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.

‍

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

‍

“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.

Sixty years later, amidst technological advances that have spurred massive innovation and changed the face of science, we decided it was time to re-inspire today’s generation. James Musick, a digital communications lead at Genentech, came to us for help in creating an immersive iPad experience that would celebrate Watson and Crick’s seminal discovery, as well as engage the science-curious. But with three months to complete the project, we needed to hit the ground running.

Ralph and The Cheesy Mess

The idea of using a game or puzzle as a way to bring users into a world filled with genetics became an early favorite in the ideation stage. Puzzle-based gameplay was a great analogy to reflect the scientific process: from trial-and-error learning stages, to information synthesis, all the way through solving the puzzle and answering the question. A game hinging on a real-life genetic mechanic would be novel and stood to introduce the science to a new audience. If designed well, with engaging play and a compelling story, we would be able to integrate the science, narrative, and gameplay into a beautiful app.

We started off diving deep into the world of video games. We indulged in playing some of our tried-and-true favorites, as well as newer games such as Osmos and Eufloria to understand how they bridged science and storytelling. At the same time, we were learning about cutting-edge research in genetics through conversations with Jason Long and other Genentech scientists, listening to podcasts, and a hefty amount of reading.

Throughout this inspiration phase, we kept coming back to a wildly intriguing area of research called epigenetics, which focuses on how environments affect genetic expression. In short, epigenetics is the area of genetics that, given a fixed DNA makeup, tells the DNA which parts of the code should express themselves and how they should express themselves as determined by external factors like weather, stress, diet, etc. So while we may have a fixed genetic makeup, the environment still plays a large modulating factor in our genetic expression.

Our fascination with the content—combined with a teamwide love of comic books and mutant-origin stories—evolved into an epigenetic-inspired noir-puzzle game based on Ralph, an artisanal cheese-maker, and his cheese company Ralph's Killer Muenster.

The mechanisms of genetics

Early on in the ideation phase, Evan Shapiro, who would become a core team member and help prototype game logic, introduced us to phylogenetic trees and maximum parsimony theory. You’ve probably encountered phylogenetic trees in biology class, where they serve to illustrate evolutionary relationships among species. Maximum parsimony, on the other hand, is more obscure. It serves as a computational forensic tool to help us understand the evolution of genetic traits along the phylogenetic tree, as well as help us infer species evolution. With maximum parsimony, the “preferred phylogenetic tree is the tree that supposes the least evolutionary change to explain observed data.” After mulling that over for a bit, we decided creating and solving a phylogenetic puzzle by employing maximum parsimony as a scoring criteria was a great jumping-off point and a compelling challenge.

To test this, our first prototype was a paper prototype where we started with a sample origin genetic trait. We sketched out several generations by mutating one trait at a time, and created our own phylogenetic tree. Given the final generation of traits and no tree structure, the goal was to see if we could work backwards to recreate the tree structure and uncover the origin trait. Basically, reverse evolution. After a lot of finessing we came up with a rule set that actually reflected natural evolutionary rules and allowed us to solve the tree and find the origin species.

With this excitement, we spent a weekend programming a single prototype puzzle using mechanics that would become the main gameplay: players reverse engineer evolution by mutating a given set of species traits backwards to a common ancestor in the fewest moves possible. This was maximum parsimony made tangible. In order for the puzzles to be solvable, we had to use real evolutionary rules describing how the species’ traits can change. By the end of the weekend, we had puzzles and a game mechanic that were keeping us up late into the night trying to one-up each other’s scores, which, to us, meant we had hit the nail on the head.

From a design perspective, one of the significant balancing acts of the project involved weighing the desire to impart specific scientific knowledge against the value of experiential learning. When we used maximum parsimony it became clear that this was a perfect mechanic to give people an experiential interaction with real genetics.

Prototyping and puzzle design

From day one, Ralph’s Killer Muenster was an intensive prototyping project. The first bare-bones prototype of the puzzle was written in Qt because we wanted a framework in which we could rapidly prototype the GUI and could reuse game logic for the production app. Qt, although not extensively used, has great functionality and plays natively with Javascript and C++. It was a well-suited framework for prototyping the core puzzle experience, which included coding the evolutionary logic, adding and testing interactions, modifying visual communication, and testing informational displays.

