We present a qualitative interview study that examines what happens when things do not go as planned with digital contraception. Through an analysis of 27 interviews with ongoing users of digital contraception at the time of the study, we convey participants’ accounts of their experiences regarding unplanned pregnancies or use of emergency contraception to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. Our analysis considers participants’ sense-making processes, and notably how they attended to questions of risk and responsibility. Finally, we depict how these participants came to continue using digital contraception after these experiences. Our study connects to ongoing conversations on technological failures in personal informatics and safety-critical systems. We emphasise that failure and success should not be used as a binary classification of long-term users’ relationships with self-tracking technology, which are intimate and critical. Rather, the sustained relation with an intimate technology is composed by several ‘failures’ which are interpreted, acted upon, and, ultimately, overcome.

Digital contraceptives are intimate technologies that support their users, and their partners, in preventing pregnancy. These technologies rely on basal body temperature data to predict ovulation and calculate a fertile window, where there is a risk of pregnancy if partners have unprotected sex. Although their use is shared and relational, these technologies are mainly designed for a primary user — the person who can become pregnant. We turn our attention to secondary users of digital contraception (i.e., sexual partners), specifically, Natural Cycles. We investigate how secondary users are designed for and how primary users imagine them to be. We contribute empirical insights on how secondary users are and are not involved in digital contraception and conclude with three design proposals describing how digital contraception tools could be designed to involve secondary users. We discuss how designing for secondary users of intimate technologies requires balancing their potential as co-users and adversaries.

Feminist research highlights the urgent need to challenge the oppressive design of commercial intimate technologies, particularly how the FemTech industry restricts access to intimate bodily knowledge through paywalls and proprietary systems. Yet, for decades, women and marginalized communities have turned to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) or ‘hacking’ practices to reclaim control over their own gynecology and intimate health, addressing gaps often ignored by medical research and healthcare. Inspired by visual themes from these movements, this pictorial critically explores how designers and HCI researchers might advance DIY approaches to intimate technologies. We exemplify this with reflections from a series of workshops on handmade intimate sensors, and draw out the joyful potential of collaborative making—building alliances, destigmatizing intimate health, and using craft to subvert gender stereotypes. We discuss matters of safety when making together and contribute to ongoing work on building feminist makerspaces.

The contemporary AI development landscape is dominated by big corporations, lacks diversity, and mostly centres the Global North, or applies extractivist logics in the South. This paper showcases a feminist process of AI development from Latin America, where we created an interactive, AI-powered tool that helps criminal court officers open justice data, addressing a data gap on gender-based violence. Through a collaborative autoethnography, drawing from Latin American feminisms, we unpack and visibilize the feminist work that was required, as a crucial step to counter hegemonic narratives. Foregrounding the subjugated knowledges of our experiences, we offer a concrete example of a feminist approach to AI development grounded in practice. With this, we aim to critically inspire those who consider building technology in service of social justice causes, or who choose to build AI systems otherwise.

Menstrual discomfort is a prevalent, diverse, and cyclical lived experience, impacting everyday lives. However, in HCI, it has been mostly approached as a data point, leaving much unknown on how technologies can care for these experiences. In response, we designed Touchware, a collection of on-body touch probes with pneumatic shape-change and weight components, which invite wearers to engage with and care for their menstrual discomfort. We report on the participatory soma design process of making Touchware and its two-week-long deployment study with 6 participants in a workplace setting. Our data analysis highlights diffuse and lingering qualities of menstrual discomfort, shedding light on how technologies may touch bodies in vulnerable states. We discuss the importance and challenges of designing touch technologies for and with bodies in the moments of menstrual discomfort. We conclude with a reflection on the agency of touch and its potential to support the self-care labour and nurturing the radical normalization of rest.

Bodily fluids associated with the menstruating body are often disregarded in the design of menstrual-tracking technologies despite their potential to provide valuable knowledge about the menstrual cycle. We prototyped a finger-worn sensor that measures vaginal fluid conductivity, which fluctuates throughout the cycle, and brought it into conversation with people through two speculative workshops (18 people), four fabrication workshops (17 people), and a deployment study where participants brought the sensor into their daily lives (7 people). We unpack that taking a material and sensory approach to intimate tracking nurtures a feminist way of sensing while creating tensions around how we want to know our bodies-tensions around how, where, and when to touch the body, hygiene, data storage, interpretation practices, and labor. With epistemological commitments to feminist materialist and post-human theory, we invite designers to embrace these tensions.

