This studio explores methods for prototyping with and for intimate and sexual experiences, focusing on a diversity of bodies and understandings of pleasure. We aim to both explore how to communicate people's somatic (sexual) profiles while engaging in creative making processes. Participants will engage in a full day workshop consisting of three distinct phases: trying out methods for representing somatic experiences, tangible ideation and making, and group reflections. Through these activities, we not only aim to enhance individual awareness of erotic bodies but also share advice and experiences on how to design for sexual experiences from feminist and intersectional perspectives. This studio seeks to promote inclusivity and challenge normative beliefs about sexual bodies, designing for intimacy and contributing to a more equitable discourse on pleasure. computer interaction (HCI); Interactive systems and tools; Interaction design; Interaction design process and methods; Activity centered design.

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. 

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.

The 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.

Feminist 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. 

The latest advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), such as Large Language Models (LLMs), have provoked a massive expansion and adoption of AI applications across the board, with seemingly no sector left untouched by recent developments. Anywhere we look, from healthcare to the creative industries, from education to en- tertainment, from sustainability to knowledge work, AI is being adopted and adapted, funded and fundraised for, developed and de- signed for, researched and used for doing research. As AI continues to be treated as a necessary and unquestioned solution for a range of societal problems, we seek to ponder and challenge its perceived suitability and inevitability. Moreover, we wonder how we can go about resisting AI solutionism (i.e., the idea that technology pro- vides solutions to complex social problems) and who gets to resist it, in particular if the structures that surround people and their spe- cific positions constrain them from doing so. This workshop will focus on gathering and sharing lessons from experiences resisting, or attempting to resist, AI solutionism; taking stock and revisiting previous learnings from decades of work within and beyond HCI; and envisioning ways, perspectives, tools, and practices to orient ourselves and each other towards more pluralistic futures. 

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.

Bodily 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.

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.

Over the past decade, community collaborations have come into focus within the HCI and CSCW fields. Largely the result of increased concern for social and contextual dimensions of practice, these partnerships facilitate a pathway for researchers and practitioners to foreground the nuances of technology as it takes place in the real world. How these collaborations are engaged, what values mediate them, and how practices might vary across geographies remain active research questions. In this paper, we contribute by zooming into the experience of four HCI and CSCW researchers engaging in community collaborations in Latin America (LATAM). Through a collaborative autoethnography (CAE), we identify three main value tensions impacting HCI practices and methods in research collaborations with LATAM communities: camaraderie vs. cautiousness, informality vs. formality and hopefulness vs. transparency. Building on our findings, we provide three recommendations for researchers interested in engaging in community-based research in similar contexts.