Workshop Background

This one-day workshop invites participants to discuss possibilities and challenges of designing with and for reproductive bodies. Reproductive health is a growing field of HCI research, concerned with different aspects of reproductive bodies and health. Here, research and design explorations towards bodies and data entanglements are being conducted, mainly under the broader concept of women’s health. This work covers topics such as menopause [Bardzell et al. 2019; Ciolfi Felice et al. 2021; Lazar et al. 2019], menarche [e.g., Søndergaard et al. 2021], menstruation and the menstrual cycle [e.g., Campo Woytuk et al. 2020; Eschler et al. 2019; Fox and Epstein 2020; Homewood 2018], as well as in/fertility [e.g., Costa Figueiredo 2020; Mehrnezhad and Almeida 2021]. While we take vantage point in this work, this workshop aims to move beyond essentializing ideas within women’s health that are often equalized with reproductive health and focused on the female body, as recent critique suggests [Keyes et al. 2020]. Instead, we are aiming towards an understanding of reproductive health that encompasses interpersonal and more-than-human relations as well as experiences of male, nonbinary, trans* and infertile reproductive bodies. Through understanding reproductive bodies as hybrids of flesh, bones, blood alongside with sensors and external technologies [Forlano 2021], we will critically reflect on the bodies that are included and excluded in current understandings of reproduction, processes of becoming or unbecoming fertile and designs of self-tracking as well as practices of self-care. We invite participants working on or interested in themes such as in/fertility, menstruation, menstrual cycle, menopause, bodily transitions and feminist perspectives on bodies, more broadly, to explore these understandings with us.

In line with recent work on posthumanism and feminist new materialism [Homewood et al. 2021; Lupton 2019; Haraway 2016] we understand different reproductive technologies and practices as socio-technical systems of human and non-human actors [Forlano 2021; Søndergaard et al. 2022]. We aim to explore reproductive bodies as entangled with non-human actors such as pregnancy tests, needles, hormones/medication, blood tests, doctor visits, thermometers, blood, ovulation sticks, menstrual products, sensors, tracking apps, Excel spreadsheets, breast pumps and much more. To critically and creatively attend to the ecologies that reproductive bodies are part of, we take inspiration from recent speculative and more-than-human design research in HCI, for example surrounding data produced by bodies [Tsaknaki et al. 2022] or explorations of menstrual care practices that expand understandings of fertility beyond reproduction [Campo Woytuk and Søndergaard, 2021].