Giving food assistance is about more than handing over a box of groceries. It’s about allowing people to make their own choices.

But the pandemic only narrowed people’s choices. Undeterred, Northern Illinois Food Bank (NIFB) put people’s needs above everything else, leading to innovations that could improve food banks everywhere. IDEO recruited neighbors to co-design a new digital tool intended to improve people’s access to food. Local residents provided more than insights—they steered design decisions and helped transform the relationship between NIFB and the community.

Northern Illinois Food Bank’s My Pantry Express app allows people to browse and order groceries online and to choose a pickup time and location that works for their schedule. We designed the app to provide useful information on dietary preferences and to be inclusive of cultural differences. The result allows choice and flexibility, helps prevent food waste, and preserves the dignity of shoppers throughout the process by making My Pantry Express feel like any other grocery site.

Ultimately, Northern Illinois Food Bank and IDEO’s strategy for success relied on new metrics. In addition to measuring effectiveness in pounds of food distributed, we found new ways to measure shoppers’ satisfaction—a solution that works better for all parties involved because it was designed by all parties involved.

An estimated 1 in 8 Americans experience food insecurity.

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The food insecurity rate is 2-3x higher for persons of color than for white households.

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60% of food insecure households do not use food pantries.

1.9M

meals distributed through My Pantry Express in 2021

50%

increase in distribution from prior year

To create Bendable, IDEO worked alongside the people closest to the problem, so every important decision grew out of their experience.

IDEO and the Drucker Institute aligned with the library system and city leaders in South Bend, Indiana, on a single objective: build a learning platform that offered education opportunities to people affected by the decline of manufacturing in the region. But even the earliest phases of research revealed that there’s no common profile that matched the diversity of learners. There are innumerable reasons why people seek to learn and as many barriers holding them back.

Knowing this, South Bend residents were the acknowledged authority for this work, and a design consultancy all their own. This radically simplified crucial decisions. Negative associations around traditional education led people to seek knowledge from those they already trusted. And they often lacked awareness about or the ability to access the many free resources already available.

The residents of South Bend helped the entire consortium see that the city wasn’t under-resourced but under-connected. That insight, and the power the community and the library system held to rectify it, made Bendable into the people-driven, connection-based learning platform it is today.

By 2025, as many as 85 million jobs will be displaced by automation, yet 97 million new ones could emerge.

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More than a third of adults pursuing postsecondary education before the COVID-19 pandemic were forced to abandon those plans.

25

programs and other resources offerings are now available to residents of South bend

4

states have begun to integrate Bendable into library systems

Protecting the right to vote means ensuring that all citizens can cast their ballots privately, independently, and easily.

With that principle in mind, Los Angeles County sought out a design strategy firm to create a next-generation, customizable system that would meet the needs of its large and diverse voter population while satisfying myriad voting regulations. The result: an accessible, self-enclosed ballot-marking device with a touchscreen that allows any voter to easily navigate, mark, verify, and submit a paper ballot. We also worked to improve the entire voting experience, including vote-by-mail ballots, interactive sample ballots, and the tally process.

As with any inclusive design, details matter. Voters with vision impairment or reading disabilities can opt for audio and tactile experiences with the push of a few simple buttons. And for voters who prefer to read the ballot in their native language—Spanish, Chinese, Korean, or any one of the 11 others supported by the county—the device lets them select their preference.

After extensive research and testing with constituents, we designed a solution that makes voting easier for anyone. And knowing that the only constant is change, we made the system flexible enough to adapt to emerging needs and technologies, protecting voters’ rights now and in the future. Read the full case study here.

26% of American adults have some type of disability. In the 2020 election, 18% of disabled voters nationally reported difficulty voting, about twice as many as non-disabled voters.

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In 2020, national voter turnout among disabled people was 7% lower than among non-disabled people in the same age group.

"Intuitive & secure"

was the sentiment most Los Angeles County voters expressed about the new voting system after the 2020 primary election

Conservation International is made up of conservation experts. To bolster its work, we bring a focus on scale, speed, and the human element to every project.

How does that look in the field? To restore the forest of Fiji, Conservation International paid a cash incentive to the community to buy, plant, and care for new trees and foliage. But once those cash incentives stopped flowing, the work ground to a halt. Taking a human-centered-design approach, one employee uncovered an insight: Fijians are more motivated to help in exchange for longer-term, noncash incentives like building infrastructure in villages. Small projects such as footpaths, repairs to communal trucks, beehives, or sports programs for youth continually reminded the community that the environment is a provider for their families, imparting a feeling of shared ownership in its conservation.

Stories like this, repeated around the globe, are how we hope to help Conservation International find sustainable outcomes. Our work together, including a six-month fellowship to help emerging leaders develop new capabilities, and a series of strategic, future-focused events for executives, has brought more tangibility and deeper collaboration to the organization.

Together we hope to create businesses, food solutions, and energy alternatives that conserve nature, and improve human health—because humans are a part of nature, too.

