A Place for Birth: Storytelling in Interdisciplinary Education

This micronarrative describes a participatory teaching event involving students of midwifery and design. Using generative design methodologies and adopting storytelling as a common ground, the design workshop sought to raise awareness of the spatial impact of the birth environment on all those who pass through it. This narrative demonstrates the value of stories in an interdisciplinary context and reveals how stories can be a vehicle to explore and provide for difference, something to which contemporary midwifery is committed. The paper aims to illustrate how thinking spatially can reveal perceptions of care and bring women’s voices to the foreground.

Keywords: unbuilt, pedagogy, architecture, health and education I can't recall leaving the house or negotiating the flight of steps from our front door, but I vividly remember the discomfort of climbing into the backseat and remaining on all fours for the duration of the journey.
It was early evening as we approached the hospital. After the rain, the tarmacked car park was dank. Wearing flip-flops and leaning on your dad, we weaved between the lamplit puddles. We passed through the maternity entrance doors, and both recoiled at the stark contrast in light, from the carpark's amber glow to the acetic glare of the incandescent bulbs, reflected from the tired walls and scuffed linoleum floor. The birth centre is on the ground floor. I could hear each flip-flop reverberate, the sound simultaneously distant and resonating through my body. We proceeded along the sterile corridor, up a gentle ramp towards the birthing suite. They were expecting us. Pressing the intercom, we hesitated, waiting for the second set of double doors to part. We were guided into a muted waiting space, dusky pink and grey. Nauseous again, I leant against an unstaffed reception desk and waited to be assessed. This is an excerpt from the birth story of my daughter, Adeline. Conscious that parental amnesia would soon set in and distort the sequence of events, I wrote this lucid account of her birth, in the timeless first weeks of becoming a mother. The absence of my mother meant that I was determined that Adeline would hear "herstory" (Figure 1).
After the birth, I found it hard to tell our story to other mothers precisely because it was a positive experience, which sat in stark contrast to the experiences of other women I knew. Some mothers need to retell, revisit, and relive their traumas to help them come to terms with what happened; this was not the case for me. Adeline's story refuted the persistent familial skepticism before the birth but more significantly contradicted the fight for survival that labor and birth assume when portrayed by the media.

Birth & Teaching
I shared Adeline's birth story in its entirety at the opening presentation of a Birth Space Workshop in March this year. This workshop, grounded in storytelling, occurred in a first year Birth Module as part of the Bachelors course in midwifery at the University of Brighton. As a senior l lecturer in architecture, I codesigned and cofacilitated the event with Jo Gould, a senior lecturer in midwifery. The workshop was a two-day interdisciplinary event that, due to COVID-19, was conducted conversationally and visually through Microsoft Teams and Miro, an online digital whiteboard tool. Attendees included the all-female first-year midwifery cohort from Brighton and an elective group of designers, including A Place for Birth

University of Brighton
This micronarrative describes a participatory teaching event involving students of midwifery and design. Using generative design methodologies and adopting storytelling as a common ground, the design workshop sought to raise awareness of the spatial impact of the birth environment on all those who pass through it. This narrative demonstrates the value of stories in an interdisciplinary context and reveals how stories can be a vehicle to explore and provide for difference, something to which contemporary midwifery is committed. The paper aims to illustrate how thinking spatially can reveal perceptions of care and bring women's voices to the foreground.
Harding as emerging "from below," 5 a positioning and centering of the most disenfranchised within a system to reveal disparities and challenge norms. We provided spatial and care-based cues to facilitate the collection of stories before the workshop. Student interview prompts included what birthing women could remember about how they felt, about the midwife and about the space itself. A first story was gathered in advance, offering participants a glimpse into the relationships between care and space. Neither midwives nor architects are in the habit of hearing these "herstories," as the telling and retelling occurs largely in domestic and familiar settings.
The initial sharing of my story served several functions: first to displace traditional hierarchies of power 6 between academics and students and to create a safe, open, and vulnerable space for the duration of the workshop. It also served as a tuning exercise, a practice run for the stories that followed. The spaces in which I gave birth mattered to me. I wanted to help students hear how the space was influential, so we identified a series

