Communicative Openness within Adoptive Families: The Role of Photos and Visual Communication

Dylan, Thomas, Harrison, Daniel and Durrant, Abigail (2022) Communicative Openness within Adoptive Families: The Role of Photos and Visual Communication. In: DIS 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference: Digital Wellbeing. ACM, New York, US, pp. 807-820. ISBN 9781450393584

[img]
Preview
Text
dis22a-sub4768-i8.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (7MB) | Preview
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533513

Abstract

HCI has a long history of designing to support family life, despite this little is known about the unique needs of adoptive families. Though work has explored the role of photos, and photo sharing in the family home, this does not take account of the essential role of photos in supporting the well-being of adopted children. We report on a Research through Design (RtD) project investigating how adoptive parents communicate life story, which is essential to a child's sense of identity. In this pictorial we show the role of photos and visual communication in enabling core aspects of communicative openness between parent and child, as derived from interviews with adopters about their child's life story book. We conclude by discussing the need for visual guidelines and tools to support a more nuanced use of photos and illustrations.

Item Type: Book Section
Uncontrolled Keywords: Adoptive families, narrative identity, photos, visual communication, life story
Subjects: W200 Design studies
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Design
Depositing User: John Coen
Date Deposited: 01 Sep 2022 11:14
Last Modified: 01 Sep 2022 11:15
URI: https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/49993

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

View more statistics