Penis? Vulva? Vagina?

Desktop version, with speech recognition: https://gt3m2.csb.app/
Mobile version, unfortunately without speech recognition: https://up91b.csb.app/

For this project, I was thinking of what speech input I could give to the computer to generate a non-speech output on the screen. As I was doing research for my thesis simultaneously (it’s currently an extremely hectic time at ITP), I came across a project by two students from the UK that aims to normalize visual representation of vulvas in the same way we see penises everywhere. This gave me inspiration for my voice tech homework: I can scream out “PENIS!” to the computer, as if I was playing the Penis Game, but rather than drawing a penis, the browser will generate doodles of the vulva instead.

My goal is to remind people that the penis is not the only genital; half of us have this mysterious thing called a vulva, or a vagina, yet no one ever says those words! Nor do we even know how to draw it. I had to look up cartoon drawings of the vulva on Google to get a sense of how I should be drawing it.

I decided to make this project a graffiti wall that gets filled with vulva drawings rather than penis drawings. The user can say “penis”, “vulva”, or “vagina” to generate the doodles in random placements, and they can move them around the screen as they wish. The more they say these words, the more vulvas get generated!

I picked a color scheme and drew eight different vulva doodles on Adobe illustrator.

After finishing the dekstop version of this app, I was bummed to find that the Web Speech API does not work on mobile. I ended up implementing buttons for users to click to spawn new doodles instead. The good thing about mobile is that users can easily scale the doodles up and down, and rotate them as they wish. On desktop, the doodles can only be moved around, without scaling and rotating capabilities. For this reason, the I made the interactions on desktop vs mobile slightly different.

On desktop, each word detected generates a random vulva of different sizes; “penis” = small, “vulva”= medium, “vagina” = large. Since users aren’t able to scale the drawings themselves, I had to create that variation based on the main input. As for mobile, since users are able to scale and rotate as they wish, I made three buttons that categorized the different shapes of my vulva doodles, rather than sizes. All doodles are generated in the same size. This categorization works better for this kind of interaction, as the users will get a better sense of what they can anticipate after pressing a button.

GitHub repos:
https://github.com/falsesugar/penis-vulva-vagina-speech (desktop)
https://github.com/falsesugar/penis-vulva-vagina-mobile (mobile)