PregnancyCubes: A design process to cultivate tensions

This pictorial proposes a strategy to cultivate tensions in a design process inspired by Stengers’ notion of problematization. This strategy is a response to the issue that a current ideal is to design technology to smooth out the curves of our everyday lives rather than acknowledging our entangled relationships with all the human and non-human actors we engage with. The argument is that if we keep striving for minimal friction, we will end up estranged and discontent. The technologies will only provide a shallow technological fix that does not fit into our entangled lives. Our case is a design process to support the relationship of expecting parents. The result is a set of nine PregnancyCubes which are meant to cultivate tensions within a relationship in different ways.