New Yorkers experience policing differently depending on who they are and where they live. Some communities are patrolled; others are profiled. When your neighbors’ experiences are starkly different from your own, it can be almost impossible to understand their perspective.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), a state branch of the ACLU, hoped to spark a dialogue around race and police tactics in over-policed communities, and to engage voters on this divisive issue before New York City’s mayoral election. But the NYCLU also understood that traditional slogans and billboards weren’t enough to foster deep personal conversations and effective political action—the city needed real talk.

The organization engaged IDEO to help create a city-wide, nontraditional campaign. In talking with New Yorkers, the NYCLU advocates and IDEO designers honed in on two simple truths: Transformative conversations happen only when people feel safe enough to listen—and to speak. And people become more compassionate listeners once they themselves feel heard. In a time of entrenched interests and growing social conflict, listening can be a radical act.

Together, IDEO and the NYCLU designed Listening NYC, a grassroots campaign to promote interpersonal listening, meaningful discussion, and collective action around policing.

To get New Yorkers—famously brash and always bustling—to stop and listen to their neighbors, they created a pop-up installation called the Listening Room that travels through the city to catalyze one-on-one conversations. It’s a portable safe space, with tables, chairs, two walls that provide a degree of intimacy, and two sides left open for a feeling of psychological safety.

At the center of the experience is a deck of Conversation Cards that encourage New Yorkers to share their stories and hear those of others. Simple prompts like “I believe the role of police is to _____,” and questions like “A cop stops you in your neighborhood. What do you do?” empower people to find common ground. Through straightforward but structured activities like these, many New Yorkers who enter the Listening Room expecting to disagree instead find themselves sharing stories and opinions in ways they never imagined.

Beyond face-to-face dialogue, the Listening Room also features a radio loaded with stories from different neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. By turning the dial, visitors can learn about encounters with policing culture from fellow New Yorkers, including two NYPD officers.

To turn talk into action, visitors are invited to send a postcard to the mayor. People choose the policy proposals most important to them—from, “Police shouldn’t be disciplining kids in school” to, “If police want to read our emails, they should have to get a warrant”—and add them to a pre-stamped postcard dropped into a special “ballot box.” The NYCLU delivered more than 2,000 of these cards to Mayor Bill de Blasio upon his reelection in late 2017.

IDEO and the NYCLU also led an interactive campaign event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Residents, students, philanthropists, and police were led through an exercise called Creative Tensions, positioning themselves around the room according to their views on everything from surveillance technology to school safety. Experts helped guide the conversation including Sheriff Jerry Clayton, director Liesl Tommy, and NYCLU organizer Brandon Holmes. The process allowed participants to see how fluid people’s positions can be.

Listening NYC has now reached thousands of New Yorkers at more than 35 locations. Schools, from a public middle school to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, have requested visits from the Listening Room, and the installation’s modular design has inspired new incarnations on topics including student safety and discipline.

The NYCLU has sent Conversation Cards to celebrities, influencers, and every member of the New York City Council. Sending postcards to Mayor de Blasio and Conversation Cards to the city council led directly to passage of the Right to Know Act—legislation that incorporates some of the NYCLU’s proposals for police reform.

Today, the impact of Listening NYC has moved beyond city limits. The NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter is introducing the pop-up installation there, while in Boston, mayoral candidate Tito Jackson even promised a visit from the Listening Room if elected. To keep dialogue flowing, the ACLU plans to distribute Conversation Cards nationwide.

Fashion thrives on reinvention. Now, digital platforms and tools are reinventing fashion. E-commerce has reshaped the shopping experience and social media has democratized the once-exclusive industry.

Amidst this furious whirl of change, the fashion platform Zalando, founded in 2008, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Headcount has ballooned to 15,000 and revenues grew 23 percent year over year. More than €1 out of every €100 spent on clothing in Europe is spent at Zalando.

In 2014, Zalando’s co-founder and CEO Robert Gentz approached IDEO to help think about the organization’s future in the face of increasing competition. Gentz realized that building design thinking capabilities across the company would allow Zalando to make systemic business shifts, like building better experiences for customers, and balancing operational excellence and execution with innovation.

