You, the reader: Who is Madeline Balaam?
Her Bio: Madeline Balaam is an interaction design researcher working at the intersection of intimate health, the body and touch. She is a Professor in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she leads a team who focus on improving the ways in which bodies and intimate health issues are responded to by design and technology. She takes a feminist perspective to her research and brings with her a strong belief that design and technology can be used to make positive change in the world. Madeline has published her work extensively at ACM CHI and ACM DIS and has received five best paper awards from the venues over the last six years. Her work is funded by several national funding agencies in Sweden (VR, SSF and Digital Futures) and an ERC consolidator grant (’Intimate Touch: Designing for where technology meets the Body”).
Boyd: I saw some of your videos on YouTube. And some of the stuff you had done in the past in a presentation. My first question was, you are designing for bodies. And I’m wondering, Do you think that bodies have or deserve dignity, and why? Because, and I ask this because of that conversation around the robots stepping into some of these personal spaces.
Madeline: So, yes, I do think that bodies and people deserve dignity. I think oftentimes when we talk about dignity, it’s a social thing. So the way in which other people treat you gives or takes away a sense of dignity that you might have in yourself. But I started to think about dignity, in particular, in relation to touch, because there was this, when I was writing this proposal and thinking about this research, there was quite a lot of literature that shows that the fingers are really good at fine controlled movement and motion, and very good at creating touch on other people. But there are parts of the body where we have a different kind of nervous system that is more attuned to determining the affective experience of touch.
So parts of the body that are hairy are more quickly attuned to determining if a touch is pleasant or unpleasurable. And of course, a touch is also socially, culturally situated. So who is touching you, where they’re touching you on your body, how they’re touching you, why they’re touching you. All of those things lead to a particular effective response. But what that research made me start to think about was if we start to be touched by technology on not just but on parts of our body that are more attuned to determining the effective quality of touch, then it’s possible that if we get touched in the wrong way, in a way that we didn’t feel we consented to or that was uncomfortable or something else, that it might lead to people finding that experience to be an undignified one, where dignity is very loosely defined for me at the moment.
We haven’t yet done enough work to really determine how to define it properly. And so it became very important to me that when we’re thinking about designing for touch and technology, that it’s done in a way that makes people feel dignified or that helps people at least to not be not dignified. And I say that because from an ethical perspective, these visions of technologies that touch, like these care robots, if they become a reality, they will be applied to the most vulnerable people in society. So older people, disabled people, ill, sick people, maybe children. And those people deserve great care. they deserve their experiences with these technologies to be really well conceived of and really well designed.
And I think my concern was like, because those people are often the most vulnerable, they’re often the people who are considered to have the least value in society. And so they often get treated poorly in ways that are not very dignified. And so for me, it was important to insert dignity there as a more kind of like political statement that if we are going to do these things, which I don’t necessarily 100% I don’t agree that we necessarily should, but if it is going to come to pass, then it should at least be done well.
Boyd: Thank you for that. I see where you’re coming from. And when I was reading your bio, it said somewhere that she takes a feminist perspective to her research. What does that mean?
Madeline: Well, there’s been maybe like 10, 15 years of research in HCI and interaction design that’s been explicitly labeled feminist HCI. And much of that work began with Sharon Bardzell, who’s at Georgia Tech now. Jeffrey Bardzell, who’s, I think, at Penn State. Jennifer Rhodes, who’s at UCL, I think, who started to identify that the ways in which we design and make technology can align with feminist values. So in those early papers, they talk about the importance of participatory approaches to the design of technology. So we’re not taking things and applying them to people, but rather the things that get made and produced and embedded in a community are things that that community has designed and signed up to and actively wants and needs. but also, what else, looking at marginalized communities or voices that are not often heard within the field and lifting those voices up as being as equally important as those majority voices that we hear a lot.
So I suppose in this very simplest sense, the work that I have done was labelled feminist and then I decided I’m alright with it being feminist because it’s looking at these more marginalised concerns of bodies and particularly intimate health concerns and women’s health concerns. But the feminist HCI agenda is also about recognising plurality in people’s experiences. So that things don’t have to be exactly the same for everybody, but actually people are different and people need different types of experiences and interactions. So in those ways, we would consider the work feminist. But then also, I think some of the work that I’ve done has become a bit more political. So many issues of women’s health and women’s autonomy are political, like access to abortion, for example, or access to well-paid maternity leave. All of those issues are political. And so it makes sense, in a way, to align the work and to try and do the work in a feminist, through feminist methodologies and through feminist ways of being because of its political nature.
Boyd: So, I had another question. What is the difference between an elevator taking you from the first floor to the third floor, and a robot carrying you from the living room to your bed upstairs when you have a broken leg? What do you think the difference is, if any?
