IDEO’s partnership with Logitech is a case study in bringing together the power of imagination and the rigor of business.

As much as we love to lead with creativity, it’s difficult to develop a business plan off ideas alone. So when Logitech asked the IDEO team to investigate a broad array of possible futures and report back, we brought our findings to life by inventing a board game. Instead of a dry presentation on circular solutions, our designers created a story about a mouse that turned into a webcam.

That imagination mattered. It fueled an exploration into expertise we collected from researching with people already living in futures destined to expand. And our rigor helped us hold more possibilities, and identify intersectionalities. Combined, they redefined what it means for ideas to be viable in business; they focused us on long-term sustainability; and they pushed us past immediate technical feasibility to ask if new ideas would be feasible for entire systems.

Our partnership with Logitech revealed that imaginative dreaming and business rigor aren’t opposing forces, but rather complementary tools in opening up new directions into a future demanding bold decisions.

As of 2019, e-waste was the fastest-growing waste stream globally, and only 20% of the 48.5+ million tonnes is disposed of properly.

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Global emissions must be cut in half by 2030 to avert the worst impacts of climate change.

By 2030

Logitech has committed to becoming climate positive and removing more carbon than they create

Fast fashion keeps getting faster. But if the industry is to meet its climate commitments, its use of plastics has to slow down.

H&M chief executive Helena Helmersson set ambitious sustainability goals when she stepped into her role. She wanted to reduce the fashion giant’s impact on the environment and enable meaningful growth. But change is tough for any company, let alone one with eight brands operating across 74 markets. Together IDEO and the H&M Group created new plastic-free packaging, rallying around a more sustainable packaging solution that’s easily customizable.

By applying a design-led approach that went far beyond hiring a sustainability consultant, the H&M Group managed to reduce its use of plastic. But it didn’t stop there. A small team called Design Studio took what it learned and grew into an established strategic capability that pioneers new ways of working in the organization, tackling complex challenges in circularity, inclusion, supply chain, and customer experience. Sustainability isn’t a passing trend for H&M. It’s moving fashion forward.

Packaging accounts for 26% of plastics produced globally every year.

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Fashion e-commerce is estimated to grow by 10% annually through 2024, requiring even more packaging.

100M

plastic-free packages shipped in 2022

2,000 tons

of plastic eliminated from H&M operations

For children with physical disabilities and their families, mobility is freedom. But in Japan, there are barriers to that freedom of movement.

In raising a child with cerebral palsy, Yuri Matsumoto found that her son was separated from other kids during everyday activities. In Japan, children’s products are divided into two categories: those for children with disabilities and those for children without. Matsumoto aspired to close this gap with a product that would allow children of all abilities to use the same chair and be included in the same activities. To realize her idea, Matsumoto needed a strategic design company to refine the chair design, create a compelling visual identity, and arrive at a product road map to help set the business up for long-term success.

The result: a breakthrough product and supporting business that provides access for all kids, both for at-home activities like studying and eating, and also for family outings to restaurants, to the park, and to play with friends. Around the world, there are people like Matsumoto who see the need for better products in a very personal way. IDEO’s role is to help them realize their vision for a more inclusive future.

The Japanese health ministry categorizes 9.6 million people as disabled.
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In Japan, children with disabilities are largely excluded from mainstream classrooms. Government subsidized support chairs are designed for posture and stability. Their bulk and rigidity make venturing out with them challenging.
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Japanese children have fewer opportunities to learn about what it’s like to live with a disability than in the US.

Launched

officially in April 2022

5

restaurants and cafés in Tokyo are currently piloting the chair

There can be no growth for business if peoples’ basic needs aren’t met.

Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, CEO of Intercorp, came to IDEO with an audacious goal: to address the most fundamental needs of his country’s people and grow his business at the same time. He’d been introduced to IDEO while attending business school in the U.S. and explained that he waited until he had a challenge that felt big enough to knock on our door. Together we built a high-quality school system that would cost just $100 per month—affordable for the middle class. That project convinced Rodríguez-Pastor and his colleagues of the power of human-centered design. Our blended teams launched an innovation hub to introduce new ways of working with the conglomerate’s 90,000 employees. And as we collaborated with Intercorp’s businesses in finance, retail, health care, and education, we learned more about how to serve the everyday needs of Peruvian families. Somewhere along the way, the ultimate design project became the organization itself.

