IDEO and Fotile have had a relationship since 2009, working together on projects including a unified design language for product offerings, retail environments, and IoT strategy. For the dishwasher, IDEO and the Fotile research team came together for design research, shadowing Chinese families in different cities as they prepared meals from start to finish. Together they discovered that unlike in Western cooking, where several kinds of cookware are used for different dishes, Chinese cooks tend to use the same cookware to prepare all of their dishes.

That meant that the cookware needed to be cleaned several times during a single meal preparation, rather than once at the end. In this context, the sink serves different purposes over the course of cooking—it’s a place to wash and store prepped ingredients, rinse the cookware, and deep clean the dishes used in food prep and during the meal.

Based on this insight, IDEO made a list of product design recommendations that became Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher—a counter-level, multi-purpose appliance that specifically suits Chinese cooking habits. IDEO’s design guidance gave Fotile the confidence it needed to launch its product into the market, and served as a blueprint for the future iteration of Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher.

On March 25, 2015, six months after the project ended, Fotile launched the world's first sink dishwasher designed for Chinese families. Eight months later, its market share exceeded 30 percent, setting off a wave of innovation in the Chinese dishwasher category.

In 2016, Fotile introduced a three-slot dishwasher with an added compartment for cleaning fruit and vegetables—a direct response to a research finding that Chinese families are concerned about food safety. When this new model hit the market, Fotile’s dishwasher market share jumped to 41.1%. In China, Fotile is now synonymous with “sink dishwasher,” and the company has a widespread reputation among consumers as a symbol of a safe and healthy Chinese family kitchen.

Since its founding in 1994, Fotile’s Chairman, Mao Zhongqun, has made it his goal to “do nothing but build a high-end Chinese family brand.”

30%

Fotile Sink Dishwasher’s share of the market in China, just eight months after launch

41%

Fotile’s dishwasher market share after it launched a three-slot version in 2016

#1 selling brand

in the mainstream price segment of the Chinese dishwasher market as of August 2023

BoAo Group’s idea to design a new baby car seat was fueled by a newly revised minor protection law, which made using child safety seats mandatory beginning June 1st, 2021. As ZUOWE and IDEO looked around China’s emerging car seat market, the team noticed a singular focus on safety and safety features across most international and domestic brands. There was a clear opportunity for a new product that could meaningfully differentiate itself by not only providing safety features but also meeting the needs of modern Chinese parents.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team needed to answer two questions: What matters to the new generation of parents in China? And how will their style and approach to parenting affect their expectations for baby car seats? Taking into account the potentially different consumer needs in different geographies, the IDEO team headed to Shanghai, a city with more than 25 million people, and the city of Taizhou in Zhejiang province, which has a population of 2 million. They conducted in-depth home visits to local families, visited many brick-and-mortar mom-and-baby shops, and interviewed people like specialized nurses, parenting experts, and child psychologists. 

Despite the differences between the two cities, IDEO discovered commonalities during consumer conversations. Young Chinese parents were experiencing a perceived identity gap. As individuals, they felt they had distinct personalities and a clear sense of self. They actively expressed themselves through their clothes and belongings. But when they became parents, this sense of self weakened or disappeared completely.  Their identities shifted to being someone’s mom or dad overnight. This new generation was eager to show their unique approach to parenthood as they used to express their sense of self. But many products were designed for children, with little regard for parents. 

This core finding helped set the direction for the new baby car seat design and brand Maple&Co. However, there were still two significant challenges to overcome. One, IDEO needed to design a product with stringent technical regulations and standards on a tight timeline—ZUOWE wanted to launch the new car seat at an important industry trade show within the year. And two, the team had to help the organization transform its thinking and ways of working to be more consumer-centric.

BoAo’s strength lies in its 20 years of experience developing and manufacturing car seats for major domestic and international automotive brands. This gave the company an edge in overcoming technical barriers and driving mass production. But its engineering and manufacturing mindset had become a barrier to transforming into a D2C brand. With such ingrained ways of working, pivoting to a more creative process can be hard. 

