Feminist Posthumanist Design of Menstrual Care for More-than-Human Bodies

In the last decade, an increasing amount of research has focused on designing for intimate care; a health domain often associated with intimate settings, experiences, and placements of technologies close to intimate parts of the human body. This could include self-tracking technologies, IoT-devices, and wearables that facilitate looking at and touching the vulva and bodily fluids [7], such as urine, breast milk [41], and menstrual blood [23], or attending to health diagnosis and conditions like urinary incontinence [6], yeast infections [101], and polycystic ovary syndrome [25]. While many of these experiences are taboo, they are also mundane parts of many people’s lives and especially important to notice during bodily transitions such as menarche, pregnancy, and menopause as such knowledge can increase health and wellbeing. In HCI this domain is sometimes referred to as an agenda for Digital Women’s Health [6], and in the industry as FemTech (Female Technology). The broader research and design agenda follows feminist thought that seeks to challenge dominant technology development and uses beyond the needs and worlds of cisgender men [82], however, the gendering of intimate care as something that regards women has been critiqued for its exclusion of non-binary folks and men with menstrual cycles and a capacity for pregnancy [59].

In our research, we focus on the intimate care related to menstrual bleeding, which involves ways of handling and disposing of menstrual blood through absorbent products or objects that in other ways collect the blood, such as menstrual pads [75], menstrual cups [79], tampons and menstrual underwear. Recent research has argued for the importance of touching and being in touch with this blood [23] and for opportunities to work with bodily materials [53] and intimate touch [10]. We follow such positions and align with design research attending to the more-than-human relations that bodily fluids leak into and entangle with [37, 41, 43, 110].

Posthumanist philosophy is radically transforming human-centered design and traditional user-centered approaches in HCI, in what has been called a more-than-human turn [33, 39, 107]. More-than-human design (MTHD) is challenging the implicit human exceptionalism that has been foundational in designing for human needs, but detrimental to the environment and often comes at the expense of all other living species. By responding to climate crises, MTHD transcends a sustainability paradigm where technology is proposed as a solution or driver of sustainable change. Such an approach has been questioned as valid for dealing with environmental crises, as we can no longer simply sustain capitalistic models and dualist ontologies [31], and the paradigm has been critiqued for being individualistic and for serving the already resourceful (Man) [95]. Instead, MTHD focuses on entanglement [35] and relational ways of knowing, hereby bringing an understanding of the inter-dependency of all living species [107] rather than humans’ control and domination over nature. MTHD comes with the premise that design is in critical need of new approaches and theoretical underpinnings to correct its own wrongdoings. MTHD works often by decentering the human, involving thing-centered perspectives [38] and more-than-human participation and concerns [2], in order to attend to non-human agency and the ways humans are entangled in more-than-human worlds. This includes the agency and intentions in AI systems and networked computational things [39], as well as microorganisms, plants, soil, and other-than-human animals [17, 69]. Research includes various ways that human designers can notice [72, 89], account and care [58] for non-human participation in design and research practice, as co-performers [61] that human designers are designing-with [107].

A significant portion of HCI work focusing on sustainability has discussed how to create sustainable artifacts by upcycling, renewal and reuse [18] as well as literal and metaphorical interpretations of design for decomposing [70, 71], unmaking [68, 90, 93] and un-crafting [77]. Adjacent to this body of literature, we have seen a recent turn to biomaterials, as more designers seek to reduce plastic waste when creating physical prototypes and artifacts [104]. In this project, we draw from work on biomaterials and use recipes for agar bioplastic, which is one of the most commonly used and accessible bioplastics, made from an algae-based powder called agar, often used as a vegan gelatin substitute [5, 14, 84, 88].

Many HCI-focused explorations with biomaterials have been guided by Material-Driven Design (MDD), focusing on designing material experiences, providing instructions, guides, and toolkits for designers to cook and grow their own samples, tuning their properties for specific applications [56]. Often seen combined with MDD, the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) bio approach provides substantial open-source guides and tools for preparing biolabs and facilities for designers and artists to engage in biology experimentation [62, 63]. By following RtD approaches and tinkering with the materials, researchers and designers have shown how biomaterials inspire new interactions, objects, habits, and practices, and how these materials might be received by society [57]. Aleksejeva et al. tell us how bioplastics are not for everyone, and cannot be simply substituted for conventional plastics, but rather, this shift comes with a change of practices —in their case, new ways of eating [5]. In this paper we suggest how incorporating biomaterials into menstrual care also involves a shift in how current menstrual products are used —new ways of practicing menstrual care.

Adjacent to vegetable or animal biomaterials, many scholars have been working with materials originating from the human body, including more intimate engagements with the body’s materiality in their designs [53]. Examples of these bodily materials include saliva [45], hair [9], breast milk [41, 42, 110], menstrual blood [23], urine [110] or gut microbes [19]. This promising early work not only "challenges and extends the methods, guidance, and framings of material driven design" [53], but opens up the definition of biomaterials to include both human, non-human and the materials in between [23]. Feminist discussions on where these bodily materials end and the non-human or other begins have also been continuously developed outside of HCI, predominantly from artistic lenses. Related to intimate care and bodily fluids are Ani Liu’s installations with breast milk [8], Giulia Tomasello’s Future Flora kit for growing vaginal bacteria [102], and Whitefeather Hunter’s biotech experiments of lab-grown meat originating from menstrual blood cells [49].

