How Might We…
Track the signals and trends today to imagine a possible future where the gender-orgasm gap doesn’t exist?
What: Create an Imaginary Business on the topic “The Future of Sexuality” for the year 2030, Strategic Foresight.
Team: Alyssa Burtt, Laurel Adams, Josie Hoffman
Timeline: 4 months (Sept – Dec 2017)
Process: Using futures frameworks like 3 Horizons and Archetypes of the Future (Growth, Transformation, Collapse, or Constraint), I worked with my team to research trends and emerging issues on the topic of female sexuality and came up with business ideas that could solve the problems in these possible futures.
Customer Segment: Women (primarily in heterosexual relationships)
Outcome: The project culminated with an artifact (a website), as well as a research report and a live presentation for our class (where we presented as-if it was 2030 and the company was real!).
Trends & Emerging Issues
In our preliminary research on female sexuality, the insight we found most intriguing was the orgasm gap between men and women in heterosexual relationships. This orgasm gap was non-existent in homosexual or lesbian relationships, and so clearly there was a problem to overcome here. We were also tracking parallel trends such fitness-tracking wearables, implantable birth control devices and websites devoted to empowering female sexuality like OMG Yes and Make Love Not Porn, which pointed towards the growing interest in addressing the pleasure divide.
Our Solution
We created an imaginary business called Compersia, selling a digital sensual tattoo that measures a woman’s pleasure response using markers such as temperature, heart rate, and chemicals in the bloodstream like dopamine. The tattoo is designed to light up in response to an increase in a woman’s pleasure. This at once both signals to her and her partner(s) when she is in fact ‘turned on’, creating a bio-feedback loop that both validates and communicates what is happening inside her body to build interoception (a sense that helps you understand and feel what’s going on inside your body).
