PROJECT DESCRIPTION

"Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births" covers eighty designs—iconic, archaic, quotidian, and taboo—that have defined the arc of human reproduction. It was important to us that the book be something as at home on a gift list for new parents as on a syllabus in a design history class. We wanted it to be an intensely visual book, with the image research as robust as the histories of the objects, systems, politics, and people in the text. Our process of design was a keen and kind symbiosis between the two authors and the two designers.

The book rejected for publication from every museum institution we worked for so we found our own funding and publisher, a years-long process. We know that this is because of the subject matter which, back when we started this project in 2016, was not as widely spoken about as it is now (and it still needs more airtime). While birth often brings great joy, making babies is a knotty enterprise.

The designed objects that surround us when it comes to menstruation, abortion, paid leave, gender stereotypes around reproduction, birth control, fertility, childbirth, and more vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. Each design in our book tells a story, from the tie-waist skirt, famously worn by a pregnant Lucille Ball on "I Love Lucy," and essential for camouflaging and slowly normalizing a public pregnancy to the home pregnancy test kit, and its threat to the authority of male gynecologists.

BOOK INFORMATION

Trim Size: 7 in x 10 in

Number of Pages: 344

Binding Method:

Paper: Favini Burano Rosa 90g/m,MaxiGloss 90g/m

Typefaces: Grilli Type GT America (three different weights)

CREDIT INFORMATION

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Book Designer: Natasha Chandani and Lana Cavar

Jacket/Cover Designer: Natasha Chandani and Lana Cavar

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