To address this hurdle, IDEO set up co-creation workshops, bringing together ZUOWE’s newly formed baby car seat team and manufacturing experts from their factories to discuss design direction and details early on. The benefits of the collaboration were clear: It was easy to share feedback in a timely manner and make product design decisions very quickly. When IDEO presented a design that emphasized natural textures during a workshop on brand positioning, a member from Bo Ao’s manufacturing team said, “This feels very different. This could become a major selling point,” and that they had “never seen” anything like it done by other baby car seat brands.

A year after working together, ZUOWE Technology launched Maple&Co and the new Maple baby car seat across its main e-commerce channels. Modern and minimalist in soft natural colors and wooden veneers, Maple appeals to the aesthetics of young parents in China. Despite a series of micro COVID outbreaks in China, within three months, Maple had already achieved better-than-predicted sales and received favorable comments about the look and quality of the car seat from parents. Fast forward two years, additional collaborations with IDEO have enabled the young startup to grow its child travel portfolio from a signature car seat into a more holistic offering that includes highly functional, fashionable, and adaptable car booster seats and strollers that thoughtfully address the needs of modern Chinese families across various life stages at home—and on the go.

China's minor protection law mandated the use of child safety seats beginning June 1, 2021.

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Despite incoming regulations fueling a surge in purchases, car seats on the market rightly prioritized safety but did not consider the emotional needs and lifestyle preferences of a new generation of Chinese parents.

1 year

after the project ended, a new, differentiated baby seat product and brand, Maple&Co, launched

Top 6

during the 2023 “Double 11” shopping festival, Maple&CO secured the 6th spot on Tmall's new brand pre-sale list

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“Over a year ago, I had to take my cat to the vet for an unexpected and expensive surgery,” says one Card Member. “To be honest, I still don’t know if I’ve paid the bill off.”

Many crave the flexibility to pay for large purchases over time, but also want to avoid the pitfalls of debt. Others rely on debit or cash for small items—no one wants to accumulate interest on a cup of coffee, lunch with a friend, or box of Kleenex—but then miss out on valuable rewards.

American Express worked with IDEO to help them attract new customers by understanding what financially stable young adults wanted in a credit card. The team began by interviewing more than 120 millennials to understand their payment behaviors around debit and credit, and how they think about borrowing and spending.

One person described the monthly panic of receiving his bill—described as “statement shock”—and his habit of making multiple payments before his billing cycle closed to ease this anxiety. Others were wary of credit because of a large veterinarian bill or financial mistakes made in their 20s, and relied on debit because it felt safer than accruing a balance to pay off. Overall, the team learned that many consumers experience anxiety about paying their bills. And while financial products that offer more flexibility and control have been needed for years, they are especially valuable in times of economic uncertainty like today.

Based on this research, IDEO prototyped, iterated, and refined two concepts, with frequent feedback from users and the client. Called Pay It Plan It, this feature offers financially responsible consumers more transparency, confidence, and control.

Pay It allows Card Members to quickly pay for small purchase amounts under $100 with a few taps in the American Express mobile app. When that purchase shows up on their account, they can choose “Pay It” and still earn rewards on the purchase. This ensures Card Members can take advantage of rewards while lowering their monthly bill by paying for smaller items throughout the month.

With Plan It, Card Members can split up larger purchases of $100 or more—like an emergency trip to the vet or a new sofa—into equal monthly payments, with a fixed fee and no interest. When the purchase appears in their account, they can select “Plan It,” and will be offered up to three monthly payment plans, ranging from three to 24 months. Each plan comes with a fixed monthly fee and no interest. Card Members know exactly how much they have to pay each month, so there are no surprises. And if they pay the purchase off early, they no longer have to pay any future plan fees.

The design of Pay It Plan It did not come without challenges: Bill pay is critical, complex, and highly regulated. Pay It Plan It required a significant internal financial and technical investment, which was achieved after IDEO shared many of the emotional, compelling stories from credit card users with leaders at American Express.

The team worked closely with the American Express regulatory and digital teams to ensure compliance and seamless integration into the mobile app and website’s user experiences and interfaces. To heighten the sense of competence, control, and transparency for users, the designers focused on small interactions like status animations, proactive suggestions, and straightforward language. These interactions help Card Members anticipate upcoming payments and clearly understand Pay It Plan It.

Plan It was designed with transparency, control, and accessibility in mind: The payment plan fee is displayed in dollars to give the customer certainty over their total costs.

