So we are here to have more of a casual conversation about how our journal article:
"The Fundamental Uncertainties of Mothering: Finding Ways to Honor Endurance Struggle and
Contradiction" came to be and to give you a little bit of a flyover about what we find interesting
with it and also maybe what you might find in it if you if you find yourself with time to read it.
So this process of writing actually took place over about a year and a half. It started with an
abstract about where does rage go in HCI and how do we deal with it without trying to get rid of it
and then it sort of morphed into a project where Kristina and Aisling and I all made these very
personal and intimate artifacts that we call Design Memoirs
and that ended up falling out of this process is a different CHI paper
in 2020. So what kind of pulling that off allowed us to do is really focus in on how
we thought those Design Memoirs and that process of making gave us new insights into HCI's patterns
for designing in the realm of women's health. We characterized the realm of women's health in HCI
a little less about the particular context of the doctor's office and whatnot
but this general idea of how we respond to the experience mothers face with uncertainty so what
we wanted to do was to find a way to unpick or work around or find a slightly more slower
and attentive way. Thinking about and around this notion of the wicked problem, this thing
that you cannot solve, this thing that remains, that stays, that is still there in the morning
after you solved all the things you can solve. There's a whole bunch of things that we're just
living with like frustration and grief and you know minor things like annoyance and
the this is a huge part of mothering and being mothered. The incredibly long timelines that this
involves it it goes on for years and years and there's an enormous part of that that when you're
in the middle of it you go "I have, you know, I've been doing this for years already and this
but we wanted to find a way to see if we could allow these things to just be.
And so if we think about the things that we created we created these Design Memoirs
of pockets of kind of wearable garments of metals the way we wanted to approach it in terms of not
trying to create some sort of linear narrative like we did you know or even the like have a
even a coherent method in some ways we thought well why don't we read and kind of put together
our the things that we made and consider them with one another right in relationship to one another
in these dyads where we could begin to think about what could we say about these together
not what can I say about your piece that you did which is so close to you but rather how can I
conceptualize if I take these two things together, these representations of a fellows experience,
how might I begin to understand and interpret them? The way we began we created these we looked
at them in relationship to one another and then we come back to okay so what is the what is the
takeaway for our HCI community. One of the books that was really influential in that conclusion
was Halberstam's "The Queer Art of Failure" and we kind of offer our interpretation of the text
in the realm of design as a way of kind of recovering the perspective that gets left
out in HCI quite a bit... or gets left out in these kind of broader narratives of innovation.
That we don't always have to be moving away and improving and that that kind of notion of
singular improvement or focusing in does kind of come at a cost -- sort of like entropy it always
sort of reproduces somewhere else. So what we end with is as a suggestion of this is other way of
looking. Maybe not another way of designing but another way of approaching a situation
and opening up into it and trying to listen to what's happened without any particular agenda
so that we can better respond to the situations we're living in at the moment.