This studio explores methods for prototyping with and for intimate and sexual experiences, focusing on a diversity of bodies and understandings of pleasure. We aim to both explore how to communicate people's somatic (sexual) profiles while engaging in creative making processes. Participants will engage in a full day workshop consisting of three distinct phases: trying out methods for representing somatic experiences, tangible ideation and making, and group reflections. Through these activities, we not only aim to enhance individual awareness of erotic bodies but also share advice and experiences on how to design for sexual experiences from feminist and intersectional perspectives. This studio seeks to promote inclusivity and challenge normative beliefs about sexual bodies, designing for intimacy and contributing to a more equitable discourse on pleasure.

We present a large-scale, qualitative interview study that examines how an intimate technology within reproductive health comes to be chosen and trusted as a mode of contraception and how its use is shared between partners. We conducted 133 semi-structured interviews with primary users of Natural Cycles, focusing specifically on its use as a digital contraceptive. Our interpretive analysis, first, sheds light on perceptions of risks and benefits, along with how, and by whom, the decision to adopt Natural Cycles got made. Second, we discuss participants' and their partners' gradual development of trust in the system, and how this intertwines with interpersonal trust. Third, we consider the shared use of Natural Cycles, including partner involvement in temperature tracking, the sharing of intimate data, and navigating specific choices and risks regarding sex and contraception. We make a primarily empirical contribution to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research on shared uses of technology and the sharing of intimate data, and highlight avenues for future work to foster understanding of intimate technologies and their shared use in relational settings.

The menopause transition has a direct impact on half of the global population, yet it has continued to be a stigmatised topic with limited focus on supporting it with technology. Whilst attention being given to menopause in HCI may be new, people experiencing it is not and people have adopted, adapted and appropriated technologies to support their menopause journey. In this questionnaire and interview study, we examine how people in the UK are using (and not using) existing general and menopause-specific technology to support themselves through the transition. Despite limited menopause-specific technologies available, participants have found novel uses of technologies such as social media and smartwatches for 1) connecting and sharing, 2) information seeking, 3) tracking and reflecting, and 4) self-care. This work contributes design considerations for menopause specific technologies, and design opportunities and challenges for technologies that can be appropriated to support menopause.

This paper examines prevailing understandings of creativity in creative computing research through the lens of feminist epistemology. We analyze “creativity support” as a construct that encodes different definitions of creative work. Drawing on existing literature and practices, the paper surfaces four views about creative work that underpin current creative technologies and HCI research: problem-solving, cognitive emergence, embodied action, and tool-mediated expert activity. Each view makes different claims about the role of computing in creative work and the creative subject assumed. We articulate the attendant politics of each view and illustrate how critical feminist epistemology can serve as an analytical tool to reason about the trade-offs of various creativity definitions. The paper concludes with recommendations for integrating feminist values into creativity-oriented HCI research.

Menstrual pain or dysmenorrhea refers to abdominal cramping or pain before and during menstruation, causing a spectrum of discomfort among people who menstruate. Menstrual pain is often regarded as ‘female trouble’, as a nuisance that gets dismissed or as a symptom requiring medical intervention. While there are FemTech products that explicitly attend to menstrual pain, they predominantly seek to hide it without accounting for the lived experience of this pain. In this paper we use feminist disability studies (FDS) as a critical analytical lens to reframe the understanding of menstrual pain. Using this lens, we conduct an interaction critique of FemTech market exemplars for alleviating menstrual pain. We then offer three design provocations to better design menstrual pain technology and call for designers to attend to menstrual pain as a cyclical, chronic lived experience with the potential of spurring leaky contagious coalitions.

The ‘intimate horizons’ of algorithmic, self-tracking technologies have become increasingly important. These applications are no longer perceived as distant, instrumental entities, but offer a more affective and intimate experience. In this paper, we address the long-term experience of living with a digital contraception technology that utilizes self-tracking. We draw upon four design workshops with a total of 14 users of the app Natural Cycles to illustrate moments of ambivalent affects and oscillating relations. Based on our analysis, we concretize four dimensions of ambivalence in different scales and temporalities. We propose three strategies of designing with these unavoidable disruptions, conflicting feelings, and shifting relations to acknowledge users’ agentic engagements, nuanced dynamics of intimate self-tracking experiences, and users as embodied and affective beings. We contend that by attending to these existential ambivalences, digital contraceptive can become better configured to plural modes of life and long-term intimate relations that they engender.