Initially, the team set out to create a new credit card with the needs of young adults in mind. But IDEO and American Express realized that Pay It Plan It could be scaled across existing credit card products to ultimately benefit and attract more Card Members. Now, almost all U.S. American Express Consumer Card Members have access to Pay It Plan It through credit cards, co-branded cards, and the well-known Green, Gold, and Platinum Cards. Since launching in 2017, Card Members have created nearly 5 million Plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in purchases, with an average Plan size of $789. Millennial and Generation Z Card Members have created approximately 44 percent of these Plans.

The flexibility and control offered through Pay It Plan have earned American Express positive press, including a call-out in The New York Times for being among solutions that “make it easier for their customers to borrow money, and to manage their monthly cash flow.”

At first glance, design-led innovation may seem difficult to achieve in large, established organizations like American Express, operating in a highly regulated and deeply rational industry. But the IDEO and American Express team successfully found ways to introduce new behaviors like rapid prototyping, cross-discipline collaboration, and leading with emotional customer stories within the existing organizational culture and structure. American Express has since established a permanent Pay It Plan It team dedicated to evolving the feature. Made up of employees across departments, this points to a new and collaborative team structure for the company.

By seeking to understand the human behind the Card Member, American Express has transformed credit and financial services for the better, helping both to be defined by empathy, utility, and transparency.

For more than two centuries, The Times held a strong reputation as a storied British newspaper. Then came the digital deluge. Publication after publication began adopting a relentless online publishing schedule aimed at capturing eyeballs and subscribers, and guarding against waning advertising sales and print readership. But The Times and its sister publication The Sunday Times thought there might be a different way forward.

As Editor John Witherow explains, “the power of an edition” had long endured at The Times, but began to erode amid a round-the-clock breaking news cycle. Witherow didn’t want to do away with editions, but rather to update the model for the digital age. Times owner News UK approached IDEO in 2014 to explore exactly that: what the edition of the future might look like and how its design could drive revenue and subscribers.

IDEO’s research and design phase included interviews with readers, journalists, editors, and marketers at News UK. The team found that people’s reading modes vary—some reflecting new digital behaviors and others adhering more closely to paper-reading styles.

Readers, the team learned, chose The Times for its editorial opinion: a perspective that cuts through the overwhelming flood of information. They viewed the daily Times and weekend Sunday Times as one paper, despite the organizational distinction. And they were proud of their choice, valuing the papers’ consistency, trustworthiness, balance, and authoritativeness. Readers wanted these qualities distilled in a digital edition, whether on a smartphone, tablet, or on the web.

Those insights led to strategic recommendations spanning digital products, editorial, advertising integration, online membership offers, and social sharing. But the boldest among those was a publishing strategy that seemed to run counter to media trends: abandoning a real-time approach in favor of publishing separate digital editions.

The Times in March 2016 introduced an editions-based publishing schedule, with new editions available across all platforms four times each weekday: overnight, 9am, noon and 5pm; the weekend schedule shrank to three editions. A year in, they had broken that schedule fewer than a dozen times—making exceptions for major moments like the terror attack in central London and David Bowie’s death—but even in those cases, The Times refrained from incessant updates, instead resuming its regular pacing.

“The way we’re publishing now, taking our time over news...taking a more considered view of the world, it’s helped us offer something different from everything else,” digital news head Alan Hunter told Digiday in 2018. Readers demonstrated that this different approach was something they’d been wanting.

In the first half of 2016, new paying-subscriber sales were up 200% as compared to the same period in 2015. At the end of June 2016, there were 413,600 subscribers to The Times and The Sunday Times, up 3.4% from a year prior. Of those, 182,500 were digital-only subscriptions—a 6% rise and a notable figure given how much online news can be obtained for free.

Through collaboration with IDEO, News UK's own digital teams capabilities grew, enabling them to implement and evolve their new digital strategy. The capabilities of the newsroom grew, too: “The decision to move to four editions a day has freed up tremendous resources to focus on big stories,” says Emma Tucker, Editor of The Sunday Times—the kind of stories that "supercharge engagement." The approach is working: By August 2019 digital subscriptions had increased 19% year-on-year to 300,000, showing the progress the legacy publisher has made in attracting readers to its online proposition. Total subscribers for the two titles' print and digital products now stand at 539,000, and their websites total five million registered users.