So, he invited a team of IDEO designers and Zalando employees to create an innovation lab in its Berlin headquarters. They called it The Studio, and in the three years since its launch, it has helped the company build new products, experiences, and modes of working that are powering a digital transformation across Zalando and in the broader fashion world.

Finding purpose

Gentz came to IDEO with a simple request: “I want my daughter to be proud of the company I created.” With that directive, the first order of business was to home in on the organization’s new strategy—to shift from an e-tailer to a full-blown fashion platform—and resurface purpose. After a series of interviews and workshops across the company, a unifying intent emerged:

Zalando exists to reimagine fashion, for the good of all.

To share that message, the team designed a five-day Festival of Purpose at the company’s Berlin headquarters and satellite locations, coupled with a long-term plan to help leaders and their teams weave that sense of purpose into everything they do.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando used purpose to mobilize its community

Building Innovation Capacity

With a shared purpose to rally around, Zalando started to design and build at a clip. The Studio experimented and prototyped, launching products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street style photos, and a digital tool called Collabary that connects online fashion influencers with brands. Projects are enabling cross-disciplinary teams to get into the practice of aligning around joint goals, making fast decisions, and building with agility.

But just as important as identifying growth opportunities for the company has been The Studio’s role as a hub. Zalando employees from across business units cycled into the Studio, teaching IDEOers about their business and the company’s culture, while IDEOers helped them master the design thinking process so they could lead future projects.

Studio graduates ensure that anything prototyped there is implemented, and integrate what they’ve learned into their day jobs. Their experience makes them design ambassadors who spread the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando pioneered a new innovation studio

Teaching Leaders How to Scale Change

It’s one thing to start working differently in a small innovation lab, but how do you scale change across an organization and determine how it will affect each major business unit—product, technology, commercial, and logistics? IDEO interviewed Zalando employees to better understand how to embed what we called new Ways of Working (WoW), a method that combines design thinking with lean and agile approaches. WoW was then deployed by a centralized team that ran workshops and coaching sessions to help leaders adopt it, measure its impact through OKRs, KPIs, and NPSs, and help their teams understand the new processes.

Today, the Ways of Working method is being rolled out across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees.

Together, the relationship between IDEO and Zalando and their multi-year project of change is spurring double-digit growth, and making good on the company’s vision of reimagining fashion, for the good of all.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando scaled new ways of working across their organization

IDEO helped position Shinho’s ingrained respect for food, family, and good health as a guiding principle for how the organization interacts with its employees and the wider world. The IDEO team integrated a new motto—“treat the world as family”—into every part of Shinho’s work, from sourcing and hiring to new ventures to the care employees take in handling each bottle of sauce destined for someone’s table.

To help transform Shinho’s internal culture, the IDEO team also crafted a narrative to communicate the company’s beliefs to new staff and outside partners. The team expressed Shinho’s foundational story through a published brand book and film, reimagined logo, and codified employee values.

“My proudest moment was when we brought the brand identity IDEO developed to life, and interpreted Shinho’s mission and vision through that lens in front of 2,000 employees at our annual meeting,” said Hanzhong Dong, Shinho's Head of Product, “It made me feel that even though we’re a group of ordinary people, we’re working on a great and meaningful thing."

Shinho’s heightened confidence and focus on supporting families has empowered the company to expand beyond soy sauce and snacks and explore new offers, from culinary training to sustainable farming to food experiences.

In July 2017, Shinho stepped onto the international stage as a tastemaker by participating in an event called Food Forward, hosted by the Michelin Guide and IDEO. Michelin-starred restaurants are synonymous with superb ingredients and service. Shinho crafts safe, organic, high-quality products that are staples for Chinese chefs, and the company shares the Michelin Guide’s aim to celebrate and expand the role of fine dining in China. IDEO brought all parties together with the shared goals of elevating China's culinary craft and culture, inspiring people around the future of food in China, and encouraging fruitful connections and partnerships.

