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.

‍

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.

‍

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.
‍

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.
‍

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.

‍

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

In an effort to be more conscious of our own health and the health of our planet, we’re being told to eat a plant-based diet, while, at the same time, lab-grown meat is gaining traction. How do we wrap our heads around all of it?

We think design can help. But a few things have to shift if we’re going to drive the global food system toward greater sustainability. At the consumer level, it’s about supporting people to make healthier decisions about how they eat. At the level of large companies or complex systems, it’s about helping organizations reinvent themselves, ask bigger questions, and make more thoughtful changes from within.

In either case, change isn’t easy. To help our clients in the food space get inspired and energized, we often recommend looking for insights in unexpected places—we call it “analogous inspiration.” It’s easy to get caught up in what you already know and mired in the same cyclical ways of thinking; to innovate, you have to break out.

Here are a few ways for folks to innovate in the food landscape (and beyond):

1. Design for emerging behaviors

During a recent project to help a global beverage company think beyond its current business, we set up interviews with people outside the industry, including one with a company that makes charging stations for electric vehicles. When the car charging company was just starting out, leaders assumed they would follow the model of gas stations by building stand-alone charging stations spread throughout a city. That’s how people had fueled cars for decades, right?

But it turns out consumers don’t want to stand around for 30 or 40 minutes while their cars charge; instead, they want to fold charging into another errand, such as a trip to the grocery store. Because their lives are increasingly complex, they want to streamline wherever they can. This insight prompted the charging company to completely rethink its approach.

Though the beverage businesses has nothing to do with cars, seeing the charging company’s abrupt change in tactics to address a human need inspired our client to think far beyond existing consumer behaviors and to advocate for big changes in the business model.

The takeaway: Instead of taking the established route, innovators should be on the lookout for new and emerging behaviors that indicate an alternative path to designing for the future.

2. Get up close and personal

A lot of living happens outside of conference rooms and surveys. In order to capture what’s really on folks’ minds, we often spend days or weeks shadowing people and looking for unconscious behaviors that can influence how we design for them.

Recently, we were working with a baby food company looking to expand its line of products. We met real customers and shadowed them for days—at home, on their commutes, while shopping, and when preparing food. By traveling on the subway with them during feeding time, watching them buy groceries, and sitting with them in their homes, we noticed how many workarounds they used when feeding their infants and a few common issues they faced with existing baby food.

These insights, while seemingly small, helped inform how we designed our client’s food packaging. It was the little observations we made by diving in head-first with parents that enabled us to create a feeding experience that feels a bit more parent-centered.

The take-away: Double down on real human interactions and don’t overlook the small stuff. Sometimes, subconscious behaviors and common workarounds indicate the need for a redesign.

3. Look beyond your industry

When you walk into a hotel room, you’re often greeted by signs encouraging you to save water by reusing your towels or foregoing a change of sheets. While no longer new to most of us, these reminders were fairly revolutionary when they first appeared and have helped to save millions of gallons of water since.

When we set out to help the Rockefeller Foundation find ways to reduce food waste, we looked for examples of waste reduction in other industries, including hospitality. Hotel signage cueing visitors to reuse towels is more than just a pesky reminder to save water; it’s a way for people to incrementally change their behavior while feeling like they’re a part of something bigger for the betterment of the planet. In this case, understanding what motivates people resulted in a drastic drop in water waste.

With the Rockefeller Foundation, we tapped into data around food waste and were able to use it to predict human behaviors and test subtle changes in a number of industries. Hyatt Hotels prototyped some of this thinking in their buffets—by switching from whole cakes to individual sweets, for example—resulting in a 10 percent cost savings for the company and an enormous reduction in food waste.

The take-away: Instead of looking within your own walls for inspiration, look outside to other industries and sectors to see how they’ve solved similar problems.

We've found these three design approaches useful. Have other ideas? We’d love to hear them! Tag @IDEO and use the hashtag #designforfood.

The world of food contains all kinds of internal tensions: On the one hand, we’re faced with hunger and food shortages, while on the other we’re fighting an obesity epidemic.

