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C.E. Offerman

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Co-Designing Bespoke Care Technologies for Post-Cancer Bodies

Cancer treatment leaves survivors with sexual difficulties that extend beyond physical symptoms and permeate many aspects of life, yet these concerns remain neglected in current cancer care. This paper responds to this gap by exploring how bespoke co-designed care technologies can support survivors when grounded in their lived sexual experiences. We conducted trauma-informed, generative workshops with two cancer survivors. The workshops surfaced four themes: gaps in anticipatory care, shifts from lovers to carers, unsettled bodies and selfhood, and navigating fragmented support. Through co-designing, we created Lived Experiences Archive (a ĝzine series of anonymous survivor stories) and BodyTalk (a sensory couple game for rebuilding emotional and physical intimacy). Beyond the artefacts, we contribute a methodological account of co-designing as care and empirical insights into post-cancer sexuality. We demonstrate the epistemic potential of bespoke intimate health technologies to generate situated forms of care and knowledge often overlooked in conventional health technology design. ...
Foreword postscript (2026) - Alessandro Bozzon, Thomas Kosch, Vera Liao, Xiaojuan Ma, Anna Ricarda Luther, Celine Offerman, Xinyu Shi, Qiurong Song

Understanding the Design Space

Conference paper (2025) - C.E. Offerman, Jacky Bourgeois, Jules van Beurden, A. Bozzon
Cancer treatments often lead to sexual health challenges that greatly impact cancer survivors’ quality of life. Current interventions primarily address physiological aspects, like medication or vaginal care, overlooking psychological, social, and cultural dimensions. This paper explores how HCI can address this gap by supporting post-cancer sexual health with interventions for survivors and their partners, considering their lived experiences. Through reflexive thematic analysis of interviews with (N=6) medical sexologists, we identified five themes: perceiving the body as a medical object, the hot potato problem in oncology, sociotechnical sexploration, reuniting what treatment has divided, and designing interventions with openness in a highly situated context. These themes highlight cancer survivors’ experiences, the (in)effectiveness of current interventions, and provision of care. This research outlines the design space for post-cancer sexual health by providing specific design directions (“what”) and ways for designing them (“how”), while advancing the broader discourse on intimacy and design within HCI. ...

Approaching Pleasure as a Process when Designing with Sexual Experiences

This paper presents a conceptual exploration of designing sexual pleasure as an evolving whole-body experience. It addresses the historically narrow focus of research and technology on functional outcomes such as reproduction and orgasm. This limited perspective overlooks diverse desires, emotional connection, and sensory engagement, reinforcing restrictive norms that shape how individuals conceptualise and experience sexuality. To inform our design inquiry, we conducted a qualitative survey (N=143) to generate how individuals understand and experience sexual pleasure. Reflexive thematic analysis of the responses reveals the influence of culture and technology on sexuality, alongside several experiential dimensions: emotional and embodied connection, play and sensory immersion, and vulnerability. These insights, together with a theoretical foundation, guide a design exploration communicated through two provocations. These provocations serve as reflections of an alternative design orientation; one that challenges normative assumptions, views pleasure as an ongoing process, supports bodily exploration, and facilitates richer, more inclusive sexual experiences. ...
Remote Patient Management systems (RPM) are crucial for addressing healthcare workforce shortages. These systems are often designed with a specified focus on clinical functionalities, without proper consideration for human-centric concerns. A care perspective is essential not only to acknowledge patients as people, but also to foster better quality of care and, ultimately, adoption. This highlights the gap of how RPM can embed caring. This work offers a systematic literature review aimed at developing "Caring RPM", a normative framework that integrates the philosophy of caring from nursing theory into RPMs. This framework underwrites the practical, moral, and relational aspects of patient care, including actionable recommendations to recalibrate RPM systems for more effective human-centric design. The framework can inspire new ways of embedding the caring dimension into HCI design practices. ...