ABOUT

Stiliyana Minkovska is an ARB/RIBA-qualified architect and female-centred healthcare designer working at the intersection of architecture, art, spatial practice, product design, and design research. Her work focuses on re-imagining maternity and gynaecological environments through feminist, experiential, and patient-led lenses.

She completed her MA in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in 2016, graduating with distinction. Her thesis, grounded in her lived experience as a young mother, explored pregnancy and childbirth as spatial, cultural, and political conditions. The project examined the deinstitutionalisation of birth within Western hospital systems, proposing alternative environments that reframe the birthing mother from a medicalised object into an empowered, celebratory matriarch—supported through spatial quality, ritual, and care-led design.

Stiliyana qualified as an Architect in 2018 through the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She later joined the Design Museum’s Designers in Residence programme, where she further developed her RCA research into contemporary childbirth environments. This resulted in Ultima Thule—an immersive, alternative birth environment comprising three progressive design elements focused on maternal comfort and wellbeing. The project was exhibited at the Design Museum, London, from January to July 2020, and subsequently donated to St Thomas’ Hospital’s Home from Home Birth Centre, where it remains permanently installed in Birth Suite 29.

Her research-led practice extends beyond architecture into art and intimate medical product design. In her artwork Erotic Kit for Internal Selfies, Stiliyana examines the antenatal and postnatal maternal body as both a site and a cosmos for new life. This inquiry directly informed the redesign of the vaginal speculum, a project supported by grants from Imperial College London, Innovate UK, and multiple awards. Through this work, she challenges long-standing medical instruments by foregrounding care, consent, and embodied experience.

In 2022, she graduated with distinction from the MRes in Healthcare & Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. During the programme, she founded M.O.T.H.E.R. &Design (Midwifery & Obstetric Transformations in Healthcare Environments through Research & Design), a research-driven platform and design methodology addressing childbirth as both one of the most profound human experiences and the most common reason for hospital admission in England.

Stiliyana currently works as a design advisor and serves as the Patient & Public Voices Lead for Maternity and Neonatal Care at NHS England. In parallel, she leads a FemTech startup operating in stealth mode, developing a new generation of gynaecological health technologies. The work begins with a radical reimagining of women’s healthcare—starting with an instrument that rejects its own lineage—aimed at redefining clinical care through dignity, agency, and embodied trust.