Designing with Polyamory

Design is, and has long been, mononormative. It focuses on couples, dyads, and traditional relationship structures that are often taken for granted as the norm. In my dissertation, I contribute techniques for inquiring about lived experiences of queerness and queer relationships with data from sensorially rich first-person and participatory design perspectives. Using sonic and tactile media to probe about lived experiences of the important but under-studied relationship formation of polyamory, in my dissertation, I ask: how might we design with and within the contexts of polyamory and computing? The project uses a combination of autoethnographic design inquiry and participatory design to investigate personal data and its potential for exploring non-normative relationships and lived experiences of polyamory.