Research project Shared Uses of Intimate Technology
Intimate technologies, such as insulin pumps, smart vibrators, and digital contraceptives, are typically designed for use at an individual level. However, their use and its consequences are often shared and social. This project examines how emerging intimate technologies within reproductive health come to be shared.
Intimate technology can be understood as a technology applied to an intimate part of the body or to an intimate bodily process. The use of these technologies is often studied at an individual level, but we see an urgent need for research to engage with the social context of ‘use’. The foundational work we offer is to understand intimate technologies from a relational perspective:
How do people come to share and experience sharing intimate technologies?
How are interpersonal relationships entangled with their use?
We work towards three objectives: The core objective is to study the shared use of intimate health technology as a relationally performed phenomenon. We will draw upon interviews and a design probes approach to sensitively study intimate technology use in situ.
Our second objective is to reimagine how intimate technologies could be shared socially, to achieve particular outcomes (avoiding pregnancy, for example). We will utilise feminist utopian approaches to develop critical designs that offer radical alternatives to the sharing of intimate technologies.
Our third objective is to consider the ‘dark side’ of sharing and develop a relational ethics, resulting in design principles and best practices for designing and studying shared uses of intimate technology.
Project members
Project managers
Airi Lampinen
Senior lecturer
Madeline Balaam