More than 230 years after its first edition was published, the new Times has established solid footing in the digital age and designed its own future—one based not on the habits of its competitors but on its legacy and the reading behaviors of its audience.

Being a design researcher, I’m constantly conducting real-world research on a subject area or problem. Researchers travel widely, and spend weeks interviewing, observing, shadowing, and prototyping. But even when a trip seems full of scheduled activities, there should always be room for opportunistic inspiration. Because that is the thing I value the most.

I am an inspiration hunter. When I see 45-minutes of travel time between interviews, what I actually see a window of opportunity for a real-world experience. As well as naked scrubbing, on recent research trips, I’ve subjected my teammates and myself to:

• Screaming like rabid fans to appear on a game show in Los Angeles.
• Having our fortunes told by psychics in Hong Kong.
• A workout class only described to us as “cathartic” and a “nonstop endorphin surge” in New York.
• Getting too close to the ring at a lucha libre match in Mexico City.

So how exactly can one justify this as inspiration? Well, it depends on your definition of inspiration. I like to see design inspiration as something that lives in the intersection of three things: Satisfying a curiosity, Defying the expected, and Touching an emotion.

1. Satisfying a Curiosity:

How many times have you thought to yourself, I should take that Cantonese / personal finance / fermentation course in my free time? When you’re working a design project, you’re often looking to help others adopt a new behavior or learn a new skill. You can empathize with that experience by doing something yourself that gets you outside your comfort zone.

The Class, aka scream-cardio.

2. Defying the Expected:

Of course we should be inspired by new approaches, that’s what we’re here to design. But finding people or things that truly disrupt your equilibrium can positively influence a project in all sorts of unexpected ways.

3. Touching an Emotion:

Seek places, people, and experiences that bring out a real human emotion that you want to design for. Then surround yourself with what you find, as not to lose it. You might end up with entire mood boards or inspiration shelves from your trip, labeled “joy” and “empathy”. Keeping these artifacts in your workspace will let you feel what you first did.

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On a recent research trip in Asia, I found myself naked in a spa, being vigorously scrubbed by an elderly Korean lady. She removed whole layers of my epidermis, all the while grunting in disapproval. The experience was agonizing but also completely amazing.

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Now, two years later, we’re pushing the limits of our skills by building the project’s next iteration: Shrumen Lumen. This time around, we’re skipping flowers in favor of 12 to 18 foot-tall kinetic mushrooms. Thanks to a totally different geometry, this project is a lot harder to build. But with hard work from an enthusiastic team of volunteers and help from a Burning Man Arts grant and our Kickstarter campaign, the Shrumen Lumen will soon be ready for the Playa. Here is how we’re making it happen.

The vision

To kick off the design process, we looked back at what made Blumen Lumen work so well. Several principles stood out.

1. The flowers had a minimal footprint on the ground but created a huge interactive space.
2. The grouping of flowers was beautiful from afar, but people could also interact with a single flower.
3. The structure was scalable. We were able to build one prototype quickly to figure everything out, then mass-produce as many as we could afford, both in terms of time and money.
4. The flowers were quick to install, and packed up neatly in a shipping container.
5. Mechanical interaction made the flowers interesting during the day, while lights added a new element at night.

We folded a lot of those takeaways into the design, sketching out a garden of five mushrooms that are big enough to provide shade during the day, and can also change shape and light up at night. Just like the flowers, we wanted people to be able to interact with individual mushrooms, but also wanted to add an interaction point that controls all the mushrooms together.

Origami at scale

The geometry of the mushrooms is based on the folding pattern of an origami magic ball. The beauty of that structure is its ability to expand and contract; the challenge is that it’s much harder to control, and, as we found out later, much harder to fold at scale.

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We jumped straight into prototyping, and planned to use the same method we had used to build the flowers: Route the patterns in corrugated plastic, fold them so that they would “memorize” the fold lines, unfold them, then weld them together. But while each flower was made of only two 10 by five foot pieces, the mushroom heads were made of 12. We’d also never worked with this origami pattern at this scale.

