ABOUT

Stiliyana Minkovska is a qualified architect (ARB/RIBA) and a female-centred healthcare designer, who practises across the wide intercourses of art, architectural, interior, product design, making and design research.

She received an MA Architecture degree from the Royal College of Art in 2016, where her dissertation was awarded with distinction. Her thesis project focused on pregnancy and childbirth, which was rooted in her personal experience as a young mother. The proposal looked at the deinstitutionalisation of birth, which occurs within the hospital environment in western societies, by turning the birthing mother from a medical object into a celebratory matriarchal reproductive economy through spatial qualities and design.

She qualified as an Architect (ARB) in 2018 from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

She completed the Designers in Residence programme with the Design Museum, where she advanced further the research commenced at the RCA. She designed three progressive elements of offerings, which work around the comfort and wellbeing of the birthing mother. The immersive alternative childbirth environment called Ultima Thule was exhibited at the Design Museum in London from January until July 2020. The triptych was then donated to St Thomas’ hospital, where Stiliyana’s birth journey commenced in 2016, to their Home from Home Birth Centre and where they reside until present at Birth Suite 29.

Her interest in healthcare with particular emphasis in the maternity wards and the birth centres has also been reflected in her artwork. She exhibited a series of Erotic Kit for Internal Selfies to capture the antenatal and postnatal conditions of the maternal-female body as a place and as a cosmos for the developing baby. This body of work led her to re-designing the vaginal speculum through series of micro grants with Imperial College London such as the Hackstarter and the Discovery Fund.

Most recently, Stiliyana graduated with MRes in Healthcare & Design with the Royal College of Art & Imperial College London in June 2022 and her personal project developed during the course was awarded with distinction. During the two-year-long course she founded M.O.T.H.E.R. &Design - Midwifery & Obstetric Transformations in Healthcare Environments through Research &Design. It exists as a vehicle offering a set of creative problem-solving lens to one of the most profound experiences and the most common reason for hospital admission in England – childbirth.

Currently, she practices as a healthcare service designer and Patient & Public Voices Lead for the Maternity Voices Partnerships in the North West NHS England & Improvement. In parallel, she runs her own design studios which at preset focuses on the future of the speculum which is not a speculum