Walker Presents Virtual Mini-Lecture and Design Lab on the Futures of Motherhood and Families

The Walker Art Center presents Futures Focus and Design Labs, virtual mini-lectures and workshop events in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition Designs for Different Futures.

The Design Labs workshops and Futures Focus lectures will address a range of different topics from the exhibition Designs for Different Futures led by academics and designers in the field. All talks and workshops will be held at 7pm, will last 90 minutes, and will be hosted on Zoom.

THE EVENTS

Motherhood Futures (Futures Focus mini lecture)
October 15, 7pm
Click here to register for this Zoom webinar.

How might we address issues in maternal health with some of the same creative problem-solving tools used by designers? How are communities coming together to rethink maternity from an equity perspective? Join us for a conversation about labor, health, and ways design tools can help us reimagine the future of motherhood.

Presenters include Michelle Millar Fisher (coauthor and curator of Designing Motherhood: A Century of Making (and Unmaking) Babies), Aly Folin (she/her, owner and midwife at North Star Midwifery), Gabriella A. Nelson (associate director of Policy for the Maternity Care Coalition), Whitney Robinson (member of Make the Breast Pump Not Suck and founder of The Renée), and Alex Steinman (cofounder and CEO of The Coven).

“Many social barriers to breastfeeding exist in the United States, a country without universal health care or a standardized family leave policy. In addition, US maternal mortality rates are on the rise. These obstacles and outcomes disproportionately affect minority groups.” —Michelle Millar Fisher, Designs for Different Futures catalogue, 2019.

Family Futures (Design Lab)
October 22, 7pm
Click here to register for this Zoom class.

In 2018, the MIT design collaborative Make the Breast Pump Not Suck (MBPNS) led a summit convening more than 250 collaborators to address “better products, programs, policies, and systems to support breastfeeding and pumping with a focus on equity,” with the first hackathon of its kind. Alexis Hope, artist, designer, researcher, and creative director of MBPNS, leads this virtual collaborative design workshop exploring issues around motherhood and maternity. Learn about ways design methods can be applied to motherhood in an interactive workshop hosted by one of the designers featured in Designs for Different Futures.

Alexis Hope is a designer and researcher based at the MIT Media Lab, MIT Center for Civic Media, and the Massachusetts College of Art department of Industrial Design. As part of her work at MIT, she developed FOLD, an open publishing platform that helps people and organizations tell complex stories in a visually striking way. As part of her commitment to participatory design, Hope helps organize unique hackathons and civic technology workshops around the world.

“Mothers and parents need time, support, and love from their communities to give their babies the best possible start in life. We purposely work to legitimize breastfeeding innovation in research, design and policy interventions. We also connect different stakeholders in the system around a common desire to create healthier communities. We believe that parents are imaginative and creative, and we want to adopt that same spirit in our multidisciplinary approach.” —Make the Breast Pump Not Suck

ABOUT DESIGNS FOR DIFFERENT FUTURES

The role of designers in shaping how we think about possible futures is the subject of Designs for Different Futures, a major exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The presentation brings together some 80 dynamic works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

Thinking about our futures has always been part of the human condition. It has also been a perennial field of inquiry for designers and architects whose speculations on this subject—ranging from the concrete to the whimsical—can profoundly affect how we imagine what is to come. Among the questions today’s designers seek to answer are: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? Can intimacy be maintained at a distance? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? How will we feed an ever-growing population?

While no one can precisely predict these futures, the works in the exhibition provide design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne from a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that innovative materials, new technologies, and fresh ideas can afford.

The exhibition is divided into 11 thematic sections—Labors, Cities, Intimacies, Bodies, Powers, Earths, Foods, Materials, Generations, Informations, and Resources—and features an international array of designers from all fields. Among the many forward-looking projects on view, visitors will encounter lab-grown food, textiles made of seaweed, a typeface that thwarts algorithmic surveillance, a series of books that will only be available 100 years from now, an affordable gene-editing toolbox, a shoe grown from sweat, a couture dress made with a 3D printer, and a system that learns from our sewers.

Each of these projects—from small product innovations to large-scale system proposals—asks us to imagine futures different than what we expect, and in doing so, helps us craft a fascinating portrait of our diverse and turbulent present.

The exhibition will be on view from September 12, 2020 through April 11, 2021.