Speaker Bio
Madeline Balaam is an interaction design researcher working at the intersection of intimate health, the body and touch. She is a Professor in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she leads a team who focus on improving the ways in which bodies and intimate health issues are responded to by design and technology. She takes a feminist perspective to her research and brings with her a strong belief that design and technology can be used to make positive change in the world. Madeline has published her work extensively at ACM CHI and ACM DIS and has received five best paper awards from the venues over the last six years. Her work is funded by several national funding agencies in Sweden (VR, SSF and Digital Futures) and an ERC consolidator grant (’Intimate Touch: Designing for where technology meets the Body”).
Intimate Health as a site for Design Research
Madeline Balaam, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Thursday 14th March 2024. 13:00-14:00 GMT. The Buncar.
For the last 15 years my research team have been designing, developing and deploying technologies that relate to intimate health, and women’s health topics. The early work that myself and my research team undertook sought to establish women’s health and women’s bodies as a place that has relevant research opportunities for the HCI and IxD community. We attempted to show how working within this context required new design methods; and to showcase the role that design and interactive technology might play in helping to providing knowledge, skills and access to resources so urgently needed to reduce women’s health inequalities. In this talk I will reflect across this programme of research, taking time to explore some of the challenges of undertaking work on the intimate body within HCI, and arguing for the role that research outside of the mainstream can play in enabling innovation.