pumbit care table
How do you design care that arrives before a mother has to ask for it?
Where
stanford d.school
Context
MS design thesis
Collaborators
Skills
systems design
product design
needfinding
AI-integrated prototyping
Overview
The Problem
Design research
I grew up in Korea, where over 80% of mothers stay at a postpartum care center after birth, places that hold a mother emotionally, where care is structured to arrive on its own. The contrast with the US was stark: mothers here were scrambling to build a village that barely existed, carrying the emotional weight alone.
Through needfinding interviews with mothers, doulas, and village members, one key insight was that mothers were asking to be seen beyond the clinically defined 12-week recovery period. I also found a clear pattern I came to call the postpartum cliff, where a small village shows up in month one, then support from a mother's care circle drops sharply by month two, leaving many mothers in survival rather than a period of true healing.
So the gap I designed for was the absence of connection and emotional witnessing. Everything in Pumbit is drawn from the values I saw in those Korean care centers, translated from a physical institution into a relational, digital one, guided by one principle: care that is anticipatory, attuned to a mother's latent needs, and never a burden to receive.
Field notes and photos from postpartum care centers in Korea (Winter 2025)
Designing Pumbit Care Table
Pumbit Care Table places the mother at the center of an outward-reaching care platform, surrounded by a human village. It gives friends and family both the language and the tools to send creative, whimsical, and culturally resonant gestures of care throughout postpartum, without placing the coordination or emotional labor on the mother.
Rather than designing solely for the mother, we designed for the village. The premise is simple: when the people around her are empowered to practice anticipatory care, meaningful support reaches the mother before she has to ask.
My thesis partner, Shawn Smith, and I built Pumbit across three phases, from hand-drawn warmth to a working, tested prototype:
Some of my doodles and sketches using Papersketch
Careling, the AI layer
Where Pumbit Stands
We are actively testing and iterating on Pumbit with mothers and their village members, and the early responses have been the most affirming part of the work. Mothers have described feeling supported without pressure, and what moved me most was that they felt held not just by the platform, but by the people it reconnected them with.
We are also exploring how to bring Pumbit into physical form, experimenting with calmtech interfaces so a gesture from the village can arrive in the home as warmth and presence, rather than on a screen.
Learnings
LIVE SITE
Visit site ↗