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.

When I started at IDEO six years ago, I had no idea what a systems designer was—only that I was one. Now, six years later, I have an answer, but I’m still perfecting the great-aunt-approved dinner table pitch.

The secret? It’s actually something you probably learned in your grade school language arts class: a good analogy.

If you’ve got approximately 10 minutes, I can tell you what I’ve learned about what I now proudly call my job—and how I’ve learned to explain it.

Systems and automobiles

An iPhone, the human body, buildings, cities, organizations, economies, the universe—all of those things count as systems, even though one can fit in your pocket and one is infinite. So what makes them all systems?

In a series of excellent lectures, Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking, uses a simple analogy to explain systems: an automobile.

As Ackoff explains, a car needs to carry you from point A to point B. No individual part of a car can move you on its own—not the wheel, the axle, the seat, or the engine. But a car can. And if you take a car apart, you no longer have a car: you simply have the pieces, because “a system is not the sum of the behavior of its parts; it’s the product of their interactions.” That’s as true for a computer as it is for the universe—or any other system.

Systems design and architecture

Ackoff, a professor at Wharton Business School, criticized managers for focusing on business silos (marketing, operations, finance). He urged them to take a wider systems view—to think about the interactions that create the whole.

I couldn’t agree more. But if that’s systems thinking, what is systems design? What’s the difference?

Ackoff heralded one profession for understanding systems best: architecture. Architects begin with the needs of the client—bedroom, kitchen, living room, bathroom—but they don’t stop there. It wouldn’t make sense to design the rooms separately; they need certain adjacencies and sizes.

Importantly, Ackoff explains, the architect “will never modify the house to improve the quality of the room, unless the quality of the house is simultaneously improved.” To take this analogy a step further, think about it this way: you wouldn’t make the kitchen bigger if it meant getting rid of the bathroom. That would be a weird house.

Ahhh, so you're an architect?

Not exactly, although it’s no coincidence that I used to be a designer at an architecture firm. I think of myself as a “human-centered systems designer,” but that wouldn’t be the clearest thing to have on a business card.

IDEO is known for human-centered design, a process that takes inspiration from the needs and aspirations of people, most often end users. Human-centered systems design also starts with people, but requires looking at all the diverse stakeholders within a system—not just end users.

Let’s dive into another analogy: a school. If you’re designing a school, students are the end user. But the needs of teachers, parents, and administrators are equally important. For example, a few years ago we wanted to create a way for schools to change their culture. Since culture is intangible, it can’t be designed in and of itself. But you can design spaces, schedules, processes, roles, rituals, and incentives—tangible “levers for change” that help create culture. We zeroed in on the needs of school leaders, and developed School Retool, a professional development program that empowers principals to evolve their school culture.

When you’re designing a system with a lot of moving pieces, it’s hard to know where to start, and very easy to get lost in the “What if’s?” Design needs constraints, and focusing on human needs provides them.

But why human-centered systems design?

Let’s return to my man Russell Ackoff. He writes, “No problem ever exists in complete isolation. Every problem interacts with every other problem and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems.” Ackoff even coined a term for systems of problems—he called them “messes.”

Indeed, our biggest problems—in education, health care, criminal justice, government—are systems challenges. And surprise: These are all human systems. When the parts of a system are made up of people, complexity is exponentially high because human feelings and needs are unpredictable and constantly changing. Despite good intentions, these important societal systems can be some of the least human-centered experiences we encounter today.

None of these problems can be solved in isolation, but it’s also easy to get a headache just thinking about tackling them.

Our most complex systems need human-centeredness the most. As a systems designer, I specialize in zooming in and out. I’m constantly jumping back and forth between the big picture and the details. I work with teams to bring the best of all disciplines together to design individual elements that form an integrated, cohesive experience for end-users. I ask questions like, “How might the environment support the new behaviors we’re trying to create? How might digital tools enable a new mindset?” I create intentional interactions between parts.

As the holidays creep closer and closer, I no longer dread the questions about work and career that come along with the appetizers. I finally have something my family is more likely to understand, thanks to the powerful and beloved literary device known as the analogy. Getting to this point feels like learning how to ride a bike—you pedal hard, gather speed, and finally crest the hill.

And if nothing else, I’ll just send all my family members a link to this piece. Hi, mom and dad!

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Fall has arrived in the northern hemisphere, and you know what that means: cool weather, warm cider, and sitting around the holiday dinner table with my extended family, trying to explain to them what I do for a living as a systems designer.

