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Present day ideals of good parenting are socio-technical constructs formed at the intersection of medical best practices, cultural norms, and technical innovation. These ideals take shape in relation to the fundamental uncertainty that parents/mothers face, an uncertainty that comes from not knowing how to do what is best for one's children, families, and selves. The growing body of parent-focused smart devices and data-tracking platforms emerging from this intersection frame the responsible parent as one who evaluates, analyzes, and mitigates data-defined risks for their children and family. As these devices and platforms proliferate, whether from respected medical institutions or commercial interests, they place new demands on families and add an implicit emphasis on how humans (often mothers) can be augmented and improved by data-rich technology. This is expressed both in the actions they support (e.g., breastfeeding, monitoring food intake), as well as in the emotions they render marginal (e.g., rage, struggle, loss, and regret). In this article, we turn away from optimization and self-improvement narratives to attend to our own felt experiences as mothers and designers. Through an embodied practice of creating Design Memoirs, we speak directly to the HCI community from our position as both users and subjects of optimized parenting tools. Our goal in this work is to bring nuance to a domain that is often rendered in simplistic terms or frames mothers as figures who could endlessly do more for the sake of their families. Our Design Memoirs emphasize the conflicting and often negative emotions we experienced while navigating these tools and medical systems. They depict our feelings of being at once powerful and powerless, expressing rage and love simultaneously, and struggling between expressing pride and humility. The Design Memoirs serve us in advocating that designers should use caution when considering a problem/solution focus to the experiences of parents. We conclude by reflecting on how our shared practice of making memoirs, as well as other approaches within feminist and queer theory, suggest strategies that trouble these optimization and improvement narratives. Overall, we present a case for designing for mothers who feel like they are just making do or falling short, in order to provide relief from the anxiety of constantly seeking improvement. 

Design is commonly understood as a storytelling practice, yet we have few narratives with which to describe the felt experiences of struggle, pain, and difficulty, beyond treating them as subjects to resolve. This work uses the praxis of embodied design as a way to bring more complex narratives to the community for contemplation---to engage and entangle personal and difficult stories within a public context. We propose the term Design Memoirs for these first-person practices and reflections. Design Memoirs are subjective and corporeal in nature, and provide a direct and observable way to reckon with felt experiences through, and for, design. We demonstrate Design Memoirs by drawing on our own experiences as mothers, caregivers, and corporeal subjects. Following Barad, we propose a practice of diffractive reading to locate resonances between Design Memoirs which render difficult autobiographical material addressable, shareable, and open for new interpretations. We present this strategy as a method for arriving at deeper understandings of difficult experiences. 

Notions of what counts as a contribution to HCI continue to be contested as our field expands to accommodate perspectives from the arts and humanities. This paper aims to advance the position of the arts and further contribute to these debates by actively exploring what a "non-contribution" would look like in HCI. We do this by taking inspiration from Fluxus, a collective of artists in the 1950's and 1960's who actively challenged and reworked practices of fine arts institutions by producing radically accessible, ephemeral, and modest works of "art-amusement." We use Fluxus to develop three analogous forms of "HCI-amusements," each of which shed light on dominant practices and values within HCI by resisting to fit into its logics.