Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Birth

Abstract

When I first came across Marie-Claire Springham’s chestfeeding kit, a project that she developed while a product design student at Central Saint Martins in London, I immediately incorporated it into my undergraduate industrial design history course. It resonated with me on many levels as an instructor and a mother. Meant to be about empathy, the chestfeeding kit quickly became politicized by revealing how lactation is highly gendered and breastfeeding is politicized in our current society. As a didactic tool, the chestfeeding kit allowed me to show wary students that product design doesn’t always have to be about making “the thing”; much of Springham’s project is about hormone therapy for inducing male lactation and the encouragement of empathy through packaging and language. I also do it for those few stubborn students still clinging to the idea that design is not or should not be political. Finally, I do it because it represents, to me, a deeply meaningful design that takes on one of the real struggles of being a new parent, unlike the loads Erica Morawski is an Assistant Professor of Design History at Pratt Institute emorawsk@pratt.edu © 2021 Erica Morawski DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2021.1996825