Saturate
In a small group interview, three fifth graders pored over a time line which shows lines arising from a drawing of actress Lucille Ball, reaching up to bracket the period from 1951 to 1957, and captioned with the words “Lucille Ball stars in television:’
Boy 1: She probably was born here and died here.
Girl 1: But she’d only be 6.
Girl 2: It shows the years she starred on TV: 1951 and 1957.
Girl 1: I call my neighbors Ricky and Lucy.
This anecdote provides several insights into our users. Boy 1 automatically assumes that the dates on the timeline imply birth and death. Girl 1 challenges this noting that the time span is just 6 years. And the final comment about neighbors “Ricky and Lucy” illustrates the childrens’ ongoing need to link information to their personal lives.
Synthesize
Over the course of the last 5 weeks, we have significantly changed directions and narrowed down the focus of where we want to be in space of “Kids and understanding time” We went from the wide range of the endless time domain, with implications of historical context, geologic time and more, plus elements of cyclic vs. linear patterns in time, to focus the app on supporting a child’s (~8 to 11 years old) development of autobiographical memory, and time as it relates to one’s own lifespan.
This was further strengthened by our user studies, where we saw childrens’ need to connect their conception of time to events in their own lives. These studies also led us to believe that connecting these dots in memory may help them discover who they are and see what is important to them.
Through our need finding we believe that a child who understands him/herself can get by better. They can advocate for themselves and have a clearer focus of where they want to go and who they want to be.
Realize
Creating “Templates in Time” allows us to provide a platform where children can create their own visual identities and find ways to discover who they are and what are the important events in their own life. Building an interactive platform allows the kids to play with the application and zooming, sliding, panning and animating helps them see their lifespan from different view points.
The use of art and media, and icons help them express their thoughts and moods in a more creative way. Allowing them to share the application with their friends helps them see what they have had in common throughout their lives. Having a space where they can explore their future self a few years down the line, may allow them to see how their past and present events influence their future.
In conclusion, Templates in Time tries to connect your dots in memory through visualization techniques, so that you can create your own visual identity.
Templates in Time is currently a web-based tool built in HTML, CSS and JQuery. We like the idea of having it web based for now, because it gives us the opportunity to share it and get feedback from numerous users. In future we are considering developing it for the iPad. Here is the URL for the current functional prototype.
Functional Prototype: http://www.stanford.edu/~athakur/timeline/
Here is also a screen cast that walks you through the functional prototype and explains the workings.
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