Mike Scaife

Abstract

Five years ago I had the good forttme o f meet ing Mike Scaife at a CHI conference. By chance I was to be the paper chair for a session on children's technologies. Mike Scaife and Yvolme Rogers were in that session presenting a paper about their work at the Universi ty o f Sussex. By the end o f that session, I was sure I had to have them as a part o f a book I was putting together on the design o f children's technology. I came to understand quickly that Mike Scaife was one o f the few people in this world (along with his partner Yvonne), who understood the importance o f changing the design process to include children. Their method o f informant design has been critical to the HCI literature on children and design (see: Scaife, M. and Rogers, Y. 1999, Kids as informants: Telling us what we d idn ' t know or confirming what we knew already, in A. Druin (ed.) The design o f children's technolo_g~, (Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, CA), 2950.)