Making a Home for Social Media

In this paper we report on the design and implementation of an initial prototype to explore how to better situate in the home social media content individually generated by family members. We considered whether existing infrastructure and practices of social media might be leveraged to offer new kinds of shared family experiences. We found that families perceived the system to be “cosy” and intimate, especially in contrast to Facebook, and as a result ‘shared to care’. While aspects of the design had a strong role to play in faciliating this perception, participants enacted their own boundaries of sharing and disclosure based on pre-existing practices and attitudes toward social technologies. The study demonstrated that there are productive design opportunities in home systems that can leverage content via a broad range of social media applications.