Designing for Raising Awareness of Pollution’s Impacts on Menstrual Health
Introduction
My master's thesis explored the potential and limitations of technologies to raise awareness of pollution's impacts on menstrual health, highlighting considerations for designers in this realm. I designed and developed a package of artefacts that contains eight activities to prompt participants to reflect on pollution and menstrual health.
Methods: Research-through-design, first-person experiments, cultural probes, interviews
Tools: Arduino, physical prototyping, sensor programming, soldering
Design Process
Literature Mind Map: Define research question and gather inspiration from previous studies
First-person experiments: Reflect on my own experiences, explore materials, brainstorm ideas, and make low-fi prototypes
Probes design and prototyping: Iterate based on my own experience, trying out the prototypes, and one pilot study
A lo-fi bracelet that can detect air quality
Distributed package: Includes eight activities
Dendro: A lamp that can change light colour based on the detected air quality. One of the prototyped artefacts
Results
From five women’s experiences completing the tasks and interacting with the artefacts, I found that confusion, negative feelings, and ambivalent feelings can appear while awareness is being raised. Also, there exists a lack of more profound knowledge of menstrual health in some educational systems. For people who do have menstruating experience, their behaviours of creating pollution are an infringement upon the individual bodily autonomy of people who menstruate. Moreover, I found a subtle connection between our bodies and our environment, which may encourage reflection on individual responsibility toward sustainability and follow-up actions.
I suggest that when designing for this specific type of technology, we should first only aim to raise and maintain a balanced level of awareness. Furthermore, guidance that guides users get through the probably unavoidable negative feelings should be provided. Instead of focusing on telling the users how the environmental data is changing, the technology can more focus on letting users know the unnoticeable changes in their bodily feelings. Also, involving non-human elements such as nature may contribute to prompting all people to reflect on sustainability and their individual responsibility and take action for their own sake.