Attributes of successful intergenerational online activities

Changing family structures and associated geographical distances between family members lead to a transfer of offline activities to online environments to maintain and facilitate the relationships. Especially in the case of grandparents and grandchildren this is crucial both for grandparents to be included in family activities and grandchildren to benefit from their grandparents' experiences and time. In order to create successful, i.e. appropriate and entertaining intergenerational online activities, we identified attributes of offline activities conducted by grandparents and grandchildren, which can be applied to interactive systems as well. During a user requirements analysis phase end users were involved to assess the most important activities as well as the communication behavior and the characteristics of relationships between grandparents and grandchildren. Finally, 13 attributes of entertaining activities have been deduced, which focus on the structure, the appearance and the users' goals as well as on special characteristics of the user groups.

[1]  Raquel Fuente De la Fuente Anuncibay,et al.  Intergenerational Grandparent/Grandchild Relations: The Socioeducational Role of Grandparents , 2007 .

[2]  Panayiotis Zaphiris,et al.  Research-derived web design guidelines for older people , 2005, Assets '05.

[3]  Eirini Flouri,et al.  ‘They’ve Always Been There for Me’: Grandparental Involvement and Child Well‐Being , 2009 .

[4]  Frank Vetere,et al.  Family storytelling for grandparents and grandchildren living apart , 2010, NordiCHI.

[5]  Adrian David Cheok,et al.  Designing physical and social intergenerational family entertainment , 2009, Interact. Comput..

[6]  Martin R. Gibbs,et al.  The Magic Box and Collage: Responding to the challenge of distributed intergenerational play , 2009, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[7]  Carman Neustaedter,et al.  The calendar is crucial: Coordination and awareness through the family calendar , 2009, TCHI.

[8]  Matthew K. O. Lee,et al.  Digital Inclusiveness--Longitudinal Study of Internet Adoption by Older Adults , 2006, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[9]  Kathy Goff,et al.  SENIOR TO SENIOR: LIVING LESSONS , 2004 .

[10]  Suleman Shahid,et al.  Designing social games for children and older adults: Two related case studies , 2010, Entertain. Comput..

[11]  Pei-Luen Patrick Rau,et al.  Interaction Devices and Web Design for Novice Older Users , 2005 .

[12]  S. Livingstone,et al.  Parental Mediation of Children's Internet Use , 2008 .

[13]  Marcela D. Rodríguez,et al.  Home-based communication system for older adults and their remote family , 2009, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[14]  Satu Elo,et al.  The physical, social and symbolic environment supporting the well-being of home-dwelling elderly people , 2011, International journal of circumpolar health.

[15]  Ramesh C. Jain,et al.  Towards environment-to-environment (E2E) multimedia communication systems , 2008, SAME.

[16]  Alan Cooper,et al.  About Face 3: the essentials of interaction design , 1995 .

[17]  Trudie Roussow.  Promoting the Emotional Well-being of Children and Adolescents and Preventing Their Mental Ill-Health: A Handbook. , 2006, Child and adolescent mental health.

[18]  Jami Bartgis,et al.  The Development of Attention and Response Inhibition in Early Childhood. , 2008 .

[19]  Eulàlia Hernández-Encuentra,et al.  ICT and Older People: Beyond Usability , 2009 .

[20]  Glenn A. Bowen.  Grounded Theory and Sensitizing Concepts , 2006 .

[21]  L. Ontai,et al.  Intergenerational Relationship Quality, Gender and Grandparent Involvement. , 2010, Family relations.

[22]  Karolien Poels,et al.  Digital game design for elderly users , 2007, Future Play.

[23]  John Short,et al.  The social psychology of telecommunications , 1976 .

[24]  Yu Zhou,et al.  Age invaders: social and physical inter-generational family entertainment , 2006, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[25]  Protima Banerjee.  About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design: Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann Published by John Wiley & Sons, 2003, 576 pp, ISBN 0764526413 , 2004 .

[26]  Kathrin Maria Gerling,et al.  Exergame design for elderly users: the case study of SilverBalance , 2010, Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology.

[27]  Panayiotis Zaphiris,et al.  A systematic approach to the development of research-based web design guidelines for older people , 2007, Universal Access in the Information Society.