And while Rodríguez-Pastor’s company has grown dramatically, he’s not one to rest on laurels. Instead, the company is becoming more ambitious: upskilling the country’s workforce through an online platform, and fulfilling its climate strategy by investing in Peru’s green economy. (The coastal nation is the world’s third most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.) While the pandemic dealt a blow to Peru’s economy, Intercorp remains steadfast in its commitment to supporting businesses that help the middle class thrive.

Peru’s PISA score of educational quality has grown by 10% in the past decade but still ranks in the bottom 10 worldwide.

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In 2020, approximately 68% of the total employed population was in some form of informal employment—jobs that offered no protection and in which workers paid no taxes. Although that percentage decreased over the previous decade, Peru has one of the highest levels of informal employment in Latin America.

55,000

students enrolled across 68 locations in Peru, Mexico, and Colombia

2.5x

increase in revenue from $2.9 billion in 2011 to $8.5 billion in revenue in 2021

The purpose for these hybrid safety specs is threefold: I can post images of our projects or build steps to my Snapchat account, save the videos for internal documentation, and also create more structured build logs.

I’ve been using them for the past week; they're super fun. Here’s how you can modify your own pair:

1. Buy the Snapchat Spectacles directly through their website.
2. Get some $29 clear replacement lenses for the tinted ones that come with the Spectacles. I bought mine from GlassesUSA. If you require a prescription, you can have them made with prescription lenses for the same price!
3. Get some protective side shields.
4. Modify the side shields to fit the glasses. This means you will need to cut the tops and center-front part off of them like so:

You can now use the supplied O-ring to attach the shields to the Snapchat Spectacles. They should now look like this:

The Snapchat app makes it really easy to edit 10-second Snaps into a build story. I even made this display rack to show them off:

Check out this video (recorded using the Spectacles!) that shows how I made the display rack:

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A few weeks ago, while I was in our workshop, I had an idea: If I could modify Snapchat’s Spectacles into a pair of safety goggles, I could document our projects without ever picking up a camera.

In one sentence, who are you?

I'm a 37-year-old Tokyoite with a mane that's swiftly moving from Pauly Shore to Kenny G.

What do you do? How did you learn to do it?

I do interactive design and Japanese literature. I learned the former at NYU's ITP program, and the latter from my amazing high school Japanese teacher Susan Tanabe.

What are your 3 favorite possessions?

1. The Twitter app
2. My mint copy of Zik Emmy's "Perfect Change"
3. My engraved Tamagoyaki frying pan

What does a typical work session look like?

To me, code is like jazz, man. Improvisation. I've got a synth—a Korg MS-20—and I run the input through Max MSP. Max interprets frequency to the nearest quarter tone, and white keys are mapped to reserve words in my current coding idiom, while black keys spit out numbers. There's not a lot of reserve words in programming, so all I need to do is throw on a fatback beat and just jam.

(J/K—coding is mostly just copy-pasting stuff from Stack Overflow.)

Pierre Menard and the infinite monkeys. Created using openframeworks, a series of openGL shaders, and about 48 hours of processing. The image is drawn using images Googled from the lyrics to the album "Irresistible."

How do you get over creative block?

I'm not "real-time" at all. I'm useless in a brainstorm, and even worse at a Q&A. First dates are a disaster, and job interviews are even worse. Whenever I'm asked something, I wish I could pause the world and go on a nice walk through Shinjuku Gyoen, because I know that right around the fifteen-minute mark, when the blood starts moving, I'll find the right idea, the right reply. Working alone is great because you have this affordance, but sometimes in groups it's hard to say, "Hey y'all, keep brainstorming, you're doing a great job. I'm just going to go take a lil perambulation, if you can just hold that thought until I get back?"

I'm also usually most creative when I'm working with some idiom or technology I've never touched before. Figuring something out for the first time is the best way to have ideas about how to use it. People like to rap about reinventing the wheel, but I feel like reinventing wheels is how we come up with bicycles.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

I have this great translation I did of Aida Makoto's novel, Youth and Perversion. I need to nudge him about rights, because it's really a sterling translation.

How do you see the world in 2078?

