#84: designing a system that withstands variability
what life support systems can teach us about designing a care team
Good morning,
Today, I’m sharing an essay on something I’ve been thinking about a lot, but couldn’t find the right metaphor for. I’m still not sure if this is the perfect metaphor but in the spirit of more experimental writing, let’s just dive in!
A few weeks ago, I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a few months and knowing that I freelance, she asked how work and childcare are going these days. When I told her we have a different childcare situation every day of the week—multiple nannies + nanny share + daycare + me—she looked at me and said, “Wait. That’s not real. How do you end up with something like that?”
My other friend, who had witnessed me build this bizarre schedule over the last year, said, “One at a time.”
And that’s the truth. If I’m being frank, it’s a very absurd set-up from the outside, but it works perfectly for a person who is patching together many kinds of work.
So I decided to unpack what it takes to design an incredibly flexible care team and schedule. In other words, what I’m calling a care lattice.
To explain how it works, I want to walk you through a metaphor.
How Complex Life-Support Systems Work
[note: this section was developed in collaboration with my CM]
Imagine you’re inside a sealed vessel—a spacecraft, a submarine, a space station. You’re floating through an environment that can’t sustain human life on its own. There’s no breathable air outside. No heat. No pressure. No margin for error. Everything that keeps you alive—oxygen, temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, power—is being managed by an internal network of machines known as the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which is designed to maintain equilibrium.
These systems were developed for NASA missions in which redundancy and adaptability are non-negotiable. If one part fails—say, the oxygen scrubber—another component must compensate immediately. The system can’t afford to collapse because the environment isn’t livable. So, it uses incredibly detailed inputs (breath, sweat, movement) to create feedback that stabilizes the whole system.
Now I’m no expert on these systems, but once I got the gist of it, I started to feel like it was a surprisingly decent analogy for my care lattice…or care support system, if you will.
Obviously my circumstances are not dire, but, in a world in which caregiving options are wildly under-designed (and inaccessible to many), this systemic approach to the care team or “village” feels important.
The Village Isn’t Dead, It’s Been Disaggregated
You’ve probably read a lot about the loss of “the village” that kids used to grow up with, with family and neighbors working to together to raise them and back each other up. And if you’re in a city, you’re probably starting to see innovation in the care space that is trying to build products and services to recreate these options. Here’s how I understand what happened to “the village”:
Family structure changes: Fewer families today live in multi-generational homes. Many parents are having children later in life, which means their own parents may be aging, unavailable, or geographically distant. Even when those relationships are strong, the physical support that once came from being nearby is harder to sustain. Same-city living, especially in high-cost areas, isn’t a given anymore. Even when there’s family, there’s not always proximity.
The infrastructure isn’t there: Full-time childcare is often as expensive as rent or a mortgage. Waitlists for subsidized programs can stretch for years. Informal support networks—friends, neighbors, extended family—are often juggling their own jobs, kids, health issues, or burnout. Care is underfunded, under-respected, and logistically out of reach for far too many families.
Our time structures no longer make space for care: Modern workweeks are rigid, fast, and often solitary. I remember visiting family in India as a kid and watching my uncle leave for work in the morning—but return home every day for lunch. Even if it was just to eat, his presence created a rhythm in the home that made care and togetherness a priority. Wildly different than a work life in which you purchase an overpriced meal to eat at your desk.
The result is a care environment that’s not just under-resourced—but also desynchronized. Everyone is running their own schedule. Now, this isn’t to take away from the very real economic and social issues that need to be solved for. But for the sake of today, let’s just address the design perspective.
Life Support Systems: A Primer
[again, collaboration nod to CM here]
In the realm of space exploration, life support systems are engineered to maintain a habitable environment within spacecraft. These systems are responsible for regulating air composition, temperature, humidity, and waste management, ensuring the crew’s survival in the vacuum of space. The International Space Station (ISS), for instance, employs an Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) that recycles air and water, maintaining a stable internal environment despite external fluctuations.
Key components of these systems include:
Atmosphere Revitalization: Maintaining optimal levels of oxygen and removing carbon dioxide.
Water Recovery: Recycling wastewater into potable water.
Thermal Control: Regulating temperature and humidity.
Waste Management: Processing human waste safely.
Here’s the key point for our purposes: These systems are designed with redundancy and adaptability in mind, allowing for continuous operation even when individual components fail.
Designing a Care Lattice (aka Dynamic Care Team)
Redundancy and adaptability are probably the two biggest things MISSING from caregiving today. If your nanny gets sick and grandma isn’t nearby, you have to take off work. If your kid gets sick and can’t go to daycare, you have to take off work, etc.
For someone whose work life is highly variable and spaced apart (ie: the work I do on a Monday happens only on Monday; if I lose a caregiver on a Monday, that project has to be punted to the next week or it’ll domino effect the other projects taking place the rest of the week,) designing for adaptability is crucial.
