For 6-year-old Dave Jr., a long line at Disneyland triggered a massive meltdown. His parents were concerned and a little embarrassed, but not surprised; Dave Jr. struggled to keep his emotions in check.

Hoping to help, Dave Jr.'s uncle, entrepreneur Craig Lund, joined forces with researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with a video game designer who had worked on Quick Hit and NBA 2K. Together, they set out to design something that could teach coping skills to kids like Dave Jr. who need to manage “big emotions,” as well as children suffering from anxiety, ADHD, and other behavior issues, which are on the rise.

Their collaboration resulted in a video game called Mightier and a startup called Neuromotion Labs—a 10-person team of psychologists, game designers, and engineers who embedded at IDEO Cambridge for a one-month sprint to improve the game and get ready for launch.

To play Neuromotion's game, kids are first taught simple, calming breathing exercises. During gameplay, kids wear heart-rate monitors on a wrist or arm that detect spikes caused by stress or anger; as their heart rates go up, the game's difficulty increases. Kids have opportunities to pause and try deep breathing to counter the ramped up challenge. As it turns out, "gamifying" restraint builds strong incentives for kids to take charge of their emotions—they have to if they want to win.

Already activated around boosting mental and emotional health, IDEO's design team worked side-by-side with Neuromotion to study how parents and children experience Mightier. From home visits to group interviews to a summer camp-style design session with kid players, live feedback fueled the next iteration of the gaming platform and better product-market fit.

IDEO helped Neuromotion hone the visual design and mechanics of Mightier and expand it's suite of games. The team observed that the Mightier program was more successful the more involved parents of players became, which revealed a need for additional resources for adults. So they created new supports, including a more detailed orientation and a personalized coaching service for parents staffed by trained therapists.

But can a video game actually help kids cope? Early peer-reviewed studies showed that playing Mightier reduced outbursts by 62 percent, oppositional behaviors by 40 percent, and parental stress by 19 percent. After 12 weeks of using Mightier, a survey of kids and parents showed that 96 percent of parents saw positive behavior changes in their children, while 92 percent of kids learned new coping skills.

Shortly after the design sprint, Neuromotion secured its next round of funding and officially launched Mightier’s array of “bioresponsive games.” The games have already been played more than a million times, and Neuromotion has measured more than a 100 million heartbeats. Mightier games are helping kids and families across the country.

What about Dave Jr.? Recently, his sister told Lund she "accidentally" bumped Dave Jr.’s bike off a pier and into the ocean. She was expecting an outburst of anger, but after eight months of playing Mightier, Dave Jr. stayed cool. His uncle couldn’t be prouder.

Many of us have let vegetables wither in the crisper drawer, or thrown out a child’s half-eaten restaurant meal, but the sheer scale of food waste around the globe is hard to grasp. According to the United Nations, about a third of the food the world produces every year—1.3 billion tons—is lost during production or tossed by consumers, with North Americans throwing out the most food per capita. The average American wastes enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days.

IDEO received a series of grants from The Rockefeller Foundation to find solutions, given the power of IDEO’s human-centered design approach to address systemic challenges. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

For IDEO’s first initiative, designers tapped into the enthusiasm of the broader creative community, in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, the City of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, the Closed Loop Foundation, ReFED, and other groups. In the summer of 2016, OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—launched the Food Waste Challenge, asking how people might curtail waste by rethinking our relationship with food. Between June and October, more than 20,000 people from 113 countries took part in the challenge, tracking their personal waste and brainstorming solutions.

Challenge participants submitted more than 450 ideas. A team of food industry experts helped select the 12 top proposals, which included software to help people buy food collectively from wholesalers and a service that delivers extra meals from corporate events to those in need. Ultimately, the Closed Loop Foundation chose to award Full Cycle Bioplastics a $50,000 grant to scale up its idea to convert inedible food and paper waste into a fully compostable alternative to oil-based plastic.

At the conclusion of the Food Waste Challenge, OpenIDEO launched the Food Waste Alliance, a platform for participants and experts to stay engaged with the most promising ideas and innovators. The alliance helped entrepreneurs share resources, prototype new concepts, secure funding, hire staff, and form partnerships. OpenIDEO invited hundreds to join the alliance, and 92 percent of members told IDEO they made progress in their work as a result. One member company, RISE, received funding from another participant who discovered RISE through the alliance. This investment let RISE prototype its concept for milling spent grain from beer brewing into flour for baked goods and ultimately join the prestigious Food-X accelerator.

