Keeping diabetes in check isn’t easy. Between checking blood sugar multiple times a day, keeping a detailed activity record, and logging food intake, staying healthy can be daunting.

But a recent advance in smart diabetes management—Ascensia’s CONTOUR NEXT ONE blood glucose meter and the CONTOUR DIABETES app—can give patients more clarity and control.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE is the latest product to spring from a multi-year collaboration between IDEO and Ascensia Diabetes Care (formerly Bayer Diabetes Care). In 2009, Ascensia and IDEO developed the award-winning CONTOUR USB blood glucose meter—the first meter to plug directly into a computer, providing patients and their doctors with instant access to blood sugar data and personal trend reports.

Buoyed by the success of the first collaboration, Ascensia asked IDEO to help design a next-generation diabetes management system (and the company’s first internet-connected device).

To help reduce the stigma of checking blood sugar in public, IDEO designed the CONTOUR NEXT ONE to look and behave like today’s modern tech devices. The highly simplified, seamless system allows patients to upload blood glucose readings automatically to the app, which helps guide informed, real-time decisions. The meter’s red, green, or yellow smartLIGHT feature gives instant feedback about whether blood sugar levels are below, within, or above the target range.

Seeing contextual data, which includes physical activity logs and photos of meals, paired with recent and historic blood sugar levels, nudges patients toward healthier lifestyle choices and better control of their condition.

For doctors, the accuracy and quantity of the data combined with the app’s easy-to-read pattern views invites more comprehensive, actionable conversations with patients.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE hit shelves in Europe in 2016 and is now available in the U.S. Ascensia is poised to develop more products enabled by rich, personalized data to help people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives.

What if we could use the sky to provide alternative solutions to these problems, creating more space for living and transportation? What exciting future awaits us?

At JAXA’s Aeronautical Technology Directorate (ATD), researchers are conducting research and development on aviation science and technology for the future. They are working to affect positive impact through research like noise reduction of airframe and an integrated aircraft operation management system for disaster relief and crisis management.

Normally, JAXA begins their projects by examining the needs of the aircraft industry or comparing themselves against global technology standards. This approach often leads to ideas that are merely an extension of the current technology. JAXA needed a new approach in order to create radical ideas and real change.

The key question was: What solutions would emerge from prioritizing people’s needs over the most advanced technological possibility—taking a human-centered approach to tackling the most pressing societal challenges?

JAXA ATD voluntary partnered with IDEO to attempt to answer this question, identifying new research areas by envisioning people’s needs in the near future. Together, JAXA and IDEO developed four scenarios of future societies.

The scenarios do not necessarily focus on technologies. Rather, the focus is on telling stories that help readers put themselves in the shoes of the four personas. At the same time, the team worked with industrial designers to illustrate convincing demonstrations of the vehicles and machines of the future.

JAXA’s team embraces the belief that “technologies developed at JAXA should incorporate emotional aspects to blend seamlessly into people’s lives.” Driven by this philosophy, the visual design of the four scenarios used a friendly illustration style intended to be approachable and understandable for people of all ages.

In order to develop human-centered concepts from scratch, the IDEO and JAXA team first undertook research and inspiration-gathering. They skydived, observed cities from above, brainstormed with students from the department of architecture at Waseda University. They interviewed airline employees, a former Judo world champion, skyscraper lovers, a business producer who focuses on new working styles. Throughout the research phase, the team explored the possibilities of the sky as a “living space,” not just a place for transportation.

The team was surprised and excited when they learned from a former fighter pilot that old cockpit designs were inspired by the Japanese tea room, highlighting a historic precedent for taking inspiration from real life to inform new technology designs.

The team synthesized their research and developed several concepts, each informed by a different social issue or pressing concern. Each issue was brought to life through a fictional personal narrative.

How might we relieve city congestion and pollution using the sky, while still keeping it clean and blue? Floating public lights, a skyway that regulates air traffic, camouflaged planes that keep the sky blue—concepts introduced in this scenario were the closest to the technologies already being researched at JAXA ATD. They show us how the sky could become an infrastructure that supports our daily lives. Meet Ayame, a girl from Gunma prefecture, ready to begin her college life in Osaka.

