Designing dyadic caregiver-child personas for interactive digital media use

This paper provides a framework that adapts a design tool known as personas to better capture the ways that caregivers mediate their children's use of interactive media. Interactive digital media has become a more pervasive part of families' lives and tensions have increased around children's engagement with digital media. Historically, caregivers have enacted various tactics to mediate their children's practices around digital media. However, the design of technologies for children fails to account for different approaches to caregiving and the relationships between caregivers and children, instead focusing on the caregiver and the child as separate entities. The goal of our framework is to enable designers to consider the caregiver-child relationship by adapting the persona design tool to account for the relationship between caregivers and children. Drawing from prior research from user experience on persona development and communication on parental mediation theory, the framework outlines five phases to be used as a guide to develop caregiver-child dyadic personas. A dyadic approach to persona design explicitly highlights the relationship between two individuals (in this case, caregiver and child). We suggest that designing with dyadic personas enables designers to be more aware of nuances in caregiver-child relationships and can surface opportunities to facilitate collaboration between caregivers and children around interactive media.