Hi everyone. I'm Marie Louise and I will present you my article
"Troubling design: a design program for designing with women's health".
This was published in the ToCHI special issue on "HCI and the body: reimagining women's health".
In the article I contribute with a design program for designing with women's health
which I've called troubling design.
Before explaining further what this is I'll quickly expand on two words in this title.
Firstly a design program is a way of building a
theory in design by proposing what design could also become.
I use design program to articulate how my research through design
produce analytical and generative knowledge for other designers and researchers.
And secondly with the term women's health I referred
to sexual reproductive and menstrual health
and put these health experiences in relation to broader feminist politics of women's rights.
So with troubling design I argue that the concept of trouble and the feminist action of troubling
provide rich ways for designers and researchers to engage with women's health.
Troubling design highlights that grappling with trouble is an implicit condition
of designing with intimate and tabooed areas of women's health.
And by staying with this trouble rather than ignoring it it puts forward how trouble and
troubling can be ways to design more ethical and responsible technologies.
So there are three main reasons why trouble is interesting here.
Firstly the euphemism female trouble is used to refer to women's health
experiences in a discreet way.
Secondly trouble is a feminist action that disturbs fixed gender categories
and norms and recently also highlighted as a feminist position of staying with the trouble.
And lastly in HCI and design troubling proposes an alternative design approach to problem-solving.
So troubling design is grounded in feminist theory of trouble and research through design mainly
building on my own design practice including five design examples and three design practices.
The examples include different kinds of speculative and critical
digital technologies primarily designed by me in a Scandinavian context they were
designed to explore how technologies are becoming intimate increasingly intimate and
being used in intimate places of the body and in intimate parts of everyday life.
So the first one PeriodShare is a menstrual cup
that automatically tracks and shares menstrual data online.
Marcelle is a variable sex toy that responds to surrounding wi-fi activity.
Ingrid is a woman living with electromagnetic hypersensitivity.
AYA is a voice assistant pushing back on sexual harassment.
And U is a toilet voice assistant that tracks hormone levels through the urine
and acts as birth control.
These examples were designed for three practices:
staying with the wrong, curious visiting, and collective imagining.
These practices propose ways of attuning our design sensibilities towards particular
ways of seeing the world, technology, people, and society, and our own situated position within it.
They allow the designers to develop various forms of knowledge
embedded in criticality and questioning the status quo
which will inform, shape, and expand the perspectives of their design practice.
The first practice - staying with the wrong - focuses on critically analyzing
and challenging the dominant present and what is perceived as "wrong".
The second practice - curious visiting - focuses on widening perspectives
on the present by seeking and visiting alternative presents.
And the third practice - collective imagining - focuses on imagining different possible futures
that can positively impact the present towards the better.
These three practices connect to temporalities of ongoing pasts,
thick presents, and still possible futures.
And they do that in order to better understand how present
experiences of women's health are influenced by interconnected past and future narratives.
These varied understandings of times, practices,
and the knowledge that this creates for design, is explained in-depth in the article.
And I invite you to dive deeper into it following this talk.
Thank you so much for listening and take care.