Unfortunately, this fold pattern was much trickier. It took a team of eight people a full hour to fold the first three-piece sheet. The plastic also cracked in several places. To make the process easier, we changed the orientation of the corrugation by 90 degrees, and asked the router shop to make shallower cuts into the plastic. The new the fold lines made the pieces much stronger, and we actually managed to fold an entire sheet of 12 pieces (though it did take 10 people).

Setting the Shrumens in motion

To make the mushroom heads contract and expand, we needed to build a solid mechanical structure, kind of like an umbrella, that would connect the folded plastic to an actuator. We experimented with a 1:12 paper scale model to figure out where to attach the actuator, and prototyped the speed of the movement. Since there will be significant stress on this structure, all the parts had to be machined. We were extremely lucky to have Jim Feuhrer (and his five decades of experience in building) to help us create them.

Building a safe structure

Last time around, when the wind came up on the Playa, we could just close the blooms to prevent the flowers from tipping over. It’s much harder to make the Shrumens more aerodynamic, so they had to be carefully engineered to withstand 60-plus mile per hour winds. To hold the origami structure in place, we mounted 1 1/4 inch aluminum tubes around two aluminum hubs. One of the hubs is mounted to the top of the actuator and can move up and down, while the other one is mounted to the stem.

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The entire head assembly slides into a 6-inch, thin-walled steel tube that is mounted onto a 3.5-inch-thick wall pipe. Luckily, with some minor modifications and reinforcements, we were able to recycle the base we used for the flowers to anchor the system.

Designing the digital interaction

Not only are we installing 1560 LED lights in each mushroom, we are also designing ways for visitors to interact with the mushrooms. By standing on certain pads, burners can change the color and movement of the Shrumens. Each pad can also measure weight, so, for example, if two people hop on a certain pad, more of the structure will turn red.

To make this work, we are using a network of Raspberry Pis in each stem. Powered by 12 volt batteries, the minicomputers control both light and movement. Each of the 1560 LEDs in the stem and cap are independently addressable, and the chip in each LED only uses one pin for data input and output, so they must be controlled with precise timing. The team chose to use a Pixel Pusher microcontroller because of its power (it can control 4000 LEDs) and built-in libraries. Processing, running on the Raspberry Pi, pushes color combinations and scenes. The Raspberry Pi also monitors the load cells, which are placed in those lighted platforms at the base of the mushroom. When visitors step on, these load cells can trigger the mushrooms to change shape or color.

The team

Of all the projects I’ve worked on, this one required the most manpower (by far). Thanks to 40-some weekend warriors—a mix of highly specialized experts and enthusiasts who picked up new skills like soldering, metal cutting, or drilling—Shrumen Lumen is about to happen. It has turned into a highly sophisticated installation, and I can’t wait to see it in the desert.

Special thanks to everyone who helped bring Shrumen Lumen to life: Ali Hasanbeigi, Anthony Wainman, Angie Kim, Annette Diefenthaler, Blake Durtsche, Bomani McClendon, Britta Durtsche, Dali Yu, Dave Sumberg, David Brody, David Good, Diem Ho, Gabrielle Fulco, George Joseph, Gilles Roux, Gina Romero, Hannah Williams, Henry Hsiung, Janko Potezica, Jazz Tigan, Jesse Silver (production lead), Jessica Pastor, Jim Feuhrer, Jimmy Chion, Joerg Student, Justin Chang, Kalan Kircher (digital lead), Lauren Fundora, Leo Marzolf, Nathalie Collins (digital co-lead), Nicholas Leverone, Nivi Ramesh, Olivier Notteghem, Peter Bronk, Rachel Frey, Remy Pieron, Sam Starr, Steve Moore, Victoria Cao

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Two years ago, I worked with a team of IDEOers and IDEO alumni to create an interactive art installation for Burning Man that we dubbed Blumen Lumen. Drawing inspiration from a foldable yurt I’d made for the art festival a few years before, we built massive, kinetic origami flowers that responded to their environment by changing color and opening and closing.

1. To create a happy group atmosphere… Hello & High Five

Everyone walks around the room in random directions. At intervals, the facilitator instructs them to interact with a person they are passing. At first, the instructions are to say, "Hello." Then, it’s a high five. And finally, it's a compliment about some aspect of their appearance. Even though you know it’s an exercise, it’s impossible to receive greetings and compliments and not feel a little better about life.

