Progress Report
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Child Care Commons 2.0 : Building Children's Social Capital and Creating Social Value for Co-Nurturing[3] Technologies and Education for Promoting the Development of Social Capital
Progress until FY2025
1. Outline of the project
In this research and development area, we will develop a technological platform to support the construction of social capital. If the extent of an individual’s social capital can be made visible and measurable, it may help people place greater value on their social relationships and provide a way to demonstrate the social capital they have built to others. To this end, we will develop technologies for measuring and visualizing social capital. In addition, given that children’s social capital is also related to their well-being, and that education may influence the future development of social capital, we will develop educational programs aimed at fostering these capacities.
2. Outcome so far
Task 31: Visualizing Social Capital Using Social Networking Services (SNS)
To visualize social relationships, we utilized logs from the social networking service (SNS). To avoid privacy concerns, we did not analyze the content of communications. Instead, relationships were visualized along two dimensions: the stability of responses (horizontal axis; e.g., variance in response time) and the directionality of responses (vertical axis; e.g., which person tends to initiate conversations).
Using these two dimensions, we constructed a two-dimensional space that allows changes in relationships over time to be visualized. We refer to this framework as the Social Orbit (see upper-right figure).
Task 32: Visualization of Social Capital Through Sensing Technologies and Information Presentation Techniques for Promoting Behavioral Change
How can we measure and visualize social capital that includes face-to-face social interactions? Recording where, when, and with whom people interact in daily life is highly labor-intensive. In this research project, we are working to semi-automate this process. Although there are still barriers to implementation in everyday life, in principle it is possible to record who met whom, when, and where by using ultrasonic speakers and microphones (see figure below). Under laboratory conditions, this technology has already demonstrated that it can accurately record who interacted with whom and at what time, even within indoor environments.
By reviewing these automatically recorded interactions at the end of each day, we believe it may become possible to document social capital with a reasonable degree of reliability and accuracy.
Task 33: Educational Programs for Fostering Children’s Social Connections
To develop educational programs, we selected remote islands in Amakusa as field sites for both research and educational practice. Through interviews and observation, we found that while children living on the remote islands tended to have strong reciprocal trust, they also had limited opportunities to build new relationships and encounter diverse perspectives.
Based on these findings, we designed and implemented the “Remote Island Children’s Summit ver.1” as a learning activity through which children could become aware of both the strengths and challenges of their local communities, positively recognize the value of local social ties, and gradually connect with diverse people outside their communities.
3. Future plans
There are still many barriers to introducing these technologies into everyday life. It will be necessary to continue exploring the optimal specifications for CCC while carefully balancing accuracy and feasibility for social implementation. Through these efforts, we will continue developing a technological platform that can be integrated into the CCC standard operational model.