In our work, we create a relationship between bodily materials (mainly menstrual blood) and biomaterials (mainly agar bioplastic, gluten and moss), and discuss how designing with, bleeding on, and disposing of both these materials challenge current harmful menstrual products and reimagine more caring menstrual health practices. We use this materiality of menstrual blood and menstrual products to understand and design for the more-than-human body.

In the early stages of the project, we investigated past and current uses of biodegradable menstrual products and the materials these were made from. What materials might be absorbent, non-toxic, pleasantly feeling against the skin, and would decompose easily in soil? We found that many of the materials used in previous biodegradable menstrual products were sourced locally. For example, banana fiber in India [1], or Vyld’s seaweed-based tampons sourced from Norther Europe [105].

We focused our efforts on our local species in Nordic ecologies and learned about knitted pads and the use of Sphagnum moss (See Fig. 2). This moss, when dried, has absorbent and antiseptic qualities which has historically been used by Indigenous communities and in industrial practices across the globe for many purposes: as a bandage, growth material for orchids, as insulation, and to absorb bodily fluids such as urine or menstrual blood [60]. Through the writing of Indigenous bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer about natural and cultural histories of mosses [60], we got excited by this extremely fascinating species of Sphagnum moss, and started identifying and gathering moss from local swamp and forest areas, examining their porosity under microscopes, and we created an experimental AI tool to classify different species through image recognition done in Teachable Machine and ml5.js.

In addition to Sphagnum moss, we became familiar with the superabsorbent properties of wheat gluten [24], and the possibility of creating a flexible foam with gluten powder, which we obtained as a co-product from the agriculture industry (See Fig. 2). We were able to make samples of this foam in our kitchens, by baking the gluten powder together with baking soda and water at a low temperature for a few minutes. Lastly, we worked with red cabbage and agar (See Fig. 2), extracting pH-sensitive dye by boiling chopped cabbage and using the dye to color a mix of agar, water, and glycerol. This mix is a commonly used recipe for fabricating DIY bioplastics, where tweaking the quantities of each ingredient in the mix will provide for different levels of brittleness or flexibility of the bioplastic [14, 84, 88].

When making water-based biomaterials, the process often includes a stage of mixing ingredients into a liquid or semi-solid mixture, pouring it into a flat mold or onto a surface, and allowing it to air-dry for several days. We used a food dehydrator to speed up this process, which allowed us to have solidified bioplastic sheets overnight. Our experimentation included pouring the mix into 3D printed molds, vacuum-formed plastic molds, and onto flat surfaces. In order to shape the biomaterials, we cut the dried sheets manually with scissors or with self-made 3D-printed "cookie cutters" in the shape of a menstrual pad (see Fig. 3). We also used an iron to heat-seal and stick layers of bioplastic together, encapsulating moss or gluten in order to form the absorbent middle layer. At this stage of the process, we had made the design decision to fabricate wearable menstrual pads (in opposition to tampons, cups, or other new shapes), due to extreme shrinkage when drying more voluminous objects. We also made this decision since menstrual pads are a more commonly known menstrual care product and are worn externally to the vagina. However, in the second workshop detailed later in this paper, we expanded the explorations beyond 2D sheets, speculating on different voluminous shapes and ways of wearing them inside the vagina. Among the results of the prototyping stage were several variants of menstrual pads, mostly consisting of two agar bioplastic sheets encapsulating sphagnum moss or wheat gluten foam, as well as thin agar pads colored with red cabbage (Fig. 4). Here the red cabbage would act as an analog pH sensor, which, when worn as a pad, would be stained and colored via the menstrual and cervical fluids, indicating the acidity of the vagina.

While the menstrual pad prototypes provided a way to imagine fully biodegradable menstrual products, we also designed for the existing practice of collecting blood from a menstrual cup and using it as a fertilizer. A menstrual cup is a reusable medical silicone cup that is folded and inserted into the vaginal canal, and can be worn for a full day. The cup has a small "tail" extension on the bottom, used to pull out the cup after being worn, and the contents (menstrual fluid: a combination of blood, tissue and cervical mucus) is dumped out, usually into a toilet, sink, or a recipient. In online communities, we have seen people pour their menstrual cup contents into jars, bottles, or Tupperware. We designed a set of 3D printed bottle tops that adapt to glass or plastic receptacles in order to facilitate observing the blood, diluting it, pouring it, watering a plant with it, or storing it (see one of the tops in Fig. 3).

