Design Opportunity
In China, the conflict between sexual shame, authoritative family culture and children's desire for self-expression is the major obstacle to implementing sex education. Children's initiative and ability to explore are often excluded from consideration. This makes children troubled by sexual abuse "lose their voices" out of fear and seldom seek help from their close relatives. Discourses of sex and gender exist in the complex life scenarios in which children grow up, shaping their knowledge and perceptions, whereas it is difficult for children to directly describe the sexual issues in their lives. Therefore, the key issue for this research is how to empower children to have equal communication and learn proper sexual knowledge in everyday life.
Concept
TickTick is an application that combined artificial intelligence and personalized storytelling sexual education for children and parents. The concept of TickTick takes the “picture-shooting", a session of the photovoice method from Participatory Action Research, as the key. With image recognition technology, the app plays the role of a sex education expert. It analyzes images taken by children, captures keywords in the scenarios, generates various topics for sex education, and provides corresponding stories or communication methods, in a bid to spread the core knowledge of boundaries, body organs, self-care etc. The education community and chatbot also provide an opportunity for the family to explore their doubts and question about sensitive issues in daily life.
Design Process
We adopted photovoice form PARTICIPATORY ACTION RESARCH to investigate family sex education in China. During the workshop, Images are found to be a medium for equal communication between parents and children. The photovoice approach allows children to take active lead in activities, empowering them to make decisions on their own. Thus, we developed Tick Tick to act as the role of sexual education expert in the workshop. As a result, Children enjoyed the experience of “recording their lives and discussing sex education with their parents". They kept taking new photos because they were curious about what kind of storyline the app could generate. Some children commented, "This is fun! I had no idea that the slide could bring such a story when I took the picture".
In addition, we found that images could induce ambiguity in parents' educational goals. For example, seeing the slides in the amusement park image, they would want to tell their children to "protect their genitals when playing around various facilities”. On the other hand, the AI-recognized labels would allow parents to choose a label among "Safety", "Friendship", and others, helping parents to communicate with their children about the most important concerns of the moment.
Impact
Ticktick is effective in engaging children in active thinking about sex and leading to behavioural changes, such as abandoning gender stereotypes. In addition, Ticktick creates opportunities for family discussions, in which images become a medium for active idea exchange between parents and children; AI also facilitates family discussions about images to move from life situations to sex education.
