Design and Midwifery: Birth Space Workshops 1st and 4th March 2021.
Last week over forty midwifery and design students came together in a Design Workshop to challenge and re-imagine Birth Space. Understanding birth through storytelling; exchanging stories of birthing women and their partners the workshop puts women and their experiences at the centre of design. Groups explored the language of these stories, the visual and spatial qualities identified within them, considered providing for all types of services users and made new proposals using collage techniques.
The workshop was co-run by Libby Blundell an Architect and the First Year Leader of the BA Architecture Course here at Brighton, and Jo Gould, as Senior Lecturer in Midwifery, from the School of Health Sciences. We invited Dr Sarah Joyce as our guest speaker, a post-doc researcher and Lecturer at Leeds Becket University, focusing on Birth Space.
What’s next for our birth space project? Jo and Libby intend to develop a series of extensions to this work, the first is designing resources for midwives on the wards, where most births have been since the covid pandemic. Look out for our ‘Midwifery Hacks’ – in the coming months!