This Major Research Project explores the futures of birthspace as sites of transformation, care, and world-making. Situated at the intersection of design, healthcare, and futures thinking, the project responds to growing recognition that contemporary birth environments, often shaped by medicalization, standardization, and risk-based frameworks, can constrain the relational, sensory, and cultural dimensions of care.
Expanding beyond a clinical definition, this research understands birthspace as a broader field of transformation, encompassing moments of becoming, transition, and reconfiguration across the lifespan. Through a relational and speculative design approach, the study investigates how future birth environments might be reimagined through collective dreaming and speculative design to transform experiences of pain, strengthen relational practices, and support more inclusive and ecologically attuned forms of care.
The research integrates transdisciplinary methods, including literature review, environmental scanning, and relational inquiry with participants within, adjacent to, and beyond birthspace. This approach brought multiple worldviews into the research, showing how perspectives from areas such as ritual practice, end-of-life care, and immersive design shape how care environments are experienced, understood, and dreamed of.
Speculative design functions in this project as a mode of research synthesis. Drawing on weak signals, lived experience, and existing scholarship, insights are translated into experiential artifacts and design fictions that materialize possible futures. Rather than solving predefined problems, these speculative outputs surface hidden assumptions, provoke critical reflection, and enable ethical engagement with how care systems might evolve.
Across these imagined futures, a consistent pattern emerges: contemporary care environments are increasingly misaligned with the embodied, sensory, and relational needs of those within them. In response, a shared longing emerges for spaces that adapt to people, support inward attention, and reconnect birth to broader social and ecological worlds.
Findings are synthesized into a set of design principles that articulate shared orientations across transformative spaces, alongside how these principles are enacted differently across cultural, political, and experiential contexts. Through this lens, birthspace becomes both a metaphor and a method—a generative starting point for reimagining plural, relational, and ecologically attuned futures of care.