Anjuli Acharya
https://www.anjuliacharya.com/
Care and control often coexist in systems designed to help us. In a world where wellness technologies promise empowerment and self-discovery, Warm Hug invites you to question what’s truly yours—your body, your choices, or the quiet nudges shaping your behavior. Through an immersive exploration of your own body, this exhibition blurs the boundaries between care and control, reflection and manipulation. Informed by reproductive health, Warm Hug is a companion that listens, nudges, and reflects, offering insights that feel personal while subtly steering you toward predefined paths of wellness. Warm Hug is a critical provocation to the question: When technology enters our most intimate spaces, how do we define the boundaries between guidance, influence, and control?
Care and control often coexist in systems designed to help us. In a world where wellness technologies promise empowerment and self-discovery, Warm Hug invites you to question what’s truly yours—your body, your choices, or the quiet nudges shaping your behavior. Through an immersive exploration of your own body, this exhibition blurs the boundaries between care and control, reflection and manipulation. Informed by reproductive health, Warm Hug is a companion that listens,nudges, and reflects, offering insights that feel personal while subtly steering you toward predefined paths of wellness.Warm Hug is a critical provocation to the question: When technology enters our most intimate spaces, how do we define the boundaries between guidance, influence, and control? The design situates the body as a site of "soft data"—subjective, contextual, and deeply relational. This work contributes to speculative and feminist design discourses by foregrounding the body's relational autonomy and challenging the notion of “raw data” as neutral. It calls for the reimagination of wellness tools as sites of negotiation and tension, rather than instruments of compliance.
https://viridian-jagged-paper.glitch.me/ (Best viewed on mobile)
FemTech and wellness apps are often designed to evoke feelings of softness, comfort, and intimacy through carefully chosen aesthetics. This disarming aesthetic encourages trust, leading users to engage deeply with these tools without questioning the ethics behind their design. The emphasis on "self-care" often obscures more troubling dynamics, such as the commodification of bodily information, behavioral nudging, and non-contestable recommendations. By appearing intimate and user-centric, these systems bypass scrutiny, framing their interventions as benign when they are, in fact, deeply intrusive. In a non-critical lens, such a product might traditionally manifest as a mobile application, offering data visualizations or behavioral nudges through a screen. However, by embodying the system in a physical form, the design exaggerates its presence in the user’s personal space, making its role as a mediator of the body and its rhythms unavoidable.