Design beyond the physical: how motherhood changed my creative practice
It was 6:27 AM on a Tuesday.
I was rocking our six-month-old daughter back to sleep after an early morning feeding, her tiny body curled against my chest. As her breathing steadied, I gazed at her face, illuminated by the soft Hatch nightlight. In that moment, with notifications silenced and my laptop in another room, I felt a clarity that had eluded me through countless strategy meetings and client presentations.
As I held her, the weight of being responsible for someone’s entire childhood hit me with unexpected force. Then came a lightness as I recalled one of my favorite, go-to scriptures: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” Suddenly, I understood I was participating in a more profound design process (childhood, motherhood, marriage) beyond the strategic ventures and apps I was trained to create. This seemed more eternal, potent, and connected than anything I had designed in my career.
The realization accumulated over time in quiet moments like this one, eventually becoming impossible to ignore. I was applying my design skills to something that couldn’t be wireframed or prototyped in the traditional sense, yet required the same attentiveness to detail, creative problem-solving, iterative improvement, and co-creation … only with infinitely higher stakes.
A brief background
My journey to this moment began years earlier. In 2021, as the world emerged from a pandemic, I moved from IBM Watson Health to Citi Ventures. On paper, it was the perfect career progression: better compensation, remote flexibility, and continuing my work applying racial equity to social impact areas, transitioning from health to finance. A year later, I joined the tech and venture build unit at Boston Consulting Group (BCG X) as a Senior Strategic Designer, which allowed me to apply my strategic design experience across a broader range of domains.
Before motherhood, I constructed an identity around designing solutions to complex problems. At IBM Watson Health, I helped design platforms for drug discovery and clinical trials, translating behavioral science into digital health solutions. At Citi Ventures, I applied strategic design to financial innovation. Then at BCG X, I led cross-functional teams through innovation workshops for global clients.
I remember a stakeholder meeting at BCG X in March 2023, just one month before my daughter’s birth. Presenting before executives with my pregnancy and energy limits hidden behind a Zoom screen, I felt the familiar thrill of orchestrating collective intelligence toward breakthrough insights. During a break, I slipped into my bedroom to call my husband about our postpartum plans. As I switched between discussing parental leave schedules and returning to present complex strategy recommendations, I experienced the first collision between these design worlds.
In that moment, I still believed I could seamlessly integrate my professional design practice and maternal responsibilities. I had no concept of how motherhood would require me to apply design thinking to my life in ways I hadn’t anticipated … redesigning not just my schedule, but my very definition of what constituted meaningful work.
Redefining success (and its measurements)
In April 2023, our daughter was born, and my understanding of accomplishment fundamentally shifted. As a designer, I’d always focused on metrics like user engagement, conversion rates, and client satisfaction. Now, entirely new metrics emerged: developmental milestones became as compelling as project completions, and my daughter’s growing awareness felt as significant as any client presentation.
I remember the morning she first recognized her name, just five months old, lying on her play mat as I folded laundry nearby. “Adelyn,” I said casually, and her entire body responded: arms waving, legs kicking, face lighting up with recognition. That moment of connection struck me with profound satisfaction … much more so than any successful user interface or client presentation I’d helped design.
That same week, I received news that a research paper I’d contributed to was accepted for publication. Previously, this would have been cause for celebration: a clear marker of professional advancement. Instead, I skimmed the email between feedings and diaper changes, feeling strangely disconnected from the achievement. The paper still mattered, but differently. It was just one element in a larger landscape of meaning rather than a central pillar of my identity.
I was experiencing a fundamental redesign of my value system.
The metrics I’d used to measure success throughout my career suddenly seemed incomplete. Like any good designer, I wasn’t abandoning previous methodologies entirely, but iterating on them, integrating new variables, testing different approaches, and listening carefully to previously ignored feedback channels.
Prototyping family life
Like any complex design challenge, balancing professional identity with family life required extensive prototyping. I attempted various configurations when I returned to work that September. This included hiring a nanny, working remotely from home to continue breastfeeding, and launching Research With Moms during maternity leave.
Research With Moms began as a simple list of maternal health studies, partly motivated by my desire to create a professional “bridge” between BCG and whatever might come next. Even with my adjunct professorship at the University of Texas, I felt parenting alone wasn’t “enough” … I needed external validation beyond motherhood. The venture quickly attracted interest from academic institutions and startups, and I pivoted from a recruitment agency model to a maternal health design studio for more substantive impact.
Yet the fundamental design constraint remained: time. As a full-time mother, I could only work during limited windows (early mornings or late evenings), constantly choosing between professional development, self-care, and nurturing my marriage. Every designer knows that constraints ultimately determine success, but this constraint proved insurmountable with my current approach. In January 2024, I made a design decision that surprised even me: I left BCG to focus more on our growing family. In our culture of “leaning in” and achievement across all domains, I chose presence, recognizing that this particular life stage required a different design approach.
After stepping back from BCG X, I continued prototyping. I maintained Research With Moms as a design studio, but still struggled with the finite nature of time and energy. One evening in March 2025, exhausted after a full day of childcare and attempting to complete a client deliverable at 10:30pm, I realized I was failing my own design principles, creating an experience that served neither my professional nor maternal aspirations adequately.
In April 2025, pregnant with our son, I made the difficult decision to wrap up Research With Moms; not from lack of interest or potential, but from recognizing that my current capacity couldn’t support both worlds simultaneously. The decision brought both grief and relief. Grief from letting go of an ambitious career path, but relief that I no longer had to carry that weight, at least not now. My adjunct teaching position provided sufficient intellectual engagement while allowing me to prioritize family presence.
Designing an integrated future
This journey has transformed not just how I parent, but how I approach design itself. I’ve come to see the artificial separation between professional and personal domains as a design flaw in our society, a false dichotomy that prevents us from creating truly integrated human experiences.
Throughout this process, I’ve also questioned cultural assumptions about independence. Our society celebrates fierce self-sufficiency, particularly for women. Yet I’ve found value in designing for interdependence. My partnership with my husband, Brannon, leverages our different strengths, along with community support and childcare arrangements that create space for individual pursuits.
What I’m developing now isn’t just a temporary pause in my career but a different kind of design expertise: an embodied understanding of human development, patience for processes that can’t be rushed, and appreciation for forms of value that resist quantification. When I eventually expand my professional engagement, these insights won’t be peripheral but central to my work.
Perhaps the most radical aspect of my journey isn’t stepping away from corporate structures, but recognizing that the principles of good design apply just as powerfully to family life as to professional projects. My evolving design practice now encompasses the spiritual and relational dimensions of human experience: designing not just what appears on screens, but what emerges in the intangible, sacred spaces between people who care for one another.
It’s a form of creation invisible on a resume but indelibly imprinted in those 6:27am moments of clarity that shape both my children’s development and my own.
