The iSchool is excited to announce that Dr. Elizabeth M. Bonsignore, Dr. Brenna McNally, Dr. Evan Golub and HCIM student Diva Smriti won best poster at the SOUPS 2018 conference. The poster titled “Co-Designing with Children to Address ‘Stranger Danger’ on Musical.ly” was created in collaboration with Karla Badillo-Urquiola and Dr. Pamela Wisniewski from the University of Central Florida. A description of the poster written by the researchers can be found below:
“Young children are increasingly using social media apps from their smartphones. There has been recent news regarding incidents with young children engaging with strangers through these apps (e.g., sexual solicitations and cyberbullying that resulted in suicide). To understand children’s awareness and explore their visions for technologies that can help them manage situations involving online “stranger danger,” we held a participatory design session with a group of seven children, ages 8 to 11 years old, using the app Musical.ly as a design probe. We present the design solutions offered by the children for protecting children from online stranger danger when using Musical.ly…Findings from our exploratory study suggest that: (1) children are more attuned to potentially dangerous situations than stereotypical didactic assumptions might allow, (2) children wanted nuanced and diverse ways to manage potentially harmful situations, and (3) interestingly…their designs included adults as mediators and supporters, contrasting anecdotal evidence that children may not want adults to access their social media circles. Overall, we found that younger children wanted more help in learning about what Stranger Danger entails and how to avoid it, while older children wanted more options for managing it, whether on their own, or with help from an adult. We plan to further probe and parse these exploratory findings in future design sessions.”
Learn more here.