A Smart Home for ‘Us’: Understanding and Designing a Parent-Child Engagement Mechanism for Child Access and Participation in the Smart Home

Families adopt smart home products for convenience and entertainment; however, these products are not designed to support children's use cases and needs, which leads to child safety issues and family tensions. My previous work has identified the juxtaposition of (1) marketing depictions of children's harmonious smart home experiences, (2) vendors' limited product features and resources for families, and (3) parents' concerns for child safety and demands for child-centered smart home features. These findings indicate the need for smart home mechanisms that support parent-child engagement and negotiation regarding children's access and use of smart home technologies, balancing safety and agency. This proposed dissertation work aims to understand how to support parents and children collaboratively co-participate in the smart home through two steps: (1) investigating parents' and children's separate and joint smart home needs and (2) ideating with families on the principles and affordances of parent-child engagement mechanisms.