All You Need is Love: Current Strategies of Mediating Intimate Relationships through Technology
A wealth of evidence suggests that love, closeness, and intimacy-in short relatedness-are important for people's psychological well-being. Nowadays, however, couples are often forced to live apart. Accordingly, there has been a growing and flourishing interest in designing technologies that mediate (and create) a feeling of relatedness when being separated, beyond the explicit verbal communication and simple emoticons available technologies offer. This article provides a review of 143 published artifacts (i.e., design concepts, technologies). Based on this, we present six strategies used by designers/researchers to create a relatedness experience: Awareness, expressivity, physicalness, gift giving, joint action, and memories. We understand those strategies as starting points for the experience-oriented design of technology.
intimate relationships relatedness review experience design emotional communication interaction design long-distance relationships