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completed

Intimate Objects

How can we make technologies for communicating and maintaining intimacy at a distance? Current communication technologies are often optimized for efficiency and general-purpose use. We use Philip Agre's notion of critical technical practice to provide a theoretical framework on which to base our design. We are building devices that differ from mass communication devices in three ways: they are for couples in a relationship to communicate with each other, not with everybody else, they are for a specific couple to use, not a generic couple, and they are for the transmission of specific intimate communication, not all-purpose communication.