Making Intimate Technologies Together
Paper i proceeding, 2025
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.
making
intimate care
intimate sensor
menstrual tracking
research through design
feminist making
DIY
open source
Författare
Nadia Campo Woytuk
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)
Mafalda Samuelsson-Gamboa
Göteborgs universitet
Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Interaktionsdesign och Software Engineering
Alejandra Gómez Ortega
Stockholms universitet
Joo Young Park
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)
Anupriya Tuli
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)
Deirdre Tobin
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)
Fiona Bell
University of New Mexico
Marianela Ciolfi Felice
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)
Madeline Balaam
Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH)
DIS 2025 Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference
2818-2832
9798400714856 (ISBN)
2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, DIS 2025
Madeira, Portugal,
Madeira, Portugal,
Ämneskategorier (SSIF 2025)
Genusstudier
Design
DOI
10.1145/3715336.3735412