Chapter Two
Objects as Inquiry (Menstruation)
A body of speculative artifacts examining how menstruation exists socially, culturally, politically, and commercially, designed not as solutions but as instruments for surfacing assumptions.
Role: Design Research
Duration: 10 months
Team: Rucha Kale
Advisors: Charlie Cannon (Thesis Advisor & Professor, RISD), Tom Weiss (Professor, RISD), Ilona Gaynor (Research Advisor & Professor, RISD), Paolo Cardini (Graduate Program Director, ID, RISD), Chris Bobel (Menstrual studies scholar and activist, Professor at UMass Boston), Sachin Asha Subhash (Founder, Samajbandh)
After InsertCo, the direction of the research shifted from designing a better product to understanding how menstruation exists in the world at all, not only as something consumed but as something narrated, governed, and commercially produced. The questions that guided this shift were who controls the narrative of menstruation, where that narrative originates, and who it serves and who it does not, how different cultures understand menstruation and why, what policies govern it and who designed them, and what commercial products exist around it and who benefits from their existence, both commercially and politically.
To ground this inquiry, I consulted Chris Bobel, a menstrual activist and professor at UMass Boston, who became an informal mentor for this research and helped shape its direction. Her central argument was that product innovation alone, however well executed, does not shift the social narrative around menstruation, and this became the premise the rest of the chapter builds from. This period of research was informed by The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies, alongside coursework in cultural anthropology and health policy at Brown, and it produced a series of artifacts, each developed not as a proposed solution but as a method of surfacing a specific assumption about menstruation for closer examination.
Artefacts questioning concealment
The first set of artifacts began from the assumption that menstrual products are designed to be hidden, and that this hiddenness is treated as a neutral fact rather than as a choice with consequences.
Period Barbie
Period Barbie tested whether menstruation could be normalized for children the way sleep or digestion already is, using an object children already understand and relate to. Rather than resolving the question, the artifact surfaced a genuine tension that remained unresolved through the research, whether it is appropriate to introduce menstruation to an age group that does not yet menstruate, or whether that is precisely the age at which it should happen.
Experimental Packaging
The packaging experiments reimagined period products inside the visual language of unrelated categories, including a cereal box and a beer crate, to test what happens when a product is removed entirely from the feminine care aisle it is expected to occupy. This line of thinking led to a further body of work, a set of transparent acrylic cases, including a single tampon case designed to attach to a keychain and a larger case designed to hold three or four pads, made from a material that could not conceal what it carried. The intention behind this material choice was to treat menstrual products as something that could be expressed rather than something that needed to be hidden.
The packaging experiments reimagined period products inside the visual language of unrelated categories, including a cereal box and a beer crate, to test what happens when a product is removed entirely from the feminine care aisle it is expected to occupy. This line of thinking led to a further body of work, a set of transparent acrylic cases, including a single tampon case designed to attach to a keychain and a larger case designed to hold three or four pads, made from a material that could not conceal what it carried. The intention behind this material choice was to treat menstrual products as something that could be expressed rather than something that needed to be hidden.
Artefacts questioning responsibility
The second set of artifacts began from the assumption that responsibility for care during menstruation defaults to the menstruator alone.
Period Care Comic Strip
The father's comic strip, set in India, depicted a male head of household teaching his children, across genders, about periods and how to care for someone who is menstruating. This artifact was grounded in a finding that recurred across conversations with menstrual health practitioners, that menstruators with educated and engaged male figures in their household reported markedly different experiences than those without. The comic strip treated the male figure not as peripheral to menstrual care but as a form of infrastructure in its own right.
Period Workshop (for Schools)
The menstrual care workshop redistributed responsibility for care directly, through a three stage exercise conducted with students, coordinators, and parents together in the same room. The first stage was a game in which participants guessed which species menstruate the way humans do. The second stage asked participants to design a character around the species they had chosen, being deliberate about the gender they assigned it, since not all who menstruate are women and not all women menstruate. The third stage asked participants to plan a day out together while accounting for the practical needs of a menstruating friend, including access to washrooms, supplies, and comfort. The workshop tested whether responsibility for care could be shared across a household and a peer group rather than assumed to belong to the menstruator alone.
Analog Period Calenders
Tampi, an analog cycle tracking calendar produced in both an individual version and a family version, responded to two concerns that arose during the research. The first was that digital menstrual tracking data could be collected and used to surveil or control menstruating bodies, and moving the tool to an analog format removed that risk entirely. The second was more practical, that an analog format could help a menstruator track their own cycle more accurately, and help their family track it alongside them, while also offering nutrition guidance suited to whichever phase of the cycle a person was in.
This first version of Tampi was not designed to accommodate conditions such as PCOS, though later iterations of the concept could be developed to account for cycles affected by that or other symptoms.
Artefacts questioning scale and identity
The third set of artifacts began from the assumption that individual and one off interventions are sufficient to produce change that lasts.
Period Parade
The Period Parade proposed a public celebration of menstruation designed to be repeatable and integrated with brands and products, deliberately positioned outside the patriarchal framing that already shapes existing period adjacent festivals.
Collective Identities
An identity concept, modeled on the Pride flag designed by Gilbert Baker, asked what it would mean to give menstruators a shared and recognizable identity across age, geography, and public visibility, rather than requiring each menstruator to advocate individually for change.
Additionally, I designed a heat map and a stakeholder map were developed to move the inquiry past individual anecdote and toward a more structural understanding, tracing who experiences menstruation related issues most acutely and mapping a menstruator's first and second circles of influence. This was the point in the research where the inquiry stopped being primarily about commercial products and began treating policy, process, and social narrative as design problems in their own right.
Taken individually, each of these artifacts is a small design provocation. Taken together, they trace a single question that sharpened over the course of the research, which was what it would actually take for a change to last beyond the moment of the intervention itself. That question is where the next chapter begins.
Continue to Chapter 3: MEJ Certificate