How might we make travel feel easy for people of all ages, no matter how far they need to go? While the researchers at JAXA ATD are working to improve the mobility of aircraft, like reducing air friction or increasing the engine efficiency of aircraft, this scenario explored how people could travel door-to-door through the sky with or without aircraft. A day-in-the-life of Naoto, a 72-year-old man who commutes twice a month from Tottori to Tokyo for medical checkups.

How might we leverage the sky as a resource for reusable energy and economic growth? One of the criteria of JAXA’s R&D activities is to improve the environment. While JAXA has been focusing on “protecting” the environment, this scenario focused on “creating” new environments. A day-in-the-life of Toshi, who runs a “sky-to-table” farming business.

How might we help people live with peace of mind, even during a disaster? JAXA’s disaster relief technologies have been extremely valuable in countries like Japan, which frequently suffers from natural disasters. In this scenario, we approached the problem from victims’ point of view while exploiting the potential of a network of aircrafts and other flying objects. Here's the story of Yuri, a victim of an earthquake in Tokyo who reunites with her family after evacuating to the sky.

The purpose of the project website is not to present answers, but to introduce new directions towards an exciting future. By presenting JAXA ATD’s vision through these four scenarios, the team invited people from all industries and of all ages to participate in co-creating the future.

Just like movies, cartoons, and novels from childhood stimulate the imagination, this project aims to spark new conversation and vision for a radically different, positive future.

By illustrating and communicating a more human-centered future to a wider audience, Japan’s top aeronautical technology development agency may already be changing the future of the sky for the better.

The speed and scale of change in our world are unprecedented. As more people relocate to cities, our lives are impacted by urbanization problems such as pollution, congestion, depopulation of rural areas, resource, and energy deficiencies.

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For factory operators, a smart valve is a game-changer. It gathers data on how smoothly the system is running and feeds it to an app, making it easier to troubleshoot from anywhere. And when things get overheated, it can automatically shut down the machinery, avoiding a meltdown.

Georg Fischer (GF), the Swiss-based, B2B industrial manufacturer collaborated with IDEO to design that valve, along with a system that adds value for generations of engineers to come.

And there were some surprises along the way. When the team set out to interview customers, they learned a lot about their real needs. “We showed a customer a sacrificial concept of a smart valve and asked, what do you think about this?” says Laura Barrabia, GF’s Head of Corporate Design Thinking. “The customer answered, we don’t want your valve to be smart, we want to be smart. If GF is providing a smart valve, where is my value?”

For GF Piping Systems, these insights helped shape initial prototypes and guided the direction of the design to something that would tie parts together into smart systems and more efficient industrial facilities—a competitive advantage.

Yves Serra, GF’s CEO, recognized early on that his company needed to strengthen its customer-centricity and digital capacity, so he approached IDEO to begin shifting GF’s culture from engineering-led and procedural to customer-focused, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and flexible. That kicked off a decade-long relationship that would help GF take a design-based approach.

Learn what it means to move from being technology-driven to being truly customer-centric.

To help GF identify clients’ pain points and address them with new digital offers, IDEO proposed three “lighthouse” projects, one for each of GF’s divisions: Piping Systems, Casting Solutions, and Machining Solutions. Lighthouse projects (also called “Beacons”) are proofs of concept that light the way for an organization and help it shift its way of working.

For example, GF Machining Solutions built a prototype for an application that uses real-time data to help customers identify and fix problems in the machines, laying the foundation for truly predictive maintenance. Making data streams more transparent for customers also simplified life for the GF service engineers, who keep the machines running.

Learn how Georg Fischer is moving from hardware offerings to digital solutions.

For GF Piping Systems, the design team developed the GF Digital Line, a set of products, apps, dashboards, and other services that help customers plan, install, and maintain water and chemical piping systems. GF teams went back to customers to test several prototypes and gather feedback on the Digital Line and make sure it addressed current and future needs. They also built internal capabilities to support product development, laying the groundwork for future innovation.