(Assuming a Werner Herzog mien.) I must confess, I'm pessimistic. I think we'll either have a benign socialist matriarchy, or else it will be a hellscape. My expectations have not been appreciably bolstered by the last year of world history.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I'd like to get into hang-gliding or some other flying sport. I'm banking on somebody from IDEO designing an affordable, eco-friendly personal flight module.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Mohri Yuko, a great Japanese interactive installation artist.

Kevin Freeny, funniest man alive 16 years running.

As a longtime resident of Tokyo, Matt Fargo finds ways to make Japanese culture more fun for everyone. He's written books about speaking dirty Japanese, created dynamic audio and visuals for musicals featuring dancing dogs, and built games for Tokyo train riders. He’s one of those restless creative people who just goes forth and makes. Before living in Tokyo, he spent time creating interactive experiences for Second Story in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He's since continued his quest to build weirdness into technology through his work at Party. Let’s peek into his brain, shall we?

Sometimes the questions are serious (“How might we better design for equity—inclusion, diversity, ageism, access, technology, etc—for all?) and sometimes they’re playful (“What’s your favorite restaurant in the Bay Area?”). But no matter what type of question goes up, the responses are always intriguing.

Our latest bathroom installation asked: “What book are you currently reading?” I’m always on the hunt for a good read, so I couldn’t be happier with the bonanza of recommendations. Dig in:

4321 ◆ A Fine Balance ◆ A Man Named Ove ◆ A Manual for Cleaning Women ◆ Amazon Beaming ◆ Americanah ◆ Barbarian Days ◆ Being Mortal ◆ Beyond the 100th Meridian ◆ Big Magic ◆ Borne ◆ Brida ◆ Celine ◆ Commonwealth ◆ Como Agua Para Chocolate ◆ Danny the Champion of the World ◆ Dark Forest ◆ Devil in the White City ◆ Dolly - My Life and Other Unfinished Projects ◆ Dreamblood Duology ◆ East of Eden ◆ Essentialism ◆ Exit West ◆ Facebook ◆ Faith of the Fallen ◆ Far from the Tree

Gut ◆ Heat ◆ Homo Deus ◆ Life Over Cancer ◆ Lovie ◆ M Train ◆ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ◆ Moon Tiger ◆ Mustache Shenanigans ◆ My Life on the Road ◆ My Year of Meats ◆ Neuromancer ◆ On Booze ◆ Origin of the Species ◆ Other Minds ◆ Pachinko ◆ Reality is Broken ◆ Sapiens ◆ Shoe Dog ◆ Stealing Fire ◆ Stories of Life and Others ◆ The ABCs of Real Estate Investing ◆ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ◆ The Circle ◆ The Collapse of American Criminal Justice ◆ The Drowned World

The Ethical Slut ◆ The Gene ◆ The God of Small Things ◆ The Gunslinger ◆ The Harry Potter Series ◆ The Incal ◆ The Interestings ◆ The Labyrinth of Spirits ◆ The Language of Food ◆ The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck ◆ The Lightbringer Series ◆ The Name of the Wind ◆ The Orphan Master’s Son ◆ The Quran ◆ The Sellout ◆ The Sixth Extinction ◆ The Sympathizer ◆ The Travels of Ibn Battutah ◆ The Unbanking of America ◆ The Unseen City ◆ The Vegetarian ◆ The Violet Hour ◆ Third Plate ◆ Topics in Calamity Physics ◆ Trials of Apollo II ◆ Yes, Please

What have you read (or listened to) on the list? And what are you curious to read? Tag your response on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with #bathroomread.

Visuals by Jane Ha.

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There’s one IDEO tradition you’ll only get to witness if you stop by our San Francisco office with a full bladder. Every few weeks, a new question goes up on the bathroom wall. IDEOers pop into the loo throughout the day, spend a few moments minding their own business, so to speak, and the wall fills up with answers.

The podcast talks about how mycelium and mycorrhiza give plants a natural network for absorbing and sharing nutrients in soil. The fungi create connections with the rootlets of individual trees and grow further out to connect with the root networks of other plants. These networks create an “underground economy” by which trees can trade and share nutrients.

This method of sharing is a good lesson for business: A lack of connections can create inefficiencies and tensions between potential collaborators. Looking at these networks raised a question for us: How can we facilitate connections between real-world businesses that would allow them to share resources?

