SANEAMIENTO / ABASTECIMIENTO

Hazel had her first child, Sam, 18 months ago. The first year passed by in the blink of an eye, as Hazel found her feet in the daily routine of nappy changes, feeding Darren, and endless visitors to her home. She now feels more on top of the daily routine of care that Darren needs but, with less people coming to the house, she can sometimes find herself at a loss as to what to do with Darren. The words of the health visitor ring in her ears, saying she needs to play with Darren as much as possible, but Hazel always worries that she is not doing enough. She finds it very difficult to come up with ways to play with Darren, losing her focus as she thinks that what she is doing is not enough. She has tried to search for ideas on YouTube but did not like the tone of these videos, which felt more like lectures about what she was doing wrong than the friendly advice and suggestions she wanted. While she used motherhood or parenting forums, she felt that these could often seem competitive and left her feeling worse about her own parenting skills than when she began.

The play worker at her local children’s centre recently told Helen about the Digital

Toybox, creating her profile on the platform, and sending her an email with the web address

and log-in details for the Toybox. Hazel quickly grabs her tablet, checks the email and goes to the web address. She was surprised to see that there was a lot of content created by other mothers and fathers, who were all around her age and from the same area. She was happy to

see that she was not alone in sometimes needing help finding ideas to play with her son. One post catches her attention, called the “Matching Activity”, posted by Amanda, which uses colourful, simple plastic shapes, some paper, and some pens. Amanda’s post explains that she bought the shapes in the local Poundland for £1 and that this is a favourite activity for her and her daughter. She decides to try this activity, stopping by the store later in the day to pick up the shapes.

After her trip in to the store, Hazel is very happy having played this new activity with Darren. He enjoyed picking up the shapes, talking to his mom about them, and sometimes mimicking their actions if he recognized the shape, pretending the butterfly was flying around the room. Darren also loves to draw, so he picked up many of the shapes and started to draw around them on the paper, with his mom talking to him and laughing throughout. Seeing how much Darren was enjoying this activity and how easy it was for Hazel to join in and talk with him, she decides to snap a photograph and upload it with a comment to Amanda’s post, thanking her for sharing the idea and commenting how much Darren enjoyed himself. Later that evening as Darren sleeps, Hazel logs back in to the Digital Toybox to look at some activities for the coming week and notices that Amanda has replied, thanking her for her comment and expressing her happiness that she found it useful. Hazel feels better knowing she has somewhere she can turn to for ideas when she is finding it difficult and hopes to add some of her own as she feels more comfortable.

6.2.2 Design processes

The Digital Toybox was designed based on the requirements derived from the fieldwork conducted in the Little Monkeys play session. Initially, it was planned to deploy the Toybox with participants from the same case study. This would have continued the “designing with” approach adopted in that case study, as it was co-created through dialogue with those

participants. However, between the design, development, and deployment of the Toybox, the children’s center went through a period of rapid change. The staff members who had been involved in the original Little Monkeys session and so important to the development of

relationships moved to other jobs and were replaced with new staff. Additionally, many of the parents from the original session had moved on as their children had passed the age threshold for the Little Monkeys session. After initially joining the new staff and families in the Little

Monkeys session, it quickly became clear that I would need to recruit externally as the staff

were not able to facilitate my relationship with the families as they were just building their own relationships with them. Consequently, participants were recruited externally for the

design and deployment of the Digital Toybox. This shifted the focus of the final case study from “designing with” parents to “designing for” parents.

6.3 Method

The deployment of the Digital Toybox involved three stages. The first stage involved individual, in-home workshops conducted with four parent-child dyads, which were used as a means to introduce the platform, gain feedback on it, and to populate the platform with some initial content that parents could engage with as they signed up. The second stage involved a five month deployment of the platform, with a total of 14 parents engaging with it. The final stage involved exit interviews conducted with five of the parents from the deployment stage. Participants were recruited through flyers posted in children’s centres and through adverts on parenting groups on Facebook. Given the delay caused by having to recuit new participants, selection criteria were loosened to include parents of children up to three years of age, living in Newcastle upon Tyne. Full ethical review was conducted and approved by the Faculty of Science, Engineering, and Agriculture at Newcastle University.