Shaping Romance: Mediating Intimacy for Co-located Couples

Abstract

During recent years multiple studies focused on how to mediate the intimacy of couples over distance by researching various intimacy aspects, such as physical contact and disclosure. At the same time, mediating intimacy for co-located couples remains relatively unexplored. Our paper focuses on this and presents an empirical field study involving 13 co-located couples that interacted with a technology probe titled ‘Shaping Romance’. In short, our qualitative findings show that technology can mediate intimacy by allowing partners to look inwards and reflect on their own desires, look outwards and reflect on the desires of their partner, and look at the whole by remembering, acting and validating. Our contributions to HCI are the technological intervention itself, our findings which highlight limitations and opportunities technology has for mediating the intimacy of co-located couples, and a design space full of dilemmas that we present for future researchers and designers.