The Rockefeller Foundation also supported IDEO’s work with City Harvest, a New York organization that collects 160,000 pounds of unused food each day and delivers it to soup kitchens and food pantries. City Harvest wanted to understand the habits of local families who visit food banks in an effort to ensure all the food the group distributes gets eaten. To get a peek into these families’ kitchens, in January 2017, IDEO researchers conducted observations and interviews across New York City’s five boroughs. Pantry customers cooked for the researchers, giving them an inside look at how the families engaged with the food they had available and what food meant to each of them: tradition, stability, even adventure. Based on insights from pantry visitors, IDEO made recommendations for City Harvest, including community-run cooking classes and a way for families to request specific foods or reserve pick-up times by text message. IDEO also created three video vignettes to help build even greater empathy between City Harvest and the people it serves.

In spring 2017, capping IDEO’s work with The Rockefeller Foundation, the organizations teamed up with World Wildlife Fund and Hyatt hotels in Florida, New York, and New Jersey to rethink all-you-can-eat buffets. IDEO studied diners and staff at Hyatt buffets and found that employees—from event planners to kitchen staff—each add a cushion of extra food to cover their bases, while guests overfill their plates to avoid missing out. In the end, diners eat just half the food organizers serve, while the rest goes to waste. This and other data-driven insights gleaned about diners’ habits led to subtle substitutions, including smaller plates of meats and cheeses that can be ordered from servers and individual pastries rather than whole cakes. These alternatives have not only built on Hyatt’s existing food waste management strategies, but have also helped reduce buffet costs at Hyatt Regency Orlando and continued to receive support from guests.

The problem of food waste is too enormous to ignore. Wasted food means squandered resources, lost money, and ultimately, hungry people—more than 15 million in the United States alone. Designers and innovators from coast to coast have helped find solutions to the crisis that fulfill a variety of needs, from preserving produce sent to food pantries to keeping plastic packaging out of the oceans. The Rockefeller Foundation and other IDEO partners are leveraging powerful design techniques to pave the way for a waste-free future.

In 2017, IDEO acquired longtime partner Datascope and integrated the company’s data scientists and engineers. Datascope team members aren’t just passionate data scientists; they’re human-centered designers who happen to work with data, as illustrated by successful collaborations like this one:

In today’s job market, there’s no such thing as being "done" with your education. This is particularly true in the fields of data science, machine learning, and AI, where significant advances are made on a monthly basis. To meet this need for more in-depth training, Metis—part of Kaplan—wanted to create a comprehensive data science program for students from all backgrounds. Metis asked Datascope to design the curriculum from scratch, drawing on the company’s deep expertise in the field.

Datascope spoke with practitioners across industries to identify the key skill sets that make them successful: a grasp of design; fluency with data management, coding, and algorithms; and effective communication with coworkers and the wider world. The team crafted a 12-week bootcamp that develops these specific abilities.

In order to prepare students for the work world, the bootcamp is structured less like a class and more like a company, where students are “hired” as data scientists—with projects to complete—starting on day one.

Students collaborate on group projects and presentations in a way that mirrors real workflows, and practice pair programming to learn from one another. Using techniques drawn from design, students are invited to refine their project briefs and continually reevaluate their approach.

Instead of a final exam, at the end of the course, students tackle five real-world, open-ended data science projects inspired by Datascope’s client work. One project involves using data from subway turnstiles to detect patterns in the volume of street traffic; another asks students to use data they scrape from the web to predict a movie’s box office profits using regression analysis.

After students complete the bootcamp, they receive an additional three months of career support, from mock interviews to site visits with potential employers. In addition to designing the curriculum, Datascope taught the first three student cohorts and helped Metis build its teaching team as it expanded the program from New York to San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. Metis now offers online courses, evening classes, and corporate trainings in data science.

If you’re going to take a data science bootcamp, it’s best to take one designed by data scientists.

You’re whizzing along on your bike, en route to a new restaurant for a client meeting. You reach an unfamiliar intersection; which way to go now?

Instead of dismounting and digging for a phone, you brush your hand along your jacket sleeve for directions, then double-tap the denim to re-start your music. Without taking your eyes off the road, you’ve taken care of the problem.

This intuitive interface for connected apparel began with Levi's, makers of durable workwear for 140 years, and Google, creators of forward-looking technology, which joined forces to fashion the first item of clothing with touch-sensitive, copper-core threads woven directly into the fabric. Once it was established that the first connected garment from the partnership would be a jacket within Levi’s Commuter line, with interaction on the sleeve, Google worked with IDEO, leaders in designing for human needs, to develop the gesture language of the jacket and industrial design of the technology within.

