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.

A broken glass plate negative from the archive of Svenska Missionsförbundet.Much of the material is unarchived, materially decayed, and distributed across homes, churches, and other institutions.

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.

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.

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.

Biosensing technologies are on their way to becoming ubiquitous in multimedia interaction.These technologies capture physiological data, such as heart rate, breathing, skin conductance, and brain activity.Researchers are exploring biosensing from perspectives including engineering, design, medicine, mental health, consumer products, and interactive art.These technologies can enhance our interactions, allowing us to connect with our bodies and others around us across diverse application areas.However, the integration of biosignals in HCI presents new challenges pertaining to choosing what data we capture, interpreting these data, its representation, application areas, and ethics.There is a need to synthesize knowledge across diverse perspectives of researchers and designers spanning multiple domains and to map a landscape of the challenges and opportunities of this research area.The goal of this workshop is to exchange knowledge in the research community, introduce novices to this emerging field, and build a future research agenda.

In this studio, we will explore sustainable tangible interfaces by making a range of biomaterials that are bio-based and readily biodegradable. Building off of previous TEI studios that were centered around one specific biomaterial (i.e., bioplastics at TEI’22 and microbial cellulose at TEI’23), this studio will provide participants the ability to experience a wide variety of biomaterials from algae-based bioplastics, to food-waste-based bioclays, to gelatin-based biofoams. We will teach participants how to identify types of biomaterials that are applicable to their own research and how to make them. Through hands-on activities, we will demonstrate how to implement biomaterials in the design of sustainable tangible interfaces and discuss topics sensitized by biological media such as more-than-human temporalities, bioethics, care, and unmaking. Ultimately, our goal is to facilitate a space in which HCI researchers and designers can collaborate, create, and discuss the opportunities and challenges of working with sustainable biomaterials.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.