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Short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and careful design-thinking-interventions, this paper explores how place and everyday care in later life are interrelated when the perspective of a lesbian 'caring interface' is foregrounded.

Long abstract:

Digital and non-digital places of everyday care in later life are manifold, as are the work, practices, infrastructures, imaginaries, institutions, arrangements, and connections that enact them (e.g. Peine et al. 2021, Pasveer et al. 2020, Ivanova 2020; Buse et al. 2018). However, how is everyday care distributed, organized, and re-placed through different places? And what can we learn about 'caring-in-place' practices when we study future feminist community places and imaginations of care?

Starting from these questions, I will present some insights from my ethnographic field work in a lesbian community housing project that has been planned and infrastructured for over a decade. In doing so, I will outline a specific lesbian practice and imagination of the 'caring interface' linked to a collectively imagined digital notice board in order to introduce the sensitizing STS vocabulary of the 'interface' into discussions on 'caring-in-place'. By interface, I refer to both a user interface between humans and computers and an ecology and place of care that organizes, connects and separates different care practices and places with "lifeworlds […] that are enabled in specific ways and through digital technology" (Waltorp 2018).

In this way, the paper aims to contribute not only to the empirical question of how digital technologies are involved in the spatial imaginations and reconfigurations of socio-material care arrangements, but also to the theoretical question of how care and place relate to each other through 'the interface' when the perspective of feminist care as well as the seemingly lesbian 'non-users' is included.