What’s “Maternal Machines”?
Maternal Machines is an ongoing Design Research project that examines technologies for maternal and infant care. The project explores historical and contemporary ideas (everything from artificial womb patents to current AI monitoring systems) to understand how care technologies reflect assumptions about gender, bodies, and whose knowledge matters.
Who is it for?
Maternal Machines is aimed at designers and Human-Computer Interaction specialists interested in the design of care technologies. The project demonstrates methods for carefully considering how assumptions and preconceptions (what the project calls imaginaries) shape technological development.
The project work may also be of interest for parents, caregivers, and healthcare practitioners who want to understand how technologies used during pregnancy, birth, and the first weeks after birth reflect assumptions about care and whose knowledge is valued.
Approach
The project pulls together multiple ideas from design research including participatory design, prototyping, critical design, and speculative design. Drawing with watercolour is one of the primary research practices and is used to examine historical patents and contemporary products while creating speculative artefacts.
The visual materials the project creates are used in participatory workshops where experts, practitioners and researchers develop and discuss imagined scenarios of care technologies. The approach explores how knowledge that is based on touch and experience can be just as valuable as knowledge that revolves around numbers.
Parents creatively adapt technologies in ways formal design processes can overlook.
Contribution
This project demonstrates how visual research methods can make abstract concerns about technology (including AI) more easily accessible in collective discussions. The work reveals how care technologies (everything from early incubators to modern monitoring systems) have tended to undermine the knowledge that parents have acquired through experience. The research also shows that parents adapt existing technologies in ways designers did not predict and often overlook. This provides valuable insights into how to bridge the gap between technological promises and everyday experiences.
Why is it in the Observatory?
At a time when AI monitoring technologies are rapidly entering intimate care spaces, this work shows how Design Research can make complex technological assumptions tangible and discussable. By using drawing and participatory workshops with diverse stakeholders, the project demonstrates that Design Research can help us question the values embedded in emerging technologies while they're still being imagined, rather than after they've already shaped our lives.
Maternal Machines is disrupting the perception that technology is more trustworthy than humans.