The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that we have ten years to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions or humanity will suffer devastating consequences.

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We need to conserve one third of the global ocean using area-based measures and ensure at least 75% of seafood is harvested using socially responsible, environmentally sustainable methods by 2030.

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75% of the world’s poor rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, which in turn depends on nature for pollination, irrigation, and soil replenishment.

20

leaders integrated human-centered design into annual goals, project pipelines, and fundraising efforts

20%

of the organization is now involved in design-thinking projects

Between the allure of the WFH lifestyle, more flexible working hours, and be-your-own-boss independence, it’s no wonder more people are staying home. But the other side of that coin is that everyone and their mother is freelancing, so it's harder than ever to stand out. We asked our freelance IDEOers and those who hire them to tell us the best ways to make it work.

Here are the top three ways to rethink and refuel your freelancing:

1. Turn ‘networking’ into ‘helpworking.’

Before you audibly groan at the word “networking,” hear us out. Let’s try an exercise: Write down a favor you might ask of someone in your field. Pause. How do you feel? A little anxious? Maybe kinda bummed?

Now, imagine how you might offer to help one of your clients. Jot down three provocative ideas you have for them. Pause. How do you feel? Energized?

We thought so. And that’s the thing. It turns out that while asking for help is hard and can make us feel bad, giving help is actually invigorating and makes us happy. Huh.

So what does this mean for your freelancing? It means looking for opportunities to come together with other collaborators or companies in a way that generates good vibes all around. You can make this happen by bringing together other freelancers for your own hackathon-style event. (Maybe even get a company to sponsor it in exchange for your combined thinking). Or you can join a community-based network. There are tons of places to find like-minded creative people, like co-working spaces or meet-ups.

Whether one-on-one or one-on-many, flip networking from the downer of asking for help, to the booster of giving help—and upgrade the kinds of projects and people you work with as a result.

2. Show all your angles. #nofilter

Help companies hire you by showing them all the kinds of work that you do. Are you a medical illustrator with expertise drawing physiological diagrams? That's exactly what we need for one of our health-related projects. When you say “interaction designer,” explain the very specific range of interactions you design. And if you worked on a group project, add a sentence to call out the parts of the project you did.

There’s a fear that by being very specific in what you do and don’t do, you’ll pigeonhole yourself. But the truth is that when a company needs to hire a freelancer, it’s almost certainly because of a very specific task that requires a skill or resource that the company doesn’t already have. If you happen to do that very niche craft… you’re hired!

So don’t leave the range or specificity of what you can do to the imaginations of your prospective clients. Lay it all out (preferably on your website, in emails, on LinkedIn—the Skills section is great for this), and you’ll be increasing the likelihood of a “swipe right” when it comes to new collaborations and projects.

3. Repetition does not spoil the prayer.

So you met a prospective client or collaborator at an event (perhaps the recent Break the News brainstorm we hosted in our Cambridge office), you clicked, you exchanged information, and then… crickets.

It’s tempting to think that the prospective partner will keep you top-of-mind for future projects. The reality is that, while they probably felt the spark too, life happens. And in the chaos they might not remember important details—like how to contact you! So make it easy for them by reminding them regularly of your work, what you’re up to, when you’re available, and how to get in touch.

There’s a reason advertisers commonly reference the number seven as the sweet-spot in terms of “effective frequency”—the number of times a customer needs to see an ad’s message before they buy. Think creatively about how you stay in touch and top-of-mind for potential partners. Send them a monthly email showcasing your latest work. Mail them a beautiful poster you made. Send a note praising their most recent project. Continue to show up to more events. Aim for more. To you, it might seem repetitive, but to a prospective client, it’s a reminder that you’re there, ready to co-create.

In the end, more is more. That’s the key to navigating today’s ambiguous (and exciting) un-9-to-5.

With the rise of the gig economy, the workplace has changed dramatically—and for the better, we think. The definition of a “long and successful career” has been flipped on its head. (Hint: It’s no longer about walking into the same office building for 30 years). And who’s leading the charge? Freelancers.

I took this picture last summer while I was back home in Istanbul. Istanbul is a city that people mold to fit their needs. Market owners, residents, even kids always find ways to reimagine the streets. Sometimes it’s a group of kids turning a cul-de-sac into a football field. Sometimes it’s the residents of the neighborhood having tea on the stairs of a building, treating the street as a café.

Growing up in there made me look at sidewalks in a completely different way. Last summer, while I was wandering around my neighborhood, I noticed this amazing piece of furniture that our neighborhood market owner made. He put a pillow on top of the water containers and turned them into a bench. It’s a perfect temporary seating arrangement.

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.

But that’s the thing. Finding readers who have the time to slog through an unpublished manuscript is hard. Like, really hard. Many people said they would read it, but never got further than the first few chapters. Was it because they hated the book? Or just because they got busy watching season four of Orange is the New Black? And the wonderful friends who did read it—were they actually honest with me? Or pulling punches because, who wants to make a friend cry?

