MomBot - a study of a Week in the Life of an Interrupted Mom

Description

In the spirit of “Show your work” or making invisible work visible, per chapter 7 of a book on Data Feminism from MIT, I would like to turn myself into a robot. More specifically, I would like to create a MomBot to whom I can delegate the many tasks I do over the week to organize my kids’ lives. MomBot will answer text messages from parents, schedule playdates, help the au pair when she needs assistance with a task, fix IT issues, remind people to charge devices, deal with the school nurse and all COVID-related communication and tasks, decide what we’re having for dinner, and any other tasks I ask her (him? it?) to do.

Since I can’t actually make a generative MomBot (yet), I’d at least like to be able to make visuals of the various messages I send to manage the above tasks and more. At least it will make the invisible work visible to myself and others, showing how difficult it is to be a working mom during a pandemic. Yes, I know that the overworked mom is a cliche topic, but it’s real. And hey, why not add my own light-hearted, personalized version to the mix? The data I will use will be generated from the text messages I’ve sent over the course of the week related to mommying.

You can see the complexity and many messages I send throughout the day. This is only a sample of them.

I've designated the color by kid (hudson, rafi or both). Pink is a good color for the feminity of being Mom(Bot). I've also designated the text size by time of day.

They are fun, they are cute. But sometimes I need some help, you know?

Reflection

I discussed the idea of making myself into a MomBot with my kids one evening when they were getting ready for bed, and they said they would not want to talk to a MomBot. They also said they would "break" the MomBot. The also said they would ignore the MomBot.

But I said they ignore me. They said they would ignore both of us. And when my husband said that they should help me, they said I don't need help. [shrug]

I think I need to start letting go of some of the invisible work, and delegate to others. We have a point system where we reward the boys for independence. I'm hoping that independence will slowly over time mean that I don't need to coordinate as much. Perhaps technology will help. Perhaps it will make it worse. Perhaps we all need a MomBot.

Design Process

Here’s a sample of the data I collected.

I was trying to convey a sense of chaos, and a sense of "busy-ness" and distraction, with overlapping messages that often don't go together. My messages are pretty raw and often I am upset and snarky with some behavior, usually related to COVID stuff and school closing. You also don't see what the message was in reponse to, you just see the response. That was done to protect the privacy of the people I'm conversing with, but also to show that it really doesn't matter what I'm responding to.

I will continue to add to this project and make it more complex as I add more data to the sketch. Right now it's only 20 pieces of data. I also think I should reorganize it by subject or child vs day of week. I'm not sure it matters which day it is.