Abstract

If you look at a doctor’s computer, healthcare looks like a list: a blood test on Tuesday, a pill on Wednesday, a check-up on Friday. But for a patient, healthcare isn't a list of dates - it’s a feeling of being supported or being forgotten. When the doctor, the family, and the hospital are all in sync, life feels stable. When they stop talking to each other, everything starts to unravel.

How do we map the "strength" of a healthcare team? How do we show the mess that happens when a system fails a patient?

This talk introduces The Care Weave, a way of seeing healthcare as a woven fabric. We use four simple lines to represent the four main characters: the Patient, the Family, the Doctor, and the Hospital System. Instead of just marking events, we watch how these lines move together. When care is working, the lines braid into a tight, strong rope. When things break, the lines push away from each other or spiral into a messy knot.

The speaker will show how they used "hand-drawn" styles to make scary data feel human and approachable. You’ll learn how to use simple visual cues - like lines that "shake" with anxiety or "vortexes" that show a crisis - to tell a deeper story than a standard bar chart ever could.

The human body is the example, but these lessons are for anyone who needs to visualize how people work together (or fall apart) in the real world.

The Build: How the Talk Flows

1. The Problem with "Dots on a Map"

Why traditional healthcare charts tell you what happened, but never how it felt. The Big Idea: Seeing care as a "weave" - where the strength of the system is found in the gaps between the lines.

2. Giving Everyone a Voice

How we designed four distinct "threads" for the Patient, Family, Doctor, and System. Why we chose a "pencil-sketch" look over a clean digital line to build trust and empathy.

3. The Strength of the Braid (When things go right)

Showing "The Goal": How the four threads pull together into a smooth, rhythmic braid when a team is working as one. The "Ribbon" effect: When things are so stable that individual effort disappears into one strong path.

4. The Chaos of the Spiral (When things go wrong)

The Silo Effect: Watching lines push away from the center to show what it looks like when doctors stop communicating. The Crisis Vortex: A look at "The Tangle" - where too much uncoordinated activity creates a spiral that traps the patient in a cycle of confusion.

5. The Human Reset

The "Reset" moment: Showing how one person (like a case manager) can step in and pull the messy spirals back into a calm, straight line. Takeaway: Three simple rules for using line-art to show "teamwork" and "trust" in any design project.

Who is this for?

This talk is for designers, developers, and storytellers who are tired of boring dashboards. If you want to learn how to use movement, tension, and simple hand-drawn shapes to represent complex human relationships, this is for you. No medical or math background required - just a curiosity about how to tell better stories with data.

Why this works:

1. Grounded Metaphors: "Braid," "Spreadsheet," "Threads," and "Spirals" are easy to visualize instantly.
2. Focus on "Why": It focuses on the human feeling (anxiety, trust, confusion) rather than the code (Rough.js, D3.js).
3. Clear Conflict: It sets up "The Braid" vs. "The Chaos," which makes the talk sound like an exciting demonstration.