Designing Motherhood
- Orkan Telhan
- Undergraduate Program in Fine Arts and Design, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
Designing Motherhood is a project that investigates design for the arc of human reproduction–from the choice or lack thereof to have a child, through birth, pregnancy, and postpartum. The initiative is organized by an intersectional team of historians, curators, social workers, doulas, early childhood experts, artists, and administrators that is putting together a multi-site exhibition, book, and series of public programs for 2021, in addition to a course that will be offered through the Weitzman School of Design. The proposed project is a curriculum intervention for design majors that will bring previously taboo and under-researched material on design for the arc of human reproduction into the classroom as a subject for student inquiry, and result in a set of open-access, distributable teaching resources for design faculty to use in their own courses at Penn and beyond. At stake is a centering of subject matter, designs, and ideas that rarely, if ever, get airtime in cultural institutions and design programs, yet are to be found everywhere in daily life. Beyond reframing of the content, the histories and perspectives offered in Designing Motherhood also reposition people with internal reproductive organs as the central locus of design—as designers themselves and as users—and elevates their concerns as universally relevant. In highlighting these stories, Designing Motherhood will have a profound impact on contemporary practice by shifting the lessons and objectives we learn from the past.