Ovum: a Fertility Tracking Device

Medical devices are moving out of the clinic and into the home. The design of these devices shapes our experience of interacting with our bodies. We attend to ovulation tracking devices that aid conception. We present Ovum; a research product that has been deployed in a long-term, qualitative study with couples trying to conceive.

Design brief:

1. A shared ovulation tracking device – since two people are typically involved in the act of conception.

2. A device design for a domestic aesthetics – since these devices are to be used within the home, and should help avoid the clinicalization of conceiving.

3. A device which let the user become the expert of reading the results – since fertility tracking have become a matter of medical expertise rather than a matter of aiding people become experts on their own bodies.  

Winner of Danish Design Award 2021 for best visionary concept.

Project team:

Sarah Homewood, Harvey Bewley, Laurens Boer, Anna Vallgårda

Publications:

Homewood, S., Bewley, H., & Boer, L. (2019, June). Ovum: Designing for fertility tracking as a shared and domestic experience. In Proceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 553-565).

Homewood, S., Boer, L., & Vallgårda, A. (2020, April). Designers in white coats: deploying ovum, a fertility tracking device. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).