DESIGN GUIDELINES FOR CHILDCARE ROBOTS WITH AN ETHNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF DUAL INCOME AND SINGLE INCOME FAMILIES

Abstract

As childcare has become a serious social concern in Korea, the development of a childcare robot is of great interest. In particular, with the increase of dual-income families, designing childcare robots for respective dual and single income households is needed. This paper presents an ethnographic study of dual and single income families with a child to develop design guidelines for childcare robots for those respective groups. We use in-depth interviews, home tours and a oneweek journal written by mothers to gather the requirements during interaction between mother and child, and user and product. A total of 6 primary requirements and each with their respective secondary requirements were gathered. By analyzing the frequency of the primary and secondary requirements we were able to find both similarities and differences between dual and single income households. By quantifying the importance of robot design issues based on frequency of primary requirements weighted by degree of correlation between requirements and issues, we present design guidelines for childcare robots for dual and single income families.