Caring about Care: A Meta-Narrative Review of HCI Research on Care
(Melody) Zixuan Wang, Yuanrong Guo, Eilidh Bowman, Yuxiang Zhai, Xinhuan Shu, Shengchen Zhang, Karey Helms, Tara Capel, John Vines
Abstract
The number of HCI papers on care has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite growing interest in care both as an application domain for technology and as an ethical stance in research and design, our integrated understanding of the concept is limited. It remains unclear how various application areas of care relate to one another, to what extent their underlying assumptions align or contradict, and how they collectively shape HCI discourse on care. To address this, we present a meta-narrative review of 317 SIGCHI papers on care. We first outline the landscape of care in HCI. We then present six paradigmatic framings of care, and a conceptual map that positions these framings in relation to each other, their representative care–tech relations, and the temporal development of the field. We conclude by discussing the implications from the review, as well as gaps in the field and future directions.
Cite as
Zixuan Wang, Yuanrong Guo, Eilidh Bowman, Yuxiang Zhai, Xinhuan Shu, Shengchen Zhang, Karey Helms, Tara Capel, and John Vines. 2026. Caring about Care: A Meta-Narrative Review of HCI Research on Care. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’26), April 13–17, 2026, Barcelona, Spain. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 31 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790811
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