Vedika Lall

The experience of contractions preceding labour is truly unique, as each woman encounters them in her own distinct way. However, this crucial indicator of the mother's health is often overlooked and poorly communicated. Shockingly, over 40% of women struggle to discern whether they are indeed in labour or not.

Uterine contraction monitoring is important because it is a critical biomarker of maternal health and a reliable indicator of labour progression to delivery. As per the status quo, uterine contractions are monitored using apps or manually in the UK and many other countries, which is unreliable and frequently leads to women miscalculating, exacerbating the impact of its subjectivity. 

Bia is an at-home uterine contraction monitoring system designed to seamlessly integrate into a mother's rest routine. It is an objective contraction management tool for mothers and clinicians that can help track and monitor the contraction activity and facilitate better communication between them. Codesigned with recent mothers and clinicians from St. Mary's Hospital, London, Bia is intended to be comfortable and flexible; it incorporates a digital interface and novel sensing technology to listen, recognise and measure contraction activity reliably.

Bia aims to inspire a new approach to prenatal care. An approach in which mothers make informed decisions and confidently collaborate with healthcare providers for a more positive and safer birth experience. With Bia by their side, mothers can look forward to a more positive and safer birth experience, knowing that they have the support and insights they need to confidently navigate this transformative journey.

Bia is currently patent pending, and I am bringing together a team to realise this vision. Please do get in touch if you would like to learn more or collaborate.

Polytile is an investigation into self-healing polymers developed by the Yoshie Lab at IIS. This project was led as a collaboration between Global Innovation Design and DLX Design Lab. 

Polymer scientists are known to work with and programme materials with desirable properties, allowing for a careful selection process in a lab. Polytile gives material scientists a new tool for investigating applications for self-healing polymers in the lab by utilising the structural properties of kirigami. By bringing two technologies together, polytile allows the researchers to be playful with the parameters and the delicate geometry of the kirigami patterns to explore and constantly iterate. This project aims to democratise the speculative self- healing polymer by reimagining its applications to facilitate positive, irreversible reactions by utilising the delayed healing principle.

Polytile comes in the form of a dashboard that allows easy visualisation and then generates reference cards for the scientists. Before beginning a specific research, the dashboard allows for a purposeful investigation to set a scope and build a vision, programme and make new material using a selected set of parameters, and later test material in the lab.

Using cutting-edge science developed by Yoshie Lab, Polytile advances material research and helps scientists imagine possibilities of their own research.

“Pleasures of Persuasion” explores how persuasion is expressed through actions, objects, words, and people and how participatory-led techniques and design thinking can facilitate social change. As a design researcher, I believe a participatory design approach may enable communities to build resilience. 

So, what role does persuasion play in fostering such a shared vision? How can we ensure uniform representation of plurality and diversity in systemic design? 

Through this dissertation, I wanted to investigate the dynamic relationship between temporal, ongoing, relational, and transformative participation induced through persuasion. It acted as an ideal opportunity to experiment and investigate and provide a new perspective in which persuasion becomes a motivating factor in a new and empowering design framework. I attempted to frame this dissertation through ethnographic research, anthropological understanding, observations, and the subtle art of listening. It contains memoirs, diary entries, erasure poetry, literature reviews, and personal interviews with those working in this field. 

More than 256000 Foreign Domestic Workers(F.D.Ws) are employed in Singapore. As live-in domestic workers, migrant women from neighbouring Southeast Asian countries fill critical care gaps in Singapore households. However, their social protection remains uneven, uncertain, and indeterminate.

There is undoubtedly a need for the Foreign Domestic Workers(F.D.Ws) in Singapore to access a more complete, trusted and integrated support system to anonymously report cases like verbal abuse, emotional distress, agency fraud and even domestic violence. This project responds to two problem statements developed using a human-centred approach and lean design research methods; 

• How might we design a product ecosystem that fulfils the emotional and practical needs of F.D.Ws of all ages and backgrounds? 
• How might we design a discrete system that alleviates anxiety while seeking help? 

Tolong aims to empower these women by providing personal, collective, and public channels, to shorten notification times and eliminate delayed responses from trusted institutions like the Ministry of Manpower or State police of Singapore. The goal is to put forth a product ecosystem that balances the emotional and practical needs of FDWs of all ages and ethnicities. These reduce anxiety by offering the appropriate channels for seeking support to ensure accurate response time during crises. They do this in tandem with ubiquitous technologies and by integrating them with civic systems.