The last stage we designed interventions for was the imagined disposing and composting of the menstrual products along with the collected or absorbed menstrual blood. Here, our designs followed a more speculative approach: we imagined scenarios in which the materials would be composted in domestic environments, such as home composts or urban gardens, or accidentally discarded in local forests and parks. We speculated that any pathogens that might be carried in the blood, such as viruses, would die in high temperatures produced in composting processes. We discussed how the materials might affect existing ecosystems and the species already inhabiting the soil and the biomaterials themselves. We created two speculative collages and accompanying narratives depicting 1) fungi, earthworms, and other decomposers being attracted to a gluten-based menstrual pad in a composting box, and 2) tardigrades, harmless micro-animals (also known as water bears) living in sphagnum moss, thriving in the menstrual pad while being worn by a human (Fig. 5). These depictions aimed to provoke reactions and discussions about feelings of disgust and taboo towards menstrual blood, as well as fungi and other decomposer organisms. In addition to these collages, we prototyped an alternative version of the menstrual pads which incorporated seeds into the different layers, inspired by "seed-bombing" practices to re-wild abandoned or depleted soil [87] (see last image in Fig. 3).

At this stage, we also discussed the possibility of soil sensing, which laid the foundation for the third workshop detailed later in this paper: "Fertility & Fertilizers". After a particular patch or pot of soil has been fertilized with blood, can we sense the differences in that soil’s fertility? And perhaps in understanding the soil’s fertility, we might learn something about our own body’s fertility and the nutrients in menstrual blood. This could also be reflected through the state of a plant growing in that soil, which would serve as a living biomarker of personal or collective health, similar to previous work on using urine as a fertilizer [108].

To gather the outcomes of the project, disseminate the work, and discuss it with others, we organized a week-long art exhibition (see Fig. 6). The exhibition guided visitors to touch and closely observe material samples and prototypes, following the biodegrading process of several samples that had been put in pots of soil at the start of the exhibition. We distributed the self-published booklet, which we called the spellbook ("Biomenstrual: A spell book for more-than-human menstrual care" [21]), as an amusing reference to the associations between feminist bioart approaches and witchcraft [27]. The booklets contained recipe guides, evocative images, collages, photographs of the prototypes, and prompts/questions, and their purpose was to invite others to perform the experiments on their own or in our workshops. The exhibition and spellbook were a way of physicalizing and making more graspable a design outcome that includes intangible design knowledge, such as practices, rituals, and reflections.

The first workshop was designed with a focus on materiality and ecology. The goal was not to make functional menstrual hygiene products but to explore how biodesign with gluten, moss, and agar bioplastic would change our relation to the products themselves, our body, and the environment. With the workshop title "Recipes for Menstrual Pads", we hinted at the hands-on nature of the workshop and connections with cooking together. The workshop was facilitated by the first author and hosted at a gallery in The Oslo School of Architecture and Desgin, and was part of the exhibition Remedy: Counter-responses in the Design of Care. Five participants joined, including two other exhibitors. The workshop lasted three hours followed by a one-hour lunch. It was documented through photos and notes, and the designed artifacts were documented by participants’ own two-minute videos.

We began the workshop with a welcome to the exhibition including coffee, tea, fruits and cookies. After a round of introductions by the participants, the first author provided an introduction to the project by walking through the exhibition and looking at the existing designs, practices, and recipes, which had been developed by the co-authors and were on display in the gallery. Here the participants got a chance to get familiar with the whole project before being invited to contribute themselves. Before starting the design activities, the first author guided a short grounding activity, inspired by somatic practices, where participants were invited to close their eyes and connect with their body and its relation with their surroundings. Then the design brief was re-introduced: make a menstrual care object with the provided biomaterials or materials found in the local ecology around the university building. We started by walking outside to look for potential organic and inorganic materials to be used; materials that were soft, absorbent, or otherwise meaningful in connection with menstrual care. In a park along a river, the participants gathered and found a collection of mosses, mushrooms, lichen, feathers, rope, thread, bark, sawdust, a cigarette bud, and a facemask. Some participants took mosses, mushrooms, and bark growing on trees, while other participants did not want to remove anything but rather wanted to use what had been shed or left as trash. We brought this curious mix back to the gallery and named it the "egg carton of encounters" (see Fig. 7), and participants presented their chosen materials and relations and associations with them. Participants looked at materials very closely, attending to material aesthetics of what may collect, absorb, filter, or resist fluids; such as how mosses absorb humidity in the air, how a bird’s feathers "resist" water, or how a cigarette bud filters toxins. Some materials were chosen because of their functionality and how "productive" they would be, while one participant chose a material (tea) mainly because of the joyful memories she connected with it. Participants then started the making of menstrual care objects, and while they worked individually they continuously shared and discussed their ideas and helped each other in the making process. Some participants started making molds and cutting and organizing materials in different new shapes that may feel good against the vulva. Other participants started getting familiar with the agar bioplastic which could work as a "glue" for their found materials or as the main material itself. One participant started by looking closely at their found materials through a microscope placed in the gallery, which quickly inspired others to do the same. After a while, we started boiling agar bioplastic on a stove in the gallery, which participants poured into or onto self-made molds or in glass containers. After a bit of waiting for the bioplastic to cure, everyone presented their final menstrual care object, and we ended the workshop with a discussion on the objects and wider social and environmental factors of menstrual health. Participants were invited to take a two-minute video documenting their object, which everyone did. We finished with a lunch provided by the exhibition.