In the not-too-distant future, patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease could be equipped with a sensor that monitors their medication and inhaler use and prevents acute events. People suffering from clinical depression could be prescribed an app-based therapeutic program in place of a drug.

The digital therapeutics global market is estimated at $1.8 billion today, but predicted to reach $7.1 billion by 2025. Much of the growth is predicted to come through investment from traditional pharma, but there are several new players emerging from the tech and start-up worlds as well with the hopes of evolving into a digital therapeutic. Omada Health, which creates behavior change programs for managing chronic disease, makes its hundreds of thousands of patients feel seen and heard with personal coaching. Click Therapeutics develops software to support smoking cessation and address major depressive disorder in adults. The meditation app Headspace has convinced more than a million people to integrate meditation into their daily lives, with proven wellness benefits.

Companies like these are revealing transformative new approaches to helping patients tackle the thorny challenges at the core of chronic disease, mental health disorders, and a growing number of other diagnoses—and in the process, they’re creating and growing thriving markets where none existed before.

Might these digital products, one day soon, be prescribed by a physician who is concerned about her patients’ heart disease, diabetes, or weight? If Tesla released software that clinically validated reductions in car accidents, even for the most dangerous drivers, would that qualify as a digital therapeutic? We are just beginning to imagine and design the future of this industry.

But these products still face the age-old challenge: how to get people to actually use them. If patients don’t love and trust the experience enough to sustain engagement over long periods, many of these therapies—and products—will fail.

Any new approach needs to begin with the needs of real people, and to follow those needs toward products that are not only desirable, but also have viable business models behind them. Here are our four big takeaways drawn from IDEO’s experience working in this field, designing digital therapeutics that engage patients—and the market.

Put down the competitive landscape report

Innovations in science and health tend to be incremental, but by looking to other industries, it’s possible to identify opportunities for more radical change. Studying analogous experiences—services, products, and other offerings that deliver something tangentially related but not exactly the same—will clarify what kinds of experiences give patients a sense of meaning, delight and value.

A partner of ours in the biotech industry recently launched its first digital therapeutic, focused on helping patients manage diabetes. In piloting the experience, we encountered a big challenge: Patients were struggling to connect the at-home testing device to the bluetooth on their phones. Without it, the experience fell apart.

Instead of buying all of our competitors’ devices to look at their solutions, we brainstormed a list of organizations that were particularly good at helping people with a set of complex instructions—IKEA, ballroom dance instructors, piano teachers, NASA-to-spacecraft communications specialists, and others. We discovered that LEGO had made its first bluetooth-connected toy and—master of instruction that it is—had created instructions to guide even little kids through a simple series of steps. Inspired by LEGO, the team created a new set of instructions. Once they were integrated into the patient onboarding experience, nearly every patient was able to connect their medical device to their phones.

Prioritize the patient

It can be easy to fall into the trap of addressing the needs of payers and providers above the patients’. After all, if a digital therapeutic isn’t reimbursable, the underlying business may not be successful; and if a physician doesn’t know it well enough to prescribe it, a company can’t increase market share. These are critical pieces of the puzzle, but they need to come after the foundational concern of any new digital health venture: fitting your therapy into patients’ lives.

During early stages of design, we rely on user research to inspire countless possibilities, and revisit our insights when we need to refine (or flip) our ideas. User research informs the business model, helps define the path to market, and may also lead to other product features.

What does this look like in practice? Consider the digital mental health company Headspace. Headspace was designed to teach people the fundamentals of meditation, engaging them in an experience that might encourage practice and adherence over time. Initially, Headspace played with incentives like badges and friendly social competition, but it slowly came to understand that the most profound motivation was mental health itself. The company prompted meditators to remember why they meditate, and asked them who in their lives would be better off because they meditated. This consistent call for reflection and awareness led to higher overall engagement.

Headspace’s popularity has catapulted the company to $100M in annual revenue and more than a million subscribers. Once the company designed an experience that people loved, subscribers embraced the product and took it upon themselves to host Facebook groups, meet-ups, and events. Headspace then opened up partnerships within the formal health industry, adapting to the needs and requirements of providers, payers, and regulators. Today, Headspace is a benefit offered to employees of over 350 large companies worldwide, and providers and health systems across the globe offer it to their patients. If you design an effective product that patients love, players in the health system have incentive to offer access.

Design with and for your most extreme, hard-to-engage patients

Designing for extreme users illuminates the wide range of people who might use a product. In IDEO’s earlier days, we saw this most clearly when we designed physical products like ice cream scoopers and pizza slicers for older adults, people with arthritis, and children with limited motor skills. We ended up creating something those populations could use, but in doing so, we developed a universally easier user experience. The product design outshone its competitors and became a top consumer choice.