IDEO and the Michelin Guide organized the day-long event, which included guest speakers, panel discussions, and tastings with four international, Michelin-starred restaurant chefs. Speakers and panelists discussed culinary education, inclusion, and the interplay between tradition and innovation in food. More than 200 people attended from across the food ecosystem: chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, investors, and educators. The event’s livestream garnered 30 million global views and 800,000 engagements.

Shinho’s products now reach 30 million families in 232 cities around the globe, driven by a cohesive mission and brand message. This kind of values-driven growth and hunger for new partnerships is setting the course for the future of food in China and throughout the region.

Despite the rapid growth of China's economy and increased access to a wider variety of food since the opening up, the market is saturated with unhealthy, processed snack foods. Consumers are increasingly seeking better-quality options, highlighting a significant gap in the food system.

30M families

purchase Shinho’s products

60 countries

around the globe offer Shinho products

Narvar, a software-as-a-service startup that provides a post-purchase engagement platform for retail clients, was scaling fast. The company had grown from 20 to 90 employees, and was well on its way to reaching 300 over the next two years. As the company grew, its leaders wanted to make sure it could sustain its vibrant, innovative culture. Narvar came to IDEO for help identifying and defining its values in a way that would would scale with the organization.

For the IDEO team, that meant articulating a system of values that supported existing behavior, reflected the company’s aspirations, and aided in evaluating new talent and development. The team started by interviewing key “culture carriers,” from the CEO to new hires, to learn what makes Narvar special. Based on this research, the team crafted a working set of values, then invited the entire company to share their feedback. In doing this work, IDEO was also able to surface organizational issues and tensions within the company for Narvar leaders to address.

Now, Narvar lives its values every day. Team members use them during candidate interviews, employees see them daily on company walls, and managers reinforce them during performance reviews. Every quarter, leadership gives out a Narvar values award to reinforce their importance. Through this project, Narvar was able to not only capture its core values, but also use them as an active ingredient in the company’s growth.

“We engaged IDEO to really understand the challenges we faced as an organization, and IDEO helped us define and articulate our culture and values. I can honestly say that all the growth and success we’ve achieved in the past two years—we couldn’t have done that without the foundation from IDEO,” said Narvar CEO and founder Amit Sharma.

For a decade and a half, the group has built a global reputation for pulling stunts like the Grand Central Terminal freeze. If design is about the capture and channeling of attention, Improv Everywhere has a lesson for us in how to achieve that. We spoke to founder Charlie Todd to get some backstory on his benevolent guerrilla art troupe.

How did Improv Everywhere start?

Charlie Todd: I totally blundered into it. I was 22-years-old, and moved to New York to be an actor in improv comedy. I said to some friends, let’s go play a prank in a bar tonight. We did it for five years, and then when YouTube was created, I already had a library of content. A thing we did in Grand Central Station got 10 million views in the first week alone. I’ve spent the last eight years following that viral breakout.

What’s the audience meant to take away from such stunts?

When a load of people turn up at Coney Island in eveningwear and jump in the ocean, and people ask why, the answer is that there is no why. We’re all conditioned to assess for some extrinsic motivation, like the thing was for charity or a comment on global warming. It’s okay to just do a thing because it’s silly.

So, it’s simple whimsy with no purpose?

Well, I’d like to think that having that experience maybe alters people’s perception in some small way. We’re encouraging people to express themselves in a public space, in an unauthorized manner. In this post-9/11 security world we live in, we’re trying to make people realize that they don’t have to ask permission to express themselves creatively.

Is it also important to be connecting people?

I grew up in South Carolina, in a small city. I was used to people making eye contact and smiling. Moving to New York, everyone is busy and has a smartphone. It was like the only time you made eye contact was if something bad was going on: a train being delayed, or a crazy person shouting. People would unify around shiftiness. So we thought: can we create something that is positive in nature, something so unusual and joyful that you have a positive connection with someone?

Do you always get a positive reaction?

During one of the No-Pants pranks we had some police trouble. An officer stumbled across the event, and didn’t like it. Our people stayed in character and said they had forgotten their pants. The officer took the train out of service. But everything was eventually dismissed. It turns out that there’s no law against being in your underwear. When we did the event the next year, the police were there, to help escort us and make sure people had a good time.

What do you do when you’re not freaking people out on the streets of New York?

