Ambient Cycle

Ambient Cycle is an app and a Wi-Fi connected LED strip that slowly changes colour according to the user’s menstrual cycle data. We wanted to explore what happens when we turn our bodies inside out, allowing our homes to adapt to our changing bodies.

We felt that menstrual cycles are an interesting design case as they are relatively predictable and many bodily and emotional changes happen over the menstrual cycle. We were also interested in gathering people’s reactions to having their private data made public in this way.

Project team:

Sarah Homewood, Anna Vallgårda

Publications:

Homewood, S., & Vallgårda, A. (2020, July). Putting Phenomenological Theories to Work in the Design of Self-Tracking Technologies. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1833-1846).