Abstract
What is dysmenorrhea?
In our daily life, we often use ‘menstruation pain’ to refer to dysmenorrhea. It is a complication that accompanies women around the time of menstruation and it causes great distress both psychologically and physically, such as emotional breakdowns and physical pain. It can be severe enough to send a woman into an emotional spiral of self-doubt or so painful that bed rest hinders her daily life.
'Eboon' is a product to relieve women's dysmenorrhea symptoms. Its body is a hand-held, self-heating product. When some women have dysmenorrhea, their hand temperature decreases to cold, making it difficult for them to focus on work and study. To solve this problem, Eboon houses disposable, replaceable, heat activated charcoal packs that relieve women of the cold in their hands caused by dysmenorrhea. That's not the only thing Eboon does. Another feature is that it can help relieve the negative emotions that women experience during their periods due to rising hormones. Eboon is designed to provide an outlet for women's emotions by smelling, pressing on soft surfaces and rubbing the hard particles against the touch. It also has a built-in sensor that records the user's mood with each press, providing a quantified digital report digital report of the user's emotions, turning unquantifiable mood swings into a visible emotional journey.
Motivations
There are two reasons that motivated me to do this project.
First, the topic is silent in society. It is a systemic problem including policy, health and medical science, gender issues, and culture. It is ubiquitous in life, but unfortunately, it is rarely discussed openly.
At the moment, It doesn't even have a very effective solution. I have suffered from dysmenorrhea for many years. When I was young and wanted to seek help from my elders for menstrual pain, I was told by my mother and teachers to "just bear the pain and it will pass, that's what we do". I didn't know who else to talk to about it except my nearest and dearest, and it became a social default to "hide it".
"Bear the pain" has become a beautiful character that women must have. I want to challenge myself as an industrial designer and respond to this problem through product design skills.
Insights
The research of this project begins with an online survey to help me understand the touch points of dysmenorrhea. The result shows that compared to physical problems, psychological and social problems are more emergent for women and it is so hard to quantify in a survey. So then I interviewed 11 target users to have refined findings, and all findings are sorted out with "how might we...?" questions.
Co-ideation workshop
As an industrial designer, I believe the product should be a functional solution for relieving dysmenorrhea at the beginning of the project. After research, I found that this topic also has a high degree of commonality among various groups of people. People are very willing to participate and speak out their opinions. I realized on the way to developing the product that this project should be a conversational and open project. So I decided to do a co-creation workshop with the stakeholders.
I invited three Chinese women who have strong PMS and cramps symptoms and one Chinese man whose partner suffers from dysmenorrhea to the workshop. I shared my research and ideas with them, then we discussed and framed the ideas together with dimensions ranging from function to fashion, from fun to emotional.
Then we voted on ideas that we preferred. From this session, these users would want a product that is both functional and emotional.
Design proposal
I designed the product into two parts. The small part is the moon, which can be taken to the office or transportation, and women can press the silicone to release their emotions. Its back cover can be opened to put in an activated carbon pack to provide heat. It has a built-in sensor that records every time you press it and the user will receive the digital emotions journey report.
Another part as a base can be left at home. It could be hanging on the wall. I used magnets to connect the moon part and the base part. When the moon part is used, it can be clearly seen that it has been taken away, conveying a signal of moon fall - “I'm not good". When it was put back, it was like a bright moon rising from the sea level and means “I am good now”.
User journey
CMF explorations
I want to talk about recycling plastic materials.
China is a big market, and if only 1% of people buy one Eboon, it is still millions of people. That means there can be huge industrial pollution from its manufacture and production. I think product designers must think about how to recycle and reuse materials to reduce industrial pollution while solving existing problems. Plastic is the material that has been used the most in Eboon.
I went looking for some recycled plastic and test how good it was for making the final model. I found some in AHO and made a model. The conclusion is that it can achieve the same quality and functions as the new plastic. This result opens up a new production possibility for Eboon.
Prototypes
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