What’s "Designing for Ambivalence"?
Designing for Ambivalence explores the role of smartphones for mothers and young children.
Smartphones have a large part in families with young children. This work, which focusses on situations where mothers are the main carers, tries to better understand how smartphone use blurs the boundaries between work and play and private and public, often creating tension. The work also explores how attitudes towards the use of technology during the care of young children is gendered.
Who’s it for?
The project is relevant for researchers interested in better understanding how to conceptualize, interrogate or theorize about technology, caring for children, and motherhood. For the same reason the project may be of interest to technology designers, educators or policymakers working in the same context.
Approach
The project adopts a critical design and speculative design approach to create several designs to explore how mothers and children use smartphones, challenging idealised notions that see them as uncomplicated or passive users of technology.
The designs are used as conversational probes, as well as building on the traditions of drawing as research and making as research.
Contribution
This project shows that mothers and their children have complex relationships with smartphones. The realities of these relationships are often hidden because they are private, this project showed how to make them visible.
The project also highlights that smartphones are an integral part of everyday life, that they exist in conflict with the widely held view that technology is bad for young children and that they raise difficult feelings in those who need to use them while caring for their young.
Why is it in the Observatory?
This project explores a significant societal issue. Moreover, the chosen approach demonstrates how insights can emerge from practising critical and speculative design as well as by using those designs as a conversational research probe.