Recent advances in care technologies have enabled increasingly complex configurations of surveillance and alarm-based systems. Within care homes, these systems now function as a central sociotechnical infrastructure through which care- and health-related incidents are detected and managed, data-driven judgements are produced, and personnel resources are coordinated under conditions of growing scarcity. Rather than operating as standalone devices, these systems co-constitute the relations, practices, and temporalities through which contemporary care is organized.
In this subproject, we examine how surveillance technologies in dementia care are produced, enacted, and sustained within sociotechnical assemblages of human and non-human actors. We investigate how responsibilities, forms of visibility, everyday practices, and ethical concerns emerge relationally as technologies become entangled with the routines of care work. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we show how these systems are incorporated into daily decision-making processes and negotiations of what constitutes “good care,” even as they reconfigure boundaries between private and public life and expand the scope and tempo of care labor.
Building on this empirical foundation, the project reimagines relations, responsibilities, and ethical practices in care homes by exploring alternative modes of living and working with contemporary care technologies. Through a speculative research-through-design methodology, we interrogate dominant ideals, scrutinize embodied values, and probe the material qualities that shape care practices. We analyze existing sociotechnical arrangements while materializing new configurations that foreground responsibility, interdependence, and the situated, practical work of care.
