'Was it Good for you Darling?' – Intimacy, Sex and Critical Technical Practice

On the basis of forty-two weeks of ethnographic data collected across six pairs of co-habiting partners, we have theorized about the nature of intimacy, developed artifacts for its mediation and explored methods for its study. In this workshop we wish to take this work as our departure point, and reflect on: The importance of problematising intimacy carefully, that is, approaching intimacy critically. The complex and multiple meanings of intimacy in the context of ongoing intimate relationships. The losses and risks attendant on supporting intimacy between distributed couples

Organizational Probes:Exploring Playful Interactions in Work Environment

Playfulness, with non-intrusive elements, can be considered a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within work organizations. Taking inspirations from the cultural probes approach, we developed organizational probes as a set of investigation tools that could provide useful information about employees’ everyday playful experiences within their work organizations. In an academic work environment, we applied our organizational probes over a period of three weeks. Based on the collected data we developed two design concepts for playful technologies in work environments

Mediated intimacy in families: understanding the relation between children and parents

Mediating intimacy between children and their parents is still limited investigated and at the same time, we find that, emerging technologies are about to change and affect the way we interact with each other. In this paper, we report from an empirical study where we investigated the social interaction phenomena that unfold between children and their parents. We used cultural probes and contextual interviews to investigate the intimate acts between children and parents in three families. Our findings show that the intimate act between children and parents share a number of similarities with other types of intimate relations such as strong-tie intimacy (couples cohabiting). However, we also identified several issues of intimacy unique to the special relation between children and their parents. These unique acts of intimacy propose challenges when designing technologies for mediated intimacy in families. Author Keywords Children, parents, cultural probes, mediated intimac

Mediating Intimacy: Digital Kisses and Cut and Paste Hugs

Interest in personal and domestic technology is growing rapidly. In this paper, we explore what it means to understand and support the most personal of human acts - maintaining intimacy between family members. Intimate acts are different to other domestic behaviours; are challenging to study; and, we speculate, provide opportunities for technologies quite different in form and purpose to those appropriate for other aspects of home life

Material Food Probes:Personalized 3D Printed Flavors for Intimate Communication

Interactions with food are complex, integrating rich multisensory experiences within emotionally meaningful social contexts. Yet, the opportunities to explore food as material resource for emotional communication have been less explored. We describe a two-month project with 5 couples centered on the co-design of personalized flavors for intimate communication, which were experienced through an explorative three day study involving a 3D food printer in participants’ homes. We discuss the value of our findings indicating preferences for both remembered and imagined positive flavors and their integration in focal intimacy practices to support emotional coregulation. We also discuss material food probes and their value for exploring and inspiring both design-with and design-around food

PROBING ELDERLY PEOPLE’S DAILY LIFE: AN EXPLORATORY PATH TOWARD THE PRACTICAL DIMENSION OF HOSPITAL MOOD

The paper describes the use of cultural probes in a design process that involves elderly people and it explores some their implications and effects. We describe a project where probes were used in a different way compared to their first description by Gaver. We show the way we build our probes and our use of them and we highlight some interesting effects that we expirienced in the field. This expirience suggests that Cultural probes might help in establishing a proper hospital mood in the adoption and acceptance of new technologies yet to be implemented. This point help us look at the concept of hospitality in a much practical way and it suggests the idea that hospital mood can be – if not engineered – at least favoured, triggered and established by diluting the “visit of the stranger”

The experience of enchantment in human-computer interaction

Improving user experience is becoming something of a rallying call in human–computer interaction but experience is not a unitary thing. There are varieties of experiences, good and bad, and we need to characterise these varieties if we are to improve user experience. In this paper we argue that enchantment is a useful concept to facilitate closer relationships between people and technology. But enchantment is a complex concept in need of some clarification. So we explore how enchantment has been used in the discussions of technology and examine experiences of film and cell phones to see how enchantment with technology is possible. Based on these cases, we identify the sensibilities that help designers design for enchantment, including the specific sensuousness of a thing, senses of play, paradox and openness, and the potential for transformation. We use these to analyse digital jewellery in order to suggest how it can be made more enchanting. We conclude by relating enchantment to varieties of experience.</p