Globally, the European Commission reports, a truckload of textiles heads to landfills or is incinerated every single second.

The fashion industry accounts for some 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Less than 1 percent of the materials used to make clothing is recycled, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The best way to keep clothes out of a landfill? Don’t make them.

Picture this: Not long ago, it wasn’t unusual for a customer to walk into an H&M store and not be able to find a basic white t-shirt in their size. Why? Like most long-established retail operations, H&M was operating with a push model—placing seasonal bets on what the demand for a given item of clothing might be, locking orders far in advance, and hoping that they were able to sell out. Make a mistake in that kind of model, though, and you can end up with customers unable to find the basics they rely on, or excess inventory you can’t sell. That’s a problem for the business, but for the environment as well—and one that doesn’t fit H&M’s aggressive sustainability goals.

Though H&M had tried to tackle the problem before, the launch of the H&M Group Design Studio, co-created with IDEO, gave the retailer the confidence to go after it again. The team started out by mapping out the complex network of people that make up its supply chain across the globe, meeting with everyone from designers to garment suppliers, logistics managers, and even folks selling the final product in H&M stores. 

They then created an algorithm for more precise ordering, as well as a tool that provides a shared view of information. Instead of placing orders, the new automated flow—dubbed “Cruise Control"—allows staff to work with a demand forecast that gives them more time to focus on customer-centric operations, like providing guidance and inspiration. It also makes it easier for H&M to follow the demands of the market, and place much more accurate bets on what consumers will want, when. Already, H&M has significantly increased sales while cutting excess inventory—a result that improves its bottom line, as well as its environmental impact.

Estimates project that by 2030, global apparel consumption will hit 102 million tons.

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22%

reduction in stock during a pilot program

34%

increase in sales during a pilot program

To foster creative projects that spoke to the needs of local communities and environments, the BSA began to engage its members in collaborative, user-led design. The organization launched its first-ever innovation challenge, putting out a call for all members to pitch their ideas for projects in the built environment.

The BSA expected those pitches to have dollar signs attached. To the organizer’s surprise, only one asked for funding. The rest requested less tangible, but equally meaningful support: advice, connections, specific expertise. Those are resources that the BSA has aplenty, but hadn’t learned how to leverage well.

From that first go at an innovation challenge, the BSA learned how to better support its members. It also learned that to lead with purpose and make strategic choices, one must develop the confidence to say no. Instead of spreading itself thin across many projects, the organization decided to take small steps, focusing on one initiative at a time, so that it can deliver focused impact and stay true to its evolving mission.

With 36% of global energy going to buildings and 8% of global emissions caused by cement alone, the architectural community is inextricably intertwined with both the causes and solutions related to climate change.

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According to a survey conducted by the AIA, the architecture profession in the US is less diverse than the population as a whole. This lack of diversity can contribute to a disconnect between architects and the communities they serve.

31

submissions received from innovators in the Boston region working on equity and sustainability challenges

5

innovation teams invited to pitch ideas

The resources that NYU students needed were organized by administrative department, and buried on disparate websites and calendars. But students don’t think in terms of departments—they just need to know where their classes are.

All of this became patently clear as IDEO shadowed students. Team members visited classrooms, walked with them through their days, and hosted pop-ups in highly trafficked areas to get ideas from passersby. That helped the team develop a common understanding of the overall student journey and grounded employees in the key moments that can either make or break a student’s experience. Visualizing their journey helped departments gain a shared understanding of the fractured communications challenge and develop possible solutions.

To synthesize those insights, we formed cross-functional action learning groups, challenging existing practices at the university and coming up with new ways of working. Participants came from a diverse set of departments, including enrollment management, student affairs, marketing and communications, IT, global inclusion, student services, the provost’s office, digital communications, and more. The cohorts sketched early hypotheses and got feedback from faculty, administrators, and students from all of NYU's undergraduate schools to refine initial concepts.

Collaborating with students gave staff a first-hand look at what students were struggling with and a way to engage students directly in addressing those challenges. Just as importantly, there was an overall culture shift at NYU: Administrators started with questions instead of agendas, came together around a table, and reached beyond their job descriptions to meet the needs of students.

First-year students reported receiving hundreds of paper forms, and email from more than 70 unique senders.

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NYU needed to offer students the right resources at the right time—and collaborate to serve them as a unified administration.

New services

in-production include centralized calendars, dynamic campus mapping, and customized notifications

Design-thinking cohorts

now support the student experience

Diversity alone isn’t enough—in marketing or any other facet of business. Today’s brands must authentically engage with and create the conditions for co-design with existing communities.

That sort of deep, meaningful engagement with customers doesn’t happen over Instagram. It requires a playbook, a prototype, and a healthy amount of trust. So, IDEO worked with Athleta and Gap to tap into the wisdom of a council of women who represent intersectional identities and lived experiences. The council surfaced powerful insights for the brand, like the fact that active women don’t need a brand to empower them—they already feel powerful.

