Abstract
Be.long.ing is a digital ecosystem for families with long-distance parents to connect them with their children. It integrates existing digital devices, physical objects and digital services in its digital platform, creating an experience with multiple touchpoints. When a child is born a family is formed and that is for the rest of their lives, so let’s make the most of it. For this project is essential to work for the family formed around the child, focusing on their needs connected to their families. The age range of the child chose was from 6 to 12 years old. Be.long.ing is focused on giving a certain independence for them to connect with their parents. The goal of this project is to make sure that parents can still achieve their role of parenting even from afar. Be.long.ing, in order to ensure that, creates a safe space for these families to share moments and build memories, strengthening and consolidating their bonds. Be.long.ing is the only integrated and dynamic digital ecosystem for families with a long-distance parent to experience meaningful moments and build memories through the interaction with existing digital and physical touchpoints.
Interface and Interaction Modality
Be.long.ing is an digital ecosystem that unifies existing solutions and technologies to improve parenting from a physical distance by means of a digital service connected with smart devices and physical objects, providing multiple senses touchpoints. The concept is simple and solid. It consists in improving the existing technology of video calls by combining them to activities. These activities goes from games and educational activities to better set ups of devices to improve experience like watching a child’s presentation, watching a movie together and bedtime stories. Parents and children have different interfaces. The interface is adaptable to the needs of each family, given the users the freedom to create new activities and customizing the connectivity to each devices, the layout during the calls and as well as other set ups. The parent has access to the personalization for their interface and the child. The child can add activities to favourite to be displayed on the homepage, but concerning the creation of activities they can send a request for the parent about the idea fro the new activity.
User Experience
The experience takes into consideration the possibility of the distant parent and the child being in different time zones and for that it tries to give the sensation with the weather displayed to help each user to comparer and understand better the daily time for both. Be.long.ing gives the user suggestions of activities based on the moment of the day for both. For the child interface this connectivity through weather, temperature and time in the different time zones is graphically showed to help them to have a better understand of the different situation between them.
Research and Development Context
Placed in the context of families with parents that needs to be away from long periods as well as divorced and separated parents, Be.long.ing proves to be a valuable tool to maintain children connected to their long-distance parents. For further development of the project, it would be interesting to detail better the Family Space, enhance the feature of weather with feelings in order to close up their understanding and of each others situation.
