Talks by Velvet Spors and Martin Porcheron

In this digital lab meeting, Velvet and Martin will both give talks on their current paper writing plans.

Velvet Spors - Glossy, Sterile Futures: A Critical Exploration of Self-Care Apps' Descriptions in the Google Play Store

The ubiquity of smartphones in everyday life makes them an attractive space for applications and experiences that aim to support people in “doing” self-care. Inspired by a diverse “landscape” of different therapy paradigms, pedagogies and concepts, these mental-health-minded self-care apps offer a wide variety of potential modes of interactions and activities for their “users”. 

However, these apps are not created in a value-free vacuum, because designers and developers imbue their creations with opinions, world views and assumptions. This paper presentation is interested in making (some of) these (often) implicit notions visible and to critically examine them. 

After carefully selecting 69 apps from the Google Play Store, this paper presentation uses thematic analysis to make sense of them by answering: 1) From the apps’ perspective, why should a person do self-care with them? 2) From the apps’ perspectives, where does stress / being mentally unwell come from? And 3) What do the apps say about self-care in general? 

Commercial self-care apps are future-oriented spaces that can be tools for individual self-discovery, but more so they are enforcers of a healthist, normative view of mental distress, hidden under the promise of “healthy”, “adjusted” and “easy” futures.

Martin Porcheron - ALTCAI Nigeria fieldwork

Last year we conducted participatory design fieldwork in Nigeria as part of the ALTCAI virtual human project. In this talk I want to talk about our ideas for turning this into a paper by (hopefully) presenting a coherent argument. I appreciate all the questions, ideas, thoughts, and links that could be made in the paper.