By designing meaningful menopause jewellery inspired by interviews with their mothers, female students can help all women.
This year, the Meaningful Menopause Jewellery exhibition at Copenhagen Business Academy (KEA) went further than last year’s designs.
The annual exhibition showcases prototypes of functional wearables crafted by students at the KEA Jewellery, Technology, and Business Institute. Combining engineering and jewellery design, the students create prototypes to alleviate 34 menopause symptoms and challenge conventional thinking.
With a particular focus on designing for unmeasurable conditions like anxiety or brain fog, the students’ designs show how haptic, app-free jewellery can help women experiencing menopause symptoms.
A wearable for women wearing headscarves
As the first smart jewellery design at the KEA exhibitions, one of the jewellery prototypes broke new ground by targeting women wearing headscarves.
“Women wearing a headscarf risk getting scalp fungus from the heat retained by the headscarf,“ explained one of the students behind the design of the Haya hair or scarf pin to TechTruster on the day of the expo. “Our device helps cool the women down. It should be placed by the temple for optimal effect,” the student continued.
She got the idea after one of her friends recently started wearing a headscarf.
From necklaces to ear cuff
All five pieces of jewellery at this year’s exhibition merged creativity, beauty, and function, relieving various symptoms of menopause.
Embla is a bold necklace that uses EMS technology to alleviate neck and shoulder pain. With a discrete, twirling movement, the Interlude ring reminds you to take short breaks and offers sensor-guided breathing meditations. The necklace pendant Målely (Moon shelter) helps you fall asleep and stay asleep as you activate the soothing sound of rain. The ear cuff, Ronja, uses acupressure to relieve restlessness, anxiety, and mood swings, activated by a matching finger ring.
Menopause and femtech are getting more attention from Danish media. For that reason, two of the students behind Månely and Ronja were interviewed on Danish national TV about their designs.
Similarly, TechTruster has written about some of the prototypes from last year’s exhibition here and here.
Eight focused weeks of work
The jewellery exhibited at KEA is the result of eight weeks of focused study and work under the guidance of Vanessa Julia Carpenter, PhD, a PhD in Designing for Meaningfulness in Future Smart Products, and Mette Laier Henriksen, a senior lecturer in jewellery design. Lab Specialist Luke Julius Frost and Technical Assistant Albert Møbius assisted the students with the technical solutions.
During the ‘Designing for Meaningful Menopause Jewellery’ course, the students worked methodically. They dove into the subject of menopause by conducting in-depth interviews with their mothers and creating questionnaires to learn about the issues and needs of menopausal women. They then prototyped solutions using various materials and electronics and built the final jewellery with functional electronics for the exhibition.
You can read about each of the prototypes here (in Danish).
Designing with constraints
“The students have created jewellery that aims to solve some of the 34 symptoms of menopause. However, they were not allowed to work with hot flashes, as devices for this already exist. It is much more difficult to create solutions for the other symptoms, such as brain fog, fatigue, or anxiety. And herein lies the challenge. They were also to avoid self-tracking via an app since so many app solutions already exist,” explains Dr. Vanessa Julia Carpenter, who has taught the course since 2021.
The last constraint was that the jewellery had to use shape-shifting in some way. The purpose of that is to further challenge the form that jewellery typically takes and to encourage students to look more thoroughly into the effect of the digital jewellery on the menopausal person and how it could help them, be perceived by others, and contribute to a sense of self.
Design constraints are a way to focus on design and be creative within a particular framework, in this case, by both using the Designing for Meaningfulness methodology, and by learning from and applying Dr. Homewood’s paper “ Inaction as a Design Decision: Reflections on Not Designing Self-Tracking Tools for Menopause ”, Dr. Carpenter was able to guide students to explore how their designs could benefit people experiencing menopause in impactful ways without becoming a burden in their everyday life.
Attention from femtech investors
Serial entrepreneur and Co-Founder of Femtech Studios, among others, Ulla Sommerfelt, opened the exhibition.
“I’m excited that you students are using your superpowers to invent this meaningful menopause jewellery. You can design a whole company with design-driven innovation – even a whole culture,” exclaimed the femtech investor.
“Fifteen years ago, even three years ago, no one talked about menopause. Now, there’s a lot of global attention to it. For example, Halle Berry and Ophray Winfrey are breaking the taboo,” continued Ulla Sommerfelt, as she mentioned that one billion women are about to enter menopause.
The communications lead from the newly founded Nordic Women’s Health Hub, Kicki Bajlum, also spoke to the students about how the Nordic Women’s Health Hub connects stakeholders to accelerate innovation for women’s health.
Dorte Knudsen, owner of the smart jewellery company all-u-me, also attended. She finds the students’ designs promising. All-u-me will launch in mid-May 2025.
If the students’ jewellery were to go into production, many could help menopausal women.
See also what Techtruster has previously written about menopause tech.
The students
Haya by: Alberte Lund Hansen, Freja Silke Hansen, Stine Marie Kjer, Caroline Eriksen.
Ronja by: Vicky Wadmuang Nyskjold, Marie Amalie Høegh, Johanna Sophia Højland, Louise Cehofski, Anne-Sofie Fossum Christensson.
Interlude by: Annie Sander, Ketil Billett, Tuva Handeland, Olivia Hovmark Møller, Sine Marie Harwits.
Månely by: Eva Kim Rasmussen, Didde Najmeddini Gindesgaard, Josephine Tønder Rasmussen, Ann-Sophie Folker Christensen & Lucie Sonja Hirschauer.