Lastly, IDEO helped GF Casting Solutions escape the “commodity trap” of competing with foreign automotive suppliers. To better understand the pressures car manufacturers face, the design team explored the development cycles of two car manufacturers. They learned how challenging it is to implement solutions to reduce vehicle weight—essential for cutting fuel consumption. As an expert in aluminum die casting, GF was well positioned to help manufacturers meet that challenge, not just with quality parts, but also with digital engineering to deliver cutting-edge lightweight casting solutions, which are harder to replicate.

By the end of these lighthouse projects, GF had rolled out a global design thinking training program that had touched more than 1000 employees. After the training, employees throughout the organization adopted a new way of working and became passionate ambassadors. The enthusiasm spread from the R&D department to HR to finance and many other departments.

Today, GF has permanent design thinking and digital teams to continue this work. All three divisions aim to launch the first releases of their lighthouse projects by early 2019. And with every project, GF’s business—and solutions—get smarter about how to meet the needs of a fast changing world.

IHG’s ambition is to grow in service of its guests around the world. IHG’s Atlanta-based team had identified a major opportunity for hotels in the midscale space—a market segment known for its inconsistency.

Alongside colleagues at London-based forpeople, IDEO was invited to help IHG shepherd that business opportunity into a human one, by asking how IHG might reimagine the everyday travel experience for people relying on this category of hotel. What kind of offer might resonate equally with guests and with the owner/operators who’d need to buy into a new brand and bring it to life?

IDEO began by talking to travelers to better understand their lives, values, and needs—travelers who spend one or two nights on the road a few times every year; travelers who regularly take short trips to small cities or away from city centers; and travelers who live on the road, moving from hotel to hotel. These included court stenographers, medical technicians, consultants, conference-goers, and more.

Early research insights evolved into two distinct concepts for a new hotel brand, which were built out into two full-scale physical prototypes at IHG’s design center in Atlanta. Over three weeks, IDEO and its IHG partners led potential guests and hotel owners through each model, gathering their feedback on new formats for breakfast offerings, service details, booking experiences, and overall tone.

The investment in prototyping paid off with surprising and actionable insights. Despite wide variation in occupation and income, these guests are sophisticated and self-reliant; they know what’s out there, and they know what’s reasonable to expect. In fact, many describe a syndrome IDEO dubbed “anticipation anxiety:” the sense of dread that comes from not knowing whether a lower-priced hotel is going to be clean or safe, or provide a bed that enables restful sleep. Many have so little confidence in the cleanliness of hotels in this price range that they travel with their own packs of wet wipes.

IDEO, along with the IHG team, recognized these behaviors as an unanswered cry in the market. The purpose of the new brand crystallized around extinguishing that anxiety and rewarding guests with something much better. avid hotels exceeds its competition by doubling down on quality in just a few select areas: an extraordinary mattress; rigorously high standards of cleanliness; a focused, high-quality, grab-and-go breakfast and coffee experience; and an overall tone of warmth and straightforwardness.

These guests made clear that for trips like this, they aren’t interested in bells and whistles, or communication that isn’t frank or to the point. That led to an insight that upends an industry truism: for these guests—and there are many of them—choosing a hotel is rarely only about the price of the room. avid guests can often afford to stay in a more expensive place for a honeymoon or a vacation or a trip with friends; they’ll spend more when they need more. But for functional stays of one or two nights, it just feels wasteful. It goes against their values and their principles.

IHG and IDEO heard a clear call for a sense of focus and affordability—but never at the expense of quality. Guests should be able to access a simple booking process, rooms designed for sound sleep, and a quality breakfast, all at a fair price. And hotel owners ought to be able to deliver that experience with confidence and consistency, at costs that build a compelling case for their own business.

That’s what avid hotels is designed to deliver, every single time. Early traveler reviews have been exceedingly positive and have noted specifically the unique differentiating offers avid brings to the market.

