TIMELESS
Timeless is a fictional pop-up shop created to broaden our understanding of the impact of infertility and fertility technologies on our lives. In 2016 and 2017, Timeless popped up at the Fertility Show and the Future Family Show in London.
The aim of Timeless is to listen, learn and share - there is nothing for sale. We offer a range of personal experiences and insights to read and listen to, alongside ways to share your stories and thoughts. Everything has come from people with direct experience of fertility treatment.
We designed a dedicated pod—a private space for with options of a massage and a guided meditation – where visitors could "take a break" and reflect on their experiences of fertility treatment. We offered a space to reflect on key issues, including kinship, fertility, commercialisation and navigating the landscape of the contemporary fertility industry.
You can find recordings and reflections of this year's Timeless pop up here.
OUTCOMES
Timeless at the Fertility Show was comprised of a Relaxation Pod and a stand with two interactive installations: the “supplement” range and the audio bar.
Timeless was a space that purposefully looked like a fictional brand partly to fit in with the show, partly as a comment on the show, and also as a way to bring to life different areas of the fertility journey.
Relaxation Pod
Audio Bar
Supplement Range
The relaxation pod is a place for visitors to have a short relaxing experience away from the show. Visitors were offered a private space where they could enjoy a foot and/or hand massage as well as a recorded guided meditation. After the session, they were invited to share their reflections on some of the questions they received on a “menu” when they entered the pod. They could share their message in private by recording with the microphone in the pod. The pod accommodated one or two people.
The audio bar offered short sound recordings of stories by previous and current visitors to the Fertility Show – men and women – talking about their experiences, offering advice, and sharing their thoughts on different parts of the process. People recorded their audio clips in our message pod on stand and we played them anonymously here. Some of the clips were pre-recorded with people who went through fertility treatment. Each clip is about a minute long.
The supplement ranges presented themes of interest that are important to the field of Reproductive Studies as well as to people undergoing fertility treatment.
Each of the 8 supplement ranges looked at part of the fertility journey from different perspectives. Each box had a quote from someone’s experience that we grouped into a theme.
Copyright © 2018 Reproductive Sociology
Research Group (ReproSoc)
Department of Sociology
University of Cambridge
All Rights Reserved.