Defining Matters of Compassion: Designing Care Technology within a Care Crisis

Access to mental health care is increasingly strained, with rising demand and long waiting times leaving many to manage their mental wellbeing alone. This work-in-progress paper responds to this care crisis by exploring how technology can support mental and emotional wellbeing. First, building on the concepts of matters of concern and matters of care, we propose a shift toward matters of compassion as a specific way to enact care that moves away from reductive problem-solving by embracing complexity, vulnerability, and uncertainty. Then, we further untangle the concept of matters of compassion by illustrating design tactics to invite compassionate engagement with experiences where resolution is not possible or desirable, where the experience inevitably brings uncertainty and vulnerability that need to be dealt with. To do so, we examine three design cases—focused on premenstrual disorders (PMDs), pregnancy, and abortion.