ThroughLine: Consent-Based Continuity System

The Problem

People moving through immigration, healthcare, or benefits don't experience one system — they experience a dozen disconnected ones, each demanding the same story again, each blind to what the last one knew. The cost lands hardest on the people with the least slack: language barriers, precarious status, exhaustion, shame.

The design question, framed anthropologically: what would it mean for the continuity of a person's situation to be a first-class thing the system carries, instead of a burden the person re-carries every time?

The numbers make the burden legible: one in five U.S. residents speaks a language other than English at home, and patients with limited English proficiency face up to 3.5× higher rates of healthcare disparities — not for lack of care, but for lack of continuity. The system demands they re-prove their existence at every new door.

What I Designed

Anthropological framing and three personas grounded in real fragmented-journey patterns — not demographics, but situations of friction and fall-through.

A service blueprint for a consent-based continuity layer: what context persists across touchpoints, who can see it, and how it travels with the person rather than being trapped in each silo.

Ten design principles for humane continuity — consent, portability, the right to be understood once, anti-re-traumatization in repeated intake.

A bilingual (EN/ES) intake prototype — the first concrete surface of the idea, designed so the first telling is the gentlest.

PERSON CONSENT LAYER INSTITUTIONS T1 — First-Timer New to the system T2 — Return User Lapsed / re-entering T3 — Relay Advocate / family ThroughLine — Consent Layer person controls pace · depth · disclosure · portability Immigration status + docs Healthcare records + access Benefits enrollment + status Three entry patterns, one continuity system Context travels with the person, not the silo Each receives only what the person shares

System architecture

Research

The design decisions in ThroughLine are grounded in three distinct fragmented-journey patterns — not demographics, but situations where institutional systems routinely fail continuity:

T1 — The First-Timer

Navigating a new system (immigration, benefits intake, healthcare enrollment) for the first time. Language barrier, uncertain what information to share and with whom, highly sensitive to signals of trust or threat in the interface. Primary design pressure: the first telling must not cost them. Every ambiguity in the intake is a risk they absorb alone.

T2 — The Return User

Coming back to a system after a gap — expired status, lapsed enrollment, a case that was closed and is now re-opened. Already experienced the system's indifference to their history. Primary design pressure: re-entry must not require re-traumatization. The system must prove it remembers before asking the person to prove they exist again.

T3 — The Relay

An advocate, family member, or support person navigating the system on someone else's behalf — or alongside them. Holds part of the context, but not all; has their own emotional stake; may be the person's only interface with the system in a given moment. Primary design pressure: the relay must not become a bottleneck or a point of information loss.

Design Principles

These principles govern every design decision in ThroughLine — from how questions are sequenced to how consent is handled to what happens when a session is interrupted:

Someone else holds part of the thread. No person should re-carry their entire history to survive a single interaction.

The user is not their situation. The design never reduces a person to their case number, status, or circumstances.

Restart is forbidden. Resume is default. The system picks up from where the person left off — not where the institution wants them to begin again.

Skip is a feature, not a failure. Any question can be skipped without penalty, explanation, or consequence to the session.

Make scope visible. Make limits visible. The person always knows what ThroughLine can and cannot do for them, before they share anything.

Plain language is non-negotiable. Not a style preference — plain language is the threshold of dignity for this audience.

The user controls pace, depth, and disclosure. The system never escalates a question's sensitivity without the person's explicit permission to go there.

We are not the system. We are the bridge. ThroughLine does not own the continuity — it carries it for the person until a system is ready to receive it.

Continuity matters more than completion. Partial progress is held, honored, and resumable. Partial is not failure.

End every interaction with the person intact. No session should leave someone more disoriented, exposed, or exhausted than when they arrived.

Key Decisions

Continuity as a right, not a feature

The framing decision that organizes everything: the person owns their throughline; the institutions borrow it with consent. This is the opposite of how current systems work — where the institution owns the record and the person re-proves their existence to each new doorway.

Bilingual from the first screen, not as a setting

For this audience, language access isn't a toggle — it's the threshold of dignity. English-first with a language selector was rejected. The prototype opens bilingual, no decision required.

The gentlest possible first intake

Because the first telling sets whether someone trusts the system enough to continue. The whole intake sequence was designed to reduce re-traumatization — progressive disclosure, no clinical language, and an explicit acknowledgment that they don't have to say anything they don't want to say.

Project Status

A concept framework with a working bilingual intake prototype. Strongest evidence of my research lens, systems thinking, and humanistic values applied to high-stakes, real-world fragmentation. Concept + prototype, not a deployed institutional product.

For any hiring context in civic tech, health tech, or accessibility design: ThroughLine is where my anthropology training is most visible as a design practice — and where the work I find most worth doing is most clearly stated. The bilingual prototype was built to WCAG AA color contrast standards, with keyboard-navigable form flows and screen-reader-compatible field labeling — because accessibility for this audience isn't a compliance checkbox, it's the whole point.

Design Status

ThroughLine is a concept framework and prototype, not a validated or deployed service

The service blueprint, design principles, and bilingual intake prototype shown here represent design intent and systems thinking applied to a real problem — not an evidence-based solution tested with the populations it describes. No formative research was conducted with people navigating immigration, healthcare, or benefits systems. The personas are grounded in documented patterns of institutional fragmentation, not primary fieldwork with affected individuals.

Next step: Participatory research with people who have direct experience of fragmented institutional systems — co-design, not design-for.

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