A research project funded by Wellcome.
Project duration: February 2024 – February 2028
Principal Investigator: Dr Paulina Yurman p.yurman@csm.arts.ac.uk
College: Central Saint Martins
Project summary
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 University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins.
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.
The 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 affect users' participation to explore imaginaries, implications and design opportunities that might lead to diverse forms of wellbeing.
Aims of the research:
- To visualise new parents’ imaginaries around emergent 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 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 the wellbeing of relevant stakeholders.
Steering committee