Within a year of partnering with IDEO, IHG had issued 150 avid hotels licenses to franchisees in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and announced a development deal for 15 avid hotel locations in Germany over the next five years—a scale of success that came at unprecedented speed for the industry. The collaborative, inclusive design process is now serving as a model for how to develop robust, guest-centered hospitality brands that deliver where it matters for people.

Fifteen years have now passed, and in that time, I’ve developed a sincere passion for the medium. I’ve worked with many photographers both in the studio and on location, and also have shot my own work, both at IDEO and personally. Though I consider myself a designer first and a photographer second, I realize now just how much this art form has influenced the way I work. The overlapping values in each discipline have sharpened my focus and demanded a constant reassessment of line, color, and composition.

Here’s how photography can help you become a better...

1. ART DIRECTOR

Being able to identify not only the subject but also the photographic styles that will work with your concept adds richness to the message. For example, is the experience that you are creating intended for families or teenage fashionistas? Should the audience feel like they’re part of the story, or like they’re being challenged by the subject? Does the graphic design feature geometric lines or organic shapes? Try answering questions like these and choose appropriate imagery with consideration for lighting, color, tone and camera perspective to help define the experience.

2. UI & UX DESIGNER

Photographic composition translates well to design composition. In photography there are many ways to draw the viewer’s eye to the intended subject or to communicate a message. In UI/UX, it is often beneficial to limit your color palette and reduce visual noise. In photography, creating an image with areas of equal tonal values or color helps to simplify and focus. You are making conscious decisions to help the viewer (or user) make choices. Interestingly, when photography is used in conjunction with UI elements, designers often have to figure out how to maintain the legibility of text, important links, and buttons. You can sometimes get away with using a dark tint (usually an opacity of black) over the image, although this can appear dark and muddy. Use a gradient overlay rather than a full tint. It will look less heavy. Video tends to be more forgiving as your eye can distinguish the type more easily against the moving content.

3. DESIGN RESEARCHER

Most people aren’t comfortable in front of the camera, and I don’t blame them — it can feel awkward and vulnerable. Creating a good rapport with a subject can ease their stress, and is essential to capturing their true character. This is my favorite aspect of portrait photography — connecting with people — and it can be hard to do in a limited period of time.

Getting to know a person before you just start shooting away is a lot like breaking the ice before diving into an interview . As Ann Kim, a design researcher at IDEO, says, “Building trust is essential to successful design research.”

As an exercise, try photographing a colleague or acquaintance. Spend time getting to know your subject before shooting their portrait. Share your final image with a few people. Ask them who they think your subject is, and what they are like. It will be interesting to compare their feedback to the experience you had with your subject.

4. STORYTELLER

Use photographs to document each stage of a design project to visually enhance your story. Capture images of your experiences during research and inspiration trips. Record user interactions through video and photography. These tools build trust by placing the user front and center, bringing focus back to the intended audience. Build your narrative by introducing the components of your design first. For the big finale, show the human response to the product or prototype as a holistic system or journey.

Photographing your process also ensures that you have assets for sharing work with colleagues or collaborators which helps to inform and inspire.

I would love to hear how other designers and creators connect with photography — both the process and the perspective it gives. How has it influenced your work? What has it helped you to see more clearly? What hurdles has it helped you to clear? Direct message me your responses on Twitter.

Have fun shooting!

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Many moons ago, when I was a couple of years out of college working at a digital agency in London, they handed me the responsibility of directing my first photo shoot. Cue anxiety. As a junior designer, I had limited experience with professional photography. I didn’t understand enough about the medium to give adequate direction to a photographer. On the day of our shoot, it seemed like magic watching the photographer and his assistants make it happen — the combination of their technical knowledge and efficient process was fascinating.

Kelly masterfully weaves together what he calls the 12 forces, tech trends driving us into the future. In Kelly’s view, the forces—Becoming, Flowing, Filtering, Remixing, etc—lean on and reinforce each other. Each is a combination of technologies and societal factors that give us a preview of what the future will look like. In the Cognifying chapter, Kelly details the ways artificial intelligence is already catalyzing technological disruption, and imagines the infinite ways it will continue to change our experience. What happens when physical objects aren’t just smart, but also constantly learning? Like many of the chapters in the book, Cognifying is both entirely relatable and totally mind bending; you unpeel layer after layer, occasionally pausing to savor the individual seeds.

