What will motherhood in 2074 look like?
"The wandering damp phantom hand
Reaches out for my mother."
Ma, a simple syllable that echoes across countless languages, captures the essence of motherhood more poignantly than most. Naming this project ‘Ma’ holds deep significance, reflecting the voices and experiences of women across three generations who courageously shared some of their most vulnerable moments with the team “It’s Giving Vintage”, who projected themselves 50 years into the future of motherhood and reproductive rights.
What began as an exploration into how strengthening intergenerational bonds between young people and the elderly could lead to longer, healthier lives, gradually evolved into an inquiry about a question that puzzled the team during in-depth focus groups and interviews conducted over a week with 18 participants ranging in age from 30 to 90 and representing five nationalities. Families are shrinking across generations, and more and more women are choosing not to have children. Is this a sign of empowerment and freedom over their own bodies, or a failure on the part of governments worldwide for overstepping into biopolitics, politicising individuals’ lives, bodies, sexualities, and death?
Many anthropologists have attempted to understand the emergence of collective behaviours such as this within both past and present contexts. However, the possible future of motherhood calls for an imaginative perspective, something designers excel at. From thinking about how to care for today’s elderly, the inquiry took a turn towards caring for elderly women 50 years from now. How might we support women choosing alternatives to traditional family structures to avoid social isolation in their later lives?
The Life-Centered Research module allowed the team to explore the speculative design framework, posing ‘what if’ scenarios that encompassed the breadth of possible, plausible, probable, and preferable futures. The result was six artefacts representing six possible futures of motherhood. When the team shared their renderings with women in Bergamo, responses to the future artefacts ranged from unsurprised and joyful to aghast, and at times they even moved some women to tears. These posters reflected a dark reality that many women already felt subjected to.
A learning emerged that history repeats but knowledge evolves. It’s not enough to simply capture events in time to predict the future. It’s also crucial to connect across generations over topics like this that impact all of humanity but are not discussed enough due to their sensitivity. Democratising tools such as the speculative design framework might be a way to enable multiple generations of disempowered groups to be heard by decision-makers in governance, policy, sociology, ethics, and technology.