This is the first connected garment that helps us break free from devices. It seamlessly incorporates Jacquard by Google technology to perform digital tasks, such as navigation, communication, and music playing with a few swipes or taps on the sleeve.

Jacquard by Google—a platform that makes it possible to integrate touch and gesture interactivity into fabrics using conductive yarn and standard, industrial looms—was inspired by a curious twist of history. The Jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804, used punch cards to automate the process of weaving complex patterns into fabric. In the 1940s and ’50s, engineers employed a similar punch-card technique to program the first computers.

IDEO spent time on the project early on, collaborating with Google engineers and Levi’s clothiers on the jacket’s development, helping craft an experience that would make the intelligent threads intuitive to wearers.

Working alongside Google and Levi’s, IDEO’s work included:

• The industrial design of the electronics integrated into the snap tag and connector (the tag snaps onto the jacket’s cuff and connects to your phone via Bluetooth)
• A vocabulary of gestures on the cuff of the jacket that lets you interact with the jacket’s technology
• Early exploration of the basic design philosophy and conceptual design for the interaction model of a corresponding smartphone app that ties it all together (works with both iOS and Android phones)

The IDEO team’s first task was to validate what commuters of all stripes wanted from the garment, in addition to the work Levi’s did in researching with its consumers. In interviews, group exercises, and wear tests with urban cyclists and other workers on the go, the team learned that cyclists needed a way to stay connected, while still living in the moment. That meant being able to answer calls, hear text messages, get the next direction, and control their music without using a screen.

Levi’s, Google, and IDEO developed a language of movement for Jacquard-enabled fabric that feels familiar and human and builds on the ways people would naturally interact with a garment (a whole-hand brush along the sleeve, as opposed to a one-finger tap on a touch screen, for instance).

Then came the design and engineering of the snap tag on the jacket’s cuff, which gently notifies you of calls, texts, and other jacket interactions with light and vibration feedback. The flexible, lightweight strap incorporates the look and feel of a Levi’s jean button, while housing advanced electronics that capture touch data. The tag is removable, charges via USB connection, and works in conjunction with a mobile app that lets you configure settings for the garment, set notifications, and customize gestures and interactions.

The Levi’s Commuter Jacket with Jacquard by Google changes the game because it’s simply that—a jacket—with technology that adds new utility and value, allowing us to wear our everyday interactions on our sleeves.

The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google hit stores in October 2017.

IDEO and Google have a long history of collaboration. Learn more about our work on Google Bloks here.

But we recognize that convergence, too, is an opportunity for creativity. These moments can contain sensemaking—the finding of patterns or shifting of perspectives that brings your team to a new, shared understanding of what you have and what lies ahead. In making choices, you are collectively committing to a common vision of what the future could be. It can feel optimistic, unifying, and clarifying. And we know it can be extra challenging to converge when you’re not all in the same room.

I started writing this piece a few months ago, before COVID-19 forced a lot of folks to shift from working in offices to working at their kitchen tables. I’m of the mind that every meeting deserves a warm-up, and I believe it’s even more true today. If your team is working remotely, they’ll be (virtually) walking in from a greater diversity of physical and mental places (for example, perhaps they’ve only taken 72 steps today and their brains and bodies have turned to video-call-induced oatmeal), so creating the conditions for focused, convergent work is even more important.

Here are 4 warm-ups to help your team creatively and remotely converge:

1. Rank this

Instructions: Before your meeting, using a live collaboration tool, set up a spectrum (a simple horizontal line will do) in the virtual space. On the left, write “least”; on the right, write “most.” Pre-create 3-4 Post-its or colored squares per person. Place them off to the side.

To begin, have everyone type a noun in each of their stickies. Then have one person propose an adjective and add it to the top of the spectrum. (If your adjective is crunchy, your spectrum would be least crunchy on the left to most crunchy on the right.)

As a group, as fast as you can, collectively sort all the noun stickies along the spectrum of that adjective. (For example, sort all nouns according to where they fall on the scale of least to most hairy, grumpy, or miraculous). Attempting to do it all at once should feel like joyful chaos.

Pick out a new adjective and re-sort, reminding folks that anyone can move any Post-it, not just their own. Go through a few rounds until laughs abound.

