Motherhood is shifting from the home to boardrooms, stages, politics and now, even to the most unexpected place of all: Space. NASA's proposed strategy for the International Space Station took it one step further, and theZISO is asking what it all means for our future?

Tiny headphones protecting small ears from the roar of the crowd, at one of the biggest music festivals in the world. Towards the end of her triumphant set at Coachella 2026, Noga Erez, Israeli artist and musician, had her toddler daughter brought on stage. She held her in front of thousands of voices still singing back her words, the excitement of the crowd electric around them both. Her music and life partner, Ori Rousso, standing right behind them.

A few years earlier, head to toe in red, in a custom Loewe jumpsuit unzipped just enough and a glossy leather breastplate, Rihanna made an iconic Super Bowl half time show performance, treating her bump as a fashion statement. It was the most watched halftime show in Super Bowl history at the time, with 121 million viewers. Over the years, Rihanna made Motherhood fully visible across every dimension of her public life- from launching feminine and sexy maternity lines for Savage X Fenty, to her children in campaigns, embracing her mother identity in her public life, naturally.

Visible, integrated, unapologetic, unfiltered. Motherhood is appearing everywhere now, and with a different kind of presence. In music, in fashion, in art, across culture, the mother figure is surfacing as a force — an expansion of identity, redirecting everything toward creating continuity for something beyond herself.

The UN General Assembly hall is one of the most formally powerful rooms, filled with world leaders and diplomats, and in September 2018, a 3-month-old baby named Neve had her own UN identification badge, reading "first baby". Her mother was about to deliver a speech- business as usual. New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern - the second world leader to give birth while in office, walked into that room with her daughter and her partner. When Ardern came down from the podium, she found her baby had made it onto the assembly floor. "It was just delightful to see her there," she told CNN. When asked why she brought her at all, her answer was: "I want to normalize it."

March 25, 2020. Hours before New Zealand went into full COVID lockdown, Ardern opened her laptop at home and went live on Facebook. "Excuse the casual attire," she said, "it can be a messy business putting toddlers to bed so I'm not in my work clothes." Then she addressed her nation about a global pandemic. Academics later studied her approach and found that her open, honest communication and expressions of care created what they called "a team of five million" against the virus. New Zealand's strict national lockdown strategy was later shown to have led to an 80% lower rate of infection than that of the U.S., saving an estimated 20,000 lives.

At a time when women still make up fewer than a quarter of all elected officials worldwide, Ardern's choices weren't just personal. They were a statement about what leadership could look like and what it is greatly missing these days: the care of a mother.

From world leaders to high-fashion houses, a real day in a mother’s life is campaign- worthy; the camera moves as if seen through the quiet, observant eyes of a child watching his mother drift through her day, catching the small things that every woman can recognize herself in. For Jacquemus’s November 2025 bag launch Valérie, named after the designer's late mother, an entire campaign was built around the texture of an ordinary woman's day — the feminine, the functional, the tender and the hurried, all held together in one structured bag with leather charms shaped like lemons and carrots from his family's farm.

Charlotte Le Bon, the face of the campaign, moves through her day the way real women do (vs. the usual supermodel unattainability)-  a professional, a woman, a mother - all at the same time. She returns from errands with dry cleaning over one arm and groceries in the other, needing to use the toilet before she can put anything down. Drawing a flower in the margin of her notebook while setting up a meeting and her bag strap caught on the door handle on the way out. Jacquemus keeps circling this same feminine and family energy, and this June takes it a generation further with a new campaign “A day with Pamela Anderson and her sons”.

And then there is our very own theZISO mother, Michal Ziso, who gave a keynote speech on stage at the CXFest in Berlin, almost eight months pregnant. “Pregnancy forces a different kind of attention- to things the body usually handles or does invisibly, to needs that don't announce themselves until they arrive. Everything familiar becomes something to consciously navigate”. Michal recalls her steps- instead of her usual walking back and forth using the entire stage as her domain, she asked for a chair just in case. She addressed it right off the bat, saying that she usually speaks fast, asking the audience not to blink, but this time breathing is heavier and she speaks slower, treating it like a storytelling pace experiment.

She brought herself onto that stage, as both the keynote speaker and the mother-to-be,  and addressed the audience with exactly that awareness. Because this is part of her life, of every woman who chooses it, and it can also bring them to familiar environments with a new set of tools. Expansion. Literally.