Our daily workflow started with an early morning meeting so we could all share progress from the previous day. We spent the rest of the day implementing and testing new visuals and interactions on paper and integrating them into the Qt prototype architecture. Lastly, we tested them with people around IDEO to see how they reacted to specific design and gameplay decisions.

We used Unity for the production app in the development environment for many of the same reasons that we chose Qt. But Unity has the added benefit of working with native OpenGL, along with the capability to compile to iOS. As time-constrained as this project was, we still wanted to impart as much narrative and visual interest as possible, and Unity proved an excellent match for this challenge.

Nivi Ramesh, our interaction designer and art director, worked to create an amazing game landscape with analogies to microscopy and slide specimens. Working closely with developers at Substantial, we created layered and animated textures paired with OpenGL shaders to achieve the tone we wanted. We had parallel work streams throughout the prototyping phase, with one team working on developing the logic and overarching architecture of the production app while the prototyping team refined interaction elements, game mechanics, and informational displays in the prototype testbed.

What makes a good puzzle?

Before diving any further, we took a step back to make sure we got the puzzles right. Good puzzle games tend to adhere to some basic principles: They are purely cognitive challenges with a few simple rules, nearly infinite outcomes, difficulty that increases with mastery, and some clear goals. Plus, they're easy to learn.

In building the game, one of our most critical challenges was creating visual representations of the genetic traits that people would be using to solve the puzzles. People had to quickly grasp how they could manipulate and evolve the traits given the genetic logic. If we couldn't get people to make this mental leap, the game wasn't going to succeed.

A real genetic trait is made up of a snippet of DNA and is a long, winding series of genetic code (or, a lot of AGTC). To make the game approachable, we chose to abstract and simplify the cheese trait representations as visual identifiers that had a bit of mystery and were themselves a puzzle to decode. We tested many different ways of visually representing the traits, the majority of which people could not directly connect to an increasing or decreasing series. The simplest visuals turned out to be the most effective: shapes, dots, and lines.

With simple geometric shapes, people could see that moving from a triangle to a square to a hexagon involved moving through a progression of increasing the numbers of sides. Similarly, lines and dots worked well for understanding how the traits could be mutated. They were easily accessible by players in planning a strategy for mutation.

Less is more

After the weekend of playing the prototype level, we needed a way to determine the optimal solution to these puzzles so that we could give user feedback and help players improve in the game. With Ralph's Killer Muenster, an optimal solution for any puzzle involves making the “most parsimonious” decisions, i.e. using the least number of moves or fewest mutations. We needed to find a way to reward people for doing less, contrary to typical game design where users are rewarded for doing more. Without a clear and appropriate qualitative feedback mechanism, we found that people were finishing puzzles without any sense for how much better they could perform.

Scavenging the Internet for a tool to analyze phylogenetic trees uncovered Mesquite, a software package built specifically for computational biology and evolutionary analysis. After learning from tutorials produced by Harvard University, we could solve the initial species sets and puzzles we had created, and arrive at the most efficient tree structure and trait mutations.

We used the statistical language R to generate thousands of possible levels, export files for Mesquite to crunch, and output the moves required for each level into a custom level file that we could use to test in our prototype game.

Levels testing and design progressed in parallel with refining the scoring display and making hundreds of other visual and UX enhancements. With our trait visualizations, levels design and scoring mechanism solved, we felt we had achieved something that was both subtle and significant: People who grasped the underlying puzzle dynamics were quite literally using their brains in a way that mimics a core methodology of genetic science. This seemed to hit at the essence of experiential learning.

Muenster launches, Bill Nye approves

The Ralph's Killer Muenster iPad game launched at the 2013 GET (Genomics, Environments and Traits) conference, coinciding with the anniversary of Watson and Crick's seminal paper describing the structure of DNA. At the conference, Bill Nye the Science Guy, a long-time advocate of a science literate society, played the game, and loved it. This made our day. The app also caught Apple's attention, and was listed as a new and noteworthy Education app in the App Store.

