Bleeding between the lines

Most of us learn how to manage periods before we learn how to understand them. While menstruation is discussed more openly now, the conversation often stays “safe”, relying on clean awareness campaigns and brand-friendly metaphors that avoid the real, messy texture of lived experience.

Meanwhile, the cost of silence keeps showing up in bodies, labour, and the spaces we live in. Policy may shift in parts of the formal world, but lived reality remains uneven, especially in informal work, where “missing a day” can mean fines, debt, or extreme measures taken just to keep earning. We are two designers collecting fragments - language, rituals, labour, stories, myths, visuals around periods.

We want to place these fragments in shared spaces for discussion and move past "opinion exchange" to look at the humor, contradictions, and costs of the silence we all navigate.

1. Our Central Question is:

How do code words, slang, and unspoken rules shape how menstruation is understood and managed in everyday life, and what changes when we put these fragments together in the open? What changes when these private systems become visible as shared data?

2. Who we want in the room:

People across ages, backgrounds, and work contexts (including informal work), plus designers/storytellers/researchers interested in how language and visuals shape reality. This session welcomes women, trans and non-binary menstruators.

3. The Data & Visual Foundation:

This dialogue is anchored in our ongoing primary research, which has gathered 250+ responses through in-person interviews and digital surveys. This dataset captures a rich spectrum of experiences, including:

⤷ Context & Identity: How menstruation is managed across different labor conditions and environments. ⤷ The Language of Silence: A collection of period code words (English + local languages). ⤷ Physical & Emotional Markers: "Period fits," body signals, rituals, and comfort foods.

4. Dialogue Structure: (This is still a work in progress and we’d appreciate any guidance to figure this out further)

⤷ Introduction: Start with 3-5 questions like ‘Write the first word you were taught to use instead of ‘period.’ to start the conversation

⤷ Discuss/dialogue/converse: Bring the language, the blood, and the rules into the open: reading slang, data, and lived accounts aloud and mapping the effort of hiding them, so menstruation appears in the room as it is: ordinary, material, and socially managed.

5. What can they take away: ⤷ a shared vocabulary map of code words + what we “buy” (privacy/safety) ⤷ a simple “period labour scorecard” that helps someone locate where period-related effort comes from (space + rule + cost) and score it 1–5. ⤷ a prototype of an “honest period visual language” moodboard / icon system (with do/don’t rules decided by the women, for the women)

6. How we will visualize this for engagement: Live Mapping: We will facilitate a live, physical visualization where participants can "plot" their own experiences using threads/stickers against the data visualization of the 250+ responses we’ve collected.