Designing for Diverse Families

Today, we are thrilled to release the latest publication from the Families and Media Project at an event at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Diverse Families and Media: Using Research to Inspire Design,  by Amber Levinson, Sinem Siyahhan, Briana Pressey, and Katie Headrick Taylor, is a casebook and design guide to inspire educators, practitioners, and designers who create media and programs for children and their families.

Diverse Families and Media was created as a response to a call from practitioners, designers, and producers of children’s media and programs who seek to apply research to their work, but often have difficulty accessing it in specialized journals or because the nature in which the research was conducted or presented may be directed mostly toward academia.

The guide presents case-based design challenges drawn from Families and Media research conducted with families in different regions of the country including New York/New Jersey, the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, and Chicago. Our research focused largely on Latino families, who are the fastest growing group in the U.S. and are projected to make up more than 29% of the nation’s population by 2060. The cases center around topics including fostering learning experiences among siblings, designing for family language learning, learning across different physical settings, engaging the whole family by connecting to heritage culture, and creating on-the-go learning opportunities.

In addition to the design challenges, which can be used in a number of ways (e.g., as a basis for a team or class discussion, to brainstorm and prototype solutions), Diverse Families and Media also includes new design recommendations based on Families and Media research as well as design principles from The New Coviewing: Designing for Learning through Joint Media Engagement (Takeuchi & Stevens, 2011).

Today’s events will kick off with two panels on designing for diversity and connecting home and school with technology. After the panels, a group of designers, practitioners, and producers will team up to discuss the case-based challenges and brainstorm ways to refine existing products and programs, or create new ones.

Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post that will recap the panel and design workshop discussions of the release event.