Observing the texture, color, and conductivity of cervical mucus has the potential to support menstrual cycle and fertility tracking, generating a layer of rich bodily, tactile/haptic knowledge in addition to other collected data, such as cycle length or body temperature. This pictorial presents design explorations, four design concepts, and one prototype of a sensor for measuring the conductivity of cervical mucus in vaginal fluids. We present these as instances in the design space for sensing intimate bodily fluids and provide discussions on the proximities, visibilities, and temporalities of these sensing technologies. We offer the unfolding concept of “tactful feminist sensing”, opening up for further engagements with intimate care that attend to the multiplicity and fleshiness of bodies.

Data visualizations have become the primary mechanism for engaging with quantitative information. However, many of these visualizations are inaccessible to blind and low vision people. This paper investigates the challenge of designing accessible data visualizations through the lens of crip technoscience. We present four speculative design case studies that conceptually explore four qualities of access built on crip wisdom: access as an ongoing process, a frictional practice, an aesthetic experience, and transformation. Each speculative study embodies inquiry and futuring, making visible common assumptions about access and exploring how an alternative crip-informed framework can shape designs that foreground the creativity of disabled people. We end by presenting tactics for designing digital access that de-centers the innovation discourse.

The Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community has the opportunity to foster the integration of research practices across the Global South and North to begin overcoming colonial relationships. In this paper, we focus on the case of Latin America (LATAM), where initiatives to increase the representation of HCI practitioners lack a consolidated understanding of the practices they employ, the factors that influence them, and the challenges that practitioners face. To address this knowledge gap, we employ a mixed-methods approach, comprising a survey (66 respondents) and in-depth interviews (19 interviewees). Our analyses characterize a set of research perspectives on how HCI is practiced in/about LATAM; a set of driving forces and tensions with a heavy reliance on diasporic dynamics; and a set of professional demands and associated structural limitations. We also offer a roadmap towards building connections across HCI communities, in an attempt to rebuild HCI as a pluriverse.

The goal of this studio is to explore the qualities of unhabitual body movements to inform the design of close-to-the-body touch technologies. After engaging with unhabitual kinesthetic activities, we will use visual and textual elicitation tools to communicate emerging felt sensations. We propose the use of photography as an open-ended visual medium and a repertoire of textural metaphors as a textual tool - a vocabulary list of felt qualities that will be extended through the participants’ contribution. We will then collectively explore how these expressions of felt sensations can be translated into concrete design elements via tangible design ideation and making.

The Pelvic Chair uses soft robotics to gently touch the outer pelvic floor to create awareness of its anatomy and function. Our pelvic floor is an important muscle group that holds up our inner organs. A soma design approach makes out a novel route to know through our senses what an experience in this context feels like, which can provide alternative ways of being in the world. Through annotated imagery, we explore the affordances of soft latex pockets filled with air to convey touch that is appropriate for this intimate, sensitive area. Iteratively, we investigate how layers of materials, area, shape, volume and temporality, together with the specific placement on the body, convey the kinds of experiential qualities we seek. We highlight that somatic design judgements are crucial in guiding this process, going beyond traditional approaches to design that focus on visual assessments, models, or hand-based touch.

Dance making is often a highly idiosyncratic, collaborative endeavour between a choreographer and a group of dancers that constitutes a rich context for designers of creativity-support tools (CSTs). However, long-term, ecologically valid studies of collaboration in dance making are rare, especially when mediated by digital tools. We present a 5-month field study in the frame of a dance course, where a choreographer and six students used a CST originally designed for choreographic writing. We contrast our findings with our initial assumptions about the role of the tool to mediate a diversity of notating styles and hierarchical roles. We highlight the value of and the challenges behind this in-the-wild study in uncovering needs and roles as they emerged over time.

