Beta Testers Needed For “These Are My Kids”

As a Participatory Designer, I am constantly amazed at how experiences and products are designed solely from the point of view of the people making them. What’s worse is that most people take the blame on themselves when they can’t use something effectively. They automatically assume that it must be their fault that they can’t do something with technology. The next time this happens to you try looking at the design. Was it designed to work with what you do?

A new form of interactive design called embodied interaction is based on using tangible situations and social approaches to creating new technology. In other words, designing interfaces and objects with an understanding of how people do things in the context of their environments and perceptions.

Currently, Kinzin is designing an application called “These Are My Kids” that can be used on its own on the web and within Facebook to share photos of our kids privately. The Kinzin Team decided to focus on this application because we talked with parents about what they do and how they want to do it. The participation design surrounding this application is fulfilled by providing simple steps to help parents accomplish something they want to do and not something we think they might need. Every design step integrates our team expertise with real world technological challenges.

Another step to making sure this application works is by getting real people with kids to use our first version (beta-version) of “These Are My Kids”. As you can well imagine this means that we need to find people who are already too busy with their families and their jobs to sit down with us and tell us what they think about the way it works. But we know that there are people out there that want to help.

If you are a parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle who lives in or around Vancouver, BC and would like to give us a hand then contact me: Julie AT kinzin DOT com or please comment here.