In the course Visualizing Complexity led by Professor Tore Gulden, a part of the masters degree of Design in Complexity at OsloMet, students worked on the case of, and in collaboration with, project partner CleanCup, who manufactures menstrual cups. The result was two GigaMaps that explored the company’s ambitions, challenges, and opportunities from a systems perspective.
Rather than approaching the project as a traditional design brief focused on improving a product, the students used GigaMapping to investigate the broader system in which CleanCup operates. Their work illustrates one of the core ideas of systems-oriented design: complex challenges rarely have simple causes or isolated solutions. Instead, products, users, organisations, cultures, regulations, infrastructures, and values continuously shape one another.
Although CleanCup’s initial challenge centred on relocating the production of its menstrual cups from China to Norway, both groups quickly realised that manufacturing was only one part of a much larger picture. The menstrual cup became an entry point into understanding the complex relationships between menstruation, sustainability, health, education, culture, gender norms, business strategy, and environmental impact.
One of the GigaMaps traces the historical development of menstrual products alongside changing attitudes towards women’s rights and reproductive health. It combines this historical perspective with analyses of manufacturing, life-cycle assessment, stakeholder networks, customer journeys, user experiences, and global cultural perceptions of menstruation. Rather than treating sustainability as solely an environmental issue, the map shows how social stigma, limited education, healthcare, regulation, and access to menstrual products all influence whether more sustainable alternatives are adopted.
The second GigaMap takes a complementary perspective by examining CleanCup as a company embedded within a wider socio-technical system. It explores the organisation’s business model, production strategy, customer expectations, branding, competitors, and opportunities for intervention. At the same time, it visualises how deeply cultural norms, religious beliefs, social media, shame, and education affect people’s relationship with menstruation and menstrual products. The map highlights that many barriers to adopting menstrual cups are not technical but social and cultural.
Across both projects, several recurring themes emerge. The students identify menstruation as a subject surrounded by silence and stigma, creating feedback loops in which embarrassment limits discussion, limited discussion reduces knowledge, and lack of knowledge reinforces fear and misconceptions. These dynamics affect not only individual users but also product adoption, public health, and sustainability efforts.
Importantly, the maps do not stop at analysis. Both groups identify potential leverage points for intervention. These include improving menstrual education in schools, involving boys and men in conversations about menstruation, redesigning marketing to focus on empowerment rather than only environmental benefits, improving user guidance for first-time cup users, developing new production strategies, and strengthening collaboration between businesses, researchers, healthcare professionals, and policymakers. Rather than proposing a single solution, the students reveal a portfolio of interventions operating at different scales within the system.
Together, the two GigaMaps demonstrate the value of systems-oriented design as a way of understanding complex societal challenges. By visualising relationships instead of isolated problems, they show that meaningful innovation often lies beyond the product itself. In the case of CleanCup, creating a more sustainable menstrual product is inseparable from addressing education, cultural norms, public policy, healthcare, manufacturing, and gender equality.
The project also illustrates the unique role of GigaMapping within design education. As both an analytical and generative tool, the GigaMap helps students synthesise large amounts of information, uncover hidden connections, and identify strategic opportunities for intervention. Rather than reducing complexity, the maps embrace it—making it possible to see the system as a whole and to imagine more informed and responsible pathways for change.