Intimacy is an embodied experience rooted in everyday life activities including bodily interactions. For some, intimacy is experienced and built across distances when intimate partners find themselves physically apart for various periods. In such scenarios, people turn to technology, using devices to connect with their loved ones intimately. When using technology, a boundary exists between loved ones in the digital and physical worlds. Despite this boundary, intimacy can be maintained and nourished when bodies are apart.
This dissertation delves into the role of interaction design in fostering non-sexual intimacy across distances through an embodied approach. By designing for intimate, yet distant, bodies, it offers the research programme co-creating design(s) in and for remote intimacy. Derived from the main research question – How can a close-to-body experience be designed to support intimacy between people across distances? – this research programme explores the design of a remote, close-to-body experience for individuals who are emotionally close but physically apart. The designed experience aims to invite far-away loved ones to reflect on, disrupt, and reinvent their habitual ways of building and experiencing intimacy across distances. Within this programmatic framework, the dissertation offers three key contributions to interaction designers and design researchers: methodological, designerly, and theoretical. Methodologically, it proposes new approaches for co-designing remote intimacy. Designerly, it presents commitments to consider when designing in the realm of remote intimacy. Theoretically, it provides situated knowledge that highlights the multifaceted nature of remote intimacy, emphasising its individual, collective, bodily, virtual, and material dimensions.
In conclusion, this dissertation challenges conventional methods and advocates for embodied design practices and approaches, opening new design spaces for supporting intimacy across distances. It invites interaction designers and design researchers to rethink and reimagine how humans experience and build intimacy in an increasingly digital world.
Supervisor: Dr. Kristi Kuusk (Estonian Academy of Arts), prof. Danielle Wilde (Umea University and University of Southern Denmark)
External reviewers: dr. Verena Fuchsberger-Staufer (University of Salzburg) and dr. Vasiliki Tsaknaki (IT University of Copenhagen).
Opponent: dr. Verena Fuchsberger-Staufer (University of Salzburg)
Language editor: Michael Haagensen
Language editor (Estonian): Refiner
Series design: Indrek Sirkel
Layout: Pärtel Eelmere
Dissertations Academiae Artium Estoniae 44
158 pages, in English
Estonian Academy of Arts, 2024
ISBN 978-9916-740-17-0 (print)
ISBN 978-9916-740-18-7 (pdf)
ISSN 1736-2261