Over the past two decades, discussions of design patterns have turned from encouragement (what to do) toward discouragement (what to avoid). Termed dark, deceptive, or otherwise harmful, user experience (UX) patterns that serve to monetize engagement while reproducing and sedimenting structural inequities are prevalent, which calls for a shifting conversation around UX development and learning. This pictorial uses a visual case study of a childcare worker platform to help critically contextualize largely abstracted or universalizing UX patterns. Developing a form of critical documentation we call Care Layering, we show how approaching UX patterns as embodied and culturally-situated resources sheds light on both limitations and opportunities around gig work platform engagement. We end with a discussion of how Care Layering helps designers work towards greater accountability in UX design.

Care work is always already unequal. It involves looking after others’ physical, psychological, emotional, and developmental needs. Paid care work tends to be conducted in private spaces, lack regulation, and reproduce unequal dynamics between clients and workers. These conditions lead to porous boundaries, a permeability experienced by workers between care and work, professional and personal, and private and public (sectors and spheres). Drawing on interviews with 16 workers who find work using Care.com, we argue that the porous boundaries of care work are reified in new ways through the design and use of emerging digitally mediated matching platforms. This has particular impacts for ranking personhood, reducing worker safety, and increasing atomization. In contrast, we find benefits in the forum-like structure and visible, interactive conversations of other platforms used to access childcare work. We end with a discussion of porousness by design and the trouble of locating design within worker platforms.

With the increase of Internet of Things devices in home environments, data will become an even more dominant part of people’s everyday lives. The invisibility of data leads us to rely on our imagination to make sense of them, yet this imagination is heavily shaped by a technocentric lens that views data as neutral and transparent. In response, in this article, we present the Data Epics project, where we commissioned seven fiction writers to write short stories based on smart home device data provided by seven households. We offer an analysis of the writers and households’ experiences with the project, presenting seven ways in which data imaginaries are made and unmade. We contribute a reflection around how making new data imaginaries unmakes common ones, the friction in unmaking certain imaginaries, and how we might further disseminate alternative data imaginaries.

The processes of data collection and transformation are often opaque to users. This means they rely on their imagination to make sense of the data they produce. The images data conjure up, however, tend to be homogenous and flat: black screens, ones and zeros, big server farms in the desert. For designers and researchers who work with data as a material, this small repertoire can be stifling. For device users, it can lead to a removal of agency in how they make sense and engage with the data they produce. In this pictorial, we draw from a two-year data fictionalization project to start building an expanded repertoire of data imaginaries. We worked with seven households and seven writers to transform smart home data sets into fiction stories. Based on the interviews we conducted, we present the images participants shared with us as a step towards more expressive and varied imaginaries of data.