Principal Investigator: Dr Paulina Yurman, p.yurman@csm.arts.ac.ukProject duration: February 2024 – February 2028 Principal college: Central Saint Martins
Maternal Machines: Design Speculations about Fantasies of Care is a design research project funded by Wellcome and led by research fellow Dr Paulina Yurman. It is hosted at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
Speculative design has made useful contributions through critical interrogations of technology and its implications in society. While notions of family and reproduction are changing, dominant representations in design and technology still depict conventional and idealised situations. As AI and related technologies increasingly become entangled in spaces of care, it becomes particularly important to explore ways in which they might address diversely complex and subjective experiences and to consider the imagined scenarios, fears and expectations (real or unreal) held by a diversity of affected stakeholders.
This research will carry out a series of workshops and activities with new parents and with researchers and practitioners from design and technology, AI and ethics, medical humanities and maternal health. It will use the design practices of drawing, multidisciplinary collaboration, speculative design ideation and affected users’ participation to explore imaginaries, implications and design opportunities that might lead to diverse forms of wellbeing.
Panel 38: Entangled Theories and Practices: Navigating Relational Ontologies In and Through Design, HCI, STS, and Philosophy of Technology.
Also in June, visit to the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland for “Alternative Perspectives on Digital Healthcare”, a seminar organised by MAKEAWARE!-Spearhead, gathering an international community of healthcare researchers and identifying future research directions. Organised by Serena Cangiano, Ginevra Terenghi, with Teresa Almeida, Arthi Manohar, Aylin Yildirim Tschoepe, Laura Ferrarello, Sara Levati and Matteo Subet.
Visit and seminar, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland
Maternal Machines: Imagining Experiences in Perinatal Care, a workshop and presentation of the paper 'Drawing Maternal Machines and other Fantasies of Care'.
Workshop at CHI 2025, YokohamaPaper presentation at CHI 2025, Yokohama
In the UK, health visitors usually visit parents and their newborns at their home during the first weeks after birth. In this design-led workshop with postgraduate health visiting students (with backgrounds in midwifery, nursing and mental health support), we discussed scenarios during postnatal care and collaboratively speculated about design interventions. We made plasticine objects, descriptive collages with drawings and magazine cutouts and created fictional dialogues with technologies.
Imagining Health Visiting workshop, February 2025
Drawing Conversations are exercises created for multidisciplinary exchange of ideas through drawing. Paulina and Dr Marina Danielle AS, a researcher and lecturer in Midwifery at City St George’s, University of London engaged in conversations prompted by their drawings of pinards, breast pumps and other designs and technologies related to childbirth and perinatal care. Particularly relevant were shared insights about sensorial, bodily forms of knowledge and their intersection with monitoring technologies for care.
Drawing Conversation with midwife and researcher Dr Marina Danielle AS
Maternal Machines: Imagining Experiences in Perinatal Care will be a one-day in-person workshop at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan, in April 2025.
In this workshop, we will explore imagined scenarios where designs and technologies are conceived as interventions for care during the perinatal period. We will interrogate and speculate about ways in which technologies could address a diversity of experiences. Our workshop will include presentations, drawing and visualisations, hands-on interactions with artefacts and group discussions. We will cultivate critical discussions about practical and conceptual questions implicated in technologies for experiences in perinatal care. We will particularly explore two interrelated themes in our workshop: non-numerical forms of knowledge and touch related experiences.
Interested participants can make submissions as short papers or pictorials and can also include hands-on demonstrations. Participants will have the opportunity to briefly present their submissions and/or demonstrations to the group.
More information
Visit to KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm for workshop and presentation of the research.
Imagining Perinatal Care, Machines and Non-Numerical Bodily Knowledge was a workshop with researchers working in intimate technologies and soma design. We drew and discussed scenarios where non-numerical and sensorial forms of bodily knowledge coexist with technologies in perinatal care. Paulina also gave a talk about the research project Maternal Machines.
Workshop and talk at KTH. Photo: Nadia Campo Woytuk
This one-day design-led workshop invited researchers and practitioners working in design research, Human Computer Interaction, AI and ethics, maternal/infant care and medical humanities to discuss, interrogate and speculate about imaginaries (historical and contemporary), designs and opportunities with technologies related to maternal and infant care. The goal of this workshop was to collaboratively interrogate, speculate and discuss possible design scenarios in postpartum situations with experts from various multidisciplinary perspectives, and develop a research network.
Multidisciplinary workshop at Central Saint Martins, October 2024
Presentation at HCI Open Day one day Conference 'Design for All', at City, University of London, a day of exchanging knowledge and insights with researchers and practitioners working in healthcare, HCI, sustainable design, design futures, speculative design and industry.
A presentation of the research and workshop with researchers working in AI and ethics was held at The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge in May 2024. Another presentation and workshop at Imperial College’s Dyson School of Design in June 2024 was held, with design researchers working in women’s health.
Presentation and workshop at LCFI, Cambridge, May 2024