Interdisciplinary Ambitions
The professional practice of midwifery and architecture operate in a transdisciplinary space, working alongside (or in conflict with) obstetricians, pediatric consultants, planners, structural and mechanical engineers, and more. In contrast, the university curriculum is principally undertaken in disciplinary silos, interspersed with clinical-based education.
The Birth Space Workshop sought to create an interdisciplinary educational space, legible and navigable to both midwives and designers. We anticipated disparities in participant skills-gaps and differences in verbal and visual fluencies, where limited vocabulary or spatial literacy may inhibit engagement. The workshop was planned as a compressed spiral curriculum 1 (scaffolding tasks sequentially, building on prior learning); 2 we designed generative tools and techniques 3 to bridge the disciplinary divide. We adopted narrative 4 as one bridging methodology, beginning with the voices of women. Their birth stories provided an initial epistemological standpoint, described by Sandra foundation level students, B.Arch. graduates and Masters students from the architecture and sustainable design programs. The workshop attendees reflected the student demographic in being predominatly white. The midwifery course students ranged widely in age, spanning several decades. Despite an open call for participants, the workshop became an unintentionally female event where the absence of male voices was noted by students and staff alike. Reasons for the lack of male uptake remain unknown.
Unlike a traditional design charrette, the Birth Space Workshop was not concerned with the quality of design proposals but focused on a short and intense collaborative making exercise to reveal the spatial implications of birth environments. We encouraged students to reflect on their recent work-based placements on the labor ward, in birth centers, or at home births. In doing so, we sought to empower midwives in positions of relative power to advocate for women spatially through adjustments to these birth environments, subsequently enabling more positive birth stories to be created and shared. of spatial and experiential prompts to listen for as I read my story.
Following this, participants broke into groups and the remaining fifty stories were read aloud and discussed. Key words, issues, questions, and themes-across stories-were identified to help foster individual and collective understanding, with participants becoming design advocates for the absent mothers. Participatory glossaries were developed, including terms like isolated, invisible, calm, reflections, rules, temperature, disorientation, respected, comfortable, and quiet. A visual dictionary was also crafted. Associated images were gathered to reflect the glossaries, helping students to recognize how a space may be haptically read. 7 Conscious of the limited demographic of attendees, resources identifying other birth practices, beyond reductive anthropometric Western approaches, were distributed. A group manifesto was subsequently written, and rapid group collages suggested ideas for alternative birth spaces. Orthographic projections and drawing esoterica were avoided in order to foster a space of mutual production and assembly ( Figure 2).

Designing Care-Designing Space
Birth always happens somewhere and it became apparent during the workshop that space for midwives is an afterthought. The workshop provocatively asked if it is conceivable that space might also care, and if so, how this might be experienced by occupants.
Although limited by available source materials, storytelling collages revealed what midwives and designers considered the spatial manifestations of care, including the personalization of birth spaces, flexibility, mobility, materiality, privacy, and control; they sought to strike a balance between socialization and retreat, making spaces that empowered women. How was this interpreted? Attendees envisioned individual cabins, with ample greenspace, views, natural light, This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Author Biography
Elizabeth Blundell is a UK-based architect, senior lecturer, and the first year coordinator of the B.A. Architecture course at the University of Brighton. Having spent several years working simultaneously in architectural practices specializing in healthcare design and teaching across subject areas, Blundell is now focusing on research and teaching at the intersection of architecture and medicine. This research draws from a feminist reading of the body, and is interested in participatory interdisciplinary projects. Collaborating for several years with the Department of Midwifery, Blundell is now looking to expand interdisciplinary teaching to those who hold power in clinical space.
that despite the health of the child (and mother) being of paramount concern, the birthing woman often finds her priorities marginalized in a contested birth space. Conventional spaces can be considered extensions of a universalizing disciplinary power, as noted by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, where the school, barracks, hospital-and by extension, the birth room-become a modern analogue of the prison, 9 reinforcing disciplinary mechanisms of control 10 that keep birthing women in subordinate positions. The workshop highlighted this-helping midwifery students see how space was interpreted by birthing women, and how their bodies, too, are "inscribed" 11 by the spaces they occupy. In parallel design students recognized the value of oral "herstories" in a project brief definition-and the potential to inscribe a practice of care through design's corporeal discipline. and acoustic privacy. Cabins were clustered around and connected to a central social space, with quick, easy and discrete access to clinical care spaces as needed. Attendees acknowledged difference, where a sense of security could be found across the spectrum of healthcare provision, from domestic to surgical. Some advocated minimizing the presence of medical tools and equipment-with particular attention paid to the position of the hospital bed, where its dominance sets an expectation of use by midwives, and therefore women ( Figure 3).
The body is central and implicated in health and design disciplines, and the workshop revealed the ways in which buildings provide for, or coerce bodies 8 (mother, baby, partner) into being entangled and interwoven. The storytelling workshop underscored