Applying Feminist HCI to Ultra-Personalization: The Case of Electric Breast Pumps
Svetlana Mironcika, Joep W. Frens, Stephan S.A.G. Wensveen · 2024
Next to digital products, also physical products can be personalized based on user data collected through digital services and produced by digital manufacturing. This approach is known as ultra-personalization. The ambition of ultra-personalization is to offer products that fit the individual needs of people who will use/wear them. While most of the examples of ultra-personalized products focus on anthropometric fit, in the case of breast pumps the unmet needs go beyond such fit. Being informed by feminist HCI we have conducted interviews with eleven lactating persons and two lactation specialists to gather accounts of embodied situated experiences with currently available electric breast pumps to understand how they fit and misfit users. We have identified five dimensions and ten subdimensions of personal holistic fit. We discuss that designing ultra-personalized products for these dimensions corresponds to feminist HCI values and qualities of pluralism, diversity, embodiment, and self-disclosure.