From Concept to Care: Designing Groundswell for Oncology Caregivers
At UPMC Magee-Womens Cancer Services, staff navigate a daily reality filled with patient care, emotional labor, and moments of profound loss. Groundswell—a new dedicated space for reflection and restoration—was designed to meet these caregivers where they are: acknowledging the emotional toll of their work and offering a quiet refuge in the heart of a busy oncology unit.
Groundswell was developed through Designing with CARE: Co-Creating Solutions for Complex Care Coordination in Oncology, a spring course co-taught by Professor Kristin Hughes at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Pittsburgh’s Schools of Medicine and Nursing. The course explores innovative approaches to gynecologic oncology care, emphasizing how design can drive “small wins” that improve care and advance health equity. Each student team is assigned a topic, workshopped in advance. One team was tasked with designing supportive environments to promote staff well-being—spaces where caregivers could safely and openly share experiences of burnout, compassion fatigue, grief following patient deaths, and frustration with growing administrative burdens. Fifteen weeks later, the concept for Groundswell emerged. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the room when the students finished their presentation,” Hughes recalls.
Over the past two years, Hughes and her University of Pittsburgh collaborators have been working on an idea that narrows the gap between classroom exploration and real-world implementation. Part of that vision, she explains, is not only to celebrate student work at the end of the semester but to commit as a team to realizing projects that can begin to shift systems of care. “We work side by side with students from concept to implementation, adapting ideas to the real-world context of healthcare systems. This kind of transformative relationship-building is essential for translating complex classroom ideas into real-world impact.”
For Master of Design student Elijah Benzon (MA ’25), the project carried personal weight. Having worked in healthcare shortly after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he understood the fatigue, loss, and chaos that can accumulate without support. “Groundswell allowed me to channel that realization into something tangible,” Benzon says, “so that future healthcare workers might have resources to process grief and avoid the chaos I once felt.”
Master’s student Lorin Anderberg (MA ’25) came into the course seeking participatory research, co-design practices, and deep relational engagement. She was drawn to Hughes’s reputation for guiding students through real-world projects grounded in community partnerships. “I aspire to be a trauma-informed design researcher,” Anderberg explains. “I wanted to explore how design can facilitate well-being, and this project has been everything I hoped for in terms of personal and professional growth.”
From the outset, the team immersed themselves in fieldwork. They conducted in-depth interviews with staff, hosted a generative workshop on grief and workplace culture, and listened closely to stories of burnout and the relentless pace of oncology work. These narratives shaped the authenticity of their design approach. “These conversations amplified our desire to create solutions that would serve care workers in a real and measurable way,” Anderberg says.
As the concept evolved, Anderberg recalls an “aha” moment when the idea of Groundswell as a culture of care for oncology staff began to take shape. Hughes’s mentorship helped guide the team through uncertainty. “She would tell us, ‘String the pearls!’” Anderberg remembers. “It was about iterating, refining, and carving away at something ordinary until it became extraordinary.”
The project’s transition from concept to physical prototype was swift and demanding. Grant funding from CMU’s College of Fine Arts and the UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital Medical Staff Fund set a mid-August launch date, giving the team just three months to transition from a high-level concept to an installed prototype. “What started as a big idea with an imaginary budget suddenly needed to fit within the constraints of approvals, protocols, and a very restrained budget,” Anderberg says.
For Benzon, the process was a sprint into unfamiliar territory: cardboard models, typography, lighting experiments, and content development. “Coming from a science background, I was suddenly designing something real. There was no clear formula—only constant iteration—and I had to become comfortable navigating uncertainty quickly.”
CMU alumnus and former Deeplocal COO Greg Baltus, now leading his company Hardware Assembly, played a critical role in producing the Groundswell pod. Baltus helped bring the design to life on a tight timeline and within a limited budget, while navigating the complexities of installation in a carefully managed healthcare facility. For him, prototyping was essential. “You have to identify the most important elements, test your assumptions, and then physically experience the space. Seating, enclosure, lighting—it all had to come together to create the desired emotional experience.”
Unexpected design challenges emerged during the process, including the midstream requirement to design and implement a secure door, locking mechanism, and tracking usage for the pod. According to Anderberg, “These challenges ultimately pushed the project forward. We ended up with something adaptable to clinical settings.”
For Hughes and her team, the project has been profoundly instructive, further underscoring the value of co-designing with, rather than for. Collaboration with the UPMC team, Benzon, Anderberg, and Baltus facilitated an exchange of disciplinary expertise that advanced the work from conceptual presentation to prototype, with the capacity to generate systems-level change within hospital contexts.
Hughes adds, “What Groundswell makes clear is that the power of design lies not only in bold visions but in the careful accumulation of small wins. Each conversation, each act of trust and acknowledgment, and each co-designed prototype tested in context contributes to a larger trajectory of care. These small wins begin as quiet gestures, yet their ripples move outward, shaping systems in ways that only become visible when we pause long enough to see.”
The Groundswell journey doesn't end here. Watch the School of Design website for our follow-up article after the launch of this project and learn about the 12-month study evaluating the effectiveness of Groundswell.