The Pelvic Chair is a shape-changing chair that touches the pelvic area. Through rhythmic and gentle movements on different parts of the pelvic area, the touch interactions from the Pelvic Chair invite attention to the anatomy, muscles, and connectedness. We present a user study with 14 participants focusing on their experience of being touched by the Pelvic Chair. Through our qualitative analysis of participants experiences, we show that meaningful touch can offer an active approach to sensing the pelvic floor that contributes to increasing somatic literacy - becoming familiar with the pelvic floor, being able to feel and distinguish between tension and relaxation, and establishing new connections between the pelvic floor and the body. Using the Pelvic Chair as a design case we show the potential for technology-initiated touch in providing an intimate and safe way of touching and connecting with the body.

Digital 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. 

We 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 primary users of Natural Cycles, focusing specifically on its use as 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.

Reproductive technologies encompass aspects of menstrual health, in/fertility, sexual health, pregnancy, contraception, abortion, or menopause, among many other things, thus entangling aspects of the everyday lives of people of all genders. As reproductive technologies have become-and will continue to be-complicit in enabling or challenging the oppressions enacted on our bodies, it is imperative that we critically reflect on the values and methods used when designing these technologies. Despite a growing body of critical work in HCI, we, a community of feminist scholars working on reproductive technologies, find that there is limited practical guidance on bringing together perspectives such that they can be distributed in easy-to-use, engaging, and collaborative ways. This critical visualization responds to these needs and presents a zine (a collaboratively made booklet) that speculates on reproductive technologies by providing examples from a previous design workshop that happened at NordiCHI 2022 and a guide with activities and reflections on how to organize this kind of workshop. We have also included instructions on how to print and assemble the zine. Some of the examples featured in the zine imagine utopian feminist futures, and some of them intentionally expose or 'trouble' the taken-for-granted dichotomies behind the design and use of reproductive technologies. For instance, several examples draw from the feminist value of embodiment and prioritize the qualitative and felt experiences of menstruating. Other projects highlight the risks of reproductive bodies being commodified and surveilled through technology. The projects are presented through a lens of 'feminist values', which are particularly useful for critically highlighting existing power structures and instead centering subjective experiences that are typically erased in (cis-)normative approaches to reproductive health. We intend the zine to act as a collaborative, accessible, low-tech, and open-ended feminist tool and to use it as a stepping-stone for bringing together an already flourishing community of designers and researchers. Since the zine itself allows for reassembling and reconfiguring, we envision an impromptu zine-assembling activity at the conference presentation, where we invite the audience to add their own feminist values and experiences of designing (and using) reproductive technologies. The zine is free and accessible online, ready to be used in future workshops, offering it as a guide, but also as an easy way to get acquainted with feminist vocabulary in general. We hope this work is one step towards formalizing an (open) community of people working with designing and researching reproductive technologies in the Nordics.