Verena Fuchsberger

Menopause and sexual life are both entangled with a mix of embodied experiences, relational aspects, and socio-political dynamics that shape individuals’ experiences and understandings every day. Menopause is a significant life change that reshapes the lives of individuals, especially regarding their sexual lives. Despite growing interest in intimate health in HCI, the sexual lives and pleasure of menopausal individuals are relatively underrepresented, particularly beyond heteronormative framings of bodies. We conducted workshops with menopausal individuals, including cisgender women, trans men, and a nonbinary individual, to explore their embodied and social experiences during the menopause transition. We report insights into the pleasure and intimacy of menopausal individuals. We draw on crip theory as an interpretative lens and contribute to ongoing discussions in HCI about pleasure and sexuality by providing future directions for sexual lives during the menopause transition: designing with non-linear intimacy and attending to relational, political, and emotional complexity in design.

1. In recent years, research on intimate health has become one of the rapidly growing areas within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Researchers have studied sexual life and embodied pleasure (Bard...

Makerspaces offer individuals the opportunity to bring ideas to life, access specialised tools and machinery, and join a community, thus potentially enhancing psychological needs for competence and relatedness. However, these benefits may not be equally accessible across all genders, as makerspaces are often dominated by young, educated men. To explore this, we conducted an online survey with 102 makerspace users and 259 non-users. The survey included questions on psychological concepts and open-ended questions aimed at identifying factors that prevent or encourage makers from using makerspaces. Our findings reveal that while the openness in makerspaces enhances need fulfillment for females, it has the opposite effect on males, a phenomenon we discuss in the context of social identification. Additionally, we found that the atmosphere of a makerspace influences its usage across all genders. We conclude with recommendations for designing makerspaces for all genders, emphasising the importance of aligning the space’s offering with its users’ needs, fostering an open atmosphere, and promoting an inclusive makerspace landscape.

Interest in making, crafting, and tinkering persists across hobbyist pursuits, professional applications, and academic research endeavors. However, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of the journey individuals undertake to develop respective identities, which, in turn, seem to define how people develop practices, make use of infrastructures, and become part of networks. In this half-day workshop, we aim to explore such biographies and identities, asking how maker, crafter, or tinkerer identities are developed and how they change during people’s lives. Participants will bring snippets of their making (such as artifacts, materials, tools, etc.) with them as means to reflect individually and discuss together. The envisioned outcome is a collection of relevant variables of maker, crafter, and tinkerer biographies and identities to be articulated as inspiration for future making, and as motivation to break down potential barriers.

Research through Design is centered on making things, services and systems as a way to construct knowledge. At the same time, the act of making happens behind-the-scenes, often overlooked, outsourced or rushed through. We would like to propose a one-day workshop of making at DIS. Specifically, we propose the making of samplers as a site for constructing a shared space to contemplate the interplay of memory and imagination in design research, inspired by traditional needlework samplers as well as modern subversive stitchwork [24]. By making together, we aim to take time to consider our personal and collective commitments and stance within and outside our roles as design researchers.