This article addresses itself to two developments in recent HCI research. One is the rising emphasis on women's health, a topic that is often seen as at least partly political. The other development in HCI research is the ongoing interest in supporting democracy and political activism. We present the case of a menstrual cup design project in Taiwan, called the Formoonsa Cup, whose product development led to the change in the legal status of menstrual cups and forcefully challenged a traditional value of hymen maintenance as an expression of “pure” and morally upright womanhood. We argue that this project is significant to HCI research for the following two reasons: first, because the design project is a successful, if complicated, case of political activism, and second, because the design and legalization processes were in part mediated by platform technologies, including social networking, crowdfunding, and direct democracy platforms. Using philosopher Michel Foucault's notion of “subjugated knowledge,” we analyze the case to improve understandings of how design can engage in emancipatory politics in the domain of women's health in HCI. In this case study, we begin with the idea that women's freedom of self-care is the knowledge that is subjugated, though by the end we suggest that subjugated knowledge is a more complex, and troubling, category than this initial evaluation suggests. We also argue that design can critique and intervene when it materializes previously subjugated knowledges and renders them both socially intelligible and politically efficacious.

Recent HCI research has linked social policy to design, e.g., in issues such as public safety, privacy, and social justice. One area where policy, technology, and design intersect is in the vision of the creative economy. In that vision, creativity, distinct local/regional cultural practices, technology, and entrepreneurship synergistically produce social innovation on a scale sufficient to drive economies. Culture and creative industries (CCI) policy specifies how governments intervene to support such clusters. Maker cultures are seen as central to this vision, but comparatively little is known about how makers produce culture. We offer a critical analysis of several encounters between CCI policy in Taiwan and its maker scene. These encounters reveal misalignments that undercut efforts intended to support making. We propose that supporting any creative culture, including making, entails a serious commitment to understanding its culture, including its cultural contents and their means of production. We further argue that scholarly rigor in cultivating cultural appreciation is just as fundamental as scholarly rigor in empirically representing cultural practices when it comes to pursuing such a cultural understanding.