In the world of digital therapeutics, this approach might entail designing for patients with limited experience using digital technology, or focusing on patients living with multiple chronic conditions, or with profound barriers to accessing care. These patients can help shape a more equitable and inclusive therapeutic experience.

One of our most challenging digital therapeutic projects involved creating an app-based experience to combat depression. To engage with potential users, we traveled to the rural Rocky Mountains to an isolated community where we met Dan, a cowboy and rancher living 40 miles away from his closest neighbor. Dan had struggled with depression for most of his adult life. On a good day, it was hard for him to get out of bed. On a hard day, he struggled with suicidal thoughts.

Before talking to Dan, we considered all of the technological features that could encourage adherence, like enabling offline access and fast download speed in low-bandwidth contexts. But through talking to Dan, it became clear that the tactical challenges weren’t the biggest problem to solve. Even in more populated areas, depression itself can be isolating. Dan helped us co-design a digital tool that even he would be willing to come back to, day after day. One of the key features a digital therapeutic could offer would be connection to others—in real life—and a chance not only to receive help, but to give it. Informed by Dan’s story, we designed an experience that could connect people living with depression to each other and engage them as supporters, mentors, and advocates.

Launch a thousand prototypes

One of the biggest challenges facing health innovation today is the belief that you need to have a solution before you really grasp what people want and how they want it. That’s how the industry is constructed. You would never write a grant proposal without telling the funder exactly what you will deliver, nor allocate budget at a pharmaceutical company without a detailed plan and anticipated ROI.

For digital therapeutics, those constraints are blown wide open. Our task is to come up with as many ideas as we can and test what will actually stick. Prototypes pave the way to a solid, working product, and patient input on prototypes can be used in countless safe, thoughtful ways.

Recently, we worked on a digital therapeutic that helps people manage the tremors associated with motor disabilities such as Parkinson’s Disease. Instead of the typical treatment, which solely relies on an oral medication known to have serious side effects, we were tasked with working on a software and hardware system that delivers targeted electric pulses to the part of the brain that calms tremors. We began with a long list of open questions about what patients living with Parkinson’s would find acceptable, usable, and engaging.

When we went into the field to interview patients, we quickly realized that they had no idea what it might be like to rely every day on a digital device that’s crucial to their health. They were curious about the inner workings of the therapy, and asked questions about the technical, logistical, and philosophical implications.

Our first prototypes included a dozen hats, headbands, or pillows that a patient might wear to charge the implanted device. We also prototyped many digital interactions, from Alexa add-ons to iPhone apps, that might guide them to administer digital medication. To take advantage of bio-monitoring data, we created numerous dashboards, exports, and communication portals that might help patients, providers, and caretakers make sense of what was happening neurologically.

A lot of those ideas were failures, but the things we learned were priceless. For example, it turns out that despite the growing number of retirees on Alexa, many of our patients didn’t trust a voice-controlled app with a task this important. It also turns out that the headgear a person needed to wear could easily make them feel embarrassed, unattractive, or emasculated. One of the most important discoveries was that faster charging is not better, if slower charging meant you could fold laundry, watch your favorite TV show, or weed the garden at the same time. At the end of the day, we designed a hundred prototypes before we landed on the key value propositions, features, and usability standards that would shape the experience.

Tying it all together

Breakthrough products and experiences like Click Therapeutics and Headspace all align with the framework outlined above. But to be clear: They aren’t successful because they have a silver bullet for engagement or the best theory of behavioral economics. They are market-movers because they focused on their users and designed their products around what they found. That led to creating something people love, and success quickly followed. It’s a formula you can apply to creating your own digital therapeutics—or any product you want users to love enough to use in their daily lives.

Illustrations by Nien-Ken Alec Lu.

The next era of digital health has arrived, and it’s booming.

But in practice, when we’re making something genuinely new, we often don’t have data to begin with, nor do we even know what kind of data we will need. We’re staring at a blank canvas, so the only way to dive in is to listen, observe, and sketch.

Making ideas real didn’t just mean collecting biometrics about patients and displaying the data in a smart way. It was much more important to use data to help experts and patients build and maintain a relationship, track progress, adjust course, and figure out next steps. These elements are all an integral part of how the service operates. And in the process, I came away with a few principles for data scientists to keep in mind when using data as a medium for design.

1. Be part of research

We needed to know what experts ask their patients to help support them in their journey to self-management, and what is reasonable to ask patients for. Is it fair to ask somebody who mainly eats at restaurants to accurately track the micronutrients of everything they eat? Probably not.

