Do you have an interest in care or caring research and technology, but may have been pushed back by the elusiveness and multivocality of “care” in everyday and academic language?

This project aims to provide an overview and some clarification on that through a meta-narrative review of 317 SIGCHI papers on care. We first highlight application areas of care that HCI research has been engaged with, detailing who, what, and where has been included or overlooked. Then, we define six paradigmatic framings of care from our analysis—care framed: as management of conditions; as everyday living support; as supporting and caring for carers; as politics and advocacy; as a way of living, doing and relating; and as a means of knowledge production. Finally, we introduce a conceptual map along with an interactive website for care in HCI, from which we discuss connections and temporal development across the framings and along the four waves of HCI, detailing the implications from the review.

It is a collaborative project that brought together researchers with expertise and practices in various care domains, including healthcare, aged care, intimate care, and care ethics. Working iteratively, we read and analysed papers, discussed interpretations as a team, and refined our framings and assumptions through collective workshops. By combining perspectives, we developed a clearer picture of how care is understood across the field. Although there is no simple answer, we hope to provide conceptual tools and frameworks to think with, and to help move forward more caring technology development.