Design, maintenance, and the menstruating body

Abstract

In this submission, I discuss my research on the maintenance of public restrooms and, more specifically, the distribution and stratification of menstrual resources throughout the city of Seattle. Through interviews, technology development, and field engagements, I show how digital artifacts-such as those connected to the Internet of Things-structure experiences of hygiene access and help expose the socioeconomic logics undergirding infrastructures of public life. I use design interventions to further examine the role of technology to cultivate and maintain collective responsibility and forms of participatory infrastructure.