Caring for a companion as a form of self-care. Exploring the design space for irritating companion technologies for mental health

This paper presents an approach to designing companion technologies for mental health based on a case study on social anxiety disorder (SAD). We highlight the potential of an irritating dimension of user experience and propose including irritating qualities in companions as a strategy to disrupt patterns of behavior and thought, support perspective change, and expand an individual’s comfort zone. Taking the Tamagotchi as a counterpoint to assisting technologies and combining frameworks and concepts from psychology and HCI, we propose the grounding metaphor of ‘caring for the companion as a form of self-care,’ arguing the potential of building reciprocal care relationships as a means by which to support emotional attachment and establish healthy routines. In this paper, we introduce this grounding metaphor and a set of principles for fostering positive irritations. Our framework provides a basis for exploring and developing novel paradigms and poses future directions for HCI.