We got so excited about the idea we jumped right into building something: a prototype called Myko, a smart scale and sensors that create a mesh network allowing two businesses to share streaming data that benefits both parties. We took the opportunity to build with Nomad, an open source streaming protocol Reid Williams and Gavin McDermott have been developing at the CoLab.

Nomad works as a decentralized messaging system, an open source protocol to discover, publish, and remix live data streams from anyone, anywhere. Nomad is built on IPFS, a distributed network, engineered as universal infrastructure to be open, scalable, and durable.

The Nomad API is based on a publish and subscribe system. When someone creates a node, it can either publish data to peers on the network, or subscribe to other peer nodes on the network. Publishing nodes are called “atomic” nodes, while subscribing nodes are called “composite” nodes. When someone creates a node on the network, it’s given a unique ID. For a composite node to receive data from an atomic node, all that’s needed is this ID. From then on, any data that the atomic node publishes is delivered to the composite node in real time.

Warning, nerd paragraph:

Using a couple Particle Photons and force-sensitive resistors, we quickly set up two atomic nomad nodes capable of broadcasting real-time data from two connected objects. I used the particle event stream API to output data in a JSON format, so I could easily parse event objects just like I would with any REST API.

Since the Photons can broadcast anywhere with wifi and a power source, these nodes will always be running, providing a constant stream of data no matter how far apart they are.

In this prototype, we built two connected weight-sensing plinths for coffee pots to rest on. The weight data from the plinths allowed us to determine when new coffee was brewed, how old it was, how many cups had been poured, and how much was left (we could even see the cups being poured in real time). One pot sat in our office at the CoLab, and the other sat in a nearby coffee shop.

When the CoLab pot was old or out of coffee, and when the cafe’s pot was fresh or about to be emptied (which happens every 45 minutes at our local cafe — they’re serious about freshness!), a signal on the plinth at CoLab was activated to tell would-be coffee drinkers to head to the cafe for a walk outside and a fresh coffee. At the same time, a signal was activated on the cafe’s pot, letting them know that IDEOers were being sent over.

The partnership possibilities created by this workflow are endless. For example, what if CoLab diverted some of its monthly studio coffee budget to create a steady income stream for the cafe? Could the cafe institute dynamic pricing on its coffee to reduce food waste? What about baked goods that go stale the next day? Could neighboring cafes use infrared sensors to share their current occupancy to load-balance their wait times in line or their occupied seats?

These questions sparked a lot more ideas and another experiment, in which we used Nomad to reduce coffee and food waste at the cafe. When a barista brewed a fresh pot of coffee, they simply pressed a button to send a notification to customers with the app. After 15 minutes, the price of a cup of coffee dropped by 10%. After 20 minutes, it dropped by 45%, and so on. Since we knew the cafe threw out its coffee after 45 minutes, we could set a timer to reset the price to normal levels when a fresh pot was ready.

In our prototype, coffee drinkers could see dynamic pricing via an app. This website was a small nomad web app powered by data from the Myko button in the cafe.

Whenever the user viewed the app, it displayed the current price of the coffee and a “buy now” button that used Stripe to create a purchase. When a user purchased a coffee, they received a unique code to redeem for the cup they purchased at the shop. The app operated off of a simple set of events whose time and content could be customized.

Something I didn’t have time to implement in the experiment was customization. Ideally, a cafe owner would be able to create new events themselves, adjusting elapsed time, content, and price with just a few taps. While this example isn’t a perfect design, we’re inspired by the live connections it can form between the cafe and its patrons.

Coffee isn’t a life-changing mechanism, but these prototypes represent a developing form of communication between objects and organizations. As we create digital twins of real world objects, our world becomes a living, breathing network, driven by data that we generate by going about our daily lives. Will smart cities be able to divert traffic through different routes based on live congestion data? Can a group of sensor-outfitted machines in a factory automatically organize a group-buy of replacement parts at a discount to the facility owner? These are questions that I’m hoping to answer through these digital fungal relationships.

Adapted from IDEO CoLab’s post on decentralizing chat here.

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At IDEO CoLab, we love thinking about what nature can teach us about emerging technology. Recently, we revisited an old podcast from a source we adore: Radiolab. Their episode From Tree to Shining Tree inspired us when we were thinking about naturally-occurring mesh networks.

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.