Spying on loved ones

The project began with a design probe that investigated how my partner and I communicate through shared domestic objects when one is at home and the other is not. The probe surfaced tensions within performances of care. In a subsequent critique of my probe and another by Ylva Fernaeus, we investigated caring for loved ones as spatial and not “in-line” with normative expectations. This resulted in four troubling orientations of care: willful detours, selfish shortcuts, naughty invasions, and unhappy departures.

Project collage of a Wife caring for her husband superimposed with diagrams of four troubling orientations
Project collage of a Wife caring for her husband superimposed with diagrams of four troubling orientations
Project collage of Mother caring for her children superimposed with diagrams of four troubling orientations
Project collage of Mother caring for her children superimposed with diagrams of four troubling orientations

We also performed a talkshow on this work to further critique ourselves and account for our situated positions in caring for our loved ones.

Leaky Objects poster by Karey Helms, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Poster of early project insights presented at DIS 2017

Publications & Creative Outputs

Karey Helms, Ylva Fernaeus. 2021. Troubling Care: Four Orientations for Wickedness in Design. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2021), Virtual Event. (Best Paper Honorable Mention Award)
PDF, DOI, Video (10 min), Video (30 sec)

Karey Helms. 2017. Leaky Objects: Implicit Information, Unintentional Communication. ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2017), Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
PDF, DOI, Poster

Karey Helms, Barry Brown, Magnus Sahlgren, and Airi Lampinen. 2018. Design Methods to Investigate User Experiences of Artificial Intelligence. AAAI 2018 Spring Symposium Technical Report (The Design of the User Experience for Artificial Intelligence), Stanford, California, USA.