Grandparents may feel revitalized when a grandchild joins the family, but the physical separation that often exists between grandparents and grandchildren can make it difficult to develop a close relationship. Current communication technologies, such as the phone, are inadequate for developing close relationships with children. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a technology probe exploring how technology can be designed to alleviate this problem. Based on the evaluation, four important themes for designing technology for distributed intergenerational bonding are elicited and discussed. The four themes are Conversational Context (to have something to talk about), Facilitation (to be given the opportunity to talk), Diversified Interaction Forms (to maintain attention of the child) and Supporting Grandparent caring for grandchild (to adapt activity to the mood of the child).

Reality is everywhere. It is right there in our face when we wake up and it continues to sneak up on us throughout our day, in the car, in our offices, and at the dinner table. In recent years it has even invaded our TVs through eternal news streams and endlessly boring reality TV shows. However, people cannot live by reality alone. In fact, we spend quite a lot off effort on escaping reality. We daydream and immerse ourselves in imaginary worlds and stories. We immerse ourselves in fiction. Inspired by this view, we report on our research into the design and user experience of a new genre of mobile location-based services, which uses peoples' physical surroundings as a backdrop for storytelling as they move around an urban environment. We present a prototype system developed to explore the user experience of location-based interactive stories, and the use of interaction designs aimed at blurring the boundary between reality and fiction. Based on qualitative data from a series of field trials, we discuss potentials and challenges for this class of location-based services.

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.