At the same time, caregiving is a highly personalized and tender task; and as a new parent with a very young child, I can’t just slot in any backup, at least not yet. So, designing for trust and dependability are also crucial.
So here is my design prompt: How can I design a care lattice that is a dynamic, interconnected network of caregivers and resources that sustain everyone’s well-being?
And here were my design principles (keep in mind, I’m reverse-engineering what I did through this metaphor, I was not this clear when I began).
Design Principles of a Care Lattice:
Redundancy: Multiple caregiving options (family, friends, professional services) ensure that if one fails, others can compensate.
Adaptability: Flexible schedules and resources that can adjust to changing needs and circumstances.
Resource Efficiency: Optimal use of available time, energy, and support systems to prevent burnout.
Feedback Mechanisms: Regular check-ins and assessments to adjust care strategies as needed.
Which is why I had to build trust with one caregiver at a time—guided by a clear sense of what I need as a worker and a parent.
For example:
1 focused day at home with my kid around: I don’t want to be away from him but I also can’t watch him.
Solution: nanny at home.1 day where I can drop him off near my office and have a real “work day”
Solution: nanny share with a family with a FT nanny who is okay with just drop-in days for shared care.1 day where I can be home without him for writing, because I write best alone at home.
Solution: local daycare that accepts part-time kids.1 day where I don’t work and just hang with my kid, because I don’t want to work full-time in this season of life. It also opens up the option for me to be back-up caregiver for other kids in our system.
And so forth.
It’s also why, even with caregivers in place, continuously nurturing back-up paths is part of my work as a parent. As a freelancer, there are months at a time where I need to be heads down in a project and then months where I can be full-time mom. How can I adjust for this while ensuring the people I employ have stable work?
It takes slow building and iterating, and so far, that’s the only thing that’s working.
Using Design Principles in Everyday Life
So, even if the life support system metaphor isn’t a perfect one, I hope it illustrates the idea that systems design is actually an incredibly useful way to look at how care runs. I sometimes wish systems design was something that we were taught in our foundational education.
If we wanted to boil down the design process behind something like a care lattice, here’s a working glossary of terms I’ve started to find useful.
These help me understand what it is I’m doing when I’m fitting puzzle pieces together, managing my own energy, caring for the people involved in the system, and generally trying to guide the long-term output of the system.
Key: the goal isn’t just to find solutions, but for the system to feel good. That’s what design is for.
Relational Modularity: A system made of discrete, flexible parts that can connect in different ways.
Each caregiver’s position reinforces the week but they aren’t connected to each other.
Graceful Degradation: A system’s ability to keep functioning even when one part fails.
The overall system keeps working even if one person drops out in a given week.
Seasonal Scaffolding: A flexible structure meant to support something during a particular season—not forever.
I’ve changed this set up multiple times this year and can scale up or down the system based on the needs of the season (for example: daycare is only once a week for two months at the moment).Emotional Load-Balancing: Distributing not just tasks, but feeling—so no one person carries all the stress.
This is major; each caregiver also takes care of a different physical/emotional need as part of their work, be it housework, teaching language to baby, facilitating friendship etc.Feedback Loops: When one part of a system affects another—and that input loops back around.
If I have a great Monday, I’m infinitely more present for my son the next day; being out of the house a Wednesday lets me savor the day and cook a big meal on Thursday, etc.User-Centered Design: Designing around real, changing human needs—not just ideals or schedules.
Having practices that allow me to know myself very well underpin all of this. User research on yourself is underrated!Meshwork: A decentralized network where connection happens in multiple directions, not just from the top.
Still working on this one but currently, the parts of our caregiving team that work best are the ones where they are connected to each other, not just through me.
Of course, not everyone has the time, resources, or bandwidth to intentionally design care like this, but I just want to offer it as a framework we don’t really hear about because sometimes, when we name what we’re doing, we realize we have more options than the default.
What might shift if we had language that helped us to see care as a design opportunity, not just a crisis to manage?
The same goes for funding a system like this. One of the biggest motivations for me for approaching care in this way has been that modular funding is necessary for a freelancer. When you don’t have consistent income, you have to be able to scale your spending up or down based on the season. An impossible task without a modular system.
Designing Forward
On a personal level, one of the reasons I put so much time into designing a system like this is to make it easier for our family to make the choice to keep expanding, without compromising my current career choices. In a world where care is so limited, it can feel hard to make the choice to have more than 1 kid. But part of why I’ve designed this scaffold is to give myself a structure that could stretch. So that adding another child doesn’t feel like a resource collapse, but continuity. In other words, designing forward.
In most design work, you’re prototyping before you deal with the constraints. That’s the point. You explore what’s needed and what’s possible before you account for what’s broken. That’s how systems shift. Why not think about care in the same way?
Happy Sunday,
Jihii
P.S. This essay was developed in collaboration with a companion machine, another way I’m designing forward—for my writing life. You can read more about that here.
Designing forward is smart. Seems flexibility is built in.