Provotyping Accountability: Exploring Smartphone Use in the Home through Design

In response to research concerns that smartphone usage negatively impacts intimate relationships, this paper presents a study exploring how design can encourage smartphone accountability in family home settings. We developed and deployed three provotypes with seven families via a Research through Design study intended to encourage reflections on ubiquitous and routinised smartphone usage. The provotypes progressively explore ways of making smartphone use visible by facilitating individualised accountability, competitive accountability, and collective accountability. We present insights into how these provotypes shaped family practices based on a qualitative study with 26 participants. We found that, by emphasising different forms of shared accountability, the provotypes reduced smartphone use, which in turn fostered family intimacy and togetherness, rooted in meanings of caring and sharing. Finally, we discuss our study’s implications for how provotypes can help explore forms of accountability in practices involving sustainable technology use within the home.