To further raise awareness around the game, we created a Ralph's Killer Muenster brand, including a visual identity, packaging, website, Twitter, game trailer, and food truck—all mobilized by Ralph to push the only tool that could save the city (and his reputation) and allow him to lift the health code violations that kept him from producing and distributing cheese. Ralph’s food truck, sent throughout San Francisco, distributed grilled muenster cheese sandwiches.

What we learned

After the launch festivities, our team took a step back to consider what we had learned. Here's the take-away:

• Set constraints to help make a hard problem more approachable. Our self-imposed constraint that the game needed to rely on a scientific mechanism helped us narrow in on phylogenetic trees and maximum parsimony as our core concepts.

• A good story goes a long way. We spent significant time concocting Ralph's story, and getting the tone and art direction down in order to engage people. We want them to stick around for the more mentally taxing interactions later down the line.

• Find the right tool for the right job. We used a variety of prototyping and user testing methods and environments, rather than trying to find or force an all-in-one. Each tool elicited learnings unique to them.

1953 was a good year for science and technology. The polio vaccine was developed, the first open heart surgery performed, and color TVs hit the store shelves. It was also the year Watson and Crick revealed one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century: the double-helix structure of DNA.

David Kelley, IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator, and his brother Tom Kelley, IDEO partner and the author of the best-selling The Art of Innovation, have written a powerful and compelling book on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us.

WATCH: David Kelley's TED Talk: How to build your creative confidence.

Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the “creative types.” But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet, David and Tom Kelley, show us that everyone is creative.

In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO and with many of the world’s top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work and personal lives, and innovatively approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

Learn more at CreativeConfidence.com.

Purchase

Know someone who might love this book? Here are some options for purchasing Creative Confidence (Crown Business, 2013):

• Order from Bookshop.org

When we were asked to whip up a special brew this July for a big Creative Confidence book-preview event featuring David Kelley, one of IDEO’s founders, and his brother, best-selling author Tom Kelley, we knew we had to kick things up a notch.

Challenge #1: Two guests of honor called for not one brew, but two! We heard Tom enjoys light, Japanese-style beers and that David doesn’t really drink, so we decided to make a Belgian-style wit for Tom and sparkling organic lemonade for David and then mix them together to create a shandy, a refreshing summer drink.

Challenge #2: Now that we had two beverages, we needed to come up with a unique way to dispense them. Luckily, we like tough build challenges with tight deadlines even more than we like beer. A few shop hours here and there between projects, and before we knew it, we said “cheers” to the Mix Master 2000 Shandy Machine!

Introducing the Mix Master 2000

How it works

The Mix Master 2000 Shandy Machine’s look was inspired by the retro-futuristic steampunk movement.

The machine sits on top of a standard, top-loading freezer replumbed to hold two kegs (one containing wit, the other sparkling organic lemonade).

Thirsty partygoers begin by turning the large hand crank on the front to select their preferred beer-to-lemonade ratio (from 0–100%). When the analog meter on top points to the desired proportions, they flip a missile switch to open the valves. The two glass vessels on either side of the machine fill with beer and lemonade, respectively, then send the home-brewed concoctions into their waiting pint via a dispensing tube.

Beer recipe

We wanted to brew a beer that would pair well with lemonade, so we decided on a nice, light, citrus-wheat ale. The goal: around 5% ABV, or alcohol by volume. We used 2-row pale as our main grain along with wheat and wheat malt with a bit of coriander, chamomile, and orange peel. You can find the complete recipe on Brewtoad.

Lemonade recipe

Making homemade lemonade is pretty straightforward. It only has three ingredients: lemon juice, sugar, and water. Batch-processing 10 gallons of the stuff, however, is a bit trickier, especially when you don’t have an electric juicer. In our case, we landed on a ratio of 1:1:8 (1 part lemon juice, 1 part sugar, 8 parts water), and ended up using 160 lemons, 2.5 gallons of simple syrup, and several man-hours of squeezing time. Yikes.

