Creating Resources for Designing With and For Care Ecologies in HCI

Amidst a growing body of work in HCI focusing on designing systems that engage with care relationships, there is increasing interest in expanding notions of care beyond transactional practices, towards broader notions of “care ecologies”. However, how can we support care systems designers to apply these concepts in practice? This paper presents the Care Spectrums, a set of sensitising concepts for designers to explore and apply to their practice. Developed as a response to a design probe exercise (the CareTree) which was carried out with 14 participants over one month, the Care Spectrums respond to the multiplicity of expressions of care in participants’ everyday lives. Translated into a design resource (the ‘Co-Designing with Care’ card deck), and trialled with 10 designers, the Care Spectrums revealed hidden caring and uncaring practices in designers’ projects, and stimulated opportunities for designing with and for people’s complex and entangled care ecologies.