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.

Menstrual experiences are shaped by many different stakeholders, entities, and the broader socio-cultural context, or in other words, the ecological systems surrounding a menstruator. We explore what it means to take an ecological approach in studying and designing menstrual technologies. We translated and adapted Ecological Systems Theory (EST) for menstrual wellbeing and packaged the outcome in the form of a socio-ecological Canvas, accompanied by written examples and a set of prompts to facilitate engagement. We invited ten experts to engage with the Canvas in reflective workshops, which informed its further refinement. These sessions highlighted the Canvas’ generative value, fostering critical reflection on how design choices are shaped by and ripple across layers of influence. With this translational research, we invite HCI researchers and practitioners to critically reflect on the ecologies they study and design for, envisioning both aspired versions of existing realities and realities that do not exist yet.

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.

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.

There has been a growing interest in reproductive health and intimate wellbeing in Human-Computer Interaction, increasingly from an ecological perspective. Much of this work is centered around women’s experiences across diverse settings, emphasizing men’s limited engagement and need for greater participation on these topics. Our research responds to this gap by investigating cisgender men’s experiences of cultivating sexual health literacies in an urban Indian context. We leverage media probes to stimulate focus group discussions, using popular media references on men’s fertility to elicit shared reflection. Our findings uncover the role that humor and masculinity play in shaping men’s perceptions of their sexual health and how this influences their sense of agency and participation in heterosexual intimate relationships. We further discuss how technologies might be designed to support men’s participation in these relationships as supportive partners and allies.

Menstrual tracking is a mechanism widely engaged towards preserving menstrual dignity, as natural birth control, for ensuring adequate preparation for an upcoming cycle, among other motivations. We investigate the design of digital menstrual trackers towards enabling period-positive ecologies in otherwise stigmatized contexts. We examine menstrual tracking practices across ages (12–65 yrs.) using a combination of methods—3 surveys (450+ responses), a cultural probe (10 adolescents), interviews (16 adults), and a review of (9) mobile applications. Our analysis highlights the diversity across menstrual tracking practices and the role of relationships in influencing these practices throughout the menstrual journey. We also identify menstrual tracking as an avenue towards the emancipation of those who menstruate. Finally, we draw on Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities to discuss sociotechnical implications for redesigning digital menstrual trackers towards crafting just and period-positive futures.

Safe menstrual hygiene practices are central to maintaining good menstrual health. In addition to menstrual literacy, practicing safe menstrual hygiene requires access to menstrual products and a private, safe, and hygienic space for changing and cleaning. Access to such infrastructure, specifically functional public toilets, becomes even more crucial for menstruators when navigating public spaces while having periods. This work presents the learnings from the prototyping of MenstruSPACE, a toilet locator application offering an annotation system for public toilets towards supporting menstrual mobilities. Our design journey revealed a set of design tensions and open challenges to be considered when designing public infrastructure annotation systems to facilitate safe menstrual mobilities.

With easy access to affordable internet-powered smartphones, developing countries are adopting smartphone applications to provide enabling services to its citizens, through eHealth, eGovernance, and digital payments. The challenge is to ensure equitable access to these services by everyone, including people with semi-literacy or low-literacy who form a large part of the population in developing countries. However, extensive HCI literature has identified literacy as one of the barriers to designing user interfaces. In this work, we propose a framework of actionable guidelines for designing smartphone UIs that would be usable by low-literate users. We reviewed the last two decades of HCI literature engaging people with low literacy, to synthesize our framework-designing SARAL. To evaluate the framework, we conducted a preliminary study with a group of 20 practitioners and researchers working in the field of UI/UX/HCI. We also analyzed six publicly available industry reports on designing UIs for people with low-literacy. The proposed guidelines intend to support researchers, practitioners, designers, and implementers in the design and evaluation of UIs of smartphone applications for people with low literacy. We present the evolutionary nature of the proposed framework while highlighting the importance of adopting a translational approach when building such frameworks.

In cultural contexts where menstruation is a stigmatized health topic, daily management of menstrual hygiene comes with its set of challenges. Our research aims to identify and examine such challenges faced during menstruation in the urban environs of Delhi, India. Through participatory design activities and interviews conducted with 35 participants who identified as menstruating and female, and a survey with 139 responses, we investigate how participants deal with their periods on the go. We also examine participants' conceptualizations of safe spaces, where they are able to deal with their period on their own terms. Finally, we discuss how menstrual mobilities are being, and might be, supported through technology-based interventions for a third space, targeting the legibility, literacy, and legitimacy of surrounding environments.

In this article, we present 6 cases (contained in 13 studies) variously connected with women’s health in a range of Indian contexts. Analyzing these cases, we highlight that “women’s health” is inextricably linked with extrinsic factors that also need addressing, to propose a broadened focus of “women’s wellbeing,” as defined through the lens of Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities . Drawing again on our cases, we discuss the importance of taking a long, holistic, and intersectional view to women’s wellbeing. Consolidating lessons learned across studies, we emphasize the potential of framing challenges around women’s health as learning problems, rather than problems of information access alone. Leveraging this perspective, we propose the use of design-based implementation research as a potential approach in identified learning ecologies, given its emphasis on long-term engagement with multiple stakeholders in the learning process. Although the empirical research we draw from took place in various Indian contexts, we conclude by arguing that key contextual characteristics may translate to other cultures and geographies as well.

Cultural taboos and limiting social norms make it challenging to communicate and teach about menstrual health in India. We present findings from an inquiry of current approaches used to educate adolescents about menstruation, examining the perspectives of young adults, parents, teachers, social workers, and health professionals for identifying design opportunities and potential for impact. Our findings from the content analysis of education and training materials in use, an online survey of 391 adults, 52 interviews, and 2 focus groups indicate that although detailed and descriptive information materials are available for use, there exists a disconnect between parents’ and teachers’ expectations regarding who will introduce these topics to adolescents. We also highlight a clear difference in attitudes regarding who must be taught, how, where, and at what stages. Finally, we articulate factors that shape access and receptivity to this knowledge and engage with the lens of feminist HCI to discuss sociotechnical implications for the design of menstrual health education initiatives.

Menstruation has long remained a conversational taboo across India, resulting in inadequate dissemination of menstrual health education (MHE). Menstrupedia, a digital platform designed for an Indian audience, aims to bridge this information gap to impart MHE via its website and comic. We contribute a study of Menstrupedia---the information exchange on its website, the education it aims to provide, and the perceptions of its users. Using a combination of qualitative research methods, and engaging a feminist Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens, we critically analyze Menstrupedia's affordances and shortcomings. We also make recommendations for the design of technology-based dissemination of MHE, as well as additional sensitive and taboo topics.