Wrapping Up - The Future of Menstrual Products

#futureofworkandplay

To finish off this project, I had to create an article and documentary explaining and backing up my insight. I found it extremely hard to condense the amount of information I had gathered and wanted to say.

Article

I went through many renderings of my article, trying to cut down the different parts I wanted to talk about. I had to think about the main message I wanted to get across. As this topic is so broad it is very hard to narrow the scope and focus on 1 thing. I started with talking about many issues surrounding menstruation and menstrual products such as research, education, policies, sustainability, intersectionality, marketing and went into depth about these. However this is too much information! A reader will be overwhelmed and not sure what to take away from the article if they have so many things coming at them. So I cut back on the issues and focused on the lack of research around menstruation.

I then go on to explain the steps to getting to government funded research. This is from the cultural and social shifts, with especially a focus on environmental awareness. The social pressure makes it harder for the government to ignore that menstruation needs formal attention.

The significance of government funded research is that the government has no set agenda. Many studies are funded from pharmaceutical companies promoting a product and are driven commercially, meaning there could be a bias to the study and the results. If the government is funding research, there is no agenda, no product they are trying to push, meaning less research will be biased, and it will be trustworthy.

From this research, product companies and policy makers - people with authoritative power will not be able to deny the research. The awareness brought from this will allow non-menstruators to empathize and understand. This is where it will encourage new policies like a plastic tax in tampons and rethink policies such as the tampon tax.

Read my final article here.

Documentary

I was tasked to create a 3 minute documentary which pieced my interviews together and backed up my insight. So I went ahead and gathered all the different parts of my interviews I wanted to show. This turned out to be 15 minutes of footage. Like with the article, I had to think about what I really wanted to communicate. I narrowed it down to the same ideas in the article; the lack or research, cultural shift, government funded research, and new policies. I wish I could've added in many more quotes and other insights I found from my interviews, but by focusing on one topic, the audiences mind only has to focus on one thing at a time, and hopefully they will take away my insight and continue to discuss it.

You can watch my documentary here.

I am really happy with how this project has turned out and I have learnt so much about menstruation and menstrual products. I am excited to see whether my insight will come to fruition and what else the future of menstrual products holds.