I get hired by brands to create surprise moments or spectacles, or brainstorm ideas for a brand campaign. I get to direct and produce TV. Last year I was the show-runner for a show on MTV. I’ve also been at the Upright Citizens Brigade for 15 years, as a performer and teacher.

Tell us about the teaching. Can you teach someone to be funny?

All you can teach is for people to learn how to be themselves—to be honest, and react in a truthful way. Everyone’s unique personality and viewpoint is funny. It’s counter-intuitive: when trying to be funny, people often try to be something that they’re not, by imitating stuff they’ve seen on television and so on. Instead of trying to be something you’re not, you need to be more authentically connected to what you are. That applies to creativity too: instead of reaching outside and trying too hard, focus in on what truly inspires you.

Photos courtesy of Improv Everywhere.

In the dead of winter, 2001, a woman riding the New York subway looked up from her book and saw a passenger wearing no pants. She was puzzled, but ignored him. At the next stop, another pantsless passenger joined him. And then more. By this time, she had put her book away. A hidden camera captured her reaction as it evolved from confusion to delight. She traded looks of amazement with the other passengers—a group called Improv Everywhere was responsible for breaking their routine.

1. A deeper understanding of 3D relationships

These puzzles teach how different shapes fit together in three-dimensional space. M. C. Escher would have no advantage: there is no cheating the puzzle, and all the rules of physics and gravity apply. In order to solve the puzzle, you have to understand how the shapes fit together. This is important for designers, especially when so much is being designed on a computer. If a product is being designed for the physical world, it needs to play nice with the rules of physics.

2. Forward and backward problem solving

Once you understand how the pieces are supposed to fit together, you actually have to make it happen. Often this involves both forward and backward problem solving. The internal monologue might go something like this: “So I am going to start with this piece because it is the biggest and is easiest to deal with, if I work around it. This smaller piece is probably the second half of the left side. And this piece has to be the last piece."

Sometimes you know the last step first. Sometimes you know step 1, 2, and 5 but then have to solve for steps 3 and 4. That can be scary in a linear world, but as designers that is sometimes the reality we face. It’s helpful to have the confidence that steps 3 and 4 will become clear, even if initially they are hard to see.

3. Hand-eye/Hand-brain problem solving

There is something very rich about holding a problem in your hand as you work with it. By holding the puzzle, you have a deeper understanding of the spatial relationships that must be solved. While it is possible to understand these things on a computer or on paper, being able to physically handle an object allows you to reach conclusions and iterate solutions in different ways. Fluency across mediums can only help us arrive at these solutions faster.

Others lessons might include balancing the details with the big picture, and reading context clues. But I found that I had an even deeper appreciation for these puzzles when I learned how to make some. I would encourage any interested designer with access to materials and tools to try making one for themselves.

For most of the puzzles, the pieces seem very simple. The simplicity is deceptive, however. Take the star puzzle: a configuration of six roughly rectangular identical pieces with two “triangular” notches cut out of each that slide together nicely (when you know how to do it.) But the pieces aren’t exactly rectangular. The notches are not simple triangles. In fact there are 12 faces, and only a handful of right angles. Plus, most commonly these pieces are only a few inches long—not safe to cut on most power tools without jigs—but which jigs? And to add to all that, they have to be precisely made in order to actually work, especially if you want them to look good. Again, there are simple solutions to all of these problems, but it takes some figuring to make it work. But that’s the point of a puzzle, right?

Maybe it’s their old school charm or the fond memories I have of solving them at Cracker Barrel, but I am a fan of wooden block puzzles. And after learning how to make them, from my wizard-like teacher at North Bennet Street School, I have come to appreciate the true elegance of these puzzles, and the lessons they have for designers.

Dix, a photojournalist, got on a plane for what he thought would be a 10-day trip. He ended up staying for four years, working at the United Nations to help find food and shelter for 300,000 displaced locals. It was during that time that Dix first came across Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel charting Spiegelman’s father’s experience in the Holocaust as a Polish Jew.