Why it works: Prioritizing is a critical and challenging part of convergence. And it is made even harder when the options you are deciding between feel like they exist on diametrically different axes. This warm-up will help you get comfortable in the ambiguity that is comparing apples and oranges (or perhaps even apples and orange shoes).

2. Goodbye, hello

Instructions: Ask everyone to come prepared to the meeting with a pen and something to write on.

Before you dive into the content of your meeting, have everyone reflect on something they let go of last year and capture a quick sketch of it. Then, separately, have them draw something that was able to fill that newly open space. Have everyone go around and share their drawings by holding them up to the camera.

Why it works: Saying no can feel like the hardest part of convergence, especially when people feel ownership over or connection to the ideas on the table. This reflection exercise will help folks remember there’s power and opportunity in choosing what not to do—because it allows us to focus more energy on the things we do choose to do.

3. Object convergence

Instructions: Ask everyone to come prepared to the meeting with a pen and something to write on.

Have everyone sketch a noun—things like a stapler, a mother-in-law, a glass of water—then go around and share. Pair people up and give them 30 seconds to brainstorm and find a new noun that connects what each individual drew (for example, stapler + glass of water = anchor). Have them do this using the chat function on your video call platform. Multiple conversations will be happening in the chat. But don’t worry, that adds a laughable challenge. Once each pair finds their linking noun, have one person sketch it, then go around and share.

Pairs pairs into quads and have them repeat the process, finding what connects those new things (anchor + lemon = scurvy). Repeat until the collective group has arrived at a single object that has united them entirely. (Hint: like in a game of telephone, this will likely look nothing like any idea anyone started with.)

Why this works: The way forward may not look like choosing person A’s idea or person B’s. It may require finding a third way that draws from the best of both. This warm-up will help you avoid the Frankenstein compromise, where, rather than making decisions, the team mashes all of the ideas together, and dilutes them all to uselessness in the process. In this exercise, teams practice the skill of looking beyond individual ideas to a higher connecting goal or purpose, and collectively aligning on this new vision.

Convergence can feel heavy. This will bring a bit of levity to the process, allowing your team to find the optimism and energy to build on one another’s ideas moving forward.

4. Shake it out

Instructions: Have everyone stand up and close their eyes. Then give these directions, while doing it with them: Reaching out all around you with your hands, shake them vigorously to manifest into the space the multitude of what if’s, what could be’s, and fears of the future. Now, use a pushing motion, clear a bubble of safe, fresh air around you. All together, let’s take a deep breath in and ground ourselves in this space.

Having everyone close their eyes creates an important sense of safety. No one can look like an idiot if they can’t be looked at. Worried that people have stopped wearing pants to video calls, and won’t want to stand up in front of their camera? Have everyone turn off video first, then give the instructions.

Why this works: Our physical state is intricately connected to our mental state. So often at work we ignore our physical bodies, thinking them a distraction, nuisance, or simply irrelevant. In the world of working remotely many of us spend our working hours glued to a screen, ceasing to exist in the three-dimensional plane. Getting your body in the right place (and remembering it exists at all) will help get your mind right too.

It is not infrequent that a team gets to a point of convergence and all feels like a swirling mess of hypotheticals. This warm-up will help create the mental clarity and space to step back and find the broader picture.

Go forth and prototype

Decision-making can be hard and stressful. You’ll probably have to kill some darlings. But you don’t want your team to walk away feeling unheard because the phrase most commonly used in your meeting was “we can’t.”

If instead you can galvanize them—catalyze their creative, collaborative brains in finding and forging the path forward—you will leave with teammates bought into a future they want to build together.

Take these warm-ups and hack them, make them your own, and iterate on them. How can you prime your collaborators to optimistically say “no” to make way for “yes,” find a third way forward, and see past the chaos to clarity?

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When I say “creative meeting,” what comes to mind? What’s the energy like? What are you and your colleagues doing? My bet is that you’re imagining a brainstorming session. Generating ideas. If you’re lucky, it’s joyful, full of potential, and exhilarating. What I’m guessing you’re not thinking of? Those moments where you have to make decisions. Prioritize, say no, and shut some doors. At IDEO, we call this part of the process convergence: the refining and focusing of options to move forward with a strategic set of choices.

Many say the food system is broken. But the problems that people, the economy, and the environment suffer as a consequence of the system aren’t so much a sign that it’s broken as that it wasn’t designed to generate good outcomes for the world we live in today. We shouldn’t try to fix the existing system but rather design new structures that nourish us.

