Rucha Kale

MID Industrial Design

Beyond the Tampon

Every object carries a worldview. The tampon, an discreet, disposable, designed to disappear object tells us exactly how menstruation has been allowed to exist in public life: hidden, managed, apologized for. Beyond the Tampon begins there, and refuses to stop.

This research-driven thesis uses objects, writing, institutional tools, and visual artifacts to examine menstruation not only as a biological experience, but as a cultural, social, spatial, and political one. It starts from a simple argument: menstruating bodies are not exceptions to be accommodated after the fact. They are human bodies, whole bodies, and bodies around which systems should already be designed. Yet schools, workplaces, bathrooms, policies, products, and everyday social norms continue to treat menstruation as something to hide, tolerate, or privately manage.

The exhibition presents the Menstrual Equity and Justice Certification, a speculative framework that imagines how institutions might be assessed, challenged, and redesigned. Part standard, part provocation, part institutional mirror, the certification is a critical object that asks what care looks like when responsibility shifts from the menstruator to the systems that surround them.

Beyond the Tampon uses design to question the limits of access, the politics of shame, and the difference between concealment and care. It proposes that menstrual equity is not achieved through better products alone, but through infrastructures, language, policies, spaces, and collective responsibility, built for bodies that have always deserved to be centered.