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FamilySong: Designing to enable music for connection and culture in internationally distributed families

Abstract:

FamilySong aims to connect internationally distributed family groups via synchronized music-listening. It fosters feelings of togetherness and mutual belonging, that is, connection and culture. We conceptualize it as a domestic Media Space with no live audio or video. It emphasizes intimacy without intrusion, and lives within an existing ecology of interactive technologies. The design journey includes both autobiographical and research-through-design components with similarly-structured family groups (very young children with parents located in the United States and grandparents in Ecuador). Parents, children and grandparents all participated both in the moment and in subsequent interaction grounded in the FamilySong experience. Grandparents took the lead in expressing the importance of the values and goals they saw embedded in the system. This work presents a design that illuminates what it means to connect like a family in which values, needs and priorities are interdependent, and joy and delight are important.