After only a few weeks, Athleta experienced the difference between research and a truly reciprocal relationship. The way their brand engages with communities is adding depth, understanding, and authenticity to Athleta’s content, products, and experiences. And women can feel the difference.

76% of US adults say that the media promotes an unattainable body image for women.

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Fewer than 1 in 10 businesses review for inclusion as part of product design and marketing campaigns.

>2X

user growth in 2022

13,000+

Athleta WellPro well-being providers active on the platform

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Since we moved in, Andy Deakin and I have teamed up to build out our displays. As industrial designers, we’re not trained in the art of window displays, but we’ve developed our own principles, drawing on our work creating physical exhibits or immersive experiences—and the rules set by the Port Authority.

Unlike traditional window fronts, ours comes with an elaborate set of constraints. The building is owned by the Port Authority of San Francisco, which has strict guidelines for what can be put on display. No direct advertising, no big logos, and nothing that looks too much like retail. The location also presents its own challenges: We have to create something strong enough to compete with the towering Bay Bridge above, and the bright sunlight along the Embarcadero. And every design has to do double duty—it needs to have meaning for people walking by on the street, as well as our coworkers and clients inside the building.

Our latest window design centers on a new line of cycling bags IDEO created with Brooks England. This time, the biggest challenge was showing off the gear without making the window feel too much like a store. We pulled inspiration from displays and exhibitions we admired, then brainstormed and sketched different iterations as a team before landing on the final concept: a bright yellow bike strapped with a mountain of boxes, which act as shelves for the bags to perch on.

Here are our seven rules for window design.

1. Set the Focus

What is the central focal point of the visual story you’re telling? Distinguish between primary elements and stage-setters. Try using only one material throughout, or in the case of the Brooks window, dip everything in one color to simplify the backdrop and create a neutral stage for the centerpiece—the bags.

2. Exaggerate Scale

Playing with scale helps create a big impact—especially if you want to amplify small objects to fill an entire window. We loved the Selfridges window display of giant flowers for the Apple watch, and employed this trick when we built a display for the launch the launch of Tom and David Kelley’s Creative Confidence. For that project, we created a six-foot-tall stack of books to fill the window.

3. Repeat a Theme

Whether it’s boxes, sticks, chairs, or lightbulbs, selecting one item and repeating it to completely fill the space is a simple trick to create an impressive sense of complexity. Aesop is a master of this and we’ve borrowed the technique for numerous exhibits.

4. Create Depth

Many windows create the illusion of depth when they’re actually quite two-dimensional. Using layers and forced perspective—similar to the tricks of theatrical set design—helps to draw the viewer in. Thomas Brisebras’ MAKE installation was a great example. Seemingly random floating sticks transformed into the word MAKE as you walked past the window. His was certainly the most Instagrammed window we’ve created so far.

5. Add Momentum

When they're composed in a particular way, static compositions can feel almost like they are in motion. Objects can be suspended in midair or positioned to make it seem like they're flying through the scene. When we created our 2020 event window, we installed multiple Steelcase Node chairs to give the impression they were jumping in the air.

6. Design for Duration

Our window budget often limits the types of materials and construction methods we can use. But keeping the duration of the display in mind can help guide the choice of materials. If it is only intended to last for a few weeks, exploring what you can do with cardstock might make the most sense. Unionmade, a San Francisco store, does a nice job of repurposing everyday objects and designing with lo-fi materials to suit their quick refresh rate.

7. Above All, Entertain

And don’t forget inject some play and humor into the mix. Watching people on the street look up and get the joke is half the fun.

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When the IDEO San Francisco studio moved its office to Pier 28, we landed a whole new design challenge: a massive, floor-to-ceiling front window along the Embarcadero. For the first time, we had a public display case to highlight our events and projects, and we had to figure out how to best activate it, while sticking to some pretty strict rules.

Last year, about a month before the con, I came across a Bender Badge project by AND!XOR—a group of hackers from California—on Hackaday. The Bender Badge is a nod to the robot character from Futurama and it comes packaged with games and flashy lights in the shape of his head. It’s also designed to be hacked (the barrier to entry is low—it can be programmed using the Arduino IDE). It seemed like a good place to focus my excitement.

For years, I have been looking for an opportunity to design something for DEF CON that interacts with sound. Networking and parties are a big part of the con, and often these events feature live DJs and music. I also wanted to create a design that relates to Bender's personality—he's often drinking and smoking, so a cigar seemed appropriate. Optimal choice: a cigar-shaped microphone.

