Hi, my name is Julie Funk and I'm presenting, "Exploring Smartphone
Relationships Through Roland Barthes Using an Instrumented Pillow Technology Probe."
This paper was co-authored by Matthew Lakier, Marcel O'Gorman and Daniel Vogel. The problem
we're addressing is how smartphone attachment discourses often pathologize behaviours through
a lens of addiction and obsession. Instead, we're exploring new ways to think and talk
about our relationships to our smartphones without using this pathologizing language.
We do this by turning away from clinical discourse and towards literary and critical theory
for this research we use Roland Barthes' text "A Lover's Discourse." "A Lover's Discourse"
offers vignettes that capture feeling and the aesthetic of falling in love each vignette is
titled with an affective term or phrase. Waiting, dependency, anxiety, and absence are the four
terms we use from the text as our discursive lens for exploring smartphone attachment.
Our aim was to provoke responses to these four terms through a speculative technology probe. To
do this we built an instrumented pillowcase that magnetically seals smartphones away
in a specially designed pocket. The phone's presence is signalled with a heartbeat audio
and with red lights. It can be removed from the pouch at any time. Five participants engaged in
a sleep study using this special speculative design object for three consecutive nights.
The pillow was chosen because we wanted to create a physical metaphor for intimate relationships and
shared spaces with objects of love, and because it pays a nice homage to Dunn and Gaver's pillow.
We began our study by distributing an online survey to our regional and local university
community. We asked respondents to self-report their comfort around, typical proximity to,
and daily behaviour with their smartphones. The survey demonstrated that the largest concentration
of respondents reported being comforted by the presence of their phone and anxious in
its absence. This motivated us to explore these responses more deeply with the technology probe.
During the sleep study with the five participants we've recruited from the online survey,
we logged the intersection of phone and sleeping behaviours including the removal of the phone in
the middle of the night and restless bumps. More details on these logs are in the paper.
Through thematic analysis of interview transcripts, sleep logs, and diary entries,
we found three themes emerge. Participants self-descriptions fit these themes. Waiting
Between Worlds is the first theme. It is marked by an ambivalence in phone use that is dependent on
dualistic social worlds, or rather social roles. In this case, these roles are parent and employee.
Participant 1 described phone attachment when anticipating notifications from their kids' school
while at work, but not feeling particularly attached to their phone when at home with family.
Anxious Attachment, the second theme, is marked by a preoccupation with the phone while it was
in the pillow during the sleep study. Participant 2's partner was travelling for work at the time
of the sleep study and not having an easy easily accessible phone caused Participant
2 to feel increasing anxiety. This is reflected in Participant 2's sleep logs. And utilitarian
dependency, the last theme, is marked by users who describe their smartphones primarily as tools
for information rather than means for connection. Participant 4 noted that the sleep study disrupted
their typical sleep rituals for accessing news, planning the next day, and setting alarms before
bed. However, this group adapted the most quickly to such changes in bedtime and sleep rituals.
This research demonstrates participants were responsive to using the four chosen affective
terms to describe their relationships to their phone. This research also reaffirms the potential
value and approaches that combine literary and critical theories with HCI experimental methods.
We find these insights useful for HCI designers and scholars and hope to see more research
combining discursive design and technology probes in future domestic design studies.
That concludes my presentation. Please see the paper or contact me for more details. Thank you.