Building the Menstrual Maze
to explore early reproductive health eduation
The Menstrual Maze is a digitally embedded educational toy that steps through the menstrual process. In my role as design research lead, I built this toy to explore attitudes towards early reproductive health education. To read key findings, read the paper here.
About the Project
This design was one of 12 projects (out of 79 total entries) to be presented at the CHI Student Design Competition for 2018 @ Montreal QC. Our research was published as part of CHI EA ‘18 Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Collaborators
Why the Menstrual Maze?
The original idea stems from a design workshop in which menstrual health activists, educators, and community members attended (read more about the Catalogue of Partial Things). Participants imagined a uterus toy that could facilitate healthy conversations between parents and young children in spaces such as a pediatrician’s waiting room and classrooms.
Our objectives were to explore 1) what introducing children ages 4– 9 to reproductive organs looks like and 2) the types of interactions that emerge from joint media experiences between parents and kids over menstrual health.
Using physical computing to build a working prototype
We visualized, designed, and built a working prototype using a combination of laser cutting and electronics. We employed research through design methods, in which the design artifact was used as a means to explore, discover, and iterate.