Motherhood is manifested after a history of being quietly veiled, but beneath this cultural moment, a structural pattern emerges. One relevant to nature, human systems, technology, and to decisions being made beyond our planet. A mature, stable host system provides shelter, nurture, resources, and validation to smaller, less proven entities- allowing them to grow, test themselves, and eventually detach and operate independently. In Shel Silverstein's children's book 'The Giving Tree', a tree spends its entire life giving to a boy it loves- shade when he is young, apples to sell, branches to build a house, and finally its trunk to sit on when he is old. The boy takes, grows, and moves on.  And now, Motherhood is becoming the framework 400 kilometers above Earth. 

The International Space Station (ISS) is approaching the end of its operational life. For more than two decades, the space station has served as a world class orbital laboratory, enabling more than 4,000 research investigations and hosting almost 300 astronauts from 26 countries. 

Thirty years ago, space was a “state enterprise”, but the next era belongs to private companies. As part of that, four ventures are currently building the next commercial space stations: Axiom Space, Starlab (Voyager Technologies with Airbus), Orbital Reef (Blue Origin with Sierra Space), and Vast Space. NASA is actively working to stimulate a commercial orbital economy through private astronaut missions, commander seat sales, joint missions and prize-based awards. 

But space is slower than forecasts. The commercial stations won’t be ready on time and with the ISS scheduled to retire in 2030, the gap in human presence in space is becoming a real future scenario we cannot afford.

So NASA raised a suggestion of a new approach- rather than shutting down the ISS on schedule and hoping the market catches up, the agency will extend its life and give it a new role. At its "Ignition" event in late March 2026, NASA unveiled a new LEO (low-earth orbit) strategy: a government-owned Core Module attaches to the existing station, followed by commercial modules that develop and validate their capabilities using ISS infrastructure- power, robotics, crew systems and operational knowledge, before detaching into independent orbit. 

NASA's proposed strategy is not about the end of the ISS’s mission, but could be the beginning of a different one. A shift in Mission Identity. A mature system, built on decades of infrastructure and knowledge, redirecting itself toward making the next thing possible. The Motherhood system.

From the music industry to politics, from fashion to space systems - Motherhood has become much more than a trend. It sits at the intersection of several forces converging at once: social media has played a massive role, transforming everyday Motherhood into visible, relatable content, creating communities built around honesty. At the same time, a broader cultural exhaustion with performance and perfection is setting in. Institutions are losing trust and the logic of endless growth is showing its limits. Authenticity is the new currency.

What Motherhood offers, as a function, is exactly that: compassion, care, patience and the ability to hold complexity and still move forward. It is rising because it is needed- a sophisticated way of operating in any system. A new kind of nurturing connection that may be exactly what our chaotic world needs. Society is beginning to understand something it has long taken for granted- appreciating mothers in everything they are, and everything they do, is not enough. Recognising the value of Motherhood to all aspects of society is. 

theZISO chooses to put the spotlight on the forces that allow continuity - on earth and in space. We ask ourselves: What changes about the questions we ask at the beginning of a design process if the Motherhood function is the design brief from day one? And what it unlocks if we do?

In space, every mission and outpost is defined with an operational lifespan. The ISS was originally planned for 15 years, habitat concepts are designed around mission duration. What if every space infrastructure was designed from its first blueprint with a different question: what will I host, and how will I enable existence after me? What will the future look like when I will need to evolve, support, and then disappear? How can we design instead of an end date- a transition date? 

An interesting example of the Motherhood system design is AIME's IMAGI-NATION. AIME, the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience, built as a multi-disciplinary network for humanity, launched IMAGI-NATION:  a virtual nation, designed to fuse the best of humanity and rewire the unhealthy systems that underpin our world.

IMAGI-NATION has an intentional death date: March 2033. When that date arrives, it will cease operations and return its intellectual property back to nature and the ecosystem around it. The strategy is built around a specific logic- to shift focus from survival to legacy, to model natural cycles of renewal, and to pass on every tool, methodology, and learning to whoever carries the work forward. "This isn't an ending," AIME says, "but a powerful act of regeneration and knowledge transfer."

On earth, countless systems are already operating as mothers- holding things up, making everything possible, without that role ever being made deliberate. Living environments, institutions, companies, accelerators, education systems. They host without fully recognizing they are hosting.

These are questions theZISO is now pursuing- across space, living environments, tech innovation and across every system designed to hold what comes next. Motherhood functions as a methodology and part of our new design brief.