In the spring of 2020 a small group of people from multiple continents came together for a design sprint aimed at helping people severely impacted by the global pandemic. As stories of overflowing ICUs accumulated from around the world, we decided to focus our efforts on helping people caring for COVID19 patients: those on healthcare’s frontlines.

People caring for COVID19 patients are all too aware of their own vulnerability. This didn’t begin with the pandemic - there has been a huge burnout crisis in healthcare for years and this leaves clinicians feeling exhausted and ineffective. The pandemic has just magnified these feelings. We began to hear from some frontline clinicians that talking with trusted colleagues about their awareness of their vulnerability provided comfort and, somehow, made them feel safer. We asked ourselves, “How might we help people on healthcare’s frontlines acknoweldge and share their vulnerability, to make them feel stronger?”

Our team of designers, clinicians, and change agents met weekly, interviewed frontline clinicians and learned about their experiences, feelings, and needs. We were struck by the reality that there were screens showing critical information about the patients’ health that were constantly updated, while, meanwhile, nobody had any idea how those providing care were doing physically and, especially, emotionally. We set out to “make the invisible visible” by creating an ecosystem in which feelings of vulnerability and gratitude could be registered simply in the moment and reflected visually, both at the level of the individual clinician as well as at the level of her group of trusted colleagues that they are a part of. And that's how Hummin' was born.