Gallery
Project overview
A curated Valentine’s Day event combining an expert lecture, open dialogue and speculative workshop focused on the evolution of intimate technologies and their broader cultural, psychological and ecological implications.
The project created a rare, safe space for critical discussion around sexuality and technology, moving beyond taboo toward informed reflection on how innovation reshapes desire, connection and embodied experience.
Event structure & narrative
Historical & technological lecture
An in-depth narrative tracing the evolution of vibrators and intimate machines from early medical devices to contemporary pleasure technologies.
The lecture examined how and when technology entered the realm of intimacy, revealing the pivotal role of the pornography industry in accelerating innovation, user experience design and material experimentation.
Practical sexology lecture
A sexologist-led session focused on self-pleasure, body awareness and dismantling myths around female sexuality.
Through accessible, empowering language and expert knowledge, the lecture encouraged participants to reconnect with their own bodies and redefine pleasure outside performative or patriarchal frameworks.
Speculative workshop for women
The closing workshop created a safe, expressive space for women to prototype future intimate devices while engaging in long-form discussions about desire, comfort, agency and emotional intimacy.
Surrounded by glitter, soft light and shared prosecco toasts, the atmosphere balanced critical reflection with warmth, celebration and collective presence.
Outcomes & impact
The event cultivated deep engagement and rare openness around a topic still wrapped in social silence. Participants left with expanded understanding of the technological lineage of intimate devices, greater confidence in exploring their own pleasure and a sense of shared agency and solidarity through collective dialogue
The prototyping session proved that feminist, embodied and future-oriented design can emerge from spaces rooted in care, trust and mutual listening.
Outcomes & impact
This project revealed how easily technology becomes a mediator in one of the most human areas of experience.
While innovation offers new forms of agency, it also risks distancing us from direct, sensory connection with ourselves and others. The growing digitisation of desire raises questions not only about pleasure, but about presence, vulnerability and the future of intimacy itself.
What stays with me most is the contrast between the warmth of shared physical space: laughter, conversation, touch, glitter, prosecco, and the increasingly virtual directions in which intimacy is moving.
The whole experience left me with concern: Are we designing tools for deeper connection, or replacing connection with tools?
A question that continues to inform my critical practice in shaping future-facing experiences.