Damien, a 33 year old, found out he needed surgery, and his first thought wasn’t about pain. It was about everything he’d have to manage alone.

He’s single. His family lives far away. 

Who would drive him to and from the hospital? Who would remember the meds, meals, 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 that it was more than you’d think, 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 more and more pressing as, across the U.S. and Europe, close friendships are in decline. Social disconnection has now been labeled a public health crisis, with 20–34 percent of older adults in Europe and 25–29 percent in the U.S. reporting persistent loneliness (Peter J Na., et al.). 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 labor.  

These are interactions that might 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 wrote, “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. 

So at IDEO we asked: what if we could leverage AI to help carry this heavy weight of cultivating social infrastructure that’s so often placed on a single exhausted friend, parent, or partner? 

What could that look like for Damien?
For you?
For all of us?

A Story in 3 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 a friend was able to manage 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 time of the operation nears, his phone is locked away with your other 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 roommate from college, Salim. In the past, in their 50-square-foot 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 is still close, but phone calls have replaced walks and the distance feels extra 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 and 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? That all feels like guesswork. 

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

But as Damien pulls up to his apartment, a different feeling starts to settle in –  a nagging anxiety. There won’t be nurses, there won’t be check-ins or doctor visits. The house is quieter than he remembers.  He’s worried about his recovery, but also the loneliness that accompanies it. The assorted gifts packed tightly in his car are 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 care network for the recovery that far outlasts an emergency room visit. 

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. 

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 and provided wherever care is most needed – whether that be a hospital or a disaster relief station. Activated by multimodal inputs like gaze or voice, it allows you to share your real-time status and personal data on your own terms with the people you trust most.

The Trust Band would allow you to share your health data with the people you trust most the same way you share your location in Find My Friends? It’s not about broadcasting everything like on social media. It’s an ambient signal, sent on your terms—to the right people, at the right time, in the right way—so those who care about you can show up when and how it matters most to you.

With the Trust Band you could share your vitals, post operation status, or discharge time with the people you trust the most, with one gesture on your watch. Keep your people in the loop even if they’re far away.

It’s a way to provide an update or alert to the people you care about so they know how to show up for you, figuratively or literally.

Concept 2: Community on Call

Now, Salim.

He finds himself in the position of a caregiver with little direction or instruction about how to be helpful. This is a barrier that we’ve all faced. Maybe we feel that we don’t know someone well enough to help in a crisis, that our aid efforts might fall flat 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 already set his care preferences ahead of time. What kinds of gestures are most meaningful, which love languages resonate, what to do and, sometimes more importantly, what not to do. 

So now, wherever Salim is, he can take thoughtful measures to help because Damien has already shared what care means to him, like:

• Sending a voice note to greet him when he wakes up
  
  
• Join a rotating meal train coordinated across his care circle
  
  
• Contribute 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 think of data beyond its commercial usage? What if we could use it to activate your 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 ends, you go home, and then are faced with an extended period of time where you might still be struggling but feel as if everyone who was there for you in the beginning has moved on. 

So how can we expand the ease with which we stay connected? What if we had a more open, expansive mode of communication than a text thread?

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

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: 

The people that love him most dearly are here with him, across timezones, across oceans, 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 just consume. Building it, defending it, and sustaining it requires effort. It requires 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.

This thought piece was co-created with a community of IDEOers: designers, technologists, caregivers, and systems thinkers all working together. 

Let’s prototype the village together.