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.

Feminist self-defense combines physical self-defense with mental strength exercises through role-playing scenarios. It aims to challenge limiting beliefs about women's abilities to respond to interpersonal violence. We present the experiences from feminist self-defense classes in Sweden and the results of a set of speculative designs that combined contribute to imagine how technology could play a role in experiencing these holistic practices. The goal is to illustrate the potential of embodied interaction design to empower beginner feminist self-defense practitioners. To do so, the study was conducted via two methods: semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, and a participatory speculative design workshop with novice practitioners. The speculative concepts demonstrate how design can support the practice of feminist self-defense. Through this study we contribute to the corpus of embodied design interventions, in this case combining design for bodily movements with feminist consciousness raising in relation to the topic of gender-based violence.

Traditionally, family intimacy has been seen as depending on spatial proximity and physical closeness. However, due to individualization and globalization, many families live apart and/or spend their days away from each other. Moreover, a shift in family communication from household-to-household to person-to-person has occurred in the context of so-called networked individualism. These changes make it imperative to investigate how contemporary families communicate to create and maintain intimacy in and across households. Drawing on the concept of doing intimate family work, this study investigates the small acts performed in everyday life to do family intimacy through ICT in the context of networked individualism. We conducted interviews with 6 multigenerational families – spread across 18 households in Sweden and the US. Results show how responsibilities and practices of family communication become part of doing intimate family work, through personalized technology, with consequences for each individual family member. We explore the various affordances family members realize through actions in order to support family intimacy and how these practices reinforce the importance of the family home as a physical base for cross-household family communication.

For many families, ICTs have become an indispensable part of family life. Smartphones and other digital communication technologies help them to keep up with each other during school/work hours; organizing family gatherings can be coordinated in chat-groups created specifically for that purpose; and keeping up with grandparents overseas has become much more vivid thanks to video-telephony. However, integrating ICTs into families’ everyday lives means new (micro) tasks, new opportunities, but also new troubles.

Drawing on interview data with six extended Swedish families spread over 18 households, we investigate how (grand-)parents manage, relate to, and assist in children’s digital family work. In our qualitative analysis, we show how particular roles and tasks are assigned to and expected of the children. We find that the children are often put into a paradoxical position. On the one hand, they are understood as digital natives “by default”, who embrace digital technologies and for whom communicating online is automatically fun and easy. On the other hand, they are placed as victims of omnipresent digitalisation, who need to be protected in favor of a more ‘natural childhood’. In accordance to these opposing positions, we analyze how technologies are called ‘good’ in the framework of family communication, and ‘bad’ in other contexts, such as entertainment.

ICTs are an indispensable part of many families’ everyday life, not only for family management but also for maintaining family intimacy. Yet, we know little about the everyday practices of using ICTs for family work. How do contemporary Swedish families use ICTs to support family intimacy? We investigate how particular social needs for family intimacy lead to creative forms of technology adaptation and use. We conducted interviews with six, Swedish families, living in different households, cities, and even countries. Our results detail three main distances—spatiotemporal, generational, and embodied—that people experience in their family life. We conclude that bridging distances requires doing digital intimate family work; i.e. families find ways of translating or recreating intimate family settings, situations, and interactions into digital contexts.