Social VR for Learning More About Children’s Values
“This is a cat on a motorcycle, which is freedom because a cat can ride anything it wants.”
While a cat on a motorcycle is not usually the first thing that comes to mind when we think about values, it may come up in the process of learning more about children’s values — and we must understand children’s values in order to design for them.
Usability, privacy, and security are oftentimes the focus of value research in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Child-Computer Interaction. However, personal values, especially those of children, are oftentimes overlooked by adults in the design of children’s technology. Not uplifting children’s voices about the technologies that affect their present and future lives could lead to technology not being appropriate or enjoyable to children in the short-term and other negative consequences in the long-term. Therefore, it is important to design technology that is more reflective of children’s values, lived experience, and worldviews. Because values are quite challenging to define and conceptualize, however, we must find creative ways to support their exploration and identification.
We explored children’s values in two main ways:
- Using Social VR, and
- Using the Rokeach Value Survey.
Social VR offers people the opportunity to interact with others and to customize their own worlds and avatars. It is a flexible tool that can be accessed using a VR headset or without on desktop, and sometimes even on mobile devices. Using a Social VR platform without the need for purchasing or finding a VR headset opens up possibilities such as being more inclusive and accessible. It allows multiple users to interact and manipulate objects within a virtual environment at the same time. We conducted a study where we decided to use the commercially available Social VR tool, Mozilla Hubs, to learn more about children’s values. Mozilla Hubs enabled children to personalize virtual worlds reflective of their values, take agency and ownership over their designs, as well as interact with other children using the platform. The preset virtual scenes and large library of available 3D objects were also an asset, allowing for relatively low barriers to entry and ease of use and customization.
Alongside Mozilla Hubs, we used the renowned Rokeach Value Survey framework from social psychology that is comprised of thirty-six individual values and guiding principles. More widely used value frameworks include Schwartz’s and Hofstede’s, which look at motivational goals for the former and cultural dimensions for the latter. Since we were interested in personal values specifically, we needed the Rokeach Value Survey framework to help scaffold, or support, children’s designs.
We worked with eight children ages 7 to 13 to learn more about their personal values using Mozilla Hubs. The eight children were regular members of an intergenerational Participatory Design group and participated in four design sessions remotely on Zoom because of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. During the first two design sessions, children were guided through and familiarized with Mozilla Hubs. During the third design session, we focused on customizing avatars and continuing exploration of the platform. Our fourth and final design session focused on having children build their own virtual worlds that reflected their values.
Before children created their own virtual worlds, we first asked them to share which value they preferred out of five Rokeach Value Survey values, which were selected based on an earlier study. The five values they could choose from included equality, happiness, freedom, self-control, and a world at peace. In this poll, the top value they selected was happiness. Children then went into breakout rooms with adult design facilitators to personalize their own worlds and then returned to the main Zoom room to share their creations with the rest of the group. Below, we share excerpts from children’s concluding presentations of their virtual worlds:
“This is my world. Most of the stuff already came in the world. In the back there is a picture of a sunset and you can’t see it but there is a picture of food because it makes me happy. I like this scene because it is very calm and it’s not too crowded and it’s sunny and most of it is outdoors.”
“I actually choosed this world because it’s a peaceful place and it just looks like if you’ve seen the other half of the place it actually looks really nice with a small river and a few trees.”
While most children preferred the value of happiness in their initial survey, we found that most children gravitated towards the value of a world at peace when designing their virtual worlds. We also saw that children gravitated more towards natural scenes for their virtual worlds and oftentimes incorporated imagery of animals and food into their scenes. Whether this is a result of the tools used, Mozilla Hubs and the Rokeach Value, remains an open question. But we can say for certain that the two helped us discover more about children’s values in a unique and quite novel way.
We hope this article inspired you to think differently about values and how Social VR can be used as a research and design tool, as well as how children’s values ought to be identified prior to designing for children. We believe that by obtaining a better understanding of how children conceptualize their values using Social VR technology, design for children can be improved.
