Between 7th and 9th September 2022 in Puerto de la Cruz (Spain) I, dr. Jure Trilar, was honoured to join a training school titled “How do we generate evidence in family/parenting support?” organised by EuroFamNet – The European Family Support Network: A bottom-up, evidence-based and multidisciplinary approach.

Discipline of family support is a value driven mission of achieving psychological and group interrelationship related changes within families and society. The relation between research, practice and policy is emphasized for meaningful impact. Special attention is given to marginalised, restructed families and children with difficulties.

Digital transformation in every aspect of society is evident – and of course digitalisation is not evenly distributed matter, so we need informed, human-centric approaches. Throughout workshops we introduced themes related to privacy, cybersecurity, access and accessibility in digital solutions usage in family and practitioners’ context.

My main contribution was to present efforts and some results in our research on Family Centered Design concept for creating digital solutions within ICT in family support section of the training school. Research methods and design approaches for development of digital prototypes and eventual remote unmoderated user-testing platform were presented. In addition, participants could benefit from presentation of established instruments and metrics from the applied field of user experience, web accessibility guidelines for better inclusion of humans with visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, language, learning, and neurological difficulties, including aging individuals, while providing better usage performance and experience for all users.

I quickly learned that discipline terminology is not congruent to which I was used to in my local academic environment. CPS does not stand for Cyber-Physical Systems, program is not related to computer algorithms and intervention does not mean late night tech support. This aside I cannot stress enough how much academic and practical inspiration I had received during these few days. I again had a chance to observe the dedication and excellence in statistics and other data analysis methods of colleagues from psychology and related disciplines. Surprising tourists with a (formally dressed of course) group poll jump was just one of those ingredients that will make you remember great events as this was…and I’m stealing this idea for the future conferences organised by us.

Thanks to the EuroFamNet organisers, especially Sonia, María José, Lucía and Nina, and other trainers, Metin, Andy, Patty and Ana Catarina for creating inclusive and pleasant environment and opportunity to collaborate in the future.

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