Designing Motherhood
Our book club pick for February was Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, edited by Amber Winick and Michelle Fisher (2021, MIT Press). The book functions like a catalog for the exhibitions organized by the editors and builds on a years-long project on Instagram, rooted in a collaboration with Maternity Care Coalition. Its rich visual iconography mixes personal and community archives, the technical, medical, social and private gaze. It stands out for its bright pink paper and for the stories mothers, their caregivers and designers need to hear.
Designing Motherhood brings to the foreground objects that are not obviously designed, would not usually be included in a design exhibition, but had to be conceived by someone. These objects shape our shared and individual experiences of birth. Belonging to the undervalued domain of care, they are invisibilized despite their impact.
The book is structured around four periods: before pregnancy, during pregnancy, at birth and in the early days. It’s at times a difficult read, because it speaks to a moment of vulnerability, of experiencing one’s own biological limitations. Pregnancy and childbirth are physically challenging and dangerous in the best of cases. Pregnancy is linked to the changes in auto-immune disorders; up to a third of women experience lasting health issues related to childbirth. In the TV series Battlestar Galactica, Dr Cottle comments synthetic humans should have upgraded the plumbing and many mothers would likely agree. Designing Motherhood strolls in that direction with a discussion of artificial wombs and how they may expand or lessen women’s rights if they became reality.
But the book highlights how we’ve missed the mark on what to design and how, only worsening the issue. It critically examines what objects say about the ideologies underpinning our conduct, from baby wearing to pushing strollers, in particular the impulse to believe we can optimise motherhood by buying the right things. It focuses on how these ideologies shape our relationships with ourselves, our children, our caregivers and our technologies. I found the case of technologies for listening to the fetus particularly fascinating (although the presentation of fetal monitoring during childbirth misses the nuances of current research). In places, the authors suggest how things could be different if we centered individual birthing people’s choices and well-being in design.
Choice is a central theme, not that it implies that choices happen in a vacuum or without constraints. The book discusses design-shaped choices in domains as varied as prenatal DNA testing, or visibilizing a pregnancy with clothing; choices as they are expanded by certain objects (the home pregnancy test); or the impossibility of choice (whether or not the labor will proceed without complications). And although the book focuses primarily on the United States, it does a great job at exposing how objects circulate around the world and may be adopted or not depending on local circumstances.
There’s a long way to go before each and every mother is supported in their transition to parenthood, including but not limited to their physical environment. There’s a long way to go until designers take into account the needs of mothers and parents. But this is a solid stepping stone to get there.
