Conference Agenda

This paper proposes an Epimethean mode of design that works with reproductive labour as a counterpoint to Anthropocenic narratives of progress. Rather than innovating new futures, design is approached as a practice of aftercare, sustaining endangered forms of life-making within existing institutions. Drawing on a long-term participatory design project at a large hospital maternity ward, the paper theorizes Epimethean design as a mode of infrastructuring that resists the translation of care into productivity and reclaims reproduction as a site of ontological and political contestation. At the same time, it argues that confronting reductionist ideas of productivity requires a double movement: undoing, by protecting fragile reproductive practices from capture within technosocial regimes, and doing, by cautiously reworking these regimes from within. This dual stance positions design as both an act of maintenance and a generative force, enabling reproductive labour to contest and redefine what counts as productive work.