Quantitative representations of the body have become increasingly commonplace, a requisite for many navigating complex health issues, yet also heavily scrutinized under feminist lenses for flattening embodied experiences and perpetuating norms. How might designers and researchers navigate this tension, engaging with quantified (bio)data in corporeal, sensory, collective, and anti-solutionist ways? This 1-day workshop will bring together HCI researchers, practitioners, and designers to solidify the role of design in shaping how we interact with, know, grasp, and enjoy our data, while staying true to critical feminist values. Attendees will be invited to Bring Your/their own (Bio)Datasets (BYOB) as well as any tools or data physicalization crafting techniques they want to employ. The intended outcome of this workshop is a plurality of datasets, data tools, and data representations that empower people to engage with their data in ways other than the ones afforded by screens and dashboards, emphasizing agency, embodiment, and community.

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.

This paper follows a trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural arts research endeavour which seeks to utilise the restitution of neglected archival materials to engage the social and cultural trajectory of the villages and nation from which that material and intangible heritage was taken, stolen, destroyed, lost, or diminished. The paper engages with tensions in colonial and decolonial design of digital heritage between the potential for counter-histories and imaginaries on the one-hand and the colonial impulse of computing and its logics on the other. Through the research through design activities formed with a decolonial praxiology, we explore how the systems, practices and technologies of archival practices in this project develop an ethics of knowledge-making that neither satisfies or diminishes decolonial intent. We tentatively argue for approaches to decolonial design that are accounted for in local and pragmatic modes of knowledge making that are delinked from globalised and abstracted systems that otherwise repress them.

In line with the ‘Computing (X) Crisis’ theme, this workshop addresses a vital aspect of designing computing technology in challenging circumstances. Specifically, it explores the complexities of participatory and engagement-driven approaches (PEDAs) in sensitive and marginalized contexts. Although PEDAs emerged from workplace democracy and structured labor environments, their application in crisis-affected and vulnerable communities raises ethical and methodological tensions. Researchers navigating these complexities must critically examine power imbalances, extractive participation, and agency in design. In this workshop, participants will collaboratively create tangible outputs by making zines while reflecting on their experiences, sharing challenges, and developing strategies for ethical participation. The workshop fosters a supportive space for mutual learning, centering care, inclusion, and researcher well-being in participation-based research.

Design is storied, and stories are designed. While elements of stories have long been part of the field through methods like personas, scenarios and design fictions, there has been a recent surge of new approaches including fabulations, epics, memoirs, site-writing and design events. In this workshop we aim to understand how stories are built, what narrative traditions they draw from, how they co-constitute research processes and what kind of knowledge can emerge from them. Specifically, we will explore the role of storytelling in HCI, the craft of writing stories, relations between fiction, truth and knowledge and finally the risks, tensions and limitations of writing stories. We will outline an overview of this new wave of stories in HCI and what they are activating and advocating for, build a set of tips, tricks and advice for writing stories and keep track of ongoing issues and open questions for further research.

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. 

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.