You, me, and HPV: Design research to explore attitudes towards cervical self-sampling

Cervical cancer screening has the potential to save lives, but it can also produce strong anxiety and self-stigma in those who are screened. Although there has been a recent turn towards women’s health in design, the potential for design to ameliorate experiences of cervical screening remains underexplored. In this paper, we report on a design research study with 15 Irish women that qualitatively unpacked their attitudes towards screening, their social learning processes, mediated through technology, and how they live with and give meaning to health-related information related to the topic of cervical screening and which they procure online. Following this, we developed NALA, a product-service-system that aimed to 1) allow self-sampling for HPV via menstrual blood, and 2) provide information around the topic of HPV, cervical cancer, and screening. This paper presents NALA, a preliminary evaluation of the system, and concludes with provocations for continuing design research in the area of digital design for women’s health.