Design unites what is necessary and desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible, economically viable, and environmentally regenerative. We live in a world of intertwined, inequitable systems—food, education, health, and more—where the problems are dynamic, multifaceted, and inherently human.

By designing for adaptability, trust, dignity, and agency, we can build a more resilient food system.

Designing for Adaptability and Trust

Today’s system was designed for efficiency: We’ve built machines to harvest rows of a single crop, consolidated farms and processing facilities to achieve economies of scale, and established highly specialized supply chains.

COVID-19 has revealed that this efficient system is rigid—it can’t adapt to new conditions. People are trying to help: Grocers are buying produce from farmers and donating it to food banks, and restaurants are repackaging their bulk purchases into household meal kits. But it’s not sustainable to purchase extra food to donate or convert 50-pound bags of onions into smaller one-pound bags.

An adaptable system requires many changes, from digitization of operating systems, to more transparent data sharing, to improved distribution of food to where it’s most needed. Investment in processing and logistics infrastructure closer to farms is key, thus designing redundancy back into our highly consolidated system.

There’s also value in examining what makes the current system work and carrying these elements into a new structure. One positive enabler of today’s efficiencies is the network of trusting relationships that farmers have built over time.

Due to COVID-19 and other factors, it’s impossible to build new relationships in person. Farmers can’t travel to meet buyers. Instead, building on existing trust, farmers need innovative ways to establish new partnerships rapidly. Farm2People is helping farmers and fighting hunger by designing for adaptability and trust. The platform enables produce to be directed toward those who need it by connecting farmers to buyers and donation recipients.

• How might we design for trust in a contactless world?
• How might we look to circular economy models to rethink the supply chain?
• How might we apply technology to rapidly build relationships?

Designing for Dignity and Agency

The system’s resilience depends on the resiliency of those who power it. The essential workers who make the food system run are at the greatest risk of illness and the lowest paid. Many are people of color. Society’s racist systems—including the food system—have marginalized Black, Indigenous and people of color and left them more susceptible to the health and economic challenges of COVID-19.

The pandemic demonstrates how essential these individuals are and how tenuous their livelihoods are. Given the nature of their work, it’s impractical for farmers to maintain the social distance necessary to protect themselves, and for some employers, personal protective equipment is too expensive to provide.

Solutions have been swift and well-intentioned but short-term. Some restaurants created campaigns raising money to cover employee costs, and Portugal extended temporary residency to migrant farmers so they can access health care. Workers will need employment that can withstand advancing technologies, like automation, which will require training in a new set of skills. This is not just a food crisis but an education crisis. The interlinked nature of our systems means that solutions must have broad scopes and address multiple factors to be sustainable.

We have an opportunity to design for dignity and agency.

• How might leaders share the responsibility for worker livelihoods?
• How might we empower workers by having them design solutions for what they face?
• How might leaders help the industry become one of continuous learning to enable professional resilience?

No one knows what will happen. But as today’s system demonstrates, we know our actions will have impact for years to come. By designing for adaptability, trust, dignity, and agency, we can build a more resilient food system.

This essay first appeared in the Milken Institute’s Power of Ideas collection focused on building and rebuilding lives in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay series features insights from thought leaders across industries.

With hotels and schools closed, farmers are destroying millions of pounds of produce they can’t sell. Despite this waste, the number of people with food insecurity could rise from 130 million to nearly 300 million due to COVID-19. This estimate doesn’t address the millions whose means of making a living have evaporated. These challenges, while exacerbated by COVID-19, existed long before.

Tobin Terry: Hi, this is Professor Terry from Lakeland. I’m just checking in to see if I can help you with anything. I hope you are well!

Erica: I’ve been fine staying safe & healthy. After this semester I was supposed to apply for the RNs program since I’m finishing up stats. Can’t reach out to counseling. So maybe you can tell me how to go about that.

Tobin: Counseling is still available! You can call 440-525-7200 or email counseling@lakelandcc.edu. They’ve been working remotely either by video chat or phone call. I can hel set you up! Sorry it’s taken me awhile to get back to you, my kids are pretty much sick of each other and fight like stray cats

Erica: Please schedule me a video chat or meeting with a counselor this coming Monday or any day next week please & thank you! 😊😊

Tobin: You got it! I’ll have the details in your email!

“My approach is to just be myself—typos and all—but I'm ready with the info when the student needs it,” says Professor Terry. “Mostly, it feels like the students are just glad to hear from someone. The way I see it, if we're helping at least one student get through this crisis, it's all worth it.”