And as with any technology, AI can have a dark side, too. Whether it's Cambridge Analytica exploiting personal information for political gain or Northpointe developing prejudiced algorithms for bail and sentencing hearings, danger lurks.

This is a moment for design. A moment for us to imagine the kind of future we want to see. What might it feel like?

To explore those questions, and give shape to the immense benefits that intelligent machines can bring to our lives, work, and society as a whole, we created a speculative design exhibition for Munich Creative Business Week called Hyperhuman.

Here's a peek at the products:

The Purpose Compass

What if a machine could help you better understand your strengths? What if it could help you succeed in a machine-augmented future?

Armies of robots already populate the factory floor and digital lawyers write our contracts. As intelligent machines become a fixture in every aspect of our work and lives, they inevitably start challenging our contribution to society, begging the question, do humans still matter? What is our purpose?

The Purpose Compass helps you determine your unique worth in the future. It understands what you are good at and helps you decide what to focus on to stay relevant, productive, and happy in the long term. Turn towards larger purpose goals—teaching, leading, inventing, or caring—to set a course and learn which skills you'll need to pick up to get there. Over time, many skills will be automated, freeing you up to learn new ones.

Purpose is shaped, not given.

The Expertise TV

What if a machine could identify gaps within an organization’s knowledge and help you figure out how to fill them?

We have unprecedented access to information, but the sheer volume of it prevents us from gaining deep understanding of a wide range of topics. We either specialize in a specific field or become generalists, making assumptions to fill the gaps in our expertise.

Enter Expertise TV: Twist its knobs and it instantly directs you to experts whose knowledge sheds light on unanswered questions that are holding your organization back.

Knowledge resides in people, not machines.

The Creativity Mixer

What if you could describe your personality, and ‘mix’ a visual identity that expresses you?

Even with a creative mindset, people often lack confidence and ability to shape and express their ideas at the highest level.

What does your brand look like? Turn the dials of the Creativity Mixer (produced in collaboration with creative.ai) to set your personality ("playful," "stubborn") and it calls up images, fonts, and colors for you to use when executing ideas. When settled with your choices, hit print for your very own brand style guide.

Creativity is latent, tools make it accessible.

The Empathy Writer

What if you could find the exact right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

Our globally connected lives mean we’re frequently brought into contact with people from different cultures and backgrounds.Despite the opportunities these networks present, we often struggle to communicate, as we are not equally fluent in the other’s language and don’t share the same cultural
mores.

What if you could find just the right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

The Empathy Writer helps you convey what you mean in a way that will be easily understood. Using the character trait tiles, I describe myself and you, then the machine helps me compose a message in a way that reflects who you are.

Empathy is amplified.

The Belief Checkout

What if tomorrow’s supermarkets considered your values and ethics when automatically buying products for you?

We outsource more and more tasks to AI. But how do we know that the decisions AI makes on our behalf are aligned with our beliefs and values? How do we impart them to the machine?

The Belief Checkout’s shelves are full of products that represent values. Pick the ones that reflect you to help steer the supermarket’s algorithm. Say you value sustainability. While eating red meat may not sound like a sustainable choice, eating an overstocked steak might be. The supermarket can help you make choices that square with your values.

We let go of control, but our beliefs stay in tact.

Hyperhuman was a collaboration between IDEO Munich, London, and Chicago. To find out more about our Protopian perspective on augmented intelligence email europe@ideo.com.

We’re in the midst of a revolution. Intelligent machines are able to augment our humanity in ways that seem lifted straight out of science fiction. Self-driving cars, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, even our thermostats learn from us and get smarter over time.

I took this picture at the train station right next to our Palo Alto office. At first glance, I thought it was an unusual fashion statement, but then I realized that the woman in the picture solved a common problem in an elegant way: When your bike lacks a chain guard, your pants can easily get stuck and you risk destroying them—or even causing an accident. By wearing a cut-off sock above her pants she kept them protected from the chain. By going with a chartreuse sock, she made sure she wouldn't be overlooked in the aggressive Bay Area traffic.