The second workshop expanded the making beyond menstrual pads. In collaboration with design researcher Åsa Ståhl and her research project Holding Surplus House, we wanted to design "menstrual carrier bags"; containers that hold menstrual blood, rather than (only) absorb it. In framing the workshop, we were inspired by science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" [66] in which she redefines the history of technology and science and the theory of storytelling. She argues that the first tools or technologies were not the weapons of domination, but the containers/bags/holders/recipients that were used for carrying, gathering, and sharing e.g. berries and seeds. As a metaphor, the carrier bag changes fiction from linear, progressive hero-centered stories to unheroic life stories. We worked with "menstrual carrier bags" as a metaphor for practices, aesthetics, and imaginaries of sustaining oneself and creating a surplus, rather than the "heroic" stories dominating the industrial discourse where menstrual objects are designed to dominate and conceal the menstruating body after which they become waste.

We hosted the workshop together with Ståhl at a food lab in the design department at Ståhl’s institution, Linnaeus University. A total of nine people participated, mainly staff members, students, and alumni. The workshop was split into two days to allow for materials to dry overnight. The first part lasted two hours, followed by a self-cooked dinner, and the second part lasted one hour. The workshop was documented through photos and notes.

We started the workshop by introducing the project and the framing of the workshop. We then presented the design brief, and highlighted that it was not necessary to have lived menstrual experiences to participate in the workshop, but rather that we would be "designing in alliances". To prepare for the workshop we had brought previously made biodegradable menstrual pads and we had also experimented with making biodegradable menstrual cups, since the shape of the cup, as an object that holds blood rather than absorbs it, fits nicely with the "carrier bag" theory. As materials and tools to use in the workshop, we brought: a menstrual cup mold, a tampon mold, embroidery hoops with waterproof fabric as molds for bioplastic sheets, agar powder and glycerin for making bioplastic, charcoal, mosses, wax, and ingredients to make pH-sensitive bioplastic, which included butterfly pea (clitoria ternatea) blossoms and red cabbage slices. In addition, the food lab had all the required equipment for making biomaterials, including stoves, tools for measuring and mixing, and a dehydrator.

The participants started exploring the materials and coming up with ideas for shapes in smaller groups or individually. Some participants used the molds we had brought, and other participants started improvising and shaping their own molds with paper, tape, plates, glass, and baking paper, in order to make the particular shape that would fit the particular situation in which they wanted a menstrual carrying object, such as for sleeping with menstrual blood running up the lower back, or different shapes of internally worn cups than the conventional menstrual cup. Other participants without embodied menstrual experiences instead focused on the material absorbent properties of moss in combination with bioplastic. Other participants were very curious about the possibility to sense a pH value in vaginal fluids, and started cooking and straining red cabbage juice and other pH-sensitive liquids. The idea of bioplastics as sensors led one participant to explore whether conductive material could be implemented in the menstrual object by adding activated charcoal that they had brought. After some time of explorations, we finished the shapes and molds, and everyone got to present their menstrual carrier bags. Then we prepared them for drying overnight in the dehydrator. The next day we met back again in the food lab and looked at the dried objects, and discussed the workshop.

The third workshop focused on the afterlife of biodegradable menstrual technologies and their potential to be composted and fertilize the soil together with the collected menstrual fluid. The workshop took place in collaboration with Regenerative Energy Communities; a research project exploring technologies for sustainable energy and agriculture, local to Växjö, Sweden, the same city as the second workshop [92]. The group, which engages with low-cost open-source forms of regenerative energy and actively participates in the care of a communal urban farm, VXO Farmlab, had recently started prototyping ways to generate electricity and fertilizer from urine, which provided a point of overlapping interest for us to set up a workshop together. The collective organizes weekly "Open Labs" which openly welcome artists, researchers, and citizens to thematic afternoons with round-table discussions and hands-on tinkering, often led by invited hosts. Together, we planned the session "Fertility & Fertilizers" hinting at the double usage of the term, referring either to fertile human bodies or to soil nutrition.

We began the workshop with an introduction to our project and each other, followed by a set of hands-on activities with off-the-shelf soil sensors and soil collected from the farm earlier that day (Fig. 9). During the introduction, we pointed out our motivation to understand and sense menstrual fluids through the sensing of soil that had been fertilized by these fluids. We also brought up the curious similarities between soil fertility sensors (which measure humidity, pH, temperature, among other things) with fertility sensors commonly used on/in women’s bodies (which also measure pH, temperature, and conductivity), and we showed a machine-learning generated video of fertility sensors, which we trained on an image data set consisting of sensors for both soil and women’s bodies. Participants introduced their own work and relations to soil, agriculture, biomaterials, or intimate care.

