It took four weeks, five days, and seven hours to finish this research, but honestly, I've barely scratched the surface. My UX and product management journey began in healthcare—preventive healthcare specifically—and in that world, we're obsessed with one question: How do we get people to actually do the things that keep them healthy?
But here's what we miss: the story of preventive healthcare products is seemingly non-existent. Healthcare is technical, reliant on research breakthroughs and technological advancement. We only care about the narrative when a movie dramatizes a doctor's discovery. Yet products don't emerge from laboratories, they emerge from people, from tradition, stories, history culture. Products are like sourdough starters, you have to feed them a bit everyday until they're ready, and from that one product, hundereds of others are born.
This research aims to answer a simpler question: Why do preventive healthcare trends move in circles?
Fasting is ancient—Buddhist monks eating one meal before noon (563 BC), Ramadan (7th century CE), Christian Lent (4th century CE). Then it disappears from mainstream Western consciousness for decades. Then it returns as "intermittent fasting" in 2016, complete with $300 breath analyzers and $249 fasting-mimicking meal kits.
Fermented foods have existed for 9,000 years—Neolithic fermentation jars, Korean Onggi vessels, Lebanese sourdough starters passed down through generations. Then they're "gross" and "old-fashioned" for a generation. Then kombucha becomes a $1.8 billion market, and everyone wants a $400 microbiome test. Matcha…?
What makes something that was "out" suddenly "in" again? New technology? A cultural moment? Scientific discovery? Or something else entirely?
To answer this, I used vibe coding—a methodology that treats products not as standalone tools, but as cultural artifacts that reveal the invisible architecture of their moment.
Just as archaeologists read pottery shards to understand ancient civilizations, this vibe code reads product design patterns to decode what made a practice acceptable, desirable, or necessary at that specific point in time.
Each artifact in my Research Collection—from Neolithic globular fermentation jars (7000 BC) to Eight Sleep Pods (2019)—contains encoded information about its cultural moment: What anxieties did it address? What authorities legitimized it? What previous solutions had failed? What story did it tell to make an ancient practice feel "new"?
Cataloging 83 products, traditions, meals, and practices across four domains (fasting, movement, sleep, gut health) with metadata including launch year, cultural moment, design language, marketing claims, and scientific justification.
Identifying recurring design patterns across time periods: measurement tools (from sundials to CGMs), automation features (from mechanical timers to AI coaches), personalization claims (from blood type diets to DNA-based nutrition), and accessibility narratives (from "democratizing" to "at-home").
Analyzing what conditions were present when a dormant practice resurged, revealing that products don't create trends—instead they arrive at the exact moment a convergence of triggers makes the practice culturally acceptable again.