The Bender Badge comes equipped with a standard set of hardware components (buttons, LEDs, and a display). Since the project was still in development, and I didn’t know which parts would be in the final version, I decided to build an add-on. The badge kit features an STM32F103 microcontroller, which includes an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). This allows the microcontroller to receive analog audio data by sampling it at high speeds and converting it into digital values. My goal was to use a microphone to capture the surrounding audio data and then convert that data into frequency components via Fourier analysis—specifically, using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The results of the Fourier analysis can be displayed as a bar graph. This is commonly referred to as a spectral analysis, and in this case, it would focus on frequencies between 20 and 20,000 Hz (the range for human hearing).

Proof of Concept

I built the microphone circuit to make sure it was configured properly before creating the printed circuit board (PCB). The circuit starts with the microphone to capture surrounding audio. Next, the signal from the microphone is amplified so that the microcontroller can receive a wider range of data from the ADC, which results in better definition from the Fourier transform. Lastly, the amplified signal goes through a low-pass filter to suppress any frequencies above 20,000 Hz that could interfere with the analysis.

The greatest challenge during this stage was implementing the DFT on the STM32 microcontroller. Thankfully, there is an algorithm called the fast Fourier transform (FFT) that speeds up the computation for the DFT, but it's still a complex and time consuming calculation. Performing the FFT and then updating the display is a time-sensitive task. If the display is updated too slowly, it will look choppy and less responsive. Luckily, I came across a library developed by STMicroelectronics that was already optimized to work with my specific microcontroller.

Circuit Board Design

One of my biggest hurdles in designing the PCB was board size. I didn’t know the exact size of the Bender Badge, but I attempted to scale everything based on the buttons and the screen. From there, I figured out what size I wanted the circuit board to be so that it looked proportional to the badge. I was able to make the badge look like a cigar by adding silkscreen to the top layer (the label, paper edges, and ash at the end), and by cutting the PCB into a cigar shape.

I placed most of the surface mount parts on the bottom of the circuit board to keep them hidden. The microphone stayed on the top layer to efficiently capture surrounding audio. (It also fit nicely as part of the cigar label.) I also added orange LED "ash" to the end of the top layer to make it look like the cigar was lit. These LEDs were meant to be triggered by acoustic activity, so that they would flicker and look more like embers than a solid light.

Firmware Finalizing

Two weeks before DEF CON was set to start, I submitted the PCB design for fabrication, and I created a prototype of the board. The majority of the leftover work involved converting the FFT output into something that could be shown on the display. The FFT outputs an array of frequency groupings, known as bins, where the size of a bin (or frequency grouping) is based on the audio sampling rate and size of the FFT. The bin size can be thought of as the output resolution of the FFT, and for the cigar mic the bins are about 39 Hz (40,000 Hz/1024) wide. Bins are important because they contain information on the amplitude of frequencies within each group. If the cigar mic does not pick up any surrounding audio between 1-39 Hz (the first bin), the value for that bin will be close to zero; but if there is activity within that frequency range, there will be a value greater than zero relative to how loud that frequency source is.

The FFT bins are grouped to create a bar graph that displays frequency data logarithmically (fewer bins grouped together at lower frequencies, and more bins grouped together at higher frequencies) in an effort to resemble human hearing. The display consists of 32 individual bars that are 4 pixels wide.

Assembly and Debugging

Once the circuit boards came back from fabrication, the first step was to assemble and test one. I connected the output of the PCB (the connection that sends the captured audio data to the microcontroller’s ADC) to an oscilloscope to see if the microphone was capturing audio and if the preamplifier was increasing the amplitude. I encountered two errors in my design. First, the microphone was incorrectly oriented, and second, I had flipped two pins on the preamplifier, which resulted in significant distortion. Both were easy fixes, but added extra time to the assembly process. As a result, I was working up until I got to DEF CON, and then some.

Shortly after I arrived in Vegas, I met up with the AND!XOR guys and showed them my addition. They loved it, and within a few hours, I had my cigar wired up, and my code running on their Bender Badge. It was awesome (and relieving) to see it all come together. Now I just have to figure out what to do for DEF CON 25.

If you want to learn more, check out my GitHub page for the project, which includes PCB files and badge firmware.

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Every year, it's hard for me to contain my excitement as DEF CON approaches, so I try to focus that enthusiasm into various projects. (For the uninitiated, DEF CON is one of the world’s largest hacking conventions. The days are long, the sleeping is limited, and it’s Vegas in the middle of summer.) In the past five-plus years, designing and programming custom badges to share at DEF CON has become increasingly popular.

Strolling down the Porto’s Rio Douro in the bright, spring sun, a Thoughtless Act caught my eye. A man selling knock-off sunglasses had thoughtfully—or instinctively—used the bench he'd been sitting on to display his wares.

It was the perfect display stand: the slats provided a neat grid format to lodge the glasses into so they could be fully admired from all angles, while the greyed wood gave a neutral backdrop to assess the color and design.