That’s when a friend who actually finished my book had an idea: What if we could take some of the best aspects of the design thinking process (such as collaboration, multidisciplinary perspectives, prototyping) and adapt them for the writing and publishing space by connecting authors with a diverse pool of readers who could provide thoughtful, honest feedback? Meet The Spun Yarn.

We hypothesized that there was a whole universe of potential readers out there—moms and dads and students and grandparents who might be interested in earning a bit of extra cash by providing thoughtful feedback on an unpublished novel. So we placed a Craigslist ad in four cities to see what would happen. Within 24 hours, we had to pull the posting because we were flooded with wonderful applicants. A traveling musician from Wisconsin. A cookbook author from Georgia. A retiree and jewelry maker from San Jose. We hired these folks and others and created the framework and the process to provide honest and actionable feedback on people’s novels—including mine.

Here's how it works:

Every novel that we receive is matched with three readers, each of whom reads the entire book and provides feedback using the same evaluation matrix (a mix of qualitative and quantitative input).

Once this stage is complete, our Spun Yarn team crunches the reader input and identifies the themes and patterns that have emerged about the manuscript. We deliver this synthesized feedback report to the writer. In a sense, what we’re doing is helping writers understand that a draft of their book is just like a design prototype. Most of the time, what we’re finding is pretty straightforward stuff. A main character needs to be fleshed out. An author’s ending ties things up way too neatly. Readers absolutely loved the glimpse into the world of surgery that a certain novel provides. Double down on that in a future prototype (I mean, draft) of the novel.

There’s a saying attributed to IDEO founder David Kelley that there’s no such thing as one magic idea. What I’ve learned from the Spun Yarn is that the same goes for novel writing. It turns out (based upon input from three very thoughtful and very honest Spun Yarn readers), that I haven’t written a masterpiece. There is a ton of work that still needs to be done. But thanks to help from my own multi-disciplinary design team (based in Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Berkeley, respectively), the next draft of my novel will be just a little bit closer.

Have you written a novel? Want some honest feedback? Visit thespunyarn.com.

About a year ago, I finished a novel. After much editing in the early morning hours, I arrived at that place where I could no longer see any flaws in the book. What I needed next was feedback (on what I hoped was a masterpiece, but couldn’t be quite sure).

From a business perspective, I can appreciate why this demographic is appealing. It makes economic sense to consider a customer segment primed to understand the company's proposed product or service.

But limiting research to the East and West Coasts is exclusionary, and can even be discriminatory. Following recent events in our national story, there’s been a lot of chatter about ignorance—about a hidden America. And this isn’t just our problem: Events like Brexit, the Catalonian referendum, and the rise of populism at large all point to the need to address different perspectives. The context has shifted, and it’s our responsibility to respond.

So, a Cambridge-based team of designers decided to do something about it. We know that addressing geographic bias begins by identifying your blind spots, so to kick things off, my colleague Graham Gardner helped us prototype a simple yet elegant solution: a data-rich Google Map.

For every engagement, we document where the team conducts research and upload this information to the map. It’s the first step in visualizing hotspots, as well as potential design research deserts. Just seeing the spread of icons across the country helps teams realize if their sample population is skewed or appropriately representative.

Mapping is a simple hack that keeps teams accountable, and it’s easy to do yourself. Here's how:

1. While signed into your Google account, open the “My Maps” page on Google Maps.
2. Click on Create a new map in the upper-left corner.
3. Click on Untitled map and give your new map a name, for example, “Design Research Phase 1".
4. Search for the addresses of locations you’ve selected for your research.
5. Click + Add to map to create a marker at that location.
6. Zoom out to see a birds-eye view of your research plan.

It’s that easy. And it’s incredibly effective.

Maps motivate action. This isn’t a revolutionary perspective. Organizations across the globe use maps to identify blind spots in their work. Consider the USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas (designed to prompt policymakers to close the gap to healthy foods) or the New York Times’ powerful piece on "Mapping Segregation," which was intended to spark dialogue about systemic segregation.

Now, we're designing ways to burst our own design research bubble, and I’ve already begun to notice some changes. On a recent client engagement, we revised our plan and suggested a few days of research in Kansas and Missouri, instead of just Boston.

To our delight, the client loved the idea. Two weeks later, we were on a flight to Kansas City. While there, we noticed the importance of community relationships in a much stronger way than we did at home base. This pushed us to reconsider how we incorporated community advice into our final product design.

Inclusive, forward-thinking design doesn’t mean replicating what works well or feels right in our backyard. It means getting out there, dialing up your inner listener, and sitting down with someone completely unlike you. Your perspective will never be the same.

At IDEO, we take listening pretty seriously. That means talking to people who are outside of our comfort zone. That said, in my years conducting design research interviews, I’ve found that our targets fit a certain profile: Coastal. Millennial. Liberal. Globally-minded.

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.