EAGER: Designing Personified Technologies to Account for Children's Social and Moral Development

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY

Investigators

Abstract

Personified technologies are designed to communicate information and interact with people using a repertoire of highly social behaviors and human-like personality traits. Although interactions with personified technologies are increasingly common in children's everyday experience, little is known about the implications of such interactions for children?s social and moral development. In this exploratory project the PI's goal is to seek rigorous empirical evidence to support the design of personified technologies for children, by investigating the influence of social features of the technology (e.g., apparent race) on children's construction of social and moral concepts. Children's experiences in interacting with technologies appear to extend beyond a simple notion of tool use, to include emotional connection, social support, and moral judgments which suggest a highly complex and interactive phenomenon. This research will take first steps toward the development of a guiding framework that is intended to better account for children's multifaceted relationships with technology and, in so doing, will provide insight into implications for design. Though such approaches are common in the social sciences, few attempts have been made to develop useful, empirically-informed theoretical frames to guide the design of (children's) technology. Project outcomes will include examples of personified technologies that support children's social and moral development, robust design recommendations that can inform the long-term development of technologies for adults and children alike, and increased interdisciplinary knowledge about children's social and moral conceptions of technology. Broader Impacts: Children navigate a complex world of social entities, natural phenomena, constructed artifacts, and information systems. What are the potential consequences of frequent interaction with embodied, socially intelligent, autonomous entities that exhibit characteristics such as biological motion, social grace, communicative ability, and apparent intentionality? Will children begin to conceptualize these technologies as entities that have moral standing in the world? Does the ability of the technology to recognize and respond to morally-charged contexts of interaction lead to specific types of social and moral attributions? This project will provide first answers to questions such as these. Research outcomes and the design recommendations that result from this work will impact the design of personified technologies for children in diverse application domains such as education, entertainment, therapy, and caretaking. The PI will disseminate project outcomes to the scholarly and technology design communities, and will work with game designers in industry to apply the findings directly to off-the-shelf market products.