General
TacoTask is a hybrid homework management system combining a mobile app with a tangible planning toolkit, designed to help primary school families manage homework collaboratively with less stress. Following the Research through Design approach [5] with iterative development [4], the project first explored a remote monitoring concept, but expert review showed that parental surveillance can increase rather than reduce children's stress (U&S). This led to a pivot: inspired by the Pomodoro Technique [2], the redesigned system translates homework schedules into physical paper strips of varying lengths for parent-child co-planning (C&A, MD&C). Co-design workshops using Co-constructing Stories [1] with six families from China and the Netherlands (U&S) and Wizard of Oz field tests with Chinese families (U&S, T&R) [3] provided preliminary evidence of TacoTask's potential to support parent-child collaboration and reduce homework-related stress, while highlighting families' needs and expectations for homework management tools.
Contribution to PI&V
This was my first design research project. Through practice, I gradually developed an understanding of how design can be used as a research tool, and how research can serve as a driving force for design. Through this project, I also realized that enabling users to become aware of their own stress and to proactively plan their learning at their own pace through self-regulation may help prevent greater stress from developing in the future.
Involved Expertise Areas
- U&S: co-design workshops, Co-constructing Stories, field testing, expert review
- T&R: Wizard of Oz testing, hybrid app-tangible prototype
- C&A: tangible interaction design, iterative design pivot
- MD&C: stress data collection and visualization
Links
More project details see Dribble Paper: PervasiveHealth 2025
References
[1]: Buskermolen, D.O. and Terken, J. 2012. Co-constructing stories: a participatory design technique to elicit in-depth user feedback and suggestions about design concepts. Proceedings of the 12th Participatory Design Conference: Exploratory Papers, Workshop Descriptions, Industry Cases - Volume 2 (New York, NY, USA, Aug. 2012), 33-36.
[2]: Cirillo, F. 2018. The Pomodoro Technique: The Acclaimed Time-Management System That Has Transformed How We Work. Crown.
[3]: Dahlback, N., Jonsson, A. and Ahrenberg, L. 1993. Wizard of Oz studies - why and how. Knowledge-Based Systems. 6, 4 (Dec. 1993), 258-266. https://doi.org/10.1016/0950-7051(93)90017-N
[4]: What is Iterative Development? - updated 2025: 2016. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/iterative-development
[5]: Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J. and Evenson, S. 2007. Research through design as a method for interaction design research in HCI. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York, NY, USA, Apr. 2007), 493-502.