Second Spring is a social collective designed to support women navigating perimenopause. For many, this major life transition intertwines physiological, emotional, and social implications. Given that the dominant social narrative around menopause is overwhelmingly negative, the team sought to explore how women might be empowered to self-regulate through unpredictable changes, developing a new health awareness and tuning into their shifting bodily rhythms.
Interviews with perimenopausal women aged 40–49 revealed a deep need for information that is currently disjointed, expensive, and hard to find. Participants expressed a desire to reclaim agency, mentally prepare, and engage proactively with their health. Rather than adopting a new identity in menopause, women need to fine-tune their rhythms to meet new bodily needs.
Designing through a biomimicry lens, the team drew on mentors including primates, who form social bonds and acquire skills through group observation, and flamingos, who build long-term bonds in small groups (2–4) to provide mutual support. Further inspiration came from a Ugandan tradition in which aunties prepare and guide their nieces for marriage.
These insights shaped Second Spring: a cyclical collective in which experienced "aunties" (menopausal or post-menopausal women) exchange knowledge and support with those earlier in the journey. The programme moves through four seasons: Spring (awareness and enrollment); Summer (an auntie-led gathering on topics like nutrition, where pods of 3–5 women are formed); Fall (smaller pod or 1:1 meetings with shared resources); and Winter (reflection, where members contribute findings and testimonials, processed by AI for the next cycle).
Learning to use the lens of biomimicry was an exciting opportunity to tap into a new and vast well of inspiration and learnings from nature, while continually shifting perspective, from fine-grained detail to holistic, systemic thinking.
