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.

On a recent trip to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, I spotted a baby kangaroo (or wallaby; it was tough to tell) fast asleep in a unique pouch.

Young marsupials, including kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas, spend the first part of their lives inside their mother’s pouches, but baby joeys raised away from their mothers—babies that are orphaned, for example—need substitutes.

When three wallaby joeys arrived at the Safari Park in April, keepers put them into little cloth sacks. But this joey was lounging inside a woman’s fleece sweater, with the bottom sewn up and the arms tucked in to prevent a sideways escape. Keepers had cut a hole in the front and hung the sweater at just the right height for the joey to hop in and out.

Sweet dreams, little one!

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

IDEO designers surround themselves with creative people for exactly this reason—when you’re stuck in a rut, sometimes the best way to dig yourself out is to steep in other people’s genius for a while. Here are 6 people whose work inspires our own.

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1. If your podcast library is overflowing…

Graphic designer, musician, podcaster: Hrishikesh Hirway is a creative jack of all trades. In this interview, Hrishikesh goes deep on how this versatility helps and hinders his creative process.

READ: Get to Know the Creator of Song Exploder

2. If coding is your form of art…

Matt Fargo is on a quest to make Japanese culture more fun for everyone. Learn how he draws from the coder’s toolkit to build unexpected weirdness into his digital projects.

READ: Code-Based Eye Candy from a Tokyo Renaissance Man

3. If Mother Nature is your muse…

When New Yorker art director Rina Kushnir's not designing layouts, she can be found painting leaves she collects in her Brooklyn neighborhood. Find out how this meticulous project helps her meditate and stay creative.

READ: How an Art Director at the New Yorker Unwinds

4. If you’re an art enthusiast…

Illustrator Cindy Derby creates imaginary worlds for children’s books, but her unique characters and experimental style capture the imagination of adults just as easily. Get to know Cindy and her made-up worlds in this interview with the artist.

READ: Why This Illustrator Makes Her Own Tools

5. If you’d rather be at a museum right now…

As curator of Architecture + Design for SFMOMA, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher puts the world of design on display. Find out how she stays inspired by constantly considering the now, questioning the promise of future technology, and looking back on the designs that made history.

READ: Meet the Woman Who Spots Great Design for a Living

6. If you’re a film buff…

Nomadic filmmaker Brandon Li uses film to express the beautiful madness of urban life. See how his creative process adapts to whichever city he’s in.

READ: These Eye-Popping Videos Capture the Madness of Cities

Let’s keep the inspiration flowing! Tell us who’s inspiring you right now using the hashtag #CreativeCrushes on Twitter.

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Creativity begets creativity. When you witness or consume brilliant work by someone you admire, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to dive head-first into your own creative pursuits.

Back in May, I saw an exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo that delivered unexpected brilliance from start to finish. Hearing other visitors remark, “I really wasn’t expecting this!” as they walked through the gallery space, I knew I wasn’t the only one.

How do you go about creating something unexpectedly brilliant? What triggers that kind of experience? Here are some learnings I had from visiting the show:

1. Disarm your audience with familiarity

This installation was created between renowned textile designer, Reiko Sudo; exhibition designer, Adrien Gardère; and Seiichi Saito from Rhizomatiks. The creators are famous, but the exhibition title, Koinobori Now!, communicated something common and familiar, with a hint of pop. Koinobori is the Japanese word for the carp streamers that appear as part of Children’s Day celebrations in Japan every spring. Nau is the Twitter-bred Japenglish word used for anything happening ‘now.’ The title Koinobori Now! is so direct it almost sounds like a children’s exhibition; everyone thought they knew what to expect. It was also a rare instance where NACT hosted a show for free, welcoming an exceptionally diverse audience.

2. Reference conventions with disruptive edge

In reality, the show was much more than just a seasonal parade of modern carp streamers. Rather, the streamers served as inspiration and as a medium for presenting the textiles designed by Sudo and her company, Nuno. Gardère mentioned in an interview that as with any textile exhibition, the challenge was to showcase the works in a way that brought them to life in the absence of the human body. He looked for inspiration in the ways in which textiles lived and breathed in Japanese traditions—on this occasion, carp streamers. But instead of following the structure and styling traditionally used in koinobori, he reinterpreted it to be more structured. From the flat fish shape, he removed the fins, tails, eyes, and scales, and added backbones and rib cages so the carp would hold their shape. The resulting koinobori was something that looked familiar yet novel.

3. Give your audience the freedom to engage

This was the first time that the NACT took down all its partitions to create one large space for the installation. Everything was kept open between the work and audience.

A school of white carp streamers floated by the entrance like phantoms beckoning people into the exhibition. Following them in, the room opened up to reveal over 300 textile carp swimming through the air in a sweeping gradation of colors. The mesmerized audience was free to wander, take photos through the carp streamers, and lay down on Muji bean bags to absorb the show at their own pace.

4. Let your theme go beyond objects to permeate the space

A lot of thought also went into the less noticeable parts of the exhibition. Saito from Rhizomatiks contributed to the environmental design by leveraging air flow and light sources. Small fans were set up on the ceiling, with shifting spotlights positioned alongside to create shimmers and ripples on the translucent fabrics The lights also cast shadows of the carp streamers onto the wall and floor.

It was a subtle gesture that made the audience register a dynamic flow throughout the room, and gave the carp streamers a current to swim in. Together with the ambient soundscape by Softpad, the exhibit came to life.

5. Interlace sensory experience with informational storytelling to trigger curiosity and imagination

The exhibition could have easily ended here, but a small space at the back revealed the backstory behind the show. Video monitors played interviews of the three main collaborators as well as Nuno’s beautiful production videos. A make-your-own-carp workstation held fragments of patterned paper for people to craft their own streamers. And a long rack of textile samples lined the walls.

Here, all 300-something textiles designed by Sudo for the installation could be seen up close, touched, and read about in detail. Each textile had a background story. Here were two of my favorites:

I learned through reading these stories that Sudo is famous for reusing and repurposing unconventional materials to create textiles that challenge the existing conventions.

Once you uncover these stories and return to the larger exhibit space to make an exit, the same installation begins to take on different dimensions.

6. Work in collaboration with others

One final learning from this exhibition—what made it so unexpectedly brilliant—was the way the collaboration between the creators materialized as a sort of alchemy, elevating each individual contribution into a magical whole. Sudo’s textiles, Gardère’s exhibit design, Saito’s space design, and NACT’s curation reacted to and considered one another, orchestrating a holistic experience beyond single objects, addressing themes beyond individual expertise, and creating something relevant and surprising for everyone.

*Exhibition flyer taken from Studio Adrien Gardère. All other photos taken by the author with permission from NACT.

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What separates a great cultural experience from a truly memorable one? An element of surprise. Unexpected brilliance sticks in your mind, and the memory becomes something you can return to for inspiration.

It doesn't look like much, but this spoon/bowl combo was a satisfying dining experience. Not long ago, I visited a college cafeteria that had several different stations, each with a different kind of plastic cutlery. Someone suggested that I use a plastic spoon from one station with a bowl from another, because they had observed over time that the inside radius fillet of this bowl perfectly matched the outside radius curve of the spoon. This way, your spoon always scraped the corner of the bowl clean. They had gone so far as to make sure there was always a supply of spoons at the the other counter, to make sure they could use them with the mis-matching bowl.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

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.