Advanced Seminar in Media Technology: Designing with intimate materials and movements: Making “Menarche Bits”

Advanced seminar in media technology by Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, postdoctoral researcher in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Topic

Digital technologies are becoming increasingly intimate, coming closer to our bodies and intervening in intimate areas of our everyday life. One such area is reproductive and sexual health, which have received increasing attention from interaction design and HCI research as well as the technology industry. However, research and design of intimate technologies brings several social and ethical challenges relating to the sensitive and political-charged status of the topics, the intimate areas of the body where such technologies may be placed and the bodily materials it may come into contact with. Taboo, stigma and a lack of knowledge and justice often surround topics of reproductive and sexual health, and established design methods and technologies are often not fit for these intimate settings. Consequently, as the use and design of intimate technologies rise, we need to better understand and reimagine the methods, interactions and ideals of digital technologies for women’s health, and the narratives such technologies (could) tell about changing bodies.

In this talk, Marie Louise will share her research agenda and design program of “troubling design”, which proposes a way of designing with the trouble of women’s health inspired by feminist theories and speculative and critical design. She will briefly present previous design projects about menstrual tracking apps, sex technologies, and gendered voice assistants as examplars of how we can design with women’s health in ways that do not treat female bodies as problems to be solved, but rather nurture design work and knowledge production embedded in criticality and questioning status quo. Secondly, she will share an ongoing research project that explores the design of shape-changing technologies for experiences of menarche (the first menstruation), inspired by soma design methods and a feminist HCI agenda. Through presenting the design of a prototyping kit “Menarche Bits” and its use in design workshops with young athletes, she will speculate on how designing with intimate materials and movements of the menstruating body can propose radically different digital technologies that deeply touch the changing materiality and temporality of the menstruating body.

By highlighting her research agenda and particular design work, Marie Louise hopes to open a conversation about how the values we put into design shape our worlds and how we move through them, and the potential utopian fantasies of building different, more just futures.

Bio

Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard is a postdoctoral researcher in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and part of the Digital Women’s health research group. Her research methodology interweaves research through design, feminist HCI, design fiction and soma design. She is currently involved in research projects exploring the design of technologies for menarche and menopause. In 2018, she received a PhD degree in Interaction Design from Aarhus University. She is co-organising the Speculative Futures Meetup group in Stockholm.

Fika will be served generously.