From breast pumps to maternity wards, the work of Designing Motherhood concerns not only parents but all humansDesigning Motherhood is the recipient of the Prize for Research in Gender and Architecture 2025, part of the W Awards. Read the full announcementAt the centre of the gallery space in the Designing Motherhood exhibition, on display at ArkDes in Stockholm (27 September 2024 31 August 2025), sits a small machine behind glass. It is the Egnell SMB (Sister Maja Breast) pump, designed by Swedish civil engineer Einar Egnell in 1956 and named after nurse Sister Maja Kindberg, who tested the machine on nursing mothers in Sweden. The machine draws milk from a breast through a pumping mechanism, guiding the milk to bottles for collection via long plastic tubes. The machine is portable with a handle on the top. It looks like a toaster or a small coffee machine.The breast pump is one object of many that have been overlooked in the writing of design histories. The Designing Motherhood project unpacks the inherently political implications of objects and technologies for womens health and reproduction. The breast pump was developed at the same time as new welfare state institutions, homes and technologies were being constructed on display next door as part of ArkDess permanent exhibition, drawing from Swedens national architecture collection. As a piece of technology, the breast pump enabled breastfeeding mothers a new form of flexibility, and was developed as provisions were made in Sweden for women to enter the workforce for example, with organised public childcare and new modern technologies to alleviate domestic labour. As a design object, the breast pump is as emancipatory as it is biopolitical, and deeply interlinked with economy, politics of labour and the private lives of parents and their children to this day.The Designing Motherhood project has materialised in a series of exhibitions and a publication. Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births, edited by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, was published in 2021, and five exhibitions have followed: at Mtter Museum, Philadelphia; MassArt Art Museum, Boston; Gates Foundation, Seattle; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston (on view until 15 March 2025); as well as at ArkDes the sixth instalment of the exhibition will open in New York in autumn 2025. Project curators Millar Fisher, Winick, Juliana Rowen Barton, Gabriella A Nelsonand Zo Greggs have worked collaboratively from the beginning, and the project is a culmination of the work and voices of many different people and institutions. In its conception and form, the project combines the work of design historians and curators with that of policy makers and activists, as well as doulas, midwives and birthing people. Each instalment of the project involves a new collaboration with an institution and a new group of collaborators. We could almost consider it a thinktank at this point, Winick suggests.The breast pump brought into view the issue at the core of Designing Motherhood. While working in the architecture and design department in a large museum, Millar Fisher hoped to acquire the object for the museums collection, and was greeted with a big fat no. We are constantly told that design and architecture is the discipline that is going to save the world, that this is the place where you can have interesting and knotty conversations, Millar Fisher explains. And it seemed, actually, a lie. There is a gap in the history of design and architecture that so far has not included these perspectives or scrutinised these objects and their political and personal implications, despite their relevance and impact not only for people experiencing pregnancy, but society at large. This project aims to address this omission.Designing Motherhood, in both the publication and exhibitions, addresses the arc of reproduction. Conception, contraception and womens agency over their bodies are explored through objects such as speculums, menstrual cups and protest posters, while the changing bodies of people experiencing pregnancy and motherhood are investigated through maternity clothes and pessaries for prolapse. Forceps, Csection drapes and birthing stools are offered as tools in the act of labour and the work of midwives, while breastfeeding demonstration sets, nipple shields and, of course, breast pumps are proposed as design objects shaping the practice of feeding newborns.The project also maps the movement of spaces for birth during the 20th century, from the bedroom to the hospital and back again. In the 1950s, the knowledge of doulas and midwives, passed down from generation to generation, was replaced by ultrasound and electronic foetal monitors, inverting the interior space of the womb. Midcentury American dream hospitals, funded by industrialist Henry J Kaiser and developed by surgeon Sidney R Garfield, included maternity wards with baby drawers which allowed for the transfer of newborns between their mothers and nurses in separate sterile spheres. These dream hospitals included the Panorama City Hospital, built in California in 1962 to designs by Clarence Mayhew and HL Theiderman; a circular maternity ward gave nurses unobstructed views of the mothers and babies in their care. In the 1970s, a renewed attention to the mothers experience during birth and an understanding of the importance of feeling at home brought the domestic sphere back as a birthing place through the homebirth movement.By bringing the steps and missteps in the histories of these spaces into view, the Designing Motherhood project advocates the expansion of access to culturally appropriate care and spaces for reproduction. The Maternity Waiting Village in Malawi by MASS Design Group, completed in 2015, seeks to reduce maternal mortality by fostering knowledgesharing and community in domestic settings, in close proximity to healthcare professionals providing an infrastructure of care within the city. The architecture of birthplaces can, as Designing Motherhood highlights, facilitate as well as hinder the safety, joy and dignity experienced during birth. The Designing Motherhood project originated in the US but includes global perspectives showing how different contexts need different culturally appropriate forms of care. Sweden is, for example, a very different political context to the US when it comes to womens rights over their bodies and the provision of reproductive healthcare, but these discussions still find resonance. Because healthcare provisions in Europe on the surface seem better than in the US, the real discrepancy between what is meant to exist and the actual lived experience of people might be harder to see, Millar Fisher explains. According to Winick, visitors to the Swedish iteration of the exhibition have explained that the trends described in the US are also happening in Sweden: It is different, but some things are the same. The exhibition in the Swedish context narrates a bigger story of the dismantling of the Swedish welfare state in recent years, and how the provision of healthcare has become both privatised and harder to come by. The film Kramp from 2023 by Yennifer Godin, for example, details the maternity care deserts that now exist in rural Sweden following the closure of hospitals. People in Sweden are now offered training so that they know how to deliver babies in cars or en route somewhere because of the long distance between hospitals.The objects included in the Designing Motherhood project are familiar, personal and intimate. As Millar Fisher and Winick write in the introduction to the publication, We dont just remember our first period, but also the technologies that first collected the blood. We dont just remember the way babies arrive but also what they were wrapped in when they finally reached our arms. The objects demand a response: on one visit to the exhibition at ArkDes, a group of young people giggle at posters for condoms; a dad with a baby in a carrier smiles at an advert about legislation allowing paternity leave; three older women debate the issues of closing hospitals in the north of the country; a couple of new mothers discuss their different experiences of giving birth and postpartum; and in front of a documentary film from the 1970s showing a birth in realtime, a retired couple watches, holding hands and maybe recalling a similar experience that they once shared. Designing Motherhood illustrates how the issues and questions relating to reproductive health are universal. As the curators point out in the introduction to the exhibition at ArkDes: These are not just womens issues. They are human issues. We have all been born, and the provision of, and access to, reproductive health affects individuals as well as communities and society at large. The display of these objects within the space of a public gallery allows their political and relational capacities to come into view, and certain (and important) conversations to take place. If the objects arent in the gallery, those conversations simply dont happen, Millar Fisher insists. Histories go completely unremarked. Experiences of reproductive health are personal and contextual, and as this project unpacks, unequal access to objects and spaces for reproductive health shapes and affects the provision of care to this day. The online version of this article has been amended to reflect Gabriella A Nelsons role as co-curator of Designing MotherhoodLead image: Incubators displayed at the 1939 New York Worlds Fair, occupied by real babies. Photo: Bengt Backlund / Upplandsmuseet, Uppsala, Sweden / Medela LLC2025-03-06Anna Livia VrselShare AR March 2025W AwardsBuy Now