Before Maus, Dix’s only exposure to comics came from reading Calvin and Hobbes and Asterix. But as he huddled in bunkers during air raids and artillery fire, Dix was struck by how simply and powerfully Spiegelman was able to render the complexities of identity, memory, and trauma in graphic form.

With violence between government and Tamil forces intensifying, the Sri Lankan government ordered the UN to evacuate the region in September 2008. Dix returned to London with post-traumatic stress disorder and a fierce determination to tell the stories of those he’d left behind.

He travelled to meet refugee families and record their experiences, and worked with illustrator Lindsay Pollock to conceptualize them into a graphic storyline. Dix also embarked on a Ph.D. in anthropology to systematically research the production of the comic. The result of all his work? The Vanni, a 200-page graphic novel about the conflict, told through one Sri Lankan family’s eyes, and an accompanying thesis on the methodology and ethics of producing such a complex piece of graphic literature.

Dix has since brought to life stories about crack-cocaine addicts in Guinea Bissau, a Nigerian woman trafficked to London (Abike's story, below), and the plight of African and Asian migrants in the Persian Gulf. At every stage, Dix works alongside his subjects to ensure he’s best reflecting their experiences, and their stories have become a powerful educational tool, illustrating complex, often abstract issues including migration, human trafficking, and drug addiction at the most human level.

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A chance meeting with an IDEO designer led Dix to our London studio, where we collaborated on a three-day long pro bono sprint to develop his stories into scalable, interactive teaching tools for classrooms. We designed and prototyped a WhatsApp-based multimedia story about Merha, an Eritrean refugee fleeing to London to escape persecution, as well as an app-based version of Merha’s story, including buttons and swipes on each frame of the story, so readers could learn more.

Dix’s next step is to secure funding to build out the app and develop lesson plans to roll out across schools internationally. But in the meantime, he’s not standing still. Dix is already testing a lo-fi version of the educational tool—an interactive PDF—in 300 schools across 26 countries including Brazil, Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic Of Congo, the UAE, and many others. His next comic? Capturing the story of the Yazidi community fleeing ISIS in Syria.

It was Boxing Day 2004 when Ben Dix, founder of British literary comic publisher PositiveNegatives, got the call. A university friend, stationed in the Tamil Tiger-held region of Vanni in northern Sri Lanka, was asking if he'd come and help. It was the day of the tsunami that killed 230,000 people, one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.

It turned what would be a humdrum brand mark into one that was tongue-in-cheek and playful. Optimistically, I wondered if it helped lift the spirits of the Great Croft residents. I also started looking for more typographical serendipity.

There are plenty of examples of signage that has degraded to the point of being unreadable, but a beautiful accident is where the change looks intentional and, ideally, adds to the meaning and character of the neighborhood.

I saw my second example at Unity Kitchen Cafe in the new Olympic park in East London, where residents and Londoners further afield are drawn by attractions such as the children’s adventure playground, nature park, or velodrome. The cafe contained a diverse mix of nationalities, so it seemed rather fitting that this broken C was reminiscent of a cedilla (ç), a nod to any European visitors. Please don't fix the sign, I love it the way it is.

I became obsessed. Searching everywhere for more evidence of meaningful mistakes, even engaging my family in the hunt, and it was on one such hunt that I found the Pelican restaurant in Peckham, south London.

I’ve been wondering about how we might design for beautiful accidents: if wear and tear isn't a thing we can control, how we can make accidents appear elegant? At Wired magazine they call such intentional accidents Wrong Theory. Inspired by Edgar Degas’ painting, Jockeys Before the Race, in which the artist defied the conventional composition of his day by inserting a grey pole that bifurcates the scene, slicing right through one of the horses’ heads. The same could be said of Marcel Duchamp’s act of turning a urinal on its head, signing it R. Mutt, and deeming it art. Wrong Theory celebrates the act of breaking the rules.

But part of the beauty of Beautiful Accidents is that they are rare. If you find one, please share it with me! Check out my Instagram or tag your photos with #beautifulaccident.

I first spotted a beautiful accident when I saw the sign for the Great Croft housing estate in London. The A swinging down against the Akzidenz Grotesque type worked so well, in part aided by the horizontal seam in the concrete, that I had to think was that serendipity or intentional?

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.