When technology does not serve children

Abstract

I just came back from this year's CHI conference. There were many interesting technologies for children that were presented and discussed, from talking dolls to wireless mobile technologies for children. Unfortunately, for the first few days of the conference I just couldn't keep my mind on much except my poor frightened three-year old daughter. (Warning: what follows in this column will contain discussions of toilets and what children do in them, so the squeamish-at-heart may want to turn the page.) This year my husband and I decided to take our little girl, Dana to the CHI conference. She had gone in years past and had a wonderful time. But that's not what had her so frightened on our trip. It was the airport's automated toilets! The offending technology accidentally flushed on her while she was still sitting on the toilet doing her business (I know my daughter in later years will probably kill me for even writing this column about her, but in the interest of technology and children I'm hoping some day she will understand ;) In any case, I tried to explain to Dana that the toilet was not going to "pull her in" while she was still on it, but this did not appease her. I tried to explain to her how sensors worked and that when I covered "the eyes of the toilet" it would flush-but this only made things even worse. My poor little three-year old just did not want to believe that we humans could control the whims of toilets with eyes. Before our trip, my daughter had finally graduated out of diapers and was essentially self-sufficient in areas of the bathroom. But this airport incident set her back months. Thanks to the addition of technology to toilets, my child would not go near anything that flushed. What finally worked was the purchasing of a little plastic portable "potty" that she could sit on and empty out into a regular toilet. This made me so mad, not just as a mother who struggled through glamorous potty-training experiences with her child, but as a researcher who thinks about HCI and children. What this situation showed me all too well was how technology can serve adults, yet hurt children in the process. I remember thinking when I first saw an automated toilet, "How wonderful! I won't have to get my hands dirty touching a flushing mechanism." …