Systems optimise for what they measure. Care, cognition, and biology are rarely measured.
Therefore, systems systematically fail certain humans. This page documents the argument, the method, and the instruments I built to make those failures visible.
Diagnostic lens
Select what the system forgot to measure.
The thesis becomes a product interface: choose a missing human variable, then see the failure state it creates.
Missing variable
73%
Embodied difference missing from the model
Failure state
Crash-test bias
Design standard treats one body as universal.
MomOps
013+ years of research across feminist care ethics, organisational psychology, and systems theory. 40+ peer-reviewed sources. One framework for making invisible operational intelligence legible to institutions.
The invisible infrastructure crisis
For 40 years, automotive engineers designed crash test dummies modelled on average male bodies. Result: women 73% more likely to be seriously injured in identical crashes.
This wasn't failure of design thinking. It was design thinking working exactly as intended.
Crash data
0173%
More likely to be seriously injured when design ignores embodied difference.
Loss pathway
0225%
Of pregnancies end in miscarriage, yet most pregnancy apps have no loss pathway.
Unseen labour
03$10.9T
Annual value of unpaid care work globally, invisible to enterprise dashboards.
From MomOps emerged
Method
Care-Conscious Design
A design approach that treats care, cognitive load, and human constraints as first-class system variables. Not edge cases. This is how I design because of what MomOps revealed.
Four validation lenses
Interruption Blindness
Reveals where products punish users for having lives. Banking apps timing out after 2 minutes treat feeding a baby as inactivity rather than life happening.
Pattern: Resumption over completion. Preserve context, show "you left off here."
Care Infrastructure Collapse
Exposes continuous availability privilege. When childcare collapses, you're operationally unavailable, but HR systems only offer sick leave or annual leave.
No legitimate care infrastructure failed status exists in organisational systems.
Care Theatre vs Care Consciousness
Distinguishes authentic care from surveillance. Pregnancy apps ignoring 25% miscarriage rate keep sending celebratory pregnancy messages after loss.
Test: if your care app can't handle care failure without causing harm, you built care theatre.
Ayni Violation
From Andean cosmic balance frameworks: measures reciprocity debt. What does this extract? Who bears invisible costs? What do we give back?
Pregnancy apps extract intimate data, sell it to advertisers, then become dangerous when legal contexts shift.
Inside care · trauma-aware patterns
Trauma-aware practice lives inside Care-Conscious Design
I no longer ship Trauma-Informed UI as a separate design system. The durable patterns belong here: care already includes trauma-aware interaction when the default user is interrupted, embodied, and sovereign.
01
Safe exit
The way out is always visible. Session history can be sanitised when exposure is a risk. ESC on this site returns home as a lightweight version of the same idea.
02
Consentful reveal
Sensitive media and data stay covered until the user opts in. The interface does not surprise the nervous system.
03
Absence over silence
Missing values are named as missing. The product never invents a number, then explains it.
Provider side
05Note on the Care Worker: Care-Conscious Design extends to the provider. We are developing UI patterns to mitigate compassion fatigue in healthcare and social work interfaces, ensuring the tools used to provide care do not extract the wellbeing of the person using them.
Field chapter · cognition
Field · Cognition
Care Under Load
This is the living field chapter of the thesis. MomOps names the institutional blind spot. Care-Conscious Design is the method. Care Under Load is where that method meets cognition under interruption: late-diagnosed neurodivergent women, perimenopause, masking until burnout, and products that still assume a stable capacity day.
The interruption penalty is sharper when fluctuating estrogen thins the scaffolding that held attention and working memory. Cognitive accessibility that ignores midlife and care load is incomplete.
- Masking until burnout looks like “fine” in research panels
- Peri can unmask ADHD traits products never designed for
- Answer-first, re-entry, and low-capacity paths are the fix
Where this shows up
The thesis, method, and field chapter show up across the systems I study. These are the domains and instruments where MomOps becomes tangible.
Live application
FemHealth Research Finder
Medical evidence exists. The architecture excludes the people who need it.
femhealth.scienceLive instrument
Tiny Trip Index
Travel platforms have the data. They don't surface it for parents of under-fives.
tinytripindex.comResearch artifact
Count Me In
Numerical exclusion: when interfaces assume everyone processes numbers the same way.
View researchField essay
Care Under Load
Neurodivergence, late diagnosis, perimenopause, and capacity-aware UX under care load.
Read the essayResearch foundation
This framework draws from 3+ years of research across feminist care ethics, organisational psychology, systems theory, and lived experience as a mother working in tech.
December 2024 publication
Apply the lens
06Want to apply this lens to your product?
I speak about care-conscious design at conferences and run workshops for product teams who want to stop building for imaginary users.