Hi everyone, I'm Marie Louise.
I will present you our paper "Designing menstrual technologies with adolescents".
This paper and this work is done in collaboration with my co-authors Marianela Ciolfi Felice
and Madeline Balaam affiliated with KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
So in this talk, I will present for you a participatory soma design project that is
advocating for young adolescents to listen to and care for their newly menstruating bodies.
We contribute with a design approach for involving young adolescents in the design
for menstrual health and a vision for future menstrual technologies.
Our work takes the menstruating body as a starting point for design.
It is known that starting to menstruate can restrict adolescent's movements
due to physiological changes and societal stigma.
This in turn can lead them to stay home from school or drop out of sports.
To support menstruating people moving freely around in the world it's crucial to create
positive menstrual experiences already from an early age,
including social acceptance and body literacy.
We have collaborated with a high school in Stockholm, Sweden, to explore how designers
and researchers can involve adolescents who recently started to menstruate
into design for menstrual health.
We were interested to know which technologies could be designed
if young adolescents use their bodies and experiences as starting point for design.
We facilitated two design workshops with seven girls aged 16 to 18 years.
In the workshop we used a prototyping toolkit
called Menarche Bits that we designed to be used with young people who menstruate.
The participants used the toolkit to design body-worn shape-changing
technologies that respond to their experiences of menstrual cycles
and how it influences their everyday life including participation in sports.
One example is a modular wearable garment that uses
heat and massage to ease menstrual pain in the lower abdominal area.
And another example is a blouse that helps with breathing and filling up an emptiness
within during depressive and difficult feelings in the days before menstruating.
Our paper both contributes methodological findings
and findings directly related to the development of menstrual cycle technologies.
Firstly we present a first example of participatory design with adolescents
in the area of menstrual health and a first example of soma design with adolescents.
As menstrual health can be intimate and involve private parts of the body
and since we wish to design with and close to this body, we put care into facilitating
a workshop that was cozy, comfortable, fun and insightful for the adolescents.
We found that the use of a toolkit approach had a crucial impact for the trajectory
from a linguistic to an embodied engagement with menstrual experiences.
Menarche Bits invited participants to develop bodily sensitivities
and to express their unique experiences and use these actively during the workshop.
In addition we contribute with the participants' own design concepts
which show that menstrual technology can be much more and different than self-tracking and
data-driven technologies which commonly support prediction, management, and control of the body.
As a radical alternative to this we are proposing a design agenda for menstrual technologies
that interact intimately with the body and support qualities of movement,
embodiment, and body literacy.
Such technologies will bring people closer to their bodies, touching it,
noticing it, and caring for it.
And we believe that these qualities can both inspire more comfort and confidence,
and support a bigger movement of menstrual advocacy
in the spaces and communities where people's experiences are shaped.
So I invite you to have a closer look at the paper for a full description of
the workshops and the design concepts through the participants' own words.
Thank you for listening and an extra thank you to my co-authors and to the participants,
the collaborators, and many more who have inspired and supported this research.