From a design research perspective, observing the way people exploit the objects and environments around them can provide fruitful and culturally-relevant inspiration. Taking ownership of public space and repurposing it for a transient commercial opportunity was natural to this street seller. We see other examples of nomadic, 'pop-up commerce' with things like food trucks and busking musicians.

It wasn't quite enough to persuade me to part with my euros, but it was a lovely example of Thoughtless Acts in action, nonetheless!

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions thoughtless acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire the invention of new products, services, and experiences.

My husband always writes me a little bit of Valentine's Day Code. The image above is one of my favorites—Charlie was learning 3JS, a 3D web development framework, and made me my dream: an exploding pink disco ball floating in space. He's made a 3D simulation of Big Sur (where we took our first road trip together), a "Charlie Bot" (forking off of hubot, creating a fake Charlie for me to talk to when I was traveling a lot) and an Adventure-style text based game, where I got to achieve my dream of meeting Prince with my dog Hudson.
—Ashley Holtgraver, IDEO Cambridge

As a Biodesigner + Cardiologist at IDEO Palo Alto, I led three classes of 5th graders at Covington Elementary School (Los Altos, CA) in their annual sheep heart dissection this Valentine's Day. I introduced them to the fundamentals of cardiovascular anatomy and physiology, including the structure and function of each chamber and valve, their relationships to surrounding conduits, and the hemodynamics and electrophysiology that drive the system. You know, just the basics. All of the kids experienced a hands-on exploration of the heart’s surface and texture, then under the supervision of volunteering parents, dissected their ways into the depths of the organ. Accompanying me was my rockstar hostess and sidekick Celia Wedner, future doc and daughter of Palo Alto’s Grant Wedner.
—Farzad Azimpour, IDEO Palo Alto

I’ve been doing cross-stitch for more than 10 years. Cross-stitch is an ancient form of embroidery that’s very intricate—it takes a long time to finish a product! The time I spend making a pattern is one of my favorite ways of expressing love on Valentine's Day.
—Christina Shen, IDEO Shanghai

For our third annual Galentine’s Day gathering, we started by designing postcards to send to our district representatives. This was followed by whiskey tastings and a fancy dinner hosted in a room decorated with posters of inspiring power-women. Everyone left with a "treat yo-self" care package, complete with home decor, "Make Your Mark" to-do lists, homemade biscotti, and soothing teas.
—Rohini Venkatraman, IDEO San Francisco

At IDEO London, we held an office-wide Valentine’s Day celebration with activities and treats under the theme of Random Acts of Love. We set up areas to collect clothes and food for those more in need, and a station to create a heart chain of messages to people across IDEO locations, hoping they’d continue the chain. Prior to the event, we asked everyone to send us one song they’d take to a desert island and why. Over a selection of strawberry daiquiris and fresh cupcakes, we filmed people talking about their chosen song. We had tears and goosebumps. Interestingly, most people chose songs to remind them of someone they love dearly. Three others chose songs that have helped them get through life.
—Bobbie Brightman and Ryan Lovett, IDEO London

This is a fortune my boyfriend and I got on one of our first trips together, before we were "officially" dating. Something told me to hold onto it. Later, he had this greeting card printed for me for Valentine's Day. He actually had to print a minimum of 100 so somewhere we have a hefty stack of personalized greeting cards of ourselves. Over 3 years later, I still have the fortune.
—Becky Lee, IDEO San Francisco

I used to work for a company that was pretty hardcore about celebrating Valentine's Day. We would exchange gifts, play games, have a big party, etc. One year I made this clock for my good friend and former colleague Irene Pau. The design is inspired by an inside joke that's probably not worth going into here. But the main goal was really just to make something weird that would creep her out, and also help her get to meetings on time. Mission accomplished?
—Griffin Thomson, IDEO Palo Alto

I love giving people Spanish Sweethearts for Valentine’s Day. They’re unique (read: hard-to-find) and everyone learns some Spanish from my gift!
—Katie Clark, IDEO San Francisco

Kiley was our New York front desk concierge for a couple of years, and she decided to leave last year to head to Arkansas and pursue writing and graduate school. She always put a lot of work into making the office feel special, so we decided to throw her a big going away party to show our appreciation. The base of the K was cut from scrap foam core on the laser cutter. The colored fringe was created from discarded Post-it pad slivers that were collecting in the hallway, which were stuck onto the K then cut vertically. Try your own letter piñata for Valentine's Day!
—Njoki Gitahi, IDEO New York

Header image by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash.

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When choosing a gift for your Valentine, why settle for a store-bought card? Drop that box of chocolates and steal these IDEO designers' crafty, hacky, wacky ideas for celebrating the holiday of love. Or better yet, try dating a designer! There’s bound to be a good gift in it for you.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.