The hands-on activities spread out around the large table of the space creating makeshift "stations" where participants moved around, and dialogues merged in and out. The drop-in nature of the open labs also allowed participants to arrive mid-activity, so the activities could be repeated and had no apparent beginning or end. On one side of the table, we laid out a set of off-the-shelf soil sensors, along with a chemical NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) test and several pH strips. The soil sensors included an analog pH meter which could be stuck into moist soil, a double-probe moisture sensor measuring resistivity (FC-28), a capacitive moisture sensor (Adafruit STEMMA Soil Sensor), as well as an Arduino Uno board and a breadboard with the correct circuits and code ready to obtain readings. In the NPK test (Luster Leaf 1601 Rapitest Test Kit), the lengthy instructions indicated we drop the contents of a color-coordinated capsule containing a chemical reactant into a water-diluted soil sample. This mix was to be visually compared with the color scale on the containers —the more N, P or K, the stronger the color appeared in the water sample. The process of diluting the sample and allowing the clumpy-er parts of the soil to sediment to the bottom was indicated to take from 30 minutes to up to a day. Since we did not dispose of this time, we chose to skip this recommendation and waited 5-10 minutes for each sample we tested. Some participants experimented with the digital sensors, and several proceeded to measure soil pH with both the sensor and pH strips. One participant was curious about the pH level of a microbial tea (also called "compost tea", a blend of beneficial microorganisms extracted from compost which can be used as fertilizer) the lab had in their space, and easily confirmed its acidity (Fig. 9).

As some participants waited for results from these tests that suggested to be inconclusive and slightly anti-climatic after such laborious preparation, the group started gravitating towards another form of sensing focusing on touch. Guided by a flowchart on how to classify soil by texture [99] (found through [81]) we quickly found ourselves in full sensory engagement with small clumps of soil in our hands. The guide suggested paying attention to the shape, color, smell, sound, and even taste of the soil, revealing hints of the salinity, acidity, moisture-holding capacities, or sandiness of the soil. This sensing activity became the most engaging and joyful activity of the workshop, as it generated immediate and clear results, as well as playful, messy, and unusual tasks and conversations. The workshop ended by performing a "soil offering ritual" where the authors and collaborators placed some bioplastic scraps and leftovers from the previous workshop (2nd workshop) in a bucket of dry and depleted soil that the lab had at hand.

In our own design process before the workshops, we mainly designed menstrual pads, because we wanted to probe unconventional materials in a conventional shape. In addition, we were unsure what impact bioplastics would have on the microbial ecology of the vagina, and found it safer to propose a pad rather than internally-worn menstrual products. However, participants were curious to push these designs beyond externally-worn menstrual products, and many of the participants’ creations were imagined as insertable into the vagina.

The objects crafted in the workshops were radically different than current commercial menstrual products. The objects had uncommon forms, such as a pad in the shape of a bike seat, a pad that mimicked the outer anatomy of the vulva (see Fig. 10), or a menstrual chair. Consequently, the interaction with these objects often differed from traditional pads or tampons. You might have to sit on the object and "free bleed", fold/roll and insert the object into the vagina, extract it later with your fingers or by pulling on a thread, or stick/strap/tie the object to your underwear or your leg. Some objects had no clear use or interaction at all, because participants chose to keep the objects ambiguous, decided the objects were unfinished, or mainly focused on their relation to the material. The majority of the objects were not white or bleached, which challenges understandings of cleanliness as a quality associated with white materials [44]. Some objects used materials that were not the most efficient way to absorb blood. Some objects would require constant monitoring or changing. Some were made for "bleeding more visibly" (Participant 1, Workshop 1) than conventional products. Many objects were frail and fragile and would have to be handled with more care than usual. Some objects would cause new sensations of wetness or unevenness of the agar or moss.

These findings emphasize a focus on practices rather than products, where making and imagining new kinds of products facilitates discussion on how practices might change. One discussion we had in the second workshop was how laborious this process of making biodegradable menstrual objects would be, but that this would be a question of how time is used and what kind of labor is prioritized.

Conversations about tools and fabrication techniques were prevalent. Participants improvised molding bioplastic with kitchen objects, tape, plates, or even bananas. We also brought to the table the "menstrual cookie cutters" we had fabricated prior to the workshops (Fig. 3); 3D-printed objects that in themselves do not make much sense, but instead their meaning is made in relation to the gluten material —where gluten pads are being cut out with this pad-shaped cookie cutter. However, even with this imagined relation, the objects are not fully products; they intentionally remain ambiguous, open to interpretation, and are meant to initiate discussions on whether such a practice is desirable. By framing our outcomes as "practice rather than content, as process rather than product" [74], we aimed to commit to feminist understandings of doing science, and in this case, HCI research.

The practices in the workshops encompassed a complex, varied composition of human, non-human living and inorganic matter, materials, and technological tools, which together form leaky ecologies of more-than-human menstrual care. What is a material, a tool, a living species, a body, or a technology is blurry and complicated to categorize. Categories leak into one another. Menstrual blood is part of a human body until it leaves that body, a leaky body [91], and becomes a material, or a blend of nutrients for soil. Seeds, dry and waiting for signs of humidity to sprout and become alive, start this process when in contact with blood, perhaps even while they are still being worn by a human on a menstrual pad. Soil fertility measurements are data about a houseplant, or the land, but when blood is poured, it becomes data about human health as well. These assemblages and new ways of combining HCI and digital technologies with biology, chemistry, ecology, and environmentalism, are prevalent in posthumanist HCI and more-than-human design, e.g. eco-technical interfaces [73].

