Noura Howell, Richmond Wong, Sarah Fox, Franchesca Spektor
We created a set of speculative designs exploring the future of menstrual biosensing technologies at home and in the workplace. These speculative designs prompt reflection on current issues with menstrual tracking, such as stereotypical gender roles and expansive data surveillance. We present these speculative designs as a product catalog for fictional company Vivewell, in order to situate the designs in a broader landscape of corporate data narratives. Samples of these designs are shown on this page, and can be downloaded below.
We also contribute a pictorial documenting our process. We explored how emergent menstrual biosensing technologies compound existing concerns for the everyday ethics of extracting and analyzing intimate data. Specifically, we review the data practices of a set of existing menstrual applications and use that analysis to inform the design of speculative near future technologies. We present these technologies here in the form of a product catalog for a fictional company called Vivewell. Through this work, we contribute both a set of speculative design proposals and a case study of a design project that begins with the analysis of existing data policies.
[Fictional Product Catalog] 2019. Vivewell: Winter Product Catalog.
This project is a collaboration with Noura Howell, Sarah Fox, Richmond Wong, and Franky Spektor. This project was funded in part by the Berkeley Center for Technology, Science, and Policy, and the Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.