Design for Collaborative Survival

Touching and Being in Touch with the Menstruating Body

“…We can draw from existing exemplars in recent literature to imagine what such interactions might look like. For example, while designed as a provocation around human-fungi relationships, the Hand-Substrate Interface [48] embodies some of the qualities we envisage in future menstrual technologies that promote touch of the body. Its design intends to promote an "art of noticing" that allows the wearer, through mediated touch, to learn more about the substrates within which mushrooms are growing, developing an understanding of how different levels of moisture support fungal growth.…”

Troubling Design

“…alternative practices of design that reject problem-solving approaches in favor of pluralistic feminist accounts of design. This includes a number of design practices that build on feminist technoscience and Haraway's "staying with the trouble" [Haraway 2016] in a multispecies perspective, including speculative design [Galloway 2018], participatory design , and speculative fabulations [Liu et al 2018]. Within the field of women's health there is a potential for thinking-with Haraway's "staying with the trouble" to inquire how our design methodologies could change from dominant problem-solving approaches to designing with trouble.…”

“…Jen Liu et al's work on human-fungi relationships connects more explicitly with Haraway's proposal of staying with the trouble. They introduce the concept of "collaborative survival" in technology design to prompt humans to "become compassionately concerned with the wellbeing of nonhuman species," hereby responding to destructive processes we might prefer to ignore [Liu et al 2018]. Also work by design researchers Kristina Lindström and Åsa Ståhl has engaged deeply with what it might mean to stay with the trouble of environmental changes [Jönsson et al 2019;.…”

“…Troubling design is both a personal and a political project, and one that builds on my own research through design practice and years of literary traditions within gender theory and feminist technoscience. By contributing to recent theories in bringing gender theory [Almeida et al 2018] and feminist technoscience [Jönsson et al 2019;Liu et al 2018] into conversations with design research, I hope this article will trouble the reader; it will stimulate questions and concerns but hopefully also suggest designerly ways forward. Consciously, I do not aim to provide a descriptive framework of troubling or universal guidelines for how trouble matters in design of women's health.…”

Sociotechnical Systems of Care

“…Extending this line of thinking, we believe we can leverage care and caring to understand our own research practices, as well as how those practices are presented. This includes deepening and broadening our stakeholder lists, as in the healthcare example above, but it also includes: § Re-examining our interests and our engagements in our research contexts, from a personal level; § Considering the types of care that our participants demonstrate for us and for our research [15]; § Seeking methods for attending to, tracing, and describing complex or "wicked" problems where solutions are nonexistent or troubling [12]; § Seeking methods and practices that extend care to the more-than-human human to foster more livable futures [4,7].…”