In the workshops, the participants showed great admiration and deep attention to living species and organic materials. From considerations of whether we should really remove mosses for our design experiments (participants in workshop 1) to the deep looking through a microscope (Participant 3, Workshop 1), participants became attentive to the ecologies the materials belong to, including their own bodies and the places and land they inhabit, together with the implications of their proposals for menstrual care (See Fig. 10). The removal and use of mosses, mainly Sphagnum moss, is an important example of the leakiness and blurriness of these ecologies. Moss as a living organism, removed from the environment and used as a material for design, creates a tension we negotiated with participants in the workshops. In Sweden, it is prohibited to gather moss from protected areas. Sphagnum moss plays an important role in the creation of peatland, a wetland ecosystem that captures and stores large amounts of carbon. If these peatlands are disturbed, the accumulated carbon is released into the atmosphere causing CO₂ emissions [85]. Consequently, imagining menstrual pads with absorbent moss at a large scale would be detrimental to the environment, and in line with participants’ concerns for designing with moss, we would not want these designs to be scaled up and mass-produced. Instead, we imagine these practices at a small scale, and as mentioned in the previous theme, not as commercial products. Considering the (un)scalability [64] of biomaterials and the ecology that these materials come from is critical for HCI, a point which we will return to in the discussion.

Building on the previous theme that listed the various compositions involved in the leaky ecology of menstrual care, this theme attends to the neglected and stigmatized relations between them. In our design practice, we have worked with relations between things/matter/subjects that at first sight perhaps do not make much sense together. For example, the relation between menstrual blood and soil, or between sphagnum moss and vagina. The relation between menstrual blood and soil becomes interesting when we become aware of how menstrual blood contains many of the exact nutrients that appear in common fertilizers, and that we might be able to observe this over time via a plant’s growth, or sense it immediately with digital/analog sensors. The second mentioned relation —between sphagnum moss and vagina— is interesting when we notice that the pH value of this particular moss species and the pH value of the vagina is strikingly similar: around pH 3-4.5, a more acidic environment than other parts of the body, or than other plant species. In the second and third workshops, when made aware of this connection, participants were eager to make biomaterials that could notice and show this particular pH value. Several participants focused on extracting pH-sensitive dye from red cabbage and butterfly pea blossoms we provided, seeking to immediately test their color-changing properties with materials and ingredients found in the labs such as vinegar (acidic, low pH) or baking soda (basic, high pH). Other participants speculated on using sphagnum moss not only as an absorbent for menstrual fluids, but as an acidic healing material to bring down the pH value of the vagina when there might be a risk of infection.

In workshop 1, participants described how seeing a familiar environment through a lens of menstrual care changed their perception of it and brought a deep looking at new textures and properties of otherwise familiar organisms. Participant 3 in the 1st workshop noted how using the microscope to observe a lichen made them notice things that they wouldn’t normally notice, such as the cup shape of the lichen structure, which "looked like tiny menstrual cups".

These examples of curious and often unknown relations show how our more-than-human bodies are intimately entangled with non-human species, and how we might attune to and design with and for them. In menstrual care, these relations are typically not traced, and we could argue that modern Western menstrual hygiene products and infrastructures have been directly designed to erase and stigmatize any sign of body-soil relations. Ignoring these relations risks social and environmental harm and furthers the breach and the Western dichotomy between humans and nature. In the workshops, we experienced a desire and curiosity to notice and learn more about these industrially-hindered relations between menstruating bodies and soil/plant bodies, which, in turn, makes these relations into meaningful things one should care about and care for —into "matters of care" [16].

The workshops were an experiment into how menstrual care —something quite personal and intimate— would play out in a collective setting. The project is intended as a community practice, and the workshops show potential for acknowledging and practicing menstrual care as a public and collective health concern, for all the bodies that make up a community and contribute to a community’s health. The three workshops took place in three different communities, and notably, each workshop had participants of different genders and cultural backgrounds, which is critical to queer the design of current menstrual technologies and embodied technologies in general, allowing for experiences to surface that were not related to our own (author’s) immediate experiences [94].

Most participants were associated with the institutions where we hosted the workshops (design students, researchers, staff), several of which were our own colleagues, which was reflected in their skills and comfort in participating in doing design work but also in discussing menstruation. The majority of participants had their own experiences of menstruating, which showed up in their designs and in conversations on taboos and values associated with menstruation. In the third workshop, we broke the ice by chatting about springtime and Easter traditions, contrasting experiences of food, animals, blood, fertility, religion, or witchcraft, which turned conversations away from Nordic/Western-centered perspectives.

While the workshops succeeded in creating a safe space for vastly differing perspectives of lived menstrual experiences, we also found an interesting tension in how participants interacted with each other’s designs, particularly around the question of whether one could touch or discuss another participant’s design. Even though participants were not intending on using their menstrual object(s), there are particular subjective intimacies attached to the design of each object, and, conceptually, the objects were still intended to be used in close proximity to the vagina. Touching someone else’s object seemed to be a material or semiotic transgression of social boundaries. Here we see parallels with Bell et al.’s concept of "intimate making", where the properties of their clay biomaterial depend on a maker’s (or collective’s) personal food compost, therefore, their personal food habits [15]. Each object is deeply embedded with personal and intimate meaning.