The menopause transition involves bodily-rooted, socially-shaped changes, often in a context of medicalisation that marginalises people based on their age and gender. With the goal of addressing this social justice matter with a participatory design approach, we started to cultivate partnerships with people going through menopause. This paper reports on interviews with 12 women and a design workshop with three. Our data analysis highlights their experiences from a holistic perspective that reclaims the primacy of the body and acknowledges the entanglement of the physical and the psychosocial. Participants’ design concepts show how design can come close the body to make space for menopause experiences, recognising and transforming them. We discuss how HCI can actively engage with the body to promote appreciation for it during menopause, and call for design that accompanies people in resisting the medicalisation of menopause as an enactment of social justice in everyday life.

Starting to menstruate can restrict adolescents’ movements due to physiological changes and societal stigma. We present a participatory soma design project advocating for young adolescents to listen to and care for their newly-menstruating bodies, specifically focusing on participation in sport. We designed Menarche Bits, an open-ended prototyping toolkit consisting of shape-changing actuators and heat pads, and used it in two design workshops with seven participants aged 16-18, as part of collaboration and menstrual advocacy in their sports clubs and high school. The participants designed menstrual technologies that respond to menstrual cramps and depressive, anxious feelings before menstruating. We contribute findings on designing menstrual technologies with adolescents using participatory soma design. We found that a toolkit approach to the design of menstrual technologies can allow for pluralist experiences of menstrual cycles. In addition, we found that participatory design with adolescents benefits from drawing on qualities of embodiment and participants’ own body literacy.

Menarche is the first occurrence of menstrual bleeding and it usually begins between the ages of 9-15. This makes menarche a crucial transition among other social, physiological and behavioural changes during puberty. In this soma-based research-through-design project we design an open-ended prototyping kit: Menarche Bits. The aim of Menarche Bits is to open a design space for young adolescents to create body-worn technologies that support them in making space for their experiences of menarche and trusting their menstruating bodies. Menarche Bits consists of heat elements and shape-changing actuators that can be worn directly on the body by adhering to the skin or being inserted into pockets in a stretchable fabric as part of a garment. We describe the soma design process behind Menarche Bits as an example of how body-worn technologies can intimately interact with the body and its movement, temporality and material changes.

We describe a Research through Design project-Curious Cycles-a collection of objects and interactions which encourage people to be in close contact with their menstruating body. Throughout a full menstrual cycle, five participants used Curious Cycles to look at their bodies in unfamiliar ways and to touch their bodily fluids, specifically, menstrual blood, saliva, and cervical mucus. The act of touching and looking led to the construction of new knowledge about the self and to a nurturing appreciation for the changing body. Yet, participants encountered and reflected upon frictions within themselves, their home, and their social surroundings, which stem from societal stigma and preconceptions about menstruation and bodily fluids. We call for and show how interaction design can engage with technologies that mediate self-touch as a first step towards reconfiguring the way menstruating bodies are treated in society.

Contemporary choreographers often interact directly with dancers when exploring their ideas, but lack adequate tools for capturing and documenting their work. Although our first study of choreographers and dancers revealed diverse strategies for recording choreographic fragments, we found that they all worked in terms of constraints, which they represented via spatial diagrams, as movement qualities or with their own personal notation system. This led to the design of Knotation, a mobile pen-based tool that lets choreographers sketch their own representations of choreographic ideas and render them interactive. In study two, Knotation served as a technology probe to support the contrasting practices of three professional choreographers. We revised Knotation based on their input, and ran a third structured observation study with six professional choreographers. Knotation easily supported both dance-then-record and record-then-dance strategies. Participants used and appropriated Knotation's advanced features, including the combination of interactive timelines and floorplan diagrams, to represent and explore complex choreographic structures.

Aligning and distributing graphical objects is a common, but cumbersome task. In a preliminary study (six graphic designers, six non-designers), we identified three key problems with current tools: lack of persistence, unpredictability of results, and inability to 'tweak' the layout. We created StickyLines, a tool that treats guidelines as first-class objects: Users can create precise, predictable and persistent interactive alignment and distribution relationships, and 'tweaked' positions can be maintained for subsequent interactions. We ran a [2x2] within-participant experiment to compare StickyLines with standard commands, with two levels of layout difficulty. StickyLines performed 40% faster and required 49% fewer actions than traditional alignment and distribution commands for complex layouts. In study three, six professional designers quickly adopted StickyLines and identified novel uses, including creating complex compound guidelines and using them for both spatial and semantic grouping.