What’s “Maternal Machines”?
Maternal Machines is a design research project that examines technologies for maternal and infant care. The work explores historical and contemporary ideas, ranging 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 HCI researchers interested in care technologies. The project demonstrates methods for critically examining imaginaries before they shape technological development. The work is also relevant for parents, caregivers, and healthcare practitioners who want to understand how perinatal technologies reflect assumptions about care and whose knowledge is valued.
Approach
The project employs participatory design, drawing, prototyping, and perspectives from critical design, speculative design and feminist design research. Drawing with watercolour serves as the primary research practice, used to examine historical patents and contemporary products while creating speculative artefacts.
These visual materials are used in participatory workshops where diverse practitioners and researchers develop and discuss imagined scenarios of care technologies. The approach explores two key themes: non-numerical forms of bodily knowledge and touch-based experiences in perinatal care.
Contribution
This project demonstrates how visual research methods can make abstract concerns about AI and care tangible for collective discussion. The work reveals how care technologies have historically undermined parental knowledge while privileging technological measurement, from early incubators to current monitoring systems. The research also shows that parents adapt existing technologies in ways designers often overlook, providing valuable insights into everyday care practices and the gap between technological promises and lived experiences.
Why is it in the Observatory?
This project demonstrates how visual research methods can critically examine care technologies, revealing persistent patterns where machines are presented as more trustworthy than humans, from incubators framed as safer than 'irresponsible mothers' to current systems using facial recognition to detect infant emotions and optimise wellbeing.
At a time when monitoring technologies are rapidly entering intimate care spaces, this work provides valuable insights by showing how:
Parents creatively adapt technologies in ways formal design processes can overlook.