Ergonomics of parenting and product design
WHAT might you ask is ergonomic about parenting? You have to do everything with one hand, one foot, and the one brain cell that isn’t tired all while being screamed at by your small human. So why are we talking about parenting on a Human Factors, business page, well there is billions poured into this industry each year and let’s not underestimate the buying power of women for something they love. There is also a volume of research about parenting using a cognitive ergonomic approach.
Prenatal care and technology
It starts with pre- natal care and the impact technology can have. Not surprisingly there is research on cell phone use and how it affects attachment to the unborn baby. These vary from using the bump to stand your phone on and therefore not rubbing your belly to some fairly important stress triggers due to too much information.
Parenting platforms
Mommit and daddit – reddit for parenting. What a great tool for parents to get support. Research has a lot to say about this and how (and who) is influencing our parenting. We are all aware how much parenting has evolved in a short time, I wasn’t in a car seat and was left in the car while my mum did the groceries. That was normal. What is normal now has reddit posts with throwaway accounts defining our shared parenting norms and offering support for disclosure. When we ask for help, we are helping people seeking data. Ok cynical but we also risk incorrect information being fed to us, from food, sleeping, acceptable behaviour and the dreaded comparisons in a very orchestrated environment. While parent reddit is a great form of anonymous support, there are a number of safety risks to privacy with a bunch of people mining this data for commercial purposes.
Car seats
Car seats are not surprisingly in this category. While all safety seats have a safety standard it doesn’t necessarily mean they are ergonomic. Design principles that help with this are safety principles, functional principles, aesthetic principles, economic principles, environmental protection principles. There are rapidly changing physical shape and size of the child that changes over a short period of time. Now anyone who has tried to put a child in a car seat that they do not like, knows how important the psychological factors are. Ensuring comfort, and even being able to see alleviates boredom. It needs to be easy to use and understand, and is it user friendly, is swapping from car to car easy. Children are curious and want to play with and touch everything, so all restraints have to be baby proof. Theres a long list that sits outside the design process to cater to the little human inside.
Automated vehicles
Then we have the question about what to do with automated vehicles. There is little doubt that young people will use these, what age will they be allowed to? does everyone still learn to drive? These are all questions for the future but the future of driving is changing. A recent study using an AV simulator with children showed that parents are prepared to have their children in AV’s and there is an opportunity to prepare them for the use of young people early on. But AV’s are not as trusted as taxis or buses and there are a lot of strange factors that determine this preference, like weather for example. Therefore AV’s and the driverless tech coming through has a long way to go working on parent trust for dual and solo child travel. AV development needs to consider the use of young, disabled and impaired passengers and to manage these problems.
Safety
Research in NZ shows children under the age of four are at particular risk of inanimate object force injury. Hurting themselves on products or getting slammed or jammed in things. Worth noting, boys are more likely to have these accidents than girls which is a cognitive ergonomic problem. Here’s an example; Arlo was drinking milk, stood up after getting a fright and fell over. His sippy cup cracked and broke on his face leaving him with lots of cuts. The company complied with all safety standards but hadn’t been tested properly to include the erratic behaviour of kids. When designing childrens products, is it enough to only test on kids sitting? Ok so the ‘rules’ are they eat and drink only while sitting, but is this reality? A happy healthy toddler will be busy and if they get a fright or shock will move and do unexpected things… all products should be tested based on a ‘I’m doing exactly what I shouldn’t be’ basis.
Strollers
This is a booming market. Expected to grow 6% until 2029 and worth 3.88 billion. Strollers have problems. Uneven quality , single function , poor portability, and lack of entertainment. Infancy is the most important part of human development, they both want to explore but also be safe. They want to see you and the world. Therefore strollers need to start addressing these issues. Again, find the busy working mum who uses the stroller to do the groceries after work and has one hand to collapse the stroller while she juggles other siblings and tasks, life is rarely a neatly packaged experiment and designers need to accommodate that.
AI and toys
Toys that listen – hello barbie and connected toys. These guys are a story of lack of trust in parents. Who had the great idea to have a barbie using basic AI tech to listen to the child, paraphrase and then offer support? Amazing, and it rocketed to the number one most sought after toy, however, they failed at getting trust from parents and this will unfortunately be the story of much AI tech as it is rolled out and the human factor is ignored. So, they sent barbie to market and it was uncovered that the AI company was selling info to others, and their (not mattel) security wasn’t very good so breaches were inevitable. So it was pulled and will likely never be again which is sad really because it’s a cool idea. The research interestingly states that kids were cognisant that people were listening to them and so didn’t say anything they wouldn’t want their parents, for example, to hear. But the problem here is (other than a massive lack of planning) the parents trust. Kids are savvy and know how to use tech but parents won’t let them due to fear. Anyone in the AI space needs to be working HARD at developing trust, even if it they see it as irrational, or they risk a failed product.
Huggy pajama – a hugging interface for parents. It is a wearable tech for parents and kids that contains sensory and pressure circuits to emulate a hug. Ah technology. I have been asked to get involved in many tech ideas like this to enable connection and to ‘make people feel something’ from their tech. The question that isn’t addressed here is, does it create the release of oxytocin required for brain development and has anyone hooked up an EEG to test a real hug vs a tech hug? Same with barbie conversations, because they will likely show the same brain parts lit up but to a lesser degree. So if you HAVE to use these things then maybe ok but the jury is still out on whether they are improving our human experience or inhibiting it.
Environment and parenting – affordances.
Our environments affect us in profound ways. What we do, how we feel and even how we develop is influenced by our environment. Environmental affordances influence how people perceive and interact. In children, the environment can afford fine and gross motor skills in children through interaction with everyday objects. Research shows the size of your house inside affords gross motor skills and the availability of toys affords fine motor skills. But have we gone too far controlling our environments for H&S reasons that they aren’t developing as they should? The other question here is what if you don’t have a huge house? We can’t all afford that, and should we be aspiring to it, considering research shows as house m2 goes up, happiness and connection goes down? And as parents, maybe we need to be spending more time outdoors and encouraged to afford our kids the ‘unsafe’ life that goes against societal norms?
This blog has focused largely on product design in human factors. There are many areas covered here, user centered design, usability, safety, comfort and ergonomics, accessibility, cognitive load, feedback and affordances, aesthetics and user testing. These things lead to increased satisfaction and greater success of products.