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Title

Mediating intimacy: designing technologies to support strong-tie relationships

Author(s)

Vetere, Frank;  Gibbs, Martin R.;  Kjeldskov, Jesper;  Howard, Steve;  Mueller, Florian 'Floyd';  Pedell, Sonja;  Mecoles, Karen;  Bunyan, Marcus

Abstract

Intimacy is a crucial element of domestic life, and many interactive technologies designed for other purposes have been appropriated for use within intimate relationships. However, there is a deficit in current understandings of how technologies are used within intimate relationships, and how to design technologies to support intimate acts. In this paper we report on work that has addressed these deficits. We used cultural probes and contextual interviews and other ethnographically informed techniques to investigate how interactive technologies are used within intimate relationships. From this empirical work we generated a thematic understanding of intimacy and the use of interactional technologies to support intimate acts. We used this understanding to inform the design of intimate technologies. A selection of our design concepts is also presented.

Publication type

Conference paper

Source

Proceedings of 'Technology, safety, community', the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '05), Portland, Oregon, United States, 02-07 April 2005 / W. Kellogg, S. Zhai, C. Gale and G. Veer (eds.), pp. 471-480

Publication year

2005

FOR Code(s)

0806 Information Systems;  1203 Design Practice and Management

Keyword(s)

Cultural probes;  Ethnography;  Intimacy;  Intimate technology;  Participatory design;  Tactile interfaces

Publisher

ACM

ISSN

0274-9696 (series ISSN)

ISBN

9781581139983, 1581139985

Publisher URL

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1054972.1055038

Copyright

Copyright © ACM, 2005. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of CHI 05 (2005) http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1054972.1055038.

Additional information

The authors acknowledge support from the Smart Internet CRC (project UE-06) and the Danish Technical Research Council (project 26-03-0341).

Full text

Peer reviewed