2. To get people into an agreement mindset… Yes, Let’s!

Stand in a circle. Someone suggests an activity by saying, “Let’s,” followed by a verb. For example, “Let’s ski!”

Everyone else loudly agrees together: “Yes! Let’s ski!”

Then, everyone mimes that activity, until someone else suggests a new activity. After a few minutes of this, it's much easier to hear ideas from other people and greet them with encouragement and agreement.

3. To stretch capacity for attention and focus… Red Ball

Stand in a circle. (Have you noticed that improv involves a lot of standing in circles?) Pick someone in the group, look them in the eye, say, “Red ball,” and mime tossing them the ball. They say, “Thank you, red ball,” to acknowledge receipt and then throw it to someone else. Once the group has the hang of this, you can add a green ball and blue ball. To make things interesting, these balls can be different sizes and weights. (They could even be a feral cat or a baby.) Pretty soon, the group will be highly alert to one another and focused on cooperating on the task at hand.

4. To free people of their inner censor… Ba Da Da

Everyone in the circle claps to create a beat. The first player says a word to the person next to them. They respond with whatever comes into their head. The entire circle then says both words and then adds, "Ba Da Da” (pronounced in the same rhythm as “potato”). For example, first person: “Crazy.” Second person: “In love.” Everyone: “Crazy in love, ba da da.” Then the second person starts everything again by saying a word to the next person in the circle. By doing everything to a rhythm, people are forced to respond in the moment and not overthink their choices.

5. To get everyone making eye contact and collaborating… Pass the Clap

Look into the eyes of the person next to you and without using words, coordinate so that you both clap together. That person then turns to the next person and does the same. Pretty soon, you’ll have a rhythm going and a clap will move quickly around the circle. See how fast you can go without losing rhythm. If you want to add some challenge, create multiple claps moving simultaneously in different directions around the circle.

Illustrations by Yoshi Yoshitani.

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More and more designers are using improv games in order to get groups in the mood to collaborate. There are many of these games, taught at places like Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade. We picked five simple favorites.

But dig a little deeper, and McMaster’s restaurant is a modest poster child for a grand ambition: to create a pre-industrial food system. We’re filming Doug as inspiration for a project for IKEA about future solutions for home food waste. His ultimate vision is a tight-knit network of conscientious producers, shops, restaurants and consumers working together to create a healthier, more sustainable, transparent, and financially viable alternative to the industrial food system.

At the heart of that is a principle of zero waste, explains McMaster, who trained at top restaurants like Copenhagen’s Michelin-starred Noma and nose-to-tail stalwart St John, in East London. Zero waste proponents argue that people, and businesses, should aim—as the name suggests—to generate no waste, through refusing, reducing, reusing and recovering the products they use every day. Over a sandwich, McMaster proudly tells us the story of his pop-up precursor to Silo in Australia, Joost, where, over two careful years, his team reduced the entire restaurant’s waste to just one, one litre jam jar.

He’s similarly conscientious at Silo. All the food and drink served, he explains, comes from local producers with whom he has a strict no packaging policy. Ingenious recipes make creative use of ingredients to minimise waste—a whey ice cream, and pickled rose petals (the byproduct of cheese production and a florist, respectively) are clever examples. Organic waste, from coffee grounds to leftover cake, is fed to ‘Bertha’, the affectionately-named anaerobic composter which takes pride of place on site. The compost it produces goes back to his producers to fertilise their fields. Silo's fittings are all upcycled—from old floor tiles that have become tables, to former school chairs, to the carrier bags that have found new life as colourful, swirl-covered plates.

Silo’s part of a wider movement, though, looking at smart ways to make the food system more sustainable, from farm to table. It’s a pressing problem: by some measures we’ll be 9 billion people by 2050, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production. We currently waste a third of food produced, consuming land, water, and using pesticides in our insatiable appetite for juicy prawns and plentiful pork chops.

Squint hard enough and you can spot a view of the future: one where we use fewer raw resources, waste less, and build new businesses mopping up what’s left from the supply chain. One underpinned by digital, where we care more where things come from, grow things more economically, closer to where they’re eaten. Where we connect with a network of fellow foodies, making a little extra money on the side, and talk to our neighbours more. Where we’ll be more conscientious about where our food comes from, and how we dispose of it, too.

