Menstrual 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.

Menstrual pain or 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 ofer 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.

The ‘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.