"Pleasure is your birthright": Digitally enabled designer sex toys as a case of third-wave HCI

In the past decade, HCI has become increasingly preoccupied with the deeply subjective qualities of interaction: experience, embodiment, pleasure, intimacy, and so on, an agenda sometimes grouped under the heading of "third-wave HCI." Analytically understanding and designing for such qualities has been an ongoing challenge to the field, in part because its established theories and methodologies are comparatively weak at understanding and being responsive to human subjectivity. In this paper, we present a case study of a group of designers who have, in the past few years, revolutionized their domain - sex toys - by combining embodied pleasure, intimate experience, health and wellness, emerging technologies, high-quality design processes, and social activism. We consider the implications this case could have for researchers innovating on especially third-wave HCI design theories, methodologies, and processes.