Shared Use of Intimate Technology: A Large-Scale Qualitative Study on the Use of Natural Cycles as a Digital ContraceptiveWe 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 \textit{primary users} of Natural Cycles, focusing specifically on its use as \textit{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.2025ALAiri Lampinen et al.Women & GenderCSCW
Designing for Secondary Users of Intimate TechnologiesDigital 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.2025AOAlejandra Gómez Ortega et al.Reproductive & Women's HealthEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDIS
Making Intimate Technologies TogetherFeminist 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.2025NWNadia Campo Woytuk et al.LGBTQ+ Community Technology DesignParticipatory DesignFood Culture & Food InteractionDIS
Designing Touch Technologies for and with Bodies in Menstrual DiscomfortMenstrual 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.2025JPJoo Young Park et al.KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Media Technology and Interaction DesignHaptic WearablesShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsCHI
Doing the Feminist Work in AI: Reflections from an AI Project in Latin AmericaThe contemporary AI development landscape is dominated by big corporations, lacks diversity, and mostly centres the Global North, or applies extractivist logics in the South. This paper showcases a feminist process of AI development from Latin America, where we created an interactive, AI-powered tool that helps criminal court officers open justice data, addressing a data gap on gender-based violence. Through a collaborative autoethnography, drawing from Latin American feminisms, we unpack and visibilize the feminist work that was required, as a crucial step to counter hegemonic narratives. Foregrounding the subjugated knowledges of our experiences, we offer a concrete example of a feminist approach to AI development grounded in practice. With this, we aim to critically inspire those who consider building technology in service of social justice causes, or who choose to build AI systems otherwise.2025MFMarianela Ciolfi Felice et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyAI Ethics, Fairness & AccountabilityAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasGender & Race Issues in HCICHI
Toward Feminist Ways of Sensing the Menstruating BodyBodily 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 posthuman theory, we invite designers to embrace these tensions.2025NWNadia Campo Woytuk et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyCognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Universal & Inclusive DesignReproductive & Women's HealthCHI
What Counts as ‘Creative’ Work? Articulating Four Epistemic Positions in Creativity-Oriented HCI ResearchThis paper examines prevailing understandings of creativity within creative computing research through the lens of feminist epistemology. We analyze creativity support as a construct that encodes different definitions of creative work. Drawing on existing literature and practices, the paper surfaces four views about creative work that underpin current creative technologies and HCI research: problem-solving, cognitive emergence, embodied action, and tool-mediate expert activity. Each view makes different claims about the role of computing in creative work and the creative subject assumed. We articulate the attendant politics of each view and illustrate how critical feminist epistemology can serve as an analytical tool to reason about the trade-offs of various creativity definitions. The paper concludes with suggestions on integrating feminist values into creativity-oriented HCI research.2024SHStacy Hsueh et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyGenerative AI (Text, Image, Music, Video)Technology Ethics & Critical HCICHI
Critiquing Menstrual Pain Technologies through the Lens of Feminist Disability StudiesMenstrual pain or \textit{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.2024JPHaesun Park et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyReproductive & Women's HealthCHI
Using and Appropriating Technology to Support The Menopause Journey in the UKThe menopause transition has a direct impact on half of the global population, yet it has continued to be a stigmatised topic with limited focus on supporting it with technology. Whilst attention being given to menopause in HCI may be new, people experiencing it is not and people have adopted, adapted and appropriated technologies to support their menopause journey. In this questionnaire and interview study, we examine how people in the UK are using (and not using) existing general and menopause-specific technology to support themselves through the transition. Despite limited menopause-specific technologies available, participants have found novel uses of technologies such as social media and smartwatches for 1) connecting and sharing, 2) information seeking, 3) tracking and reflecting, and 4) self-care. This work contributes design considerations for menopause specific technologies, and design opportunities and challenges for technologies that can be appropriated to support menopause.2024EBEmily Lopez Burst et al.University of BristolAging-Friendly Technology DesignCHI
Ambivalences in Digital Contraception: Designing for Mixed Feelings and Oscillating RelationsThe ‘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.2023JPJoo Young Park et al.Reproductive & Women's HealthSleep & Stress MonitoringDIS
Tactful Feminist Sensing: Designing for Touching Vaginal FluidsObserving 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.2023NWNadia Campo Woytuk et al.Reproductive & Women's HealthDiet Tracking & Nutrition ManagementDIS
Para Cima y Pa’ Abajo: Building Bridges Between HCI Research in Latin America and in the Global NorthThe Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community has the opportunity to foster the integration of research practices across the Global South and North to begin overcoming colonial relationships. In this paper, we focus on the case of Latin America (LATAM), where initiatives to increase the representation of HCI practitioners lack a consolidated understanding of the practices they employ, the factors that influence them, and the challenges that practitioners face. To address this knowledge gap, we employ a mixed-methods approach, comprising a survey (66 respondents) and in-depth interviews (19 interviewees). Our analyses characterize a set of research perspectives on how HCI is practiced in/about LATAM; a set of driving forces and tensions with a heavy reliance on diasporic dynamics; and a set of professional demands and associated structural limitations. We also offer a roadmap towards building connections across HCI communities, in an attempt to rebuild HCI as a pluriverse.2023PRPedro Reynolds-Cuéllar et al.MITInclusive DesignDeveloping Countries & HCI for Development (HCI4D)CHI
Studying Choreographic Collaboration in the WildDance making is often a highly idiosyncratic, collaborative endeavour between a choreographer and a group of dancers that constitutes a rich context for designers of creativity-support tools (CSTs). However, long-term, ecologically valid studies of collaboration in dance making are rare, especially when mediated by digital tools. We present a 5-month field study in the frame of a dance course, where a choreographer and six students used a CST originally designed for choreographic writing. We contrast our findings with our initial assumptions about the role of the tool to mediate a diversity of notating styles and hierarchical roles. We highlight the value of and the challenges behind this in-the-wild study in uncovering needs and roles as they emerged over time.2021MFMarianela Ciolfi Felice et al.Creative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsDance & Body Movement ComputingDIS
Resisting the Medicalisation of Menopause: Reclaiming the Body through DesignThe 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.2021MFMarianela Ciolfi Felice et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyFoot & Wrist InteractionEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsCHI
Designing Menstrual Technologies with AdolescentsStarting 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.2021MSMarie Louise Juul Søndergaard et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyReproductive & Women's HealthParticipatory DesignCHI
Designing with Intimate Materials and Movements: Making “Menarche Bits”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.2020MSMarie Louise Juul Søndergaard et al.Haptic WearablesShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsOn-Skin Display & On-Skin InputDIS
Touching and Being in Touch with the Menstruating BodyWe 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.2020NWNadia Campo Woytuk et al.KTH Royal Institute of TechnologyCognitive Impairment & Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia)Reproductive & Women's HealthTechnology Ethics & Critical HCICHI