Reclaiming and Commemorating Difficult Felt Experiences
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Matters Mattering: Collective Interactions and Play [cont.]
Presentation Title:
- Reclaiming and Commemorating Difficult Felt Experiences
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Consumer self-tracking products help generate optimization expectations about diverse aspects of the lived human experience including levels of physical fitness, mental health, and general wellness. The commercial rhetoric and positioning of the humans who do not, or cannot use these devices and systems is that they are somehow diminished or not aspiring to be all they could be. This notion that humans need to be fixed by a technological solution can engender considerable anxiety and stress, particularly when there are different power dynamics in who gets to determine who is supposedly broken. The work presented here seeks to reclaim and reframe difficult human experiences as complex events that require acknowledgement and emotionally reckoning with, rather than striving for a neat resolution through socio-technical means. The Done Medals are personal awards commemorating the successful endurance of an assisted fertility cycle. The medals reorient the maker and wearer away from stressful trackers, apps, and data, and towards an affirmation that a series of difficult events were completed and can now be shared as a social good.
