The management of bodily excretion is an everyday biological function necessary for our physiological and psychological well-being. In this paper, I investigate interaction design opportunities for and implications of leveraging intimate and somatic data to manage urination. This is done by detailing a design space that includes (1) a critique of market exemplars, (2) three conceptual design provocations, and (3) autobiographical data-gathering and labeling from excretion routines. To conclude, considerations within the labeling of somatic data, the actuating of bodily experiences, and the scaling of intimate interactions are contributed for designers who develop data-driven technology for intimate and somatic settings.

Tensions in designing for care are often positioned as conflicts to be resolved. We draw upon queer theories to investigate caring for loved ones as not "in-line" with normative expectations of care as positive and fulfilling. Through the critique of two autobiographical design projects designed for informal, everyday care of our families, we describe four troubling orientations of care: willful detours, selfish shortcuts, naughty invasions, and unhappy departures. From these, we argue that tensions in care may not always be designed against, but can also be desired and generative.We conclude by discussing a "wickedness" in caring for loved ones that problematizes in-home technologies as attractively naughty and potentially violent, and the four orientations as resources for interaction designers to spatially navigate tensions of domestic care.

As new materials become available for textile and interaction designers, it is crucial that we develop an understanding of the lived experiences of such materials and explore meaningful contexts for their development. In this paper, we engage with systems in which bodies as materials and materials as bodies constitute an assemblage of vitalities in constant flux with one another. In particular, we address how such systems in their interactions with (non)human bodies blur boundaries between inside and outside the body, and between human and machine, acting as soft systems. Drawing on our first-person, design-led research, we present three design explorations of soft systems that deeply engage with the body: Breathing Wings, Fiddling Necklaces and Menarche Bits. We analyze how the three projects contribute towards what we conceptualize as “vibrant wearables”: wearables that through their material vibrancy surface design qualities of leakiness, characterized by a multi-directionality of “spilling over,” ongoingness, which attends to non-linear temporalities and cycles of life and death, and mutuality that emphasizes the interdependency, and becoming, of vibrant encounters. These three design qualities all conceptually trouble boundaries of bodies and materials and are practical resources for designers and researchers working with the body in/as a soft system. Our work offers concrete examples of how to work with material vibrancy, which is particularly relevant to new materialist discourses in textile, fashion and interaction design. We argue for the generativity of these design qualities for other designers and researchers aiming to elevate materials and soft systems in interactions with bodies. Moreover, we contribute towards design research that conceptually and materially troubles the boundaries of the body, and we argue for attending to the material power of (non)human bodies as a soft system.

Bodily transformations that attend breastfeeding include entanglements of more-than-human materials and agencies. These can be seen in exchanges of physical matter, such as bacteria, that blur bodily boundaries. I present three design explorations of my breastfeeding experiences as entangled: knitting bras for lopsided breasts, transforming milk into fiddling necklaces, and site-writing around breastfeeding. Through spatial and conceptual mappings of the explorations, I propose them as alternative narratives in designing for leaky breastfeeding bodies. I also offer two broader reflections on designing with, for, and among more-than-human bodily materials: generous absence and bodily mappings. The accompanying reading instructions to this bodily research open for further encounters and reflections between the three explorations.

This paper explores human bodily fluids for more-than-human collaborative survival. We present four utopian fabulations in which urine, menstrual blood, and human milk are designed with beyond the scale of a singular human body. Each fabulation illustrates queer scales and uses of bodily fluids through extended or improper uses as pathways towards caring multi-species relations within a damaged environment. From these narratives, we reflect on imagining generous collaborations for an openness towards unknowable possibilities and crafting different measures through the tensions of coinciding scales.

This essay performs a speculative ethics in designing with a researcher's own bodily fluids. This is through the creation of "performative texts", which are autoethnographic accounts of past experiences in which written words perform through visual and spatial compositions alongside verbal readings aloud. I present three performative texts about moments of discomfort in designing with milk from my own breastfeeding relationship. They are to reflect upon felt experiences of potential harm and to understand social and material relations of care. From these I offer three possibilities for how HCI might consider the ethics of first-person research in attending to more-than-human entanglements: unsafe spaces, situated escapes, and censored inclusion. These possibilities and the approach of performative texts contribute to research for more sustainable futures by exploring the decentering of humans through an intimate engagement with the self.