This level of student support might seem unusual, but at Lakeland Community College, it underpins everything the leadership, staff, and faculty do. For the past four years, president Morris Beverage and his team have been working with IDEO to become radically student-centered. So far, this has resulted in a more timely financial aid process, dedicated maker space, collaborative community of teachers from across the district, and improved first-year experience courses. Their aspiration is to drive resilience both within the organization and local educational system.

Many organizations are currently navigating unprecedented levels of complexity, and can’t help but feel paralyzed or wish that things will return to normal in a few months. It’s natural, when circumstances are uncertain, to delay action or downplay the implications. But what if, instead of waiting or planning for the return of “business as usual,” we used this time to redesign our systems for the better? Rather than constantly making small tweaks, we rebuild comprehensively.

Lakeland Community College is leaning into this moment, not only meeting students’ needs in a proactive way, but also discovering opportunities to redesign their student experience altogether. The following design-led strategies from Lakeland Community College lend inspiration to leaders in a moment when we sorely need it.

When their family of six is sharing a single computer with spotty Internet access, is that student going to be able to finish an online assignment on time? Leaders at the College knew that their decisions could not be made in a vacuum when they began the transition to online learning. Student engagement is a strong predictor of student retention and success, just as customer and employee engagement drives retention in other industries. But to meaningfully engage with and support students, leaders first needed to understand how students were experiencing the crisis. In addition to meeting with employees who closely interact with students, the Lakeland team connected directly with students and looked to other industries to gain deeper understanding and empathy for varied individual experiences.

Years ago, Beverage stumbled across a study on the “Enlightened Witness” care provider approach developed by Kaiser Permanente of California. Rather than primarily asking patients about their current symptoms, “enlightened” providers also inquire about patients’ lives beyond their health condition, including their current situations, past experiences, and families. If a patient says that a parent struggled with alcoholism, for example, the provider seeks to understand how this affected the person later in life. Research revealed that this care model led to measurable positive outcomes, including a reduction in doctor office visits.

The approach inspired Beverage to send out an email and video message to all students, providing them with his personal email address and inviting them to reach out to him directly. Based on dozens of responses, the team prototyped a student support program modeled after the “Enlightened Witness” program over the course of just five days—an unprecedented pace for a sector notorious for regulation and bureaucracy.

We are building this as we go and there will be bumps, but good education can’t wait. _{MORRIS BEVERAGE, PRESIDENT OF LAKELAND COMMUNITY COLLEGE}

Beverage and a small crisis response team made up of employees across Lakeland began prototyping what they called the “Enlightened Navigator” Program. (The term “navigator” originated from an existing role some Lakeland employees hold, which is dedicated to helping students navigate the college’s resources.) This core group hypothesized that by letting students know that they are cared for, Lakeland employees could gain empathy for their challenges, eliminate barriers, and better design how they serve them.

Hoping to enlist volunteers from Lakeland faculty and staff, Beverage sent out an email message and video asking them to participate in the program. This led to over 130 Lakeland employees signing up to be navigators and providing consistent personal outreach to a group of students. The program was designed to enable continuous feedback between students, navigators, and the crisis response team, so they could quickly respond and adapt as the student’s situation changed from week to week.

When Tracy Shook, Director of Marketing & Communications, reached out to one of her students, she discovered that the student was homeless. Somehow, despite everything, the student is keeping up with her online course load. Shook checks in with her regularly to see how she can offer help amid the student’s shifting and unusual circumstances, whether searching for shelter, trying to feed her family, or finding reliable Internet access. Shook recognizes that education remains critical, even in the midst of a life-or-death global crisis. For many students, reaching their goals and creating a better future for themselves is also key to survival.

The program’s design offers navigators like Shook the chance to interact with students for the first time, further facilitating an institutional shift towards student-centeredness. To support navigators, the crisis response team designed a playbook with sample questions to ask students, tactical FAQs, and other information navigators might need. Equipped with this resource and leadership support, navigators feel more empowered and confident to take action and provide meaningful care to students.

For other navigators like Gloria Lane who manages the women’s center, the program is an opportunity to develop even more empathy and admiration for Lakeland students. Lane is currently supporting a student who works as an aide at the nearby Cleveland Clinic. Through the early hours of the morning, the student sits with elderly, confused, or suicidal COVID-19 patients. After these demanding, emotional shifts, the student, with encouragement from Lane, pushes herself to flip the switch and study for an upcoming math exam.

