Maternal Machines: Design Speculations about Fantasies of Care

While notions on family and reproduction are changing, dominant representations in design and technology still depict conventional and idealised situations. As AI increasingly becomes entangled in spaces of care, it becomes particularly important to explore ways in which it might address diversely complex and subjective experiences and to consider the imagined scenarios, fears and expectations held by a diversity of affected stakeholders. Centering on a series of workshops with new parents, designers, technologists, medical humanities researchers and maternal health practitioners, this proposal will use 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 ideations, machine learning and 3D fabrication, this research will explore ideated situations and design opportunities around emergent technologies to support wellbeing in maternal and infant care. This research is innovative as it explores constellations of human/machine interactions through the practice of speculative design to disrupt ways of thinking about technologies created for care and initiate new understandings that address a diversity of experiences. Keywords: design; technology; AI, maternal, care, imaginaries.