From Seekers to Designers of Dignity: Notes on the Futures of Care

Opening Breath

Co-host Dr. Monique Smith—Founder & Executive Director of Health DesignED at Emory University School of Medicine—opened the Conference with an alternate-nostril breathing exercise. The shared inhale–exhale grounded the room, signaled psychological safety, and reminded us that every design decision must honor the body’s most basic rhythms.

That calm focus set the stage for the next one-and-a-half days.

From Curbside to Community

Heartbeat on the Street, a two-hour design sprint led by Katie Abbott (Co-Founder & COO) and Dr. Manisha Sharma (Co-Founder & Chief Care Innovation Officer) at MitoKhon, split participants into three breakout groups—Suburban, Urban, and Rural. Guided by six anchors—social-medicine basics, heart-centered insight, innovation within regulation, ripple-effect inspiration, cross-sector collaboration, and an open “?” for community-defined needs—each team sketched a Street Medicine + Nourishment program.

Our table traced family caregiver Maria Lopez’s journey from fearful newcomer to empowered neighborhood advocate, surfacing levers like transportation, childcare, and micro-credentials that turn caregivers from recipients of help into co-designers.

Story as Infrastructure

Picking up that local momentum, futures strategist Hillary Carey of Just Visions supplied the narrative voltage:

Vision, Carey reminded us, is tension—“the stretch between what is and what could be,” echoing futurist Ruud van der Helm. When caregivers sketch futures aloud—“What if hospice intake felt like a hotel check-in?”—they hand designers and clinicians a map worth following.

Lunch-break aside: Carey shared that her own lodestar is racial justice in design—proof that choosing one cause and going deep keeps big futures work grounded in daily practice.

Designing in an Ethic of Care — and Belonging

Social-worker-turned-designer Rachael Dietkus, founder of Social Workers Who Design, grounded the conversation:

Drawing on UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute, Dietkus challenged teams to recognize, protect, cultivate, tend, honor, and celebrate care at every touchpoint.

Earlier, Conference co-host Chris McCarthy of ILN reinforced the point with a story of his mother’s long hallway wait—proof that dignity is decided in the margins of care.

Hope, then, is not naïve; it is design fuel.

Public Health at the Margins

Later, Dr. Fred Rachman of AllianceChicago convened an open-space session, ”Strategies to Broaden Appreciation of the Importance of Supports and to Engage in Evidence-Based Public-Health-Level Activity,” a few key points:

• Modernize messaging and meet audiences where they scroll (see Dr. Syra Madad’s Critical Health Voices).
• Co-design solutions with Community Health Workers (CHWs) and other trusted locals.
• Elevate Patient Advocacy and other community-rooted certification paths.
• Quantify and communicate ROI to employers, payers, and policymakers—and pair those numbers with values-based framing, because, as Meghan Bausone of Medusa Design Lab noted with abortion access, financial arguments alone can still be overridden by ideology.

Matthew McCurdy of BLKHLTH stressed that disparities widen at the margins; renewal must start where vulnerability begins. For more on community-driven health infrastructure, see “AI, Care, and Community: Insights from Blooming Day 2025.”

The Four Archetypes

The auditorium fell silent as Susannah Fox, former CTO of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, delivered the closing keynote. Her pared-down deck introduced four archetypes:

Fox—author of Rebel Health—mapped the social circuitry of change:

• Seekers dig into Reddit rabbit holes at 2 a.m. to decode a parent’s cryptic lab results.
• Networkers spin up WhatsApp threads so cousins on three continents can swap wound-care hacks in real time.
• Solvers turning engineering skills into DIY diabetes tools for a child.
• Champions persuade HR to extend back-up FMLA or convince an insurer to cover a critical device.

Most caregivers cycle through all four roles in a single week—sometimes in a single day. Yet none of it works, Fox warned, when need and know-how never meet:

For caregivers, visibility isn’t branding—it’s survival.

Threads to Take Home

Progress in health and caregiving is less a pipeline of breakthroughs than a braid of people, story, and ethics:

• Embodiment: Begin with the body—breath, posture, sensory cues—because physiological safety is the floor on which every higher-order interaction stands.
• People: Map the Seeker–Networker–Solver–Champion ecosystem around any condition you care about.
• Story: Paint the future so vividly that colleagues can step into it and start rearranging the present.
• Systems: Pair micro-interactions with macro-advocacy; local hacks only scale sustainably when policy and infrastructure move in parallel.
• Shared ROI: Frame dignity as an economic engine—lower readmits, stronger retention, resilient communities—so payers and employers see themselves in the solution.
• Ethics: Audit every micro-interaction for dignity—and for belonging; design is happening there whether you notice or not.

None of this requires permission—only practice.

PS. Still need a feel for Design for Dignity? Pulling into the parking lot approaching midnight, co-host Amy Heymans of Beneficent graciously greeted me and handed me a welcome kit for my dorm room. My roommate? Jason Cunningham—a physician who understood “systems thinking” and “human-centered design” more than most designers I know.