(Re-)Framing Menopause Experiences for HCI and Design Jefrey Bardzell Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA jbardzel@indiana.edu Shaowen Bardzell Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA selu@indiana.edu Amanda Lazar University of Maryland College Park, MD, USA lazar@umd.edu Norman Makoto Su Indiana University Bloomington, IN, USA normsu@indiana.edu ABSTRACT Informed by considerations from medicine and wellness re- search, experience design, investigations of new and emerg- ing technologies, and sociopolitical critique, HCI researchers have demonstrated that women’s health is a complex and rich topic. Turning these research outputs into productive interventions, however, is difcult. We argue that design is well positioned to address such a challenge thanks to its methodological traditions of problem setting and fram- ing situated in synthetic (rather than analytic) knowledge production. In this paper, we focus on designing for experi- ences of menopause. Building on our prior empirical work on menopause and our commitment to pursue design in- formed by women’s lived experience, we iteratively gener- ated dozens of design frames and accompanying design crits. We document the unfolding of our design reasoning, show- ing how good-seeming insights nonetheless often lead to bad designs, while working progressively towards stronger insights and design constructs. The latter we ofer as a con- tribution to researchers and practitioners who work at the intersections of women’s health and design. CCS CONCEPTS · Human-centered computing → Human computer in- teraction (HCI); Scenario-based design; · Social and pro- fessional topics → Women; · Applied computing → Health informatics. KEYWORDS Menopause, design framing, scenarios, women’s health Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. CHI 2019, May 4ś9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5970-2/19/05. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300345 ACM Reference Format: Jefrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Amanda Lazar, and Norman Makoto Su. 2019. (Re-)Framing Menopause Experiences for HCI and Design. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Proceedings (CHI 2019), May 4ś9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3290605.3300345 1 INTRODUCTION The burgeoning feld of health HCI has developed systems and approaches that beneft people experiencing a variety of health-related conditions, their families, healthcare pro- fessionals, and society at-large. In some cases, it involves developing a system or a feature set to address a problem or need as articulated in the medical literature. For example, technologies are designed for individuals with diabetes to measure their blood sugar. But with the turn to wider formu- lations of health, such as wellness [18], self-care [5, 34], and a focus on social structures and environmental factors that con- tribute to health inequities [35], problems and solutions are not always easily coupled together. In women’s health HCI reseach, these wider formulations of health have recently been taken up through topics such as pregnancy [20], abor- tion [33], incontinence [1], and intimate self-discovery [2]. We build on that work by focusing on menopause, which we understand as an era of life qualifed not only by di- verse physiological changes but also by changes in social, sexual, and even self-relations. The authorsÐtwo design re- searchers, a computer scientist, and a health technology researcher and expert on anti-ageismÐintuitively felt that HCI could do something about menopause but didn’t know what. Our review of the literature showed a few potential pathwaysÐto use health sciences research to inform design and to build on existing health IT agendas, such as tracking. But as self-identifed feminists, we also intuited that the lack of research on menopause was partly political. That is, we believe that the experience of menopause is not only shaped by hot fashes and irregular periods, but also by taboos about menstruation and menopause, the ways that women’s health has been marginalized in medicine, and societal images link- ing female desirability and fertility. This intuition was con- frmed through literature on menopause and our past empir- ical work [30]. Our starting point thus entailed a desire to CHI 2019 Paper CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK Paper 115 Page 1