He’s single. His family lives far away. 

Who would drive him to and from the hospital? Who would remember the meds, meals, and follow-ups? Would he be alone through recovery—not just physically, but emotionally?

He started to wonder how many others were quietly going through the same thing. He was surprised to learn it was more than he thought, and not just in acute moments of need like surgery. 

“Am I the only one who feels like this?”

It’s a question that’s become increasingly pressing as close friendships decline across the US and Europe. Social disconnection has now been labeled a public health crisis, with 20 to 34 percent of older adults in Europe and 25 to 29 percent in the US reporting persistent loneliness. Disconnection isn’t just personal—it’s global. And it’s only getting worse, because cultivating care and community doesn’t just happen automatically. It requires directed effort, real investment, and emotional labor.  

These are interactions that may seem small, but are outsized in their importance in our collective social fabric. The friend who remembers your appointment. The sibling who updates the thread. The partner who senses what you need before you ask.

All this work is essential, and it’s so often quiet, unpaid, and invisible. As Rose Hackman, journalist and author of Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power, writes, “Emotional labor is highly valuable. It is an essential form of work that keeps our society and economy running. Our economy and society rely on the unpaid emotional labor of millions who care for and nurture entire families and communities, including children and the elderly.” 

When this labor goes unsupported or unrecognized, it doesn’t scale, leaving more people like Damien to fall through the cracks. 

At IDEO, we asked: What if we could leverage AI to help shoulder the burden of cultivating social infrastructure that is often placed on a single, exhausted friend, parent, or partner? 

What could that look like for Damien?
For you?
For all of us?
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A story in three parts

Damien is sitting in a white-walled hospital room, checked in for an inpatient surgery that requires a multi-day hospital stay. He’s grateful that a friend was able to rearrange their work schedule. Without them, he would’ve had to postpone. The hospital wouldn’t discharge Damien without a guardian driver. 

As the operation approaches, his phone is locked away with the rest of his belongings. No texts. No updates. No contact with friends or family. 

A nurse stops by to let him know that he’ll be heading into surgery in just a few minutes. Suddenly, it hits him. He is alone. All of the people who care about him are far away.

Damien’s closest friend is his former college roommate, Salim. In the past, in their small dorm room, support was simple. A late-night snack, a shared playlist, a long-winding walk through campus.

Salim and Damien don’t live together anymore. Their careers took them to different cities. Their relationship remains close, but phone calls have replaced walks, and the distance feels even more palpable when one of them is struggling. 

Salim is constantly checking in with Damien prior to the surgery—this is support that’s familiar to him. Walking through the anxieties, reassuring him that everything’s going to be fine, distracting him with stories about work and the stuff they used to get up to in college. How much they’ve grown up since then.

Damien’s out of surgery now. Salim’s relieved. He wants to show up, but he doesn’t know how. The type of care that Damien needs now is more ambiguous and also more urgent. He wants Damien to feel the cognitive burden lifted, that someone has his back, anticipating what Damien needs so he can focus on recovering. 

But right now? This all feels like guesswork. 

Flash forward a few days. Damien is being released by the hospital and is finally headed home. The care package curated by Salim, Damien’s family, and his closest friends made him smile when it was next to his bed after he woke up from surgery. The cornucopia of voice memos, flowers, chocolates, cards with sprawling handwriting, and stuffed animals surrounded his bedside table like paparazzi. It was a collective reminder of being held in place by the people who love him.  

But as Damien and his friend pull up to his apartment, a different feeling starts to settle in—a nagging anxiety. There won’t be nurses, check-ins, or doctor visits. The apartment is quieter than he remembers. He’s worried about his recovery, but also the loneliness that accompanies it. The assorted gifts were an in-the-moment celebration, but what about the days and weeks ahead? It’s one thing to be there in an emergency; it’s another to build a sustained recovery care network that far outlasts an ER visit.
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Design Interventions

So much of the effective care networks that hold us together rely on the ambient and the unspoken. Knowing you have someone in your corner looking out for you, who knows what it takes to get you through a crisis. But this requires new tools for staying in touch, ones that account for our present, more socially fragmented reality. 

Here are some of the ways we’d like to redesign these moments to increase connection.
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Concept 1: Trust Band

Think back to Damien as he’s wheeled away into the OR. What is it that he needs most at that moment? A way to stay connected with the circle of people he trusts the most. The knowledge that he’s being looked after by people who love him. 

The Trust Band is an AI-embedded wristband designed for critical situations. It’s provided wherever care is most needed—whether that’s a hospital or a disaster relief station. Activated by multimodal inputs, such as gaze or voice, it allows Damien to share his real-time status and personal data on his own terms with the people he trusts most.

The Trust Band allows Damien to share his health data with the people he’s closest to, just as easily as he shares his location in Find My Friends. It’s not about broadcasting everything like on social media. It’s an ambient signal, sent on his own terms—to the right people, at the right time, in the right way—so those who care about him can show up when and how it matters most to him.

With the Trust Band, Damien can share his vitals, post-operation status, or discharge time with a single gesture, keeping everyone in the loop even if they’re far away.

Concept 2: Community on Call

Now, Salim.

He finds himself in the role of a caregiver with little direction or instruction about how to be helpful. This is a common barrier. Perhaps we feel that we don’t know someone well enough to offer help in a crisis, that our aid efforts might fall short or backfire. Maybe it’s more of a matter of the specifics of the crisis. Having never gone through one like that ourselves, we don’t know what kind of help is meaningful. These all-too-human anxieties are what Community On Call is designed to assuage. 

With Community On Call, Damien has pre-set his care preferences. These include which care gestures are most meaningful, which love languages resonate with him, what to do, and, sometimes more importantly, what not to do to help him through his recovery. 

So now, wherever Salim is, he can take thoughtful measures to help because Damien has already shared what good care looks like, such as:

• Sending a voice note to greet him when he wakes up.
  
  
• Joining a rotating meal train coordinated across his care circle.
  
  
• Contributing to a care package, tailored to his needs and ready the moment he’s out of surgery.

Companies are already collecting and harvesting user data to power targeted ads, sell products, and segment audiences. But what if we were to consider data beyond its commercial applications? What if we could use it to activate a care community in times of crisis?

Concept 3: Aid Arrangements

Back to Damien.

The challenge to fighting isolation is that it’s a feeling that persists beyond the big moment.

The surgery is over, Damien’s gone home, and now he’s faced with an extended period of time where he’s still struggling but feels as if everyone who was there for him in the beginning has moved on. 

So how can we make it easier for Damien to stay connected? What if there were a more open, expansive mode of communication than a text thread?

Aid Arrangements is a vibrant, multimodal “get well” arrangement. A living and interactive bouquet of messages, voice notes, video recordings, songs, and memes, it’s an exploration of new, more modern forms of communication. 

When Damien opens his Aid Arrangements, the bouquet pulses and a petal unfurls. There’s a message waiting for him when he’s ready. In that moment, he’s reminded that the people who love him most dearly are here with him, across time zones, across oceans, and mountains.

He’s not alone.

An invitation

We’re lonelier and more disconnected than ever. Community can’t be treated like a commodity, something we simply consume. Building, defending, and sustaining it requires effort. It requires emotional labor. In moments of acute stress or crisis, this labor becomes even harder to carry alone.

Let’s offload and share some of that weight using technology that helps us show up more easily, more fully, and as our best selves while reknitting our social fabric.

Let’s prototype the village together.
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This thought piece was co-created with a community of IDEOer designers, technologists, caregivers, and systems thinkers.