Communicative Openness Within Adoptive Families

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

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.