Designing for Ambivalence: A designer’s research into the role of smartphones for mothers and young children

This practice-based research explores the role of smartphones for mothers of pre-school children who are their primary carers. For many women, the first few years of motherhood demand the complex negotiation of maternal and non-maternal identities. A period loaded with idealisations of motherhood and childhood, this is often a time of isolation in which mothers use and adapt surrounding resources to respond to multiple demands. In this context, the smartphone is at times used for connecting to work or to non-domestic realms, and at others is given to young children to keep quiet or entertained. Transforming from tool into toy, the smartphone becomes object of competition for parental attention, but equally turns the mother into a rival since its use is often shared. Smartphones represent work, autonomy or distraction for the mother, but also play and pacification for the child, offering multiple and competing discourses that this research explores. During the trajectory of this research, I have developed a series of experimental and critical design proposals that give form to behaviours brought by smartphones in the childrearing task. The development of these proposals formed the first stage of exploration in this research. A second stage took place in the encounters between people and the designs. At times producing both attraction and rejection, the design proposals helped me engage in conversation with others about practices, often private, that are ridden with ambivalence and guilt. Informed by critical design, psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives, this research is an example of the possibilities for design to expose unintended uses of technology, to challenge conventional user portrayals by depicting mothers as complex users and to explore potentials for change

Ritual Machines

Poster presentation on the outputs of the collaborative (RCA and Newcastle University) research though design project Family Rituals 2.

The Ethnography of Absence: Mapping Emotions. Interactive exhibition

Family Rituals 2.0 is a collaborative research project between four UK universities funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Digital Economy programme. Research disciplines with in the project include anthropology, product design, psychology, design interaction and geography. The research is examining how quotidian family rituals contribute to wellbeing for mobile workers and their families during periods of work related separation. The project initially proposed that designers and anthropologists would undertake participant observation with families, but during pilot interviews it became abundantly clear that family time was sacrosanct and the research team were effectively denied access. This focused the project to develop tools for ethnographic encounters one of which was the ‘emotional map’

Family Rituals @.0 Ritual Machine 'Anticipation'

Bespoke technology has been designed and built for Hywel and Jasper, to create moments of reflection for them: allowing discussion about thier work/life balance and their attitudes to working away from home

Family Rituals 2.0

The notion of family is broad (and changing) and encompasses a variety of different social structures beyond the classic conception of the nuclear family yet it is a cornerstone of our social worlds. Even as many in ‘Western’ society follow the trend of isolated living, in single occupant dwellings, for most people, notions of home are intimately tied to notions of family. We form familial bonds (regardless of traditional notions of kinship), with those with whom we live. The rise of network society and the pervasiveness of digital technologies has however, meant that the boundaries between our working and domestic lives are becoming increasingly blurred. The impacts of this on home and family life are being further exacerbated by changes in our patterns of living, which are pushing us towards increased mobility and itinerant domesticity. Increasingly, life is marked by significant periods of absence from home and family, and increasingly we may turn to digital technologies to help us mediate that absence. Arguably, a core element of domestic life is its ritualistic aspects, which are important features of the functional and emotional landscape of the home. Wolin and Bennett (1984) have defined family ritual as “a symbolic form of communication that, owing to the satisfaction that family members experience through its repetition, is acted out in a systematic fashion over time.” Family Rituals 2.0 sought to understand the ritual activities that families engage in during periods of remote working, and to speculate on the potential roles of technology in mediating complex working family lives

Doctoral Research Presentations

The Department of Design has a thriving community of scholars and practitioners engaged in doctoral research. In this session students,graduates and visiting researchers will present their research covering a broad range of topics and research interests

Making everyday things talk:Speculative conversations into the future of voice interfaces at home

What if things had a voice? What if we could talk directly to things instead of using a mediating voice interface such as an Alexa or a Google Assistant? In this paper, we share our insights from talking to a pair of boots, a tampon, a perfume bottle, and toilet paper among other everyday things to explore their conversational capabilities. We conducted Thing Interviews using a more-than-human design approach to discover a thing's perspectives, worldviews and its relations to other humans and nonhumans. Based on our analysis of the speculative conversations, we identified some themes characterizing the emergent qualities of people's relationships with everyday things. We believe the themes presented in the paper may inspire future research on designing everyday things with conversational capabilities at home

More-than-Human Fluid Speculations

This paper shares speculative questions and ideas that emerged from considerations about bodily fluids and other related fluids as materials used for drawing and as materials related to the subject of a drawing. Partly informed by post-humanist perspectives that view human agency as entangled with other non-human material agencies, this paper presents short experiments in drawing that have prompted reflections about the ways in which knowledge is partial, situated and influenced by other forms of knowledge

Maternal Machines

This pictorial paper presents drawn design speculations exploring the relationships between machines and the maternal, and the possibilities for robots to become companions for new mothers. My paper builds on previous work that investigated complicated and contradictory attitudes towards the presence of technological artefacts entering emotionally charged spaces such as motherhood and infant care. While conventional approaches in the design of mother and infant related products are often child centric and present idealised portrayals of motherhood, this pictorial presents explorations about ways in which design might address motherhood as a complex space. Using the robot as a speculative figure, I present scenarios where they become maternal and where they respond to diverse maternal subjectivities