Early testing

After we figured out what we wanted our shandy machine to do, we found some glass vessels lying around the shop.

They looked straight out of a science lab, which was cool, but we thought we’d have some foaming issues because of their small openings. We hooked up a hose from the tap in our kegerator and tried filling them with beer. Sure enough, the beer started foaming immediately and it took several minutes to drain using gravity. Not good if you want a proper pour...

We needed to do something about the foaming issue in order to make this thing usable more than once. We did some experimenting and learned several things:

• There couldn’t be any kinks in the tubing.
• A colder vessel worked best.
• The first pour was really foamy, but subsequent pours were better.
• Filling the glass from the bottom via a tube prevented overflow and allowed any foam that did bubble up to dissipate quickly.
• Adding some back pressure to the vessel made the biggest difference in preventing foam. (To give you an idea of the really rough type of prototyping we love, we used the finger of a rubber glove to make a makeshift balloon on top of the vessel.)

Architecture

The basic plumbing layout of the system is pretty simple. We have three-way ball valves that direct flow from the keg to the vessel, from the vessel to the dispenser tube, or block flow entirely.

To control the valves, we 3D-printed some gears to fit onto the lever controls. To drive the valves, we fitted stepper motors with smaller, 3D-printed gears.

Inputs

For the main shandy mixture-control system, we settled on a large hand crank.

We machined a shaft and attached an encoder to the end. We added some detents to the wheel to make sure the crank had a nice hand-feel and gave solid feedback so people could precisely dial in their desired mixture ratio (the detent mechanism is equivalent to putting a baseball card in the spokes of a bike tire).

We used a 3D-printed gear and flexible plastic leaf to engage the gear. We had to play around with some adhesive foam in order to damp the vibrations and get just the right sound and feel we were looking for. We added a covered, mission control-style toggle switch to start the cycle and a cancel button to round out the inputs.

Feedback

The main source of feedback on the machine is the large analog meter on the top of the machine. We searched online in vain for a large meter that would fit our steampunk style, have an appropriate measuring range, and could be controlled by Arduino. In the end, we found an old automotive meter that measured voltage from 0-16v.

We replaced the scale with one designed by our colleague Joe Graceffa and added a custom housing around it.

When we were testing the Mix Master 2000, we found ourselves staring at the Arduino serial output a lot to figure out where the machine was in its cycle. To make this easier, we added a small OLED display with an onboard SD card slot. Simple serial commands trigger bitmap images that signal Startup, Ready State, Beer Filling, Lemonade Filling, Pouring, and Error State.

Electrical layout

An Arduino Mega controls the shandy machine. This diagram shows how all of the components are connected:

To drive the meter, we needed to boost the 0-5v PWM output of the Arduino Mega to 0-16v. We built a simple, non-inverting amplifier circuit to increase the voltage. A fine-adjustment potentiometer allowed us to fine-tune the maximum voltage and made the meter read full scale.

Code

When the Mix Master 2000 is first powered on, we can’t be sure that the valves are in the correct position. Each motor is stalled against the valve hard stop to establish a home position (the valve hard stop is in the dispense position so there’s no risk of keg leakage). Once the machine’s ready, the crank encoder state is polled and the meter PWM is updated to reflect changes in the shandy-mixture percentage. As soon as the start switch is thrown, the pour cycle begins. During our early testing, we figured out how long it would take to fill a glass with each liquid (the times turned out to be different because of varying carbonation levels). The parameters for beer and lemonade fill times are used to calculate the on times for both valves using the selected shandy ratio.

The cycle sequence starts by opening the beer valve and filling the beer vessel for a predetermined amount of time. When the beer valve closes, the lemonade valve opens for a predetermined amount of time. Finally, both valves move to the dispense position to allow liquid to flow from the two vessels and into the person’s glass. A built-in wait time prevents the start of another cycle, ensuring all the liquid is dispensed.

If necessary, a cancel button throws an interrupt, immediately moving both valves to the safe home position and halting program execution until the Arduino reset button is pressed.

