Logo: to the web site of Uppsala University

Families creatively negotiate many different types of digitally mediated communication to do social family work – sometimes playfully and sometimes due to urgent need. This negotiation can manifest in numerous ways, reflecting the dynamic nature of modern family life. Such creative acts are performed across a multitude of interfaces and media forms and serve to maintain family intimacy and cohesion. In this study, we combine the concept of creative un-use with the study of family life and digital technology. We analyse in-depth interviews with Swedish extended family members who are curating, cutting, reducing, or modifying their uses to ‘do family’. Our results show that these social and creative acts are constantly negotiated and shifting as new technologies are adopted and uses, norms, routines, habits, and expectations change. We show how acts of creative un-use, always oscillating between use and non-use, and as small or sometimes quirky they may be, are deeply entangled with family work and used as a means to support both within and between household family ties. The study finally explores what creative family appropriation of digital communication technology means for how these very systems are designed.

Digital applications for tracking pregnancy and fetal development are increasingly popular, yet we know little of how these technologies shape individual pregnancy experiences. This empirical study investigates how 17 expectants in Sweden use such apps to make sense of their pregnancies. It is grounded in feminist perspectives, highlighting the need to focus on women's health. Drawing on entanglement and flat ontology, we show how apps are part of socio-material configurations where they contribute to pregnancy meaning-making. We show how users experience a gradual realization that apps model ideal pregnancies and not the participants' own, how the app's commercial nature conflicts with many participants' ideals of pregnancy, and how participants continue to use apps despite this but engage in selective use. All to support ways of making pregnancy in desired ways. Finally, we outline how users engage with pregnancy apps and the resulting natureculture arrangements where bodies and technology are intertwined and co-constructed. We argue that entanglement should be seen as a process, not a state, as users continually negotiate their use, engaging in what could be called processes of untangling.

In this paper, we explore the growing trend of European game developers embracing their cultural heritage with greater dedication. Taking a bottom-up approach, we showcase various successful examples of games that engage with local cultural canons. Additionally, we investigate how games can evolve into creators of cultural heritage by examining those that have already achieved such status. Furthermore, we delve into the potential fusion between independent games and cultural heritage by presenting several paradigms and posing pertinent questions about this evolution. Our study offers a framework that envisions games with strong local identities from diverse regions forming transnational networks and agencies within the videogame industry. Such developments could give rise to a new European game scene that draws inspiration primarily from local heritages, thereby fueling creativity and innovation in the field.

This paper addresses the growing crisis of consent in machine interactions, particularly in data-driven technologies where consent is often legally compliant but ethically shallow. Users frequently accept default settings and terms without understanding, undermining the notion of informed, voluntary consent. Drawing from theories of relational consent—originating in the field of sexuality—we explore more dynamic, ongoing, and context-aware models of consent in computing. This challenges static, one-time consent frameworks and reframes consent as a dialogic, ethically engaged process. We present the notion of relational consent in computer interaction and apply it through exploration and speculative design in two case studies. The first examines animal husbandry, where power asymmetries and datafication challenge notions of agency. The second explores video games, reimagining consent as continually negotiable. Together, these cases offer highly diverse perspectives that illustrate a wide range of consent-related challenges. The findings aim to better support autonomy, integrity, and fairness in machine-mediated interactions. This work contributes to the design of more ethical technologies that take into account both human and more-than-human considerations.

GenderCrusher is a hybrid interactive experience that queers facial recognition technologies through playful critique. Drawing on queer theory, it challenges machine learning's reliance on fixed identity categories, particularly in gender classification. By inviting players to "assist" an AI in diversifying gender recognition, the experience exposes the limitations and biases of facial recognition systems and questions whether inclusivity can be achieved through data expansion alone. The GenderCrusher eventually breaks down or can be aborted, symbolising refusal to comply with restrictive norms. Built using Twine, Arduino, and image generative AI tools, GenderCrusher operationalizes queer critique into a tangible, engaging format that opens discourse to wider audiences. It demonstrates how playful, critical design can destabilise binary structures, resist normativity, and illuminate the socio-technical complexities of identity in and with AI. Ultimately, it offers space to reimagine AI through queer, non-normative lenses beyond representational fixes.

The hybrid, interactive experience "P - our love is the thing that fuels the light" use interactive fiction to explore human-AI relations. P is a hypothetical strong AI, a scripted interactive representation with which you engage in conversation. P is many things that AI is today, but in contrast, P is so openly. P is biased and faulty, not good at exact predictions, malleable, made by humans, and trained on human data. Designed with the concept of radical softness in mind, P wants people to come close, to share intimacy with the machine, and through this expose its weaknesses and the weaknesses we all share as human beings. P embraces vulnerability and empathy and frames these as strengths and perhaps tools to rethink a human-AI future. P helps us to think, and feel, about AI.

 When video games have historical settings, what is known of the past and how this is interpreted with eyes of the present time shapes our gameplay experience. As the past is always reinterpreted and reshaped -- informed by contemporary concerns -- playing historical games becomes a two-way dialogue between history and the now. In this study we explore this dialogue through the lens of Ubisoft’s (2018) Assassin’s Creed Odyssey (ACO), focusing on the doing of gender and sexuality as constructs which vary through place and time. Through close playing, we examine how gender comes to be ergodically through playing with gender by combining the scholarly perspectives of game studies and ancient history.

We argue that the position of modern video game players, with their contemporary values and experiences of doing gender, combine with ‘player choice’ as a core value in modern game development to impact what kinds of historical reconstructions are available for game developers. Our main case study, ACO, avoids making players perform gender practices of the past that clash with modern values. This concerns the characterisation of the female protagonist, representation of other women in the game and representations of sexuality through the game's narrative, aesthetics and game mechanics. Finally, we argue that games like the Assassin's Creedseries are leveraging history to tell exciting stories. Yet, the gendered story ACO tells could have been made considerably more interesting by drawing on the ways that gender has been done in history, rather than, as is now, erasing the historical power positions women have inhabited.

This study analyzes representations of women—protagonists and NPCs—in Assassińs Creed games between 2007 and 2024, to explore the impact of the last decades’ work for gender rights on the English language AAA game industry. Through close playing, we explore game bodies with attention to the surface level of narrative, graphics, sound, and underlying mechanics of actions and reactions. Through netnography, we add promotional material, retail sites, and social movements of importance to the analysis. Results show four eras for female protagonists: nonexistent, protagonists in side games, defined by their male coprotagonists, and choose your gender. Over the 17 years studied, women are more present, and NPCs are more complex. Though female protagonists remain sidelined or shallow representations as female skins on male characters. We discuss how discrepancies and conflicts between artistic visions, marketing, and brand choices impact how women are represented, and the impact on representation by external cultural events, for example Gamergate/Metoo, during this period.

This chapter provides a critical examination of the promise of AI technology with a focus on museums and cultural heritage organisations. We argue that while AI shows great potential for digitalisation, collections management and curation, its implementation is a complex endeavour. First, we discuss artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies with great potential such as computer vision and natural language processing, as well as the implementation of AI for heritage encounters. We then identify a number of challenges in implementing these technologies—namely using technology to address the diversity of human memory and culture that is inherent in cultural heritage collections, but also issues of accessibility and technical know-how. Finally, we envision the future potential of AI for the digitalisation of heritage.