The following was an entry for the Design for Pregnancy Challenge 2018
Design Brief
Encouraging Active Role of Men in Pregnancy Journey:
Women's pregnancy journeys are shaped and influenced by patriarchal socio-cultural practices. Imagine, design interventions that will encourage men to move beyond roles of just being ‘providers’ and ‘transporters’ and reify gender norms.
Proposed Solution
A mobile application that keeps all the immediate stakeholders in the current context connected - actively or passively while also facilitating communication and coordination between the dominant as well as the non-dominant members of the patriarchal order in a family plus the representatives of the health care system.
Why a mobile application?
A women’s pregnancy journey is a very crucial journey for not just the women, but also for the other members in the family, especially father. The father bears a equal responsibility in all the phases of the journey, from sharing the responsibilities to sharing the emotional trauma.
We believe, it's the innate nature of men of being a PROTECTOR that somewhere burdens him with other responsibilities such as being a bread earner, maintaining a tradeoff between work and home, being strong all the time etc. Even the fact that men are bit reluctant to let women of the family to talk to “stranger” Health Workers can be seen a result of this nature only. The Briefing and talking to people from research team also showed that men are primarily concerned for their spouses but due to to societal infrastructure of survival and cultural practices, their communication at this crucial time of life is sporadic at times.
Most men have a smartphone and women at least a feature phone. This creates a space for a technological intervention that facilitates an uninterrupted communication between all the immediate stakeholders in the pregnancy journey. This will allow a constant care and a platform for sharing of responsibilities and information among the stakeholders.