The final touches: steampunking & aging

We’re big fans of steampunk, so from the beginning, we knew we wanted the Mix Master 2000 to look quasi-Victorian. First, we used as much copper and brass as possible, then, drawing on John’s background as a Hollywood set designer, we “antiqued” it using various scenic techniques.

We started by stripping everything off the main body of the machine and painting it all silver. After that dried, we sprayed it again with black paint. While that was drying, we took Scotchbrite pads and scratched the corners, edges, and anywhere else we thought needed a little character. After the black paint layer dried completely, we started to reattach all the other pieces. We painted them copper or brass and scratched them up here and there to add wear and tear.

Once the whole machine was reassembled, we decided it should look a bit dirtier. To do this, we mixed different brown-toned acrylic paints with denatured alcohol. We brushed this onto key places like the corners of the motors so it looked like dirt had accumulated and it was streaked with rain (we wiped off the paint before it dried so the effect didn’t look too heavy handed). For sanitation purposes, we didn’t paint the drain tray or the stainless tubes that dispense the shandy.

What’s next

We think the Mix Master 2000’s pretty cool as-is, but there’s always room for improvement. One issue we’d like to address is foaming. The balloon we added on top of the beer vessel helped, but pouring a lot of shandies in succession caused major foam build up. Increasing the amount of back pressure in the vessel could improve this situation, so we’re experimenting with adjustable pressure-relief valves. Coupled with the relief valve, a low-pressure aquarium pump could help to push out the foam more quickly, avoiding a buildup.

While we’re using the Mix Master 2000 for shandies at the moment, it really could be used for any number of two-part drinks: Black & Tans, mixed drinks, or custom non-alcoholic concoctions are all ideas we’re toying around with. As beer geeks, we’re particularly keen to brew two similar beers, one with a bland base and another that has a lot of hops so we can all dial up the perfect hoppy pour.

Parts List

• Main housing — ?” ABS
• Ball valves — McMaster # 4757K52
• Valve gears — FDM
• Valve housing — FDM
• Crank — McMaster #6020K35
• Stepper motors — Lulzbot #817752011303
• Stepper drivers — Sparkfun #ROB-11699
• Arduino Mega
• Display — 4D systems 128x128 Sparkfun #LCD-11377
• Power supply — 12V 5A, 5V 12A
• Meter — salvaged autometer 16v range
• Glass vessels — found in shop
• Glass holders — FDM
• Meter housing — Laser cut acrylic
• Start switch — Sparkfun #COM-11310

We couldn’t have made the Mix Master 2000 without the help of Joe Graceffa’s graphic design skills, Aaron Ferber’s awesome lemonade-making abilities, and Momo Miyazaki's amazing video. This post was co-written with John Grimley.

The creators of the Mix Master 2000, Chris Gold and John Grimley.

Here at IDEO Chicago, we like beer. A lot. And we don’t just love drinking the stuff, we like brewing it, too. Our ChIDEO Brew Crew started about two years ago and since that time, we’ve made more than 60 gallons, mostly for studio events like Rocktoberfest or St. Paddy’s Day, but sometimes just because it’s Tuesday and we feel like it. We even have a customized kegerator in our kitchen to showcase our drafts.

Perhaps one of the most iconic objects Bill designed was the GRiD Compass, the world's first laptop computer. Bill's design was the original clamshell design that all current laptops have descended from. We wondered if we could use a GRiD as a way to collect stories about Bill from around the office.

The result is this GRiD Laptop that has been modified to house a Galaxy Tab. It renders everything in orange and black similar to the original GRiD, boasts a working keyboard, and can be plugged in to charge at the base behind the original door that housed the ports.

We are using this laptop as a way to add content to billmoggridge.com which has been created to honor him by sharing our favorite moments, Moggridge-isms, photos, videos, songs, and more.

I hope this puts a smile on your face, just as Bill has done for so many others during his lifetime.

