Feminist theory is core to posthumanist HCI and can support more-than-human designers and researchers in questioning what human is being decentered and what marginalized voices are foregrounded. In this article, I interweave feminist and posthumanist design scholarship that affirms natureculture relations through the practice and concept of fabulation. I present a research-through-design practice of producing a short film "I Moss You" that is recorded through a microscope and tells a story about mosses and menses, space travel and earthly survival. I contribute by positioning fabulation as a feminist posthumanist design approach that challenges dominant sociotechnical imaginaries of progress, involves non-humans in speculative storytelling and fosters joy in taking care of and enlivening relations with earth. I discuss how fabulation aligns with feminist values in HCI and design, including critiquing power hierarchies and dominant norms of technology, emphasizing situated knowledges in design practice, and attuning to relational becoming with ecology.

In this work, we introduce biodegradation as a process of more-than-human unmaking. We begin by positioning biodegradation amongst related works in design research before presenting a circular process of making and unmaking biomaterials and living organisms through biodegradation. To exemplify this process, we detail two existing works—ReClaym and Biomenstrual—that exemplify how biodegradability can be explored in design through different biomaterials, methods, and contexts. By diffractively reading these projects through one another, we identify six themes and corresponding suggestions for researchers engaging with biodegradation. Lastly, we discuss the broader design implications and limitations, as well as the more-than-human values that emerge from designing for biodegradation via biomaterials. Through this, we aim to provide design researchers with practical tools and insights for engaging with biodegradation to unmake anthropocentric hierarchies between humans, non-humans, and biomaterials, which in turn can promote environmental sustainability and support more-than-human collaboration and care.

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of “unmaking-with” as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics—situating, materializing, and enacting—that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.

Envisioning alternative futures and desirable worlds is a core element of design that must be cultivated, especially when a deep transition of practices, values, and power is necessary for vibrant and just future lifeworlds. In this paper, we contribute towards fabulation as an approach for design futuring that foregrounds feminist commitments and more-than-human concerns. Analyzing two fabulation case studies around biodata and bodily fluids, we offer three themes based on our process of developing these fabulations: how they engage materials, how they work to trouble temporalities, and how they cultivate imagination. We argue for the emerging potential of fabulation as an approach for open-ended, joyful design futuring, mobilizing speculative storytelling to foreground absent or neglected relations when imagining alternative lifeworlds.

Social stigma and human exceptionalism have contributed to unsustainable menstrual products and a neglect for the nutrients in menstrual blood that can enrich soil. In a Research-through-Design project, we explored how menstrual care can extend to caring for non-human species and the environment. We describe our design process and insights from three workshops with 20 participants, where we designed tools and technologies and worked with biomaterials to create biodegradable menstrual artifacts that can be composted and bring the nutrients in menstrual blood into soil. By drawing on feminist HCI’s quality of ecology and bringing more-than-human design into the domain of intimate care, our research affirms the fertile relations between feminist HCI and posthumanist HCI through the concept of more-than-human bodies. We discuss how our work contributes to inclusive understandings of technology, and to a feminist posthumanist design methodology that centers more-than-human bodies in intimate care.

This one-day workshop invites designers, researchers and practitioners whose work might involve design, to collectively speculate about designed artefacts and technologies through the creation of drawing conversations: visual dialogues resulting from the merging of drawings created by different people. The workshop aims to use drawing as an activity for collaborative engagement with ambiguity, interpretation and mutual learning. Through drawing activities, we aim to join in Venice's rich creative traditions, and develop speculative visualisations in order to find common grounds between the diverse research interests of our organisers and participants.

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.

Design futuring approaches, such as speculative design, design fiction and others, seek to (re)envision futures and explore alternatives. As design futuring becomes established in HCI design research, there is an opportunity to expand and develop these approaches. To that end, by reflecting on our own research and examining related work, we contribute five modes of reflection. These modes concern formgiving, temporality, researcher positionality, real-world engagement, and knowledge production. We illustrate the value of each mode through careful analysis of selected design exemplars and provide questions to interrogate the practice of design futuring. Each reflective mode offers productive resources for design practitioners and researchers to articulate their work, generate new directions for their work, and analyze their own and others' work.

We present a Research through Design project that explores how whispering influences the ways people experience and interact with voice assistants. The research project includes a co-speculation workshop and the use of a design probe, which culminated in the production of a design fiction short film. Our design-led inquiry contributes with experiential qualities of whispering with voice assistants: creepiness, trust, and intimacy. Furthermore, we present how whispering opens up new dimensions of how and when voice interaction could be used. We propose that designers of whispering voice assistants should reflect on how they facilitate the experiential qualities of creepiness, trust, and intimacy, and reflect on the potential challenges whispering brings to the relation between a user and a voice assistant.

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.

The euphemism “female trouble” (discreetly referring to women's health experiences) suggests that trouble is linked to women and bodily transitions women can go through. However, trouble is not only a noun; it is also a verb with a strong feminist tradition. In this article, I present troubling design ; a theoretically grounded and practice-oriented design program for designing with women's health. Troubling design brings to matter how trouble is an implicit condition of designing ethical and responsible technologies for women's health. By designing with trouble, troubling design encourages designers and researchers to develop knowledge embedded in criticality and questioning status quo, in order to expand their perspectives on designing with intimate and tabooed bodily experiences. Grounded in feminist theory and research-through-design, troubling design contributes with analytical and generative design knowledge articulated through design examples and three practices: staying with the wrong, curious visiting, and collective imagining.

While digital personal assistants (DPAs) are moving into our homes, managing our everyday lives and providing help in the household, we have barely begun to understand them. Design fiction can be a method for contextualizing the social and cultural implications for adoption of future technologies like DPAs. In this paper, we present an analytical perspective on gender issues arising when a DPA moves into our home. Through a critical and feminist design methodology, the design fiction project "Intimate Futures" focuses on how a DPA's character and functions are often gendered and what it means for the design and adoption of a DPA. We argue that the gender issues of DPAs are interwoven with our collective imaginings of DPAs, and that design fiction is a method to explore and "trouble" our collective imaginings of DPAs. The paper contributes with an analysis of gender issues of DPAs, and a methodological way of "staying with the trouble" of future technologies through design fiction.