STREEN: designing smart environments for story reading with children

Abstract

Augmented e-books employ digital media to enhance the reading experience, and although they have the potential to promote the reader’s engagement, so far the possibilities afforded by these technologies have been underexplored. In this article, we study the potential of literally transforming the space where reading takes place, in order to create superior reading experiences and foster the emergence of an immersive story universe, placing the reader in an imagined time and space. We present ongoing work on STREEN (Story Reading Environmental Enrichment), a smart environment for story reading. STREEN is able to trigger digital media enrichment depending on the reading performance and the narrative. We explain our innovation methodology that is based on an analysis of the design space to create a framework for a design thinking process. Additionally, we describe the first steps of using this methodology to explore and design STREEN solutions for primary school children.