As Rodriguez notes in the episode, each chapter almost seems like a book unto itself. “It feels like what we get here at IDEO with a group of people in a project space for six months.” It turns out, some of these chapters started 10 years ago as blog posts, then went through ruthless revisions by magazine editors, and were rewritten again over the years, eventually ripening into this multifaceted fruit.

Some business books are like bananas: easy to consume, bland, too mushy. But when IDEO Futures host Diego Rodriguez dug into podcast guest Kevin Kelly’s latest book, The Inevitable, it felt like something entirely different. Kelly’s book outlines the technological trends that will drive every aspect of business going forward. It’s no banana. It’s more like a pomegranate—layered and fractal. Peeling back the layers requires work, but the rewards are juicy.

That’s the radical promise of the Circular Economy: moving from our traditional take-make-dispose economy, to one that has a closed loop, where materials, nutrients, and data are continuously repurposed.

Working with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which aims to inspire a shift to that new model, we’ve designed this guide to meet an emerging need among industry leaders: an alternative, restorative, and regenerative approach to business, one that creates new value and delivers long-term economic, social and ecological prosperity.

Transitioning the Circular Economy into the mainstream will be one of the biggest creative challenges of our time. But we believe design thinking is an ideal approach for tackling this complex, systemic, ambitious challenge.

Created for innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, the guide aims to raise awareness of the Circular Economy, nurture a systems perspective, and share practical innovation methods.

We hope these ideas will galvanize readers to start designing tomorrow’s breakthrough businesses.

Get started at circulardesignguide.com.

What if we had a new way to design products, services, and businesses that were good for people, the planet, and business?

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I’ve always loved drawing. I had cool, encouraging parents who’d do things like let me draw an invitation to my 6th birthday party, then go make copies of it so that I had personalized cards to send out.

I remember discovering my mom’s college sketchbook in the basement when I was a teenager, and feeling like it gave me a window into who she was at that time of her life. I started keeping sketchbooks in 10th grade, and have managed to hold on to almost all of them since then.

In my career as a programmer, I live and work inside my computer screen. My professional body of work can sometimes feel so ephemeral—everything I’ve ever made could be wiped out by a really strong magnet. So it feels really nice to have some solid, double-layered bookshelves and bins full of sketchbooks to step back and look at sometimes.

Lately, I’ve been drawing complicated women in the evenings. A woman’s physicality is so much more political than a man’s—and to me, this makes it so much more powerful. A woman has more expectations placed on her physical looks—her clothes, her hair, even her expression—and that only makes it that much more of a provocation when those expectations are thwarted.

When I was a kid, I’d spend hours drawing Ariel from Disney’s A Little Mermaid. I'd sometimes catch myself unconsciously copying her expression with my own face. Even at 9 years old, I’d feel a little embarrassed when I felt a big, fake grin on my face. I liked Ariel and her gadgets and gizmos aplenty, but I wasn’t like Ariel. I was faking it.

Then in high school, when it was time for my exciting locking-myself-in-my-room-and-drawing-self-portraits period, I had to shift into thinking intentionally about what my face was doing while I drew from the mirror. I found that whether I was trying to make a specific kind of face, whatever came out ended up feeling like a character. And that somehow felt instantly more powerful than just the image in the mirror.

The women I like to draw now capture some element of that feeling. They may not be the definition of self-possessed, they may or may not be confident and composed, but they are self-aware, and in control of what they are putting out into the world. They may be performing a little, but they're doing it on their own terms, for their own benefit.

They’re from noir movies and punk bands. They’re artists, journalists, wastoids, and dweebies. I like to think they lived for themselves and as themselves—the most provocative act there is for any human. I admire them and want to see myself in them

“I have been drawing complicated women in the evenings lately.” Cambridge software designer Ashley Holtgraver reveals the secrets of her notebooks.

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.