reasons. Through the “How Might We” (HMW) technique, the derived root cause was transformed into a productive inquiry. The problem to be considered by various stakeholders is outlined in Table 2.

HMW envisioned a near future that would ultimately bring positive results to parents, children, and teachers by solving current problems. In order to deliver the current problem as a vivid scene, a 5-cut visual scenario was composed from the perspective of parents and teachers, respectively, with a combination of rough images (Figure 1). Design fiction, which embodies this “present” situation, was used in the online survey as a tool for wider audiences to emphasize the current issues of SCSC experienced by parents and teachers using previous interviews. The process of materializing each scene requires a careful value judgment to be drawn after sufficient consideration beyond questions like “Is this possible?” and “What would happen if this technology/services/system was to exist?” (Lyckvi et al., 2018). It was necessary to find out what value the future SCSC would create through the participation of broader stakeholders and dissemination of diverse opinions. We provided selections of probable, plausible, and possible scenes from the near future through a series of questions combined with images and text—the online survey also asked narrative reasons for choosing specific scenes. The selections we provided demonstrate a wide range of possibilities that are not constrained by technological, social, and ethical issues. Our main intention was to understand the diverse childcare environments in the near future that parents and teachers dream of by asking respondents to choose their Preferred Future. The questionnaire was conducted for five days (11. 15. 2021-11.19.2021) with a total of 36 parents and teachers who had experience. The questions started by guiding people to imagine a situation in which smart services were introduced in public daycare centers in 2025 and then asking what role parents and teachers would play in answering the questionnaire. They were asked to imagine and respond to what kind of scene the smart device would take and send to the parents and how the functions for safety accident prevention (fever, fall accident, medication) would work.

Figure 1 Present problem and “present” design fiction

The proposed design fiction of “preferred futures” was reviewed by the research team from their respective fields of expertise. From the perspective of child family researchers, designers, and developers, experts in each field were able to have a theoretically supported discussion about SCSC in the near future and could evaluate whether these future services are ultimately beneficial for the qualitative interaction between children and teachers, or if they could lead to other problems. These additional discourses on “future” design scenarios act as a divergent tool for evoking critical and holistic issues of the future.

Does the proposed future scenario solve the root cause? What should be considered if these services are introduced in 2025? What should be approached more carefully? The discourses from child studies researchers, service developers, and designers were as follows.

There are things to consider in the preference future. In Scene 1 and 2, there is a possibility that children who should be concentrating on play will focus on and pay attention to the machine because it travels around photographing the children during the indoor free play activity. Nonetheless, the SCSC of the preferred future requires a time constraint function. In the case of SCSC, where interaction and use between teachers and parents is not restricted by time or place, the request for parental interaction can add a new burden to teachers. By instituting a time limit function, teachers' human rights and working hours should be protected. Thus, SCSC should be carefully considered as an intermediate system (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). As such, the interaction between teachers and parents belonging to a micro-system has a positive effect on the development of children. What can be expected through such a preferable future is that, above all, the workload of teachers is reduced, so that high-quality interactions between teachers and children are increased and smooth interactions between teachers and parents are promoted. From a developer’s point of view, the possible implementation this research can apply is the existing machine learning technology. Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer algorithms that can improve automatically through experience and by the use of data. A model called the “Teachable machine” offered by Google was mentioned during the discussion of the technology.

From the designer’s point of view, the application must be distinguished differently between parents and teachers. How the camera robot moves, whether it is a drone, and the form of movement are important. Longitudinal research on technologies for detecting heat and fall accidents, and how this technology affects children’s emotions is needed. There is the possibility that various technologies can be applied by using camera-based robots. Currently, features using temperature detection, motion detection, and face recovery technology have been introduced, but more technologies can be incorporated into the service, adding to the list of presently used technologies. This may be possible once robots and implementation technology contain more sophisticated service design.

Gaver points out that "convergence may not be the only or best model for progress" (Gaver, 2012). In the deliver phase in existing design thinking, among the many good ideas that emerged during the development process, things that cannot be realized with current technology or that cannot be economically successful are rejected, and these are converged as an “only and best” prototype. Although the prototypes are being evaluated, it is still considered as a future-oriented solution within the ambiguous and limited frame of the “present.” This is because traditional design thinking is mainly focused on design for the world as it exists today (Johannessen, 2017).

Design fiction draws “a matter of concern” about the changes and social systems that future technology will bring by depicting a fictional world. The process of develop-deliver-deliver in a new design fiction diamond model helps to pivot and build a different future rather than a reformation of the current systems (Gerber, 2018). Further, it helps to depart from the focus in a narrative based on “the matter of fact.” The new design fiction diamond model does not limit the output of design thinking to a future-oriented solution but diverges the process to future-oriented problems. The goal of this future orientation was to eliminate the constraints and limitations of our everyday lived experiences in order to stimulate creativity and openness to new ideas that, while not currently viable, may rely on a near-future technology, capability, or scenario (Forlano & Mathew, 2014). In the participatory approach, “what is preferred” depends a great deal on who is doing the preferring (Voros, 2003). Unlike the traditional method in which the development of service design is implemented by experts first, and the prototype is tested by future users, the new design fiction framework suggests a reversed process - where actual users become the core member of the “preferred future” and experts are required to consider what needs to be implemented.

In particular, in services related to childcare, since the role of micro-systems (such as parents and teachers) has an essential influence on the growth and development of children (Bronfenbrenner, 1979), design fiction was confirmed as a participatory activity that recognizes their preferred future as an important factor in the development process. In this design thinking process, the role of the expert group consisting of designers, service developers, and educators is as a facilitator and co-editor to support smooth exchange and interaction between parents and teachers in the intermediate system. Design fiction in the SCSC process contributes a holistic exercise in envisioning the sociopolitical context of the problem as a whole and then considering how specific technology and function are positioned and operated within that setting to create a preferable future.