Proceed with Care: Reimagining Home IoT Through a Care Perspective

Abstract

As the internet is increasingly embedded in the everyday things in our homes, we notice a need for greater focus on the role care plays in those relationships-and therefore an opportunity to realize unseen potential in reimagining home Internet of Things (IoT).In this paper we report on our inquiry of home dwellers' relationships to caring for their everyday things and homes (referred to as thingcare). Findings from our design ethnography reveal four thematic qualities of their relationships to thingcare: Care Spectacle, Care Liminality, Ontological Braiding, and Care Condition. Using these themes as touchstones, we co-speculated to produce four speculative IoT concepts to explore what care as a design ethic might look like for IoT and refect on nascent opportunities and challenges for domestic IoT design. We conclude by considering structures of power and privilege embedded within care practices that critically open new design imaginaries for IoT. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing; • Human computer interaction (HCI);

Sonic Technologies of a Queer Breakup

“…Throughout this study, we paid attention to consent, anonymity, and an ethic of care [10,59] as main guidelines for ethical considerations. Before starting the study, Kinnee talked with both Warlock and Michael to explain their goal of examining questions of voice assistants and queerness, and perhaps interrogate how IoT devices have baked in assumptions about the home, households, and relationships.…”

Feminist Care in the Anthropocene: Packing and Unpacking Tensions in Posthumanist HCI

“…To address the presumed need to support alternative technofutures with fatter, more harmonious, and therefore more just and sustaining relationships with non-humans and our shared environments, there have been an increasing number of proposals to de-center design from within HCI (e.g., [24,64,80,104,109,118]). Researchers have looked to these and other theories such as critical race and decolonial theory (e.g., [49]), object-oriented ontology (e.g., [123]), and care ethics (e.g., [71]). Projects in the feld of Sustainable Human Computer Interaction (SHCI), in particular, have long been sensitive to the many co-constituting relationships between humans and nonhumans.…”

“…For example, Bardzell et al analyzed ethnographies of farming practices to speculatively imagine how HCI might shift away from anthropocentric functionalism in pursuit of more care-ful relationships [17]. Key et al used care ethics as an analytic and speculative lens to ofer alternative design considerations through more-than-human frameworks for embodiment, positionality, temporality, and reciprocity [71]. Wakkary uses care to make visible the politics and ethics of things-with which designers (or co-biographers) need to more fully engage if they ever hope to design for more-than-human-centered worlds [118].…”

“…This activity was designed to enlarge participants thinking [25] through resonant translations. Participants were asked to choose a micro-situation (inspired by [71]), which could be a ritual, a habit, a lark, a happening (e.g., milk being delivered to the front door, rain washing away your kid's sidewalk chalk, brushing your teeth, sun fading a rug near a window, etc.) to physically reenact (Figure 1).…”

Lifelines

“…Airea: Arts and Interdisciplinary Research, 2021, 3, 35-51 | 48 Please do not adjust margins the introduction. As such it helps to orient Design towards being-with persons, rather than 'understanding' users, and tends towards the lifeworld (Wong et al 2020), praxes of care (Latour 2008;Key et al 2021), and designing contexts to support embodied participatory sensemaking (Jaasma et al 2017), rather than the reductive goal of the 'killer app', as critiqued by Abowd and Mynatt in 2000. Furthermore, the attention paid to philosophies of the person by the Human-Computer Interaction literature to date tends to understand these as applicable only in therapeutic engagement, rather than as fundamental to research, even when research is directly engaged with individuals (Thieme et al 2020).…”