Maternal Machines: Design Speculations about Fantasies of Care

A research project funded by the Wellcome Trust, 2024-2028
( grant ref. 300080/Z/23/Z)

www.arts.ac.uk/maternal-machines

https://wellcome.org/grant-funding/people-and-projects/grants-awarded/maternal-machines-design-speculations-about

I am the recipient of a Wellcome Research grant for my project Maternal Machines: Design Speculations about Fantasies of Care. The research uses speculative design approaches to interrogate, imagine, identify  and visualise design scenarios and opportunities with technologies related to maternal and infant care.

Speculative design has made useful contributions through critical interrogations of technology and its implications in society. 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, fantasies and expectations held by a diversity of affected stakeholders.

Centering on a series of workshops with new parents and with researchers and practitioners working in design and technology, AI and ethics, medical humanities and maternal health, this research uses speculative design to investigate imaginaries, possible scenarios, opportunities and implications about emergent technologies related to maternal and infant care, considering ways in which artificially intelligent systems and other more-than-human elements can be entangled actors in this space.

Utilising the design practices of drawing, multidisciplinary collaboration, speculative design ideation and affected users’ participation, this research will explore ideated situations and design opportunities to support diverse forms of wellbeing. 

Aims of the research:

• To visualise new parents’ imaginaries around AI and related technologies, including those from underrepresented groups.
• To speculate about the design opportunities and implications of artificially intelligent and related technologies in spaces of maternal and infant care.
  
• To explore understandings of care through interrogations of designs and technologies of care in collaboration with stakeholders from design, human-computer-interaction, AI and ethics, medical humanities and maternal health.
  
• To speculate, design or visualise design opportunities that might lead to diverse forms of wellbeing for relevant stakeholders.
  

My research is hosted at University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins, where I am a design lecturer.


Steering Commitee:
- Maria Luce Lupetti, Politecnico di Torino
- Joseph Lindley, Lancaster University
- Victoria Bates, University of Bristol
- Matt Malpass, University of the Arts London