Designing for the Emotional Pregnancy

Abstract

Pregnancy is a transformational journey towards parenthood. Bodily and mental changes are inevitable for the one who is pregnant, and many find this transformation to be challenging. This paper reimagines the emotional pregnancy within the context of a prenatal yoga setting. In doing so, it explores novel approaches to designing interactions in a supportive environment. We introduce an explorative study with three women at different stages in their pregnancy to suggest avenues for design research in support of emotional wellbeing during this time.

Resisting the Medicalisation of Menopause: Reclaiming the Body through Design

“…Although several life events such as pregnancy [79,92], breastfeeding [6,50,106], and menstruation [40,87,96] have received attention from HCI, menopause remained unexplored until very recently. The frst works on menopause followed a rationale similar to that of commercial symptom trackers.…”

The Troubling Cups: Making Trouble at Work about Inequalities in Pay.

“…Carrasco and Kerne explored how social media affects LGBT+ user experience of managing self presentation, thus developed implications for design to support and encourage the community to define their gender and sexual identities freely rather than through predetermined definitions [Carrasco and Kerne 2018]. Furthermore, many studies stayed with the trouble of women's health and the intimate female body [Almeida et al 2016b;D'Ignazio et al 2016;Svenningsen and Almeida 2020;Søndergaard and Hansen 2016] or advocated for Haraway's argumentation of staying with the trouble [Land et al 2020]. As an example, Søndergaard and Hansen [2018] have stayed with the trouble of digital personal assistants (DPA) through design fiction by troubling our collective imaginings and gender roles of DPA's.…”

Embodying the Emotional Pregnancy

“…In other words, while some features have shown to be supportive toward pregnant women's feeling of confidence during pregnancy [19], the use of technologies for tracking, monitoring and self-surveillance can also be argued to be a way of distancing oneself from the physical and mental body [39]. While self-tracking systems and tools continue to proliferate, our previous research has shown that attention towards emotional pregnancy is still lacking [38]. We understand this detachment can be detrimental to women's health and subjective wellbeing and instead aspire to reimagine interactions that fully account for the situated and material body.…”

“…One example that deals specifically with emotion has taken place in a hospital setting and has put particular focus on how technology can connect their patients with appropriate services, therefore offering enhanced experiences [17]. In [38], we have started exploring emotional pregnancy as diverse and individual. While critiquing current cultures and Western norms surrounding pregnancy, we explored the emotional facet of pregnancy to support and empower pregnant women through designing systems which focus on the individual voice of pregnancy and in changing how pregnancy is often perceived by the public to advocate for systemic change.…”