Madeline: I think there is a difference because when you get in, well it depends who you are I suppose, but if you’re going, pressing the button, so you call in the elevator and then you get into the elevator and you tell it where you want it to go. So to me it seems like you, the user of the elevator, have the most of the agency in that situation. Now of course like the elevator might break where it might get stopped by someone else on the way or you might press the wrong button and go down rather than go up but to me you as a user hold the agency so you’re in control.
But if you were picked up by a robot and carried, that’s quite a vulnerable position to be in. You have to worry about, or I at least might worry about this robot (because it will be a big powerful machine); might it crush me? Might it break and crush my bones and me and kill me? Might it drop me? Like, how do I ensure that the robot takes me to where I want to go? Did I decide to be picked up by the robot, or has it just come along and picked me up and started to move me about? So all of these issues of agency come to play a bit more. And then, I don’t know, as an adult human, being carried, you don’t get carried very often. I think that there would be ways in which you could be held and carried that might feel like it’s okay to be having this sort of slightly intimate experience with this technology and ways that it might feel deeply uncomfortable. So I think they are different.
Boyd: So there are some things that are similar on both. Let’s assume you had agency over where the robot was taking you and when it did. So they would both have agency, the elevator and the robot user. And then there’s also this space in between the decisions, the decision to enter the elevator and decision to leave, versus the decision to be picked up and then being put down. There’s that space where you have submitted some of the agency to the machine, so you have to wait until it has fulfilled its purpose. So there, they seem like they are similar.
So I think it introduces another conversation about trust and how it can be borrowed and passed around. But that’s maybe that’s for another time. I have two more questions. Okay, one more. What’s the role of materials in those kinds of interactions you’re designing? Is it utility? Is it beauty? Is it trying to make them more human-like or more humane?
Madeline: The materiality of the things plays a very important role because they work together. So you have the physical materiality of the thing you’re working with, the movements it makes through the actuation, and then the body that is actuating on, and the combination of those three things are the things that constitute the experience. So what we have found is when you’re trying to touch the body, and especially the very sensitive parts of the body, it’s quite easy for those touches to be really uncomfortable based on how you might have shaped what you are actuating.
And we have then found like if you then layer materials on top of one another, so you have like different type densities of foam and stretching materials, then you can kind of dissipate a touch over a bigger surface area and then it feels more comfortable. It maybe still touches the part of the body that you want it to, but it’s not poking in a way that is just not something that you want on your pelvic floor muscles. So the materiality there plays a really crucial role. So when you when we’re doing soma design, I think what makes it really challenging is that not only do you have to program the behaviors of the thing to work in a sequence with the nuance and subtlety that is important to whatever experience you’re trying to convey, but that you also have to get the industrial design of the thing right, so not just the visual aesthetics of the piece, but the way that it’s manufactured almost, to make sure that the actuation works in a way that is intended so they they work really closely together to produce the experience.
Boyd: What excites you and what scares you the most about technology entering previously human spaces? So, for example, the robot carrying you, where previously your grandchild or adult child carried you. Or the pelvic seat where it previously would have been some combination of maybe a gynecologist and a physiotherapist.
Madeline: I think the things that would worry me most, from a very pragmatic point of view, we’ve been making the pelvic chair for like, I don’t know, three or four years, me and Anna. And so for us it’s become like quite normal to have this thing, to have your pelvic floor muscles touched by these like actuating shapes, but it’s obviously weird, and so I worry about whether other people just find it weird, and maybe we have spent like three or four years making something that people just say like, that’s just very weird and I didn’t like it.
Then beyond that I worry like maybe it’s not possible with the with the technology expertise that we have to make touches that have the nuance and subtlety that we require for touching the human body well because we’re so good at touching with our hands it’s really hard to then make things that do to produce touch anywhere near as good as you might get from somebody else’s hands.
And then I think I worry a bit, (and this is more of a research worry) but if you are not used to describing how things feel, how it feels to be touched, which most of us aren’t because it’s not something that you do very often, then it becomes also very hard to collect good data about how something feels, because people can only really say, oh, that felt good, that felt bad, that felt like going to the gynecologist. None of that is very interesting for us from a research perspective, so I worry a bit about that.
And then I suppose, I don’t want a future where we are looked after by care robots. And so there’s, I guess, the more that there is research that talks about care robots and produces knowledge and techniques that care robots might use, then the more likely you are to make that kind of future happen, even if you’re doing it in a bit of a skeptical manner. I don’t know, because in Japan they seem like they really do have care robots. They’re not touching people very much yet, but they’re doing other things.
And then the other thing that I find personally exciting is having managed to sort of convince funders to fund research that’s essentially about making chairs that touch people’s pelvic floor muscles. And that I find a positive move forward. I think things have changed in the last ten years. The things that I do now are no longer like, they’re no longer like minority research. There’s more and more people doing this kind of research in our field, and I find that very exciting too. I don’t know if that answered your question, but it is my answer.
Boyd: Thanks for the talk!
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