Another navigator recently spent an hour on the phone with a student who said he felt lost without in-person classes and had been avoiding a big project on the stock market. “He had lost confidence and nearly shut down,” says Cindy Simerly, a navigator and business management professor. “But after helping him navigate the computer software and giving him appropriate tips for how to approach the project, he is back on track and believes he can do it. He kept apologizing for the time it took, but also kept thanking me.”

Like many organizations, colleges tend to delegate this type of outreach to one dedicated team. The Enlightened Navigator Program brought together employees from across the college—leadership, faculty, deans, financial aid associates, marketing team members, women’s center staff, and others—to achieve the shared goal of supporting students. This design enabled the collaboration, mobilization, and distributed leadership needed to spark a student-centered mindset throughout the college.

We’ve seen how this collaborative approach can benefit other organizations: At Ford, for example, teams from human resources, legal, and manufacturing are currently working together and focusing on people as they prioritize worker protection and safety when reopening their factories.

Every student should have a somebody, especially in the current state of the world. _{CHRISTINA CORSI, ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC INITIATIVES AND CAMPUS ENGAGEMENT}

So far, Lakeland has actively engaged and supported over 600 students. But their work doesn’t stop at graduation. “The core group realized that we should continue this [program] into the fall,” says Christina Corsi, Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives and Campus Engagement. Navigators are focused on supporting their students through the summer and into the fall, doing everything they can to help students make it to day one of fall semester classes. The program has been so successful that Lakeland is planning to integrate aspects of it into the new student orientation. For example, employees will now proactively reach out to new students with personalized messages of support as a part of orientation.

Lakeland’s four-year journey to becoming more student-centered has made them better able to listen, experiment, and quickly adapt to whatever comes their way. This is the type of flexibility and resiliency required to not only respond to a pandemic, but to inspire the redesign of a dated system that’s currently creating barriers for enrollment and degree completion.

“Through this program, we designed and lived in the kind of organization that we want to forever be: collaborative, empathetic, and experimental—all the things that student-centered higher education institutions should be,” says Leah Hartmann, Executive Assistant to the President and Special Projects Lead. “We saw a glimmer of what’s possible and now know it can be done.”

Illustration by Kim Salt

Texting a student who is not in his class just to ask how they’re doing was a first for Professor Tobin Terry. The English professor at Lakeland Community College is part of the Enlightened Navigator Program, a new effort to support students during the coronavirus crisis.

From New York to Nairobi, educators, parents, and students have been finding ways to keep on learning. Many of the creative workarounds that have emerged in response to the pandemic are more than Band-Aid solutions; they are postcards from the future. Hidden within these adaptations are clues to how education might evolve.

The pandemic has both surfaced new needs and exposed the brokenness of our existing system. As designers who bend towards optimism, we view these needs as opportunities to build back better. We aren’t blindly optimistic, of course. Systems that work well for some and not for others didn’t get that way by accident—they were designed that way and could be reinforced if we aren’t purposeful.

We also know that there are many people out there who are already thinking about possible solutions, so we put out an ask to those doing the work to reform education: How might we adapt to remote learning while also using this moment to radically reimagine what we need our education systems to be?

In just three weeks, we received nearly 450 responses. We heard from parents and students, but also architects and entrepreneurs, whose insights you’ll read in the quotes below. A panel of high school students reviewed promising submissions, and top ideas will receive support from HundrED, Sesame Workshop, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, TED-Ed, and IDEO to bring them to life. But in the meantime, we were too inspired not to share some of the early ideas with you.

1. Equity will no longer be an afterthought

“When learning from home, not all students have equal time or space to focus on their classwork.” —Kristen Myers, Communication Designer, Chicago, IL

The pandemic has amplified existing equity gaps and brought new ones into stark relief. Simply put: when students are less visible, it’s easier for them to simply disappear. And if a student’s house doesn’t have reliable internet, it doesn’t matter how much they show up ready to learn—the barrier to success is structural. Instead of trying to rectify inequities after they emerge, schools must proactively make decisions that serve students proportional to their needs.

We were particularly inspired by some ingenuity from countries where access to technology is less reliable. The country of Panama, for example, crowdsourced lessons from its best public school teachers and broadcast those classes on national TV. For the last five minutes of each lesson, a special ed instructor explains adaptive techniques for families whose kids have special needs.

By sharing lessons on television, over 6 million students across Panama had access to the country’s best teachers. Innovation doesn’t necessarily mean leveraging the latest technology. Panama’s approach meets students’ needs at scale. In the future, being radically inclusive will be the norm, not the exception.

