From Heathrow to Gibraltar: architecting pandemic infrastructure at a human scale

Picture a 14-year-old standing at Heathrow, unable to board a flight to see her grandparents because the COVID pass system doesn’t recognise anyone under 16. Her parents have their passes. The airline requires proof. The system simply says no. This was one of dozens of seemingly small but deeply human problems I tackled when I joined the NHS COVID Pass team in 2022, working to evolve a service that had become critical infrastructure for 47 million people.

The pandemic was still reshaping daily life when I arrived. The core architecture existed, but human complexities were multiplying daily. Children needed access for school trips abroad. Divorced parents discovered their children’s surnames didn’t match vaccination records. Elderly citizens in Gibraltar couldn’t navigate systems designed for mainland UK. Each edge case represented thousands of families facing real barriers.

I drove the evolution of this infrastructure, creating pathways for young people to access vaccination records, building contingency features for variants we hoped would never emerge, and preparing the system to gracefully scale down as the crisis passed. This work built on previous projects where I’d designed secure communication platforms for journalists facing censorship and developed early content validation systems. Together, these experiences revealed fundamental principles about building responsive infrastructure that extend far beyond healthcare.

Speed as a design material

Government typically moves in years. The pandemic demanded we move in days. This radical compression transformed how we designed. User research that might take months happened in rapid sprints. Features that would normally require six months of consultations launched in weeks.

I learned to work in what I call “progressive resolution”: launching functional features quickly, then rapidly iterating based on real usage. The young person’s access feature started simply, then evolved through constant refinement based on actual families trying to travel, teachers managing school trips, and border agents processing documents.

Speed forced brutal prioritisation. A nurse in Manchester flagged the surname mismatch issue during a video call. I designed a verification workaround that week that helped thousands of separated families. Traditional governance would have taken months to acknowledge the problem existed. Crisis compressed decision-making in ways that actually improved outcomes.

Translation as leadership

My background researching narrative design at the Royal College of Art proved unexpectedly valuable. The COVID pass existed at the intersection of public health, technology, policy and human behaviour. Each group had its own language, its own concerns, its own definition of success. I became a translator, creating what I termed “perspective maps”: rendering the same system through different professional lenses.

I brought epidemiologists into direct conversation with UX designers, had engineers explain technical constraints directly to policymakers, and ensured citizen advocacy groups could challenge assumptions in real-time. These intensive sessions collapsed weeks of sequential consultations into hours of productive conflict and resolution.

Working across the UK’s devolved nations added complexity. Scotland’s young person consent laws differed from England’s. Wales required bilingual interfaces by law. Northern Ireland’s proximity to the Republic created unique border considerations. I developed a federal design approach: core standards with regional variations, allowing each nation to maintain sovereignty while ensuring interoperability.

Trust through transparency

Citizens were sharing medical data with government during a crisis that had upended every certainty. Technical security alone doesn’t create human confidence. I made privacy protection visible and comprehensible at every step.

The 2D barcode system let venues verify status without accessing medical details. Users needed to understand this intuitively. The temporary nature of passes, requiring regeneration every month, became a feature demonstrating data minimisation in action.

Young people’s access brought unique privacy challenges. I designed verification methods that protected children’s data while ensuring healthcare access couldn’t be weaponised in custody disputes. Parents could grant access without creating surveillance infrastructure. The system respected both safeguarding requirements and family autonomy.

On a later project, working with a major pharmaceutical company on vaccine adherence, I discovered the same principles again. Patients engaged with digital health tools only when privacy protections were obvious. Transparency means making the right things visible at the right moments.

Orchestrating ecosystems

I developed an approach I termed “service choreography”: designing the relationships between multiple actors in the system. GP surgeries uploading records, airports verifying credentials, schools managing group travel - each stakeholder became part of a carefully orchestrated dance.

The split family scenario illustrated this perfectly. A child presents for vaccination with one parent. The surname doesn’t match. The healthcare practitioner needs to verify identity without delaying queues. The system must record accurate data without creating future barriers. The other parent needs access without compromising custody arrangements. I designed solutions that acknowledged every actor’s constraints while maintaining system coherence.

Understanding these interdependencies revealed unexpected opportunities. Airline feedback improved NHS interfaces. School travel needs influenced border processes. Each constraint became a catalyst for innovation elsewhere in the ecosystem.

Encoding institutional memory

Crises generate extraordinary learning at incredible speed. When the crisis passes, teams disperse and hard-won knowledge evaporates unless deliberately preserved.

I created what could be called “knowledge architecture”: capturing decisions and the debates behind them. Why 30-day pass expiry? Which approaches did we abandon? Which edge cases did we consciously exclude? I recorded video walkthroughs of complex service flows and built libraries of stakeholder perspectives that preserved human context behind technical choices.

The journalism platform I’d designed included encrypted knowledge repositories that could survive regime changes. Early fact-checking systems I’d developed created verification methodologies that became industry standards. Each project taught different preservation methods, all sharing the goal of strengthening future responses.

Building responsive capacity

The COVID pass sunset in 2023, but its legacy transcends the technology. It proved large organisations can move at startup speed, that government can earn citizen trust through thoughtful design, and that crisis infrastructure can be both robust and humane.

For organisational leaders, these principles apply across any disruption. Crisis reveals existing capabilities. The ability to translate across silos, make privacy tangible, orchestrate ecosystems, and preserve institutional learning must be developed before crisis strikes.

Service design here means building organisational responsiveness: creating systems that evolve rapidly while maintaining trust, serve edge cases without compromising core functionality, and scale gracefully as circumstances demand.

The next crisis will look nothing like COVID-19. Organisations that invest now in responsive design capabilities, that practice translation across silos, that make trust tangible in their services, and think in ecosystems will emerge stronger from whatever comes next.

My work on the COVID pass taught me that crisis infrastructure is about recognising that disruption is now normal. Every system we build exists in a world where change is constant and today’s edge cases become tomorrow’s headlines. The question is whether your organisation will respond with grace, speed and humanity when crisis arrives. Because it will arrive. The only variable is whether you’ll be ready.