research-article

Shaping Romance: Mediating Intimacy for Co-located Couples

Authors:

Anne Ellegaard Christensen,

Malene H. Magnussen,

Tobias S. Seindal,

Dimitrios RaptisAuthors Info & Claims

OzCHI '21: Proceedings of the 33rd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Pages 86 - 98

https://doi.org/10.1145/3520495.3520502

Published: 15 September 2022 Publication History

Abstract

During recent years multiple studies focused on how to mediate the intimacy of couples over distance by researching various intimacy aspects, such as physical contact and disclosure. At the same time, mediating intimacy for co-located couples remains relatively unexplored. Our paper focuses on this and presents an empirical field study involving 13 co-located couples that interacted with a technology probe titled ‘Shaping Romance’. In short, our qualitative findings show that technology can mediate intimacy by allowing partners to look inwards and reflect on their own desires, look outwards and reflect on the desires of their partner, and look at the whole by remembering, acting and validating. Our contributions to HCI are the technological intervention itself, our findings which highlight limitations and opportunities technology has for mediating the intimacy of co-located couples, and a design space full of dilemmas that we present for future researchers and designers.

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Cited By

Cassidy CFigueira IPark SKim JEdwards EBranham S(2024)Cuddling Up With a Print-Braille Book: How Intimacy and Access Shape Parents' Reading Practices with ChildrenProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642763(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642763
Aljuneidi SGerstenberg RHassenzahl M(2023)DisClose: Negative Body-Related Self-Disclosure to Mediate Intimacy over DistanceProceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference10.1145/3638380.3638391(114-127)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638380.3638391

Index Terms

Shaping Romance: Mediating Intimacy for Co-located Couples
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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OzCHI '21: Proceedings of the 33rd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

November 2021

361 pages

ISBN:9781450395984

DOI:10.1145/3520495

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

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Published: 15 September 2022

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OzCHI '21

OzCHI '21: 33rd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

November 30 - December 2, 2021

VIC, Melbourne, Australia

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Cited By

Cassidy CFigueira IPark SKim JEdwards EBranham S(2024)Cuddling Up With a Print-Braille Book: How Intimacy and Access Shape Parents' Reading Practices with ChildrenProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642763(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642763
Aljuneidi SGerstenberg RHassenzahl M(2023)DisClose: Negative Body-Related Self-Disclosure to Mediate Intimacy over DistanceProceedings of the 35th Australian Computer-Human Interaction Conference10.1145/3638380.3638391(114-127)Online publication date: 2-Dec-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3638380.3638391

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