2. The “classroom” will be everywhere

“Arts centres, museums, libraries, forest schools, universities, they could be used to accommodate small cluster groups (same children and teacher at all times) to help spread the school population across venues in communities.” —Nia Richards, Learning Experience Designer, Wales, UK

With no vaccine yet in sight, returning to a physical campus in the fall is a daunting challenge. But hidden within the challenge to adapt to this new normal hides a larger truth: Schools’ biggest constraints are their own walls.

What if we saw this not as a space constraint but a space opportunity? When you expand the boundaries of the classroom, there’s almost limitless untapped potential. In response to our ask, we received dozens of innovative uses of physical space. From garden classrooms where students can learn from their natural environment to virtual classrooms that connect students from around the world, expanding our perspective on where learning can happen broadens how and what we teach. And when students learn in the context of the real world, they’ll be better equipped to solve real-world problems.

3. Students will manage their own schedules

“The schedule ... It's archaic. It's inflexible. It no longer works in today's society.” —Kevin Varano, High School History Teacher, Lancaster, PA

For the past few months, we’ve all been living in a time warp. Days pass in blinks. Weeks last for months. The markers of time seem arbitrary. But the same was true for students before the pandemic—the school day, school year, and division of subjects are all constructs. The fact that the school day ends at 3pm and has a three-month summer holiday may work for families who can afford childcare and camp, but not for families who can’t. The rigidity of school schedules is a structural barrier to equity.

Then there’s the schedule of the school day. Josh Stern, a rising senior in high school from New York, believes a lot of his work was limited by the demands of the standard school day. During quarantine, he’s been able to do his work when he’s feeling most energized and take mid-day meetings with professionals in fields that he’s interested in pursuing.

During this crisis, students like Josh have been managing their own time while balancing school with hobbies, work, and family care. It will be hard to pull that flexibility back. It’s time for schools to adopt flexible schedules that better meet the needs of students.

4. Schools will support families rather than just the other way around

“Parents (such as myself) became involuntary Teaching Assistants overnight when schools closed. We had no preparation, no experience and, frankly, no clue as it came to teaching.” — Erik Mooij, Parent, Utrecht, Netherlands

If we have learned anything from the past few months, it’s just how hard teaching can be. Families are developing an intimate understanding of all that goes into helping their children learn—and schools are developing an intimate understanding of how ill-equipped they are to help families serve their children. In the future, schools will rethink how they can better support families.

Take Kidappolis, a bilingual learning app that helps families stay engaged in their children’s education through SMS-based updates. When parents are empowered to help their children, not only will families become more invested in their children’s success, but learning outcomes will improve too.

5. There will be new measures of success

“Using standardized tests to evaluate schools exacerbates inequity & distorts educational purpose.” — Hi Howard, Nonprofit Executive Director, Denver, CO

For years, test results have been the metric that matters for teachers, students, and schools. But during the pandemic, the outsized importance of grades, tests, and attendance has paled in the presence of greater needs—like whether a student has a computer to use or enough to eat. We’ve seen how, for students, school and life are not separate entities. It's hard to focus on finishing an assignment when you have to watch over your baby sister. That will hold true on the other side of this global pandemic.

For far too long, we’ve relied on proxies for what students know—courses completed, grade level, and test scores—rather than giving students an opportunity to show what they know. Moving forward, we’re encouraged by competency-based approaches to assessment that reward a broad definition of growth.

We’ve been blown away by the innovation borne out of the constraints of the pandemic. Schools around the world have tapped their communities to buy and distribute hundreds of thousands of laptops to students in need. Remote learning plans that could have taken districts years have been implemented in weeks. Teachers have found ways to bring creativity, joy, and levity to this heavy moment.

Though everyone is rapidly adapting, systemic change is far from guaranteed. Ensuring that student- and family-centered solutions stick will require following the lead of those doing the work. Educators, families, and students have ideas for how to reimagine the future of learning. Let’s use this time to listen to their voices.

Learn more about OpenIDEO’s Reimagine Learning Challenge here. You can also sign up for Challenge updates here.

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In two months, the world of education has shifted faster than it has in the past 200 years. Seemingly overnight, nine out of every ten students in the world were sent home. Elementary school students missed their friends. High school seniors missed prom. College students missed graduation. Teachers lost their classrooms. Parents lost their childcare. One thing not missing, however, was innovation.

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.

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