What’s shaping this? First, people’s attitudes are shifting. Alongside a longstanding, and growing segment of society choosing sustainable products, a more radical, quiet zero waste movement is emerging. Influential bloggers like 42-year-old Californian Bea Johnson and her book Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide To Reducing Your Waste are championing a very different approach to consumption, and inspiring followers worldwide. Expect their expectations to move sustainability from a nice-to-have to a central part of their buying decisions, and shaping brands accordingly.

The first signs are perceptible at every turn. Take packaging: long a problem, the EU produces 15 million tons of plastic a year, or 156.9kg per person. We’ve been geeking out about Ooho, from Skipping Rock Labs, which is pioneering a seaweed-based spherical container that’s hygienic, biodegradable, and even edible. Going one step further, Berlin supermarket Original Unverpackt, has done away with food packaging entirely.

One big source of food waste, meanwhile is supermarkets’ drive for ‘perfect’ produce. According to the Soil Association, a whopping 20-40 percent of fruit and veg is thrown away for not looking right, despite one survey finding 65 percent of people would buy it, for a discount. Supermarkets like Asda, Intermarche and Tesco have capitalised: you can now buy ‘Ugly’, Inglorious’, or ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ parsnips, potatoes, apples and strawberries that once would have been discarded, for 30 percent cheaper.

But one man’s trash is another’s treasure. There are also smart opportunities for businesses to capitalise at every stage of the farming, distribution, and disposal chain. As part of the IKEA project we also met Londoner Tom, who runs a small company called Rejuce. We joined him as he collected surplus fruit and veg heading for the rubbish from the vast New Spitalfields market, to turn into juices and soups to sell at festivals like Green Man, Bestival and Field Day. Companies like Regrained, and BTTR, meanwhile, take used wheat and coffee grounds, respectively, and turn them into cereal bars or compost.

Closer to home, we’ve seen a raft of companies exploring urban farming and in-house hydroponics at a consumer level, as a way to dramatically cut down food miles and water, and make use of underutilised urban plots. Those include INFARM, which is building digitally-controlled microfarm units, and Growing Underground, a startup in London growing microgreens in the old World War 2 tunnels under Clapham, in South London. Further out, efforts by biofabrication companies like Memphis Meats and Modern Meadow to grow meat in labs might end up as machines on our kitchen countertops, eventually.

Technology isn’t just providing the hardware, though, but a platform to connect. Startups like Farm Drop and Farm Direct are using digital as a way to build more peer-to-peer systems, exploring ways to connect farmers to foodies more directly. The likes of Cassoulet, AmpleHarvest.org, Leftover Swap and Olio are cutting food waste by sharing or selling surplus produce, or leftovers person to person in cities. The Pare Up app, meanwhile, allows New Yorkers to find bargains from local stores on about-to-expire food. For the laziest among us, perhaps we’ll be sending our leftovers off via autonomous delivery robots like Starship Technologies.

Grass roots as these efforts are, zoom up to 30,000ft, and organisations like the Ellen Macarthur Foundation are taking a system’s level view, specifically the radical shift to a more Circular Economy. Partnering with huge multinationals like Unilever, Nike, IKEA, and many others, they’re arguing for eliminating waste from the supply chain, and every byproduct fuelling another part of the ecosystem within in which it exists, mimicking nature. Companies like Patagonia are successfully pioneering how these new businesses might put sustainability at the heart of their company, and be wildly profitable in doing so. Take their new bison jerky, sourced to foster better grasslands, as well as provide delicious food.

Back in Brighton, looking around at the ingenious zero-waste solutions in the restaurant, McMaster muses on what has made Silo a microcosm of a sustainable business, and a glimpse of a more circular future. It’s creativity. “Waste,” he says, “is a failure of the imagination.”

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Tucked in the quiet backstreets off Brighton’s lanes, Doug McMaster’s restaurant Silo is a typical modern eatery in many ways: industrial-chic fittings, chalkboard menu of vegetarian fare, white brick walls, chipboard tables and world music soundtrack.

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.