The making of
'Lightkeeper'

There are 2.8 million informal caregivers in Australia providing over $1billion worth of unpaid care every single week.

Informal caregiving is the unpaid backbone of the health and community services industry, yet there is surprisingly little support available for the millions of people who selflessly provide so much of their love, time, and attention each year. With an ageing population, declining fertility rates, and more women electing to stay in the workforce, it’s crucial that we greatly decrease the complexity, uncertainty, and administrative burden that accompanies the provision of informal care in Australia. 

While almost every group of Australian's are represented by caregivers, our team immediately gravitated towards one...

The easiest way to understand people’s emotions, stories, and ways of thinking about the world is through observation and conversation.

In an age of ‘big data’ it may come as a surprise that the rich insights required for innovation are readily found in small sample sizes. Lightkeeper’s complex narrative was built on the back of just 10 in-depth conversations.

As interviewers, our team’s role was to ask one or two very open-ended questions, and then to listen. We likened this experience to winding up a wind-up toy and then simply letting it go.

No true innovation is possible without learning to play the role of the unbiased listener; we need to ‘not know’ before and in order to ‘know’.

From these 10 conversations we were able to build a picture of what life is like as a Kate, what the stresses and challenges are, how the journey unfolds, and how it reaches its heartbreaking conclusion. With a wealth of lived experience in our team complementing the notes from our conversations, this period of reflection and synthesis was heart rending. 

There was a day, in mid-April, where 5 out of the 7 members of our team shed tears. We knew that we had stumbled into a period of people’s lives that was tense, emotional and typically endured in private. Shining a light on this period became a powerful and constant motivator.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable part of our entire Lightkeeper journey was deciding what our specific approach to helping Kates would be. We saw opportunities everywhere, and narrowing in on one felt jarring and almost cruel. We had hours of circular discussions and debates that got us nowhere. Eventually, our team agreed on the specific ‘problem’ that we wanted to address.

This problem can be described as follows:

'Despite intellectually understanding the ageing journey, for a variety of complex reasons Kates often find themselves in a situation where critical decisions regarding their parents have to be made quickly and under immense pressures. '

For a lot of us, knowing that our parents will one day pass away doesn’t mean that we prepare appropriately for this inevitability. In Australia, as in other Western cultures, we are very good at preparing for new life: we talk to our family and friends, we celebrate, we read, we learn the developmental stages, we nest.

At the other end of our time on this earth, things are very different. As a general rule we are devastatingly unprepared for death, even a death that has long been expected. We don’t have difficult conversations with our loved one’s until things reach a crisis point, we struggle to face mortality, we don’t understand the stages of the body and the mind’s deterioration, or all of the paper-work and administration that accompanies death (this last one may sound strange to those who’ve not yet experienced it).

Through providing Kate with an overview of the caring journey, allowing her to locate herself within this journey, and through giving her some timely advice on the practical things she could be doing, we believed we could enable her to make better decisions, earlier. 

Death, like birth, follows a blueprint. While each is unique, there are signposts along the way,  and a collective experience to draw from.

Armed with a shared understanding of both the ‘problem’ we wanted to address, and the way in which we wanted to address it, we entered the second stage of our journey, and begun to develop the product itself.