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.

Body maps are a popular tool in body-centric design, facilitating a sensitization and expression of felt sensations and emotions. Yet, they also bring forth assumptions about the body and our somatic experience. Based on an open and exploratory design ideation inquiry, we have started to explore how body maps could be advanced so as to cater to a plurality of bodies and aspects that shape somatic experiences. We present an annotated portfolio featuring six design themes (temporality, sociality, representativeness, granularity, context, focus). These themes help us examine implicit assumptions of current body maps, and offer possible alternatives for what future body maps could become. We contribute our themes, inspirational design ideas and practical design techniques to help craft novel body maps. Our contributions can serve as inspiration to others, towards advancing body maps as a research tool for body-centric interaction design.

Digital technology is increasingly used to enhance museum experiences for visitors. Concurrently, research shows that people seldom visit museums alone, yet design often focusses on creating individual experiences. This article addresses this conundrum by examining visitor’s social interaction and meaning-making in museums in order to provide empirical results actionable for design. It does so through an ethnographic approach combining observations and extended focus group interviews in an analogue museum. Results highlight how museums are social spaces, made so by active participant visitors. Processes of social meaning-making occur as visitors draw on objects in social identity-making and recontextualization – linking the past to the present –, play, share knowledge, and engage in embodied practices. The study suggests shifting from designing personalized toward interpersonal experiences. Four design sensitivities are presented: Interpersonalized meaning-making, playful sociality, social information sharing, and social movement.