It’s critical to understand people’s real needs in their context to understand what data is meaningful and feasible to collect. Qualitative field research is key in the process of developing empathy for those we design for and for getting a feel for what life challenges might get into the way of data collection. Understanding when we can collect data—and when we can’t—provides valuable information.

2. Sketch by hand and share

Informed by research and armed with crayons, we created a variety of data visuals aimed at tracking patient progress in various aspects of their day-to-day lives—basically, sketches of the features that might be helpful. Drawing is much faster than writing code. We made the visuals a prominent part of the project room to serve as a catalyst for brainstorming and discussion with other members of the team who aren’t data scientists. We explored trends of activity and sleep over time, and played around with visual ways to track mood and to inform people of healthier food options without asking them to count calories and micronutrients.

This approach allowed us to make significant progress in two ways. One, showing our sketches to experts allowed us to narrow down which metrics were useful, and to start tracking down potential data sources. Sketching in crayon versus writing in code also helps us fail faster and narrow in on the right questions to ask.

And two, sharing our sketches with the broader team, which included designers from a broad spectrum of disciplines (communication, interaction, research, software, business), made our work more transparent and helped us establish a common language. It also sparked conversations, inspiring us and helping us to gather further feedback.

3. Gather up and agree on all your data

Once we identified useful visuals, algorithms, and interfaces, we began hunting for the data that could fill them in and move us to higher fidelity prototypes. In our case, data included the client’s historical data, simulated data, and team data. We simulated data about meals and snacks and plugged it into publicly available nutritional APIs. This exercise allowed us to identify the types of data that might be suitable as input for these APIs.

We also bought a bunch of trackers for the team to explore ways we might keep tabs on activity, which showed us where a tracker might go wrong (moving your arm in a circle might count as a step, when in actuality you’re not taking a step at all) and narrowed down the types of data that are meaningful to collect (for example, movement vs. steps). By diving in with our own data, we were able to fill our communcation, interaction, and software designers in on how we would approach collecting patient info.

4. Look to the future

As we were exploring data solutions for the various components of this service, we had to keep in mind that design and development take time and resources. For example, tracking micronutrients via nutritional APIs relies heavily on the assumption that patients are willing—or will even remember—to share their meals. In reality, we didn’t know what patients were willing to share about the foods they eat, nor did we know what food-related information experts need to track a patient's progress.

Redirecting the team’s effort to a lower-fidelity solution to track these behaviors (say, allowing patients to share a food journal) can save a lot of time and effort while still informing the future development of the service.

As a data scientist, starting with people and crayons rather than data and a keyboard felt uncomfortable at first, but it made the process of identifying what’s important and doable much more efficient. Making data science a visual part of the project space also helped the data scientists on the team become co-designers from the very beginning—meaning that we could contribute a lot more to the project. Hopefully, the tips above will empower you to do the same.

A big thank you to Mike Stringer for his help shaping this piece.

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You might think the first thing data scientists do on a project is grab a bucket of data and run with it. And for good reason—that’s how many data scientists write about projects after the fact.

In business, new models and offers are further constrained by the need to satisfy current stakeholders and follow market trends. So how can you break free of present-day realities to envision a genuinely novel future?

In other words: Design can move us beyond the imagination-traps of our own experience to uncover truly new possibilities.

When I founded IDEO’s CoLab four years ago, one of our goals was to find new ways to catalyze visionary business leaders and to activate new models by assembling diverse perspectives from across industries. We frequently employ design fiction exercises with our partners to open up more exploratory approaches to tough problems—particularly the ever-changing nature and role of technology. The process helps connect the dots between an aspirational vision of the future and a business approach that can make that vision a reality.

How to apply design fiction to your business

The futures that we imagine are based on a few catalytic data or trends—“inevitables”—that serve as foundational elements of a future vision. By anchoring on these inevitable factors, we can then imagine the implications that ripple across a business, industry, or society. For example, five or 10 years ago, one might have assumed that smartphone ubiquity was inevitable and started to imagine the implications (good and bad) of everyone in the world having access to a super computer, the internet, a camera, and more. By extending from what’s already true to what might soon be true, it becomes possible to exert some agency in the way you move forward, even when you can’t know exactly what’s ahead.

The late Bill Moggridge (an IDEO founder who came up with the concept of a folding laptop) referred to this as “preferred futures.” In this view, rather than viewing the future as something that happens to you and can’t be controlled, you adopt the mindset that you can influence what happens, asking, “What future do we want to create? And how do we reverse engineer the pathway to get there?”