On the other hand, some designs proposed by participants were explicitly intended to be collective, belonging to public space. For instance, one participant described a chair they had embellished with moss padding on the seat: "where menstruating people can come and sit in a collective space. They can get rest from their regular everyday life while they bleed into this mossy goodness." (Participant 5, Workshop 1). Furthermore, despite that during the first and second workshops we encouraged participants to make their own individual designs, and many of them did, creating these individually intimate connections, we also saw many shared and collective efforts happening during the whole process. Some designs and objects clearly seemed to belong to one participant, others had no ownership at all, or became shared property by means of collective imagining and building on each other’s work. In the second workshop, somebody discarded a piece of material they were working with, and another group of people took it and continued the work. In both the first and second workshops, participants gave each other tips and suggestions on how or what to make, discussing each step of the process. In the third workshop, no individual task was given at all, making the experimentation radically collective, to the point where, during our analysis, we found it very difficult to separate and attribute specific quotes and reflections to individual participants.

These curious tensions and fluctuations between intimate, collective, personal, public and private indicate how more-than-human menstrual care cannot be a matter of individual human bodies but must incorporate and design for collective practices for all the (non)human bodies affected by menstrual care.

During the third workshop, there were many rich conversations on sensing and fertility: on traditional definitions of women’s fertility and ability to conceive, but also as a property of menstrual blood in its ability to fertilize soil. Motivated by these conversations, we asked participants to explore the soil sensors and tests we had brought. Our main insight was how the more tactile and bodily methods of testing soil fertility became much more engaging and interesting to all participants. It is no surprise that obtaining material knowledge through touch invokes sensations and emotions that vision-based sensing does not. We were curious and excited to get dirty and messy, stain our fingers and get soil under our nails, as if implicit permission to "get dirty" had been granted by the collective decision to follow the flowchart. Several of our collaborators and participants noted how, in comparison to the digital and chemical tests, this method of touch-based soil sensing narrowed the distance between the "sensor" (human) and the "sensed" (soil), embodying feminist arguments of challenging (technology-mediated) vision as the dominant mode of perception, especially when designing technologies [11, 16, 60]. In addition to touch, the soil sensing became a truly multisensory bodily experience, as participants rolled and pressed the balls of soil in their hands, listened to the sandy or gritty sounds, smelled the earthy and rich scents of the soil retrieved from the farm, or smeared the damp soil on their skin, observing the dried streak (see right image in Fig. 11).

Through these findings, we see a curious relation between touching the soil and touching the body and its fluids. Recent work in intimate care in HCI describes how touch can be a destigmatizing and feminist approach to gaining bodily knowledge [10, 23]. Our own reflections and those of our participants expand this knowledge creation process to the soil: what might we know by touching the soil that has been fertilized by menstrual blood? The fertility of the soil becomes indicative of the fertility of the menstrual blood and the human body or bodies it came from. This act of intimate sensing becomes a very physical and direct way to experience Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality: how embodied beings “are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them” [4].

In addition, we saw transcorporeal reflections throughout all workshops, as participants engaged with the compostability of the biomaterials. In the first workshop, one participant crafted an object meant to be a reciprocal relationship with the sources of the biomaterials. The participant imagined the "idea of bioplastic as a bowl and then being able to exchange things in nature as we need [...] sort of discard what’s in the bowl back in nature and put new things from nature inside it. And that way we could also have direct contact with the things we are absorbing our blood with" (Participant 4, Workshop 1).

In all workshops we had discussions on disgust, dirt or waste, and to what extent participants would personally be willing to bring these materials close to their intimate areas, or bring their intimate fluids close to the soil and public spaces. We reflected on how bodily fluids are perceived as disgusting, as waste, or as "dead", symbols of rot and putrefaction, only once they have left the body, transgressing the limits of the skin. Similarly, we thought about how we might be more likely to refuse to get intimate with something "alive" directly collected from a forest, like putting moss close to the vagina, if we become aware of all the microorganisms living in there. These conversations probed our own conceptions of disgust and associations with biomaterials, and working closely with materiality during these workshops encouraged participants to reflect on how their own bodies affected these materials, and how these materials affected their bodies.

With a recent rise in HCI publications and projects that do not explicitly introduce a novel digital interface, or a computational artifact or system [29], but instead contribute new interactions with "non-digital" materials [41, 76], we find it necessary to discuss the presence and definitions of technology in our work, and how it contributes to developing the field of interaction design in HCI. Digital technologies are abundant throughout our work, albeit not in the prototypes or the objects designed in the workshops: in the fabrication process (3D printing, mold-making), in the digital documentation and articulation of the work, and in the interaction with the materials, through microscopes, photography, image recognition experiments, and digital and chemical sensors. We also find technological discussions in the potential for a material to have computational capabilities or to act as a biointerface, by embedding electric or conductive ink, threads, powders, or components into them, as many of the HCI biomaterial community has already started doing [14, 15, 65]. In our research, we see this potential in the case of the red cabbage-dyed bioplastic, which, through its pH sensitivity and color-changing reaction when in contact with vaginal fluids, acts as an interface to monitor and understand vaginal health. In similar ways as our research does, we have seen low-tech or no-tech design contributions that discuss new methods, open and discover unknown design spaces, and provide insight into how to conduct this kind of work in HCI. Helms’ performative texts help HCI researchers unpack the ethics of designing with one’s own bodily fluids [42]. Campo Woytuk et al. designed analog probes that provide insights on how to design technologies for touching the body and its fluids [23]. De Koninck and Devendorf designed a card deck to prompt us to notice the relationships of care between our bodies and textiles [28].