Unfortunately, I discovered this helpful little hack the day after I ruined my favorite yellow pants with chain oil. But don't pity me too much; in the end my dry cleaner saved my day, and from now on, I'll always carry a cut-off sock with me.

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 their work.

In exploring the topic, I soon realized the issue was not the lack of stuff he would leave behind when he passed away, but rather quite the opposite. Today, a digital information overload is present for almost all of us.

‍

As the techie of the family, I’ve taken on the role of digital archivist for two close loved ones we’ve lost over the years. My brother died in 2003, and 15 years is a very long time ago in technological terms. Nonetheless, I was able to build an archive of his photos, MP3s, school papers, personal documents, and other digital fragments. I felt closer to him because of this.

Today of course, we have social media, and it’s a cultural trope to say that we live out our lives publicly on it. But social data only represents a limited and curated self that we share with the world. Our digital footprint is vast. Beyond our social data, we have our emails and chat histories, the photos and videos we take, the photos and videos others take of us, and our web searches—all of which are rich with metadata, including time, date, and location.

IBM estimates that humanity is generating 250 billion gigabytes of data every single day, and that 90 percent of all the data ever created by mankind has been generated in the past two years alone. In just two years, we’ve surpassed the volume of the entire record of human knowledge from cave paintings up until the end of 2015.

Consider that we’ve only had photographs for a few generations. I can look back at this photo of my young grandfather and his rugby team in County Sligo, Ireland, but we have no photos of his grandfather. Until quite recently, most of humanity never had any record of how their ancestors looked—something we take for granted today. Even the written word was not always ubiquitous; just 200 years ago it’s estimated that only 12 percent of the world’s population was literate.

The digital records for people over a certain age are inherently incomplete, but the younger you are, the more complete your picture is, whether you created it yourself or it was captured by your parents as they documented your childhood to share with Grandma. In the historical blink of an eye, our digital footprints have gone from spotty to distinct—a complete picture of our online lives.

This begs the questions: What if we left our digital footprints behind intentionally? How might we curate, filter, or amend our digital records as we plan for our own end of life?

There are a number of emerging technologies and techniques that can help us design our digital afterlives. If you’re interested in training a chatbot to mimic you, you can begin today with Replika.ai, a bot that learns to be more like you the more you use it. The team behind it has even open-sourced their underlying chat tech on GitHub.

VocalID is a company that allows people to preserve their vocal legacy by recording a set of voice samples. Its primary customers are people who lose their voices—for example those with ALS or Parkinson’s. Could people give these voice samples to family members after their deaths, or request that their voices die with them?

Beyond text, researchers at the University of Washington have shown that with a broad enough set of video samples, we can train an AI to create entirely new video clips of the same subjects. And emerging technology called “deep fakes” can use machine learning to swap faces in online videos.

Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Syncing from Audio. University of Washington.

The collision of our immense datasets with rapidly advancing abilities in machine learning is not only inevitable, it’s happening now. Roman Mazurenko is a digital avatar of the real Roman built by one of his grieving friends after his death. Anyone can download it/him from the app store.

This is not about the singularity or transhumanism; I’m not talking about uploading my consciousness to the cloud to create Virtual Sean. But rather, how might our loved ones experience us differently after we pass?

In the future, we’ll have new ways to preserve more bits and pieces of ourselves— our voices, photos, texts, etc.—and new ways for our loved ones to experience this ephemera. There will be new challenges as well. Much of the data we create is invisible to us and is not under our direct control or ownership. When we pass, this data will live on, whether we like it or not.

I expect that you might be simultaneously intrigued and concerned by this topic; that’s to be expected. But just as we must one day face the end of our lives, we must also grapple with our digital identities and digital legacies.

Let’s get the dialogue started.

A few months ago, my cousin asked me about his digital legacy. He asked how his kids could explore his personal artifacts—his ephemera—in the digital age, when there are no vinyl records, physical photographs, or even MP3s to hand down.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.