Supporting young children's communication with adult relatives across time zones

Regular contact between children and their adult relatives can be a problem if they live in different time zones. In this situation, finding an agreed time to contact each other can be both confusing and complicated. This paper presents a study of the effect of time zone differences on communication between grandparents and grandchildren living in different time zones. We deployed a system between time zone distributed families to study this effect and analysed its use based on four parameters of time and events based theory: rigid sequential structures (that some events cannot occur before others), fixed durations (that most events always last the same time), standard temporal locations (that events have a standard time when they occur during the day) and uniform rates of recurrence (that some events always reoccur at a uniform rate). Our findings highlight the importance of: the need to consider the parents' role in facilitating contact and making the technology easy to use by children independently; the advantage of concurrent synchronous and asynchronous interaction forms; and the need to respect people's private time. These findings can inform the design of technology for supporting young children's communications with adult relatives across time zones.