It sounds pretty heady—perhaps something to be left to experts—but the process of creating design fiction is actually accessible to most people by following a four-step process. This exercise is inspired by an activity from a class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business called “Designing the Future” that I taught alongside two IDEO business designers, Becca Carroll and Sandeep Pahuja.

1. Pick an industry and describe its role in the consumer’s life

Let’s take insurance as an example. Insurance is a safety net for when something bad happens. But insurance customers don’t simply want protection—they also want to understand and manage risk, find the most agreeable policy to ensure support when they need it, and trust that their claims will be processed and paid. These criteria are often referred to as the “jobs to be done”—in short, they are the things the consumer has “hired” the product to do.

2. Write a story about the future, free from today’s constraints

If you focus on the “jobs to be done” (and don't get caught thinking about existing insurance companies and how they operate), you can begin to imagine new ways to do those jobs for customers with the help of new technologies and other shifts (behavioral, regulatory, etc.) we believe will be relevant in the future.

For example, if we take the job of understanding risk, there’s a story to be told about machine learning and the explosion of sensor data, which will allow us to create more sophisticated risk models. More sophisticated risk models could lead to a more personalized approach to assessing risk and ultimately the ability to provide more relevant products to customers. In this future, perhaps insurance companies shift from being the safety net after something happens to proactive behavior change coaches who help protect you before something happens.

When writing a story about the future, we continually ask, “What future do we want to create?” This helps us focus on the ultimate goal of creating value for people and preventing harmful consequences, not just creating new technical capabilities and hoping for the best. In this case, we answer it by imagining how the experience of insurance might take on an entirely new form and function when enabled by the tools of the near future.

3. Back out to the assumptions that would make this future real

Taking this vision of the future as possible, we can work backwards to uncover the assumptions need to be in place to support it coming to be. Our go-to provocation is inspired by Roger Martin and Jennifer Riel: What would have to be true to make this future a reality?

Asking what has to be true is a powerful tool to help you optimistically articulate the key assumptions implied by your story and connect them to your current offers and potential path forward. It’s easy to come up with a long list of reasons why something won’t work, and this often leads to risk aversion and incremental thinking. By surfacing the criteria for success you can pragmatically assess how realistic these assumptions are and design experiments or milestones to demonstrate if you’re on track. Invite your colleagues to get imaginative alongside you and uncover even more ideas.

Elon Musk famously published his master plan (and then a second) for Tesla that stepped through five key assumptions that would allow Tesla to move the automotive industry towards an electric future. These included making electric vehicles high performance and cool—a shift from the pervasive negative view of EVs’ aesthetics and functionality; and changing the notion that these cars are too expensive for average consumers, riding the scale/cost curve to reduce the price and range of vehicles, and making them more accessible to the mass market.

4. Prototype

So now you know what would have to be true. Are those things possible? Rather than speculate and debate, prototyping is your way to find out. Begin with scrappy, low-fidelity prototypes to test your assumptions and continually iterate forward, incorporating your learnings into higher-fidelity prototypes. Getting really clear on these key assumptions enables you to take an evidence-based approach to making investment decisions in risky innovation projects.

As quickly as possible, you’ll want to test your assumptions in the market. This is another sticky point where risk aversion and desire to jump to scale can grind progress to a halt. Designing in-market experiments that are right-sized and laser focused on testing key assumptions is an organizational skill that is difficult to cultivate. Successful startups often are forced to be quite scrappy in the market and increasingly, larger companies are building these capabilities. The founders of Airbnb famously tested their idea out by renting out air mattresses in their apartment during a conference. Established companies are getting into the act too, LEGO, Coca-Cola and General Electric have all market tested new products on crowdfunding site Indiegogo.

It’s unlikely that there’s only one viable solution to get to any preferred future—there are many avenues that may get you there and thus it’s important to diversify and have a number of bets. Many entrepreneurs will tell you that their current business is not exactly like their original business idea. Often, it’s pretty far from it. That’s because the steps required to go from idea to reality involve a lot of prototyping, experimentation, and openness to change along the way. Whether you work in the field of innovation, you’re an entrepreneur with a startup, or you have an idea for a business that you’re ready to explore, using the principles of design fiction and cross-organizational collaboration can help.

Hear more on design fiction and cross-organizational collaboration in this episode of IDEO U's Creative Confidence podcast.

Illustration by Mark Conlan.

There’s no such thing as a truly original idea, or so the saying goes. Even the most imaginative inventors and artists are limited by the boundaries of their own experience, and every fresh idea is derivative of something that came before.

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.