Our research, together with these adjacent projects in intimate care and more-than-human perspectives of the body, probes HCI to reflect on concepts of technology. Although not all definitions of technology include a digital or computational component, HCI predominantly gives more value to approaches that seek novel, demo-able, highly technical artifacts; the technological new [29]. However, many of the prototypes and practices that participants made throughout our workshops might be considered technology themselves, even if there are no digital or computational elements in them. We understand technology as a composite: an assembling of digital materials and computational systems together with organic and living non-human organisms and inorganic matter and materials. Or, we can take as reference the field of critical menstruation studies, where menstrual products (pads, cups, and tampons) have been defined as "menstrual hygiene technologies": "technological devices used to assist the menstruant in achieving menstrual hygiene" [83]. This definition challenges patriarchal ideas of what constitutes a technology and who should have access to it, arguing that tools and techniques historically used by women and coded as "feminine" have been excluded from the category of technology [106]. As in Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory on technology, we must not forget about the tools that hold, gather, collect, and share; tools that have been historically associated with women’s labor and care [66].

Consequently, we might then see the collection of things in our project as technologies; technologies that trouble the binaries of digital vs analog, physical vs immaterial, human vs non-human, culture vs nature, smart vs dumb. Such a feminist posthumanist understanding of technology would not only help rework the margins of what gets valued as "high"-tech and what narratives can inform HCI, but would be necessary for HCI to be open to, take part in and contribute to intersecting areas of design, (micro)biology, computer science, art, and material science. More importantly, being self-reflexive on HCI and new technology’s complicity in the climate crisis (through resource extraction, e-waste, and energy usage), it is important to consider if designing more, bigger or heavier technology can truly create long-term positive impact on the Earth. While we are not innocent in using new technology in this project, such as experimenting with AI, which has a large carbon footprint, we also do not capitulate to the technological new. Rather, we broaden our understandings of how we, as interaction designers and HCI researchers can contribute to design of technologies through unmaking current harmful practices and making new interactions and materials. With these multiple definitions and directions, we call for more criticality and inclusion on how technology might become present in HCI and design, recognizing the diversity and plurality of ways it already does so.

While participants were interested in the materials themselves, and carefully followed best practices to fabricate them [14], they were just as curious about where the materials came from, where they would go after use, and how they felt against the skin; in other words, a relational, situated and embodied way of knowing and making with biomaterials.

Working with biomaterials opened up for conversations beyond human utilitarian or extractivist usages, towards post-anthropocentric use cases that benefit other-than-human species, and question and problematize when and how biomaterials transform from a "living" species to a "material" for human or non-human use. We designed with this lens, and learned such lessons from mosses [60]; we did not purchase moss but gathered small quantities in local ecologies where we believed the moss colony would continue to grow. Knowing the slowness in which mosses grow, we would argue to never scale the use of moss as a composite biomaterial in commercial menstrual care, since accumulations of sphagnum moss are essential in the formation and conservation of peatlands, the largest form of natural terrestrial carbon storage. Participants’ own harvesting of, for instance, moss and bark, opened up embodied reflections both on the potential harmful extractive practices of new biomaterials in menstrual care, but also fostered critique of the current harmful petroleum-based plastics in menstrual hygiene.

The materials we worked with have agency and temporality that must be attended to and cared for, which demands that human designers take a position of humility and embrace not-knowing [80]. With long-term usage, biomaterials such as agar bioplastic might start to rot and smell. A key quality of biomaterials are their ability to biodegrade and transform, and thus they will not necessarily work as a substitute for anthropocentric usages of traditional plastics. Bringing biomaterials into the process helped us and the workshop participants sensitize ourselves to this agency and temporality of, not only the bioplastic or mosses, but of the more-the-human body’s materiality, and their interaction together. Although we never brought menstrual blood or bodily fluids to the table, the workshops encouraged a deeper discussion on how to work with these bodily materials in design: holding these pads and items in our hands, feeling the textures, and testing absorbance with water all contributed to going beyond initial speculations, arriving at a midpoint between speculative prototype and product. Here we see potential for biomaterials and DIYBio methods to contribute to feminist HCI and intimate care design, by providing insights on how to work with materials that biodegrade and rot, as well as challenging unsustainable technologies that are indeed harmful to not only the environment but also to human bodies.

We hereby extend the focus that reproductive bodies has recently gained in HCI through soma design practices to more-than-human bodies [47], where the decentering of the reproductive body does not contrast a social justice-oriented approach but seeks to more fully grapple with the ways human health, including menstrual health, is intimately entangled with environmental health; the worsening of which disproportionately negatively affects marginalized folks.