As per usual, I tried to document and share all the details of the build process for others to learn from. Click through for the full details of what went into this build:

Parts:

• Broken GRiD 1720 from Ebay
• Refurbished Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 w/ dock and keyboard

Before we start taking things apart, look at this! Things may not have changed as much as we think...

Taking apart the GRiD:

The Display

I wanted to have the charger on the base of the computer and not in the screen. For that we would need to make an extension cable that will work like the original cable that connected the screen. Luckily I have the dock and the keyboard dock to hack. I end up using both.

Here is the dock taken apart:

All we need is this part. This will connect to the bottom of the tablet:

This is the part inside the keyboard dock. I use this as the port to glue into the base of the laptop:

First I de-soldered the connector that originally would have plugged into the tablet. Then I connected the dock part to this keyboard part. Now I can use the multimeter in conductivity mode to probe the connections to learn which pad on the keyboard part will need to go to which pad on the dock part:

Then I (very carefully) soldered everything up with an ample length of cable to make my extension cable:

Once I verify the connections are sound, I blob on some 5 minute epoxy to lock everything up so it won't break later.

I couldn't have asked for better luck on fitting this in there! This is the bottom of the connector touching the base of the screen housing:

Lastly, there was no way to wake up the tablet once I put it in the housing, so I put a bolt in the lathe and turned a button that sits in the casing and allows you to press the button from the outside:

Lastly, I had to cut a hole in the display window so you can touch the screen of the tablet. I tried doing this with an x-acto and failed miserably. Luckily, our model-maker extraordinaire, John Grimley, came to the rescue and laser-cut / backpainted a replacement bezel. Thanks!

The Keyboard

Now on to the keyboard. I used a bluetooth keyboard from Motorola. The Samsung one that came with the tablet was too small. I was pretty lucky to find one with almost the exact size of the original GRiD keyboard:

I took all the keys off the GRiD and sanded them down so I could glue them flush to the bluetooth keyboard:

I used hot glue, a steady hand, and a lot of patience:

Now we have a proper keyboard, we need to wire it up. I wired the pairing button to the original power button of the GRiD because you have to press the pair button every time you power on. One reason I made that cable using the keyboard dock circuit board earlier is because the board breaks out power and ground which I can wire to power the bluetooth keyboard. This way there are no batteries to replace.

The Bluetooth Board:

Wired onto the keyboard dock:

Now everything is wired together, so I just place the connector in the original slot for the parallel port:

The Software:

This was actually the most difficult part to figure out. I wanted to have the display be yellow-orange on black like the original GRiD. I started poking around on the Android XDA-developers forum to dig up information. I won't go through all the steps in detail, but after trying versions of Android Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, Cyanogen Mod, etc. etc. I found that I had to re-install Android Honeycomb (which was on there in the first place!) and install Chainfire 3D:

This app calls itself “an intermediary OpenGL Driver“ so it sits in the middle and can mess with commands going to the GPU. This requires a rooted device. There's a guy on YouTube who does an awesome walkthrough on how to root a Galaxy Tab 8.9. If you are looking to do something similar.

Chainfire 3D has a “Night Mode“ that allows you to mess with which colors function and to what degree:

However, it still wasn't changing the color! It would change only during screen transitions when there was some sort GPU task happening. I decided to try some hacks to force the GPU to constantly be running letting Chainfire have the ability to intercept things. I had seen some other “screen tinting“ apps that on their own didn't accomplish what I wanted, but added a level of something going on so Chainfire could do it's job. The one I used is called “Screen Adjust.“

Before:

After!

The Website

While I was working on the GRiD, IDEOers Arjun Mehta and Katie Clark—along with several others including Lance Birtcil, Ben Booth, Francis Tseng, Ivy Hu, Danny Stillion, Tom Hardin and Tim Brown—were putting together the tribute website that the laptop was built to access: billmoggridge.com.

It's really beautifully done, so go check it out to see what kinds of fantastic stories have been shared.

With the passing of IDEO co-founder Bill Moggridge, we have been reflecting on the ways he has influenced our lives and made the world a better place. Bill has had an enormous impact on the field of interaction design and professed the importance of making interactions delightful.

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.