All moms want to give their babies the best start in life, and for many, that means nourishing their babies with breastmilk. However, breast pumping is often inconvenient and uncomfortable. Tethered to the wall, undressed, and surrounded by cords and dangling bottles, most mothers who pump are interacting with technology that hasn’t fundamentally changed in more than 25 years.

Passionate about solving this challenge, the startup Willow set out to completely re-imagine the breast pumping experience. The team at Willow envisioned a “dream pump” that would deliver what moms want most: mobility and discretion.

The Willow team approached IDEO to be a close partner in bringing their product to life. As a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, industrial designers, and mechanical engineers, IDEO, Willow, and Function Engineering worked together seamlessly to identify mothers’ unmet needs and resolve engineering complexities with a simple and elegant design.

The resulting product, Willow, is the first all-in-one, wearable breast pump that cuts the cords, ditches the mess of bottles, and fits easily inside a bra. Mobile, discreet, and hands-free, Willow allows women to achieve their breastfeeding goals without pressing pause on their own lives.

The final design of Willow was informed by research and in-person interviews with dozens of mothers, ranging from first-time to experienced pumpers. Insights about their personal routines, challenges, and workarounds guided the design team as they built more than 60 physical prototypes to understand how Willow could best fit into mothers’ lives. Learnings from those prototypes helped the team to define the size, shape, color, and materials of Willow, as well as each step in the pumping process.

One key design element that emerged from this iterative process was the simplicity of Willow’s architecture, which makes the pump easy to use, assemble, and clean. The pump contains just a few basic parts that snap together, and only two parts that need to be cleaned (both are dishwasher-safe).

Considering how personal the breast pumping experience is, the team aimed to help the pump feel less like a stark, mechanical device and more like a considered, modern, and personal accessory—a goal ultimately achieved through the pump’s colors, texture, and finish.

Because of Willow, mothers no longer need to plan their lives around pumping—it can happen anywhere, at anytime. Willow gives moms back their time and freedom and gives them choice; now moms can play with an older child, work, or enjoy precious relaxation time at home. With Willow, pumping breastmilk finally fits seamlessly into women’s active everyday lives.

More than 50 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, yet only half receive psychiatric treatment. When they do, it usually involves medication and one-on-one therapy to treat the most visible symptoms, including hallucinations and paranoia. But the disease can also cause debilitating symptoms that medication can’t easily treat, such as social anxiety and isolation, lack of motivation, and memory deficits.

For people living with these symptoms, what might seem like simple activities—socializing, spending time outdoors, exercising—can sometimes feel overwhelming. And if patients aren’t given effective care, they can become even more isolated, and their physical health and quality of life suffer. They’re far more likely to let the rest of their treatment regimen slip, skipping medication or therapy sessions.

To help address these challenges, a digital health research group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) approached IDEO with an idea to supplement the longstanding medication-and-therapy model with a tool to alleviate hard-to-treat symptoms, and more importantly, improve patients’ quality of life. It would require identifying unmet needs among patients and determining which kinds of interactions could have the greatest impact on young people with mental illness.

The outcome of that collaboration is PRIME, or Personalized Real-time Intervention for Motivational Enhancement, a digital platform that empowers young people with schizophrenia with the tools, motivation, and community of support they need to achieve their goals.

The simplicity of PRIME belies its deep functionality. The easy-to-use mobile app helps patients stay motivated to stick with behaviors that boost their health, social skills, and productivity, and it provides motivational coaching from trusted professionals and social connections with other patients.

How It Works

The PRIME app lets users set daily goals based on their particular needs. There are more than 500 small challenges to try—from inviting a friend to play basketball to spending time with a family member—and users can see their progress tracked through incremental successes over time.

Whenever users need help, trained motivational coaches are on hand to provide cognitive behavioral therapy coaching, encourage patients to achieve their goals (and to push beyond their comfort zones), and support their interactions with other users.

Tapping into its vibrant social network to help patients feel less isolated, PRIME prompts users to snap photos of happy moments, highlight important events in their lives, and share challenges they’re proud to have accomplished. Unlike Facebook, which can be overwhelming for some patients with schizophrenia, PRIME is a closed community where users can talk freely about their challenges with others who are just like them.

Click above to hear our audio story, or listen on SoundCloud.

To measure the efficacy of PRIME, UCSF and IDEO combined traditional metrics, such as Patient Health Questionnaire scores and time spent in the app, with new metrics evaluating patients’ quality of life. For example, they studied the pictures of things that made users happy before and while using the app, and measured the frequency, depth, and quality of patients’ social interactions in the app based on word choice and punctuation.

Learnings from these human-centered metrics helped the team iterate further on PRIME’s design, so that the platform would generate even higher levels of engagement and stronger improvements in patients’ motivation and social functioning. In this 2016 peer-reviewed, clinical study, 80 percent of patients with schizophrenia achieved their daily goals, and users logged into the app an average of 4.5 times a week, far more than the expected rate of once a week.

PRIME has also made an impact on patients and their families on a personal level. The mother of one research participant was thrilled with the results. She told IDEO, “I wish you could have witnessed my daughter’s first response to seeing the faces and profiles on her phone. She looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Everyone looks normal. Everyone looks like people you see every day.’ It was as if she looked into a mirror that reflected possibility and hope.”

Human-Centered Design

The PRIME platform is an example of how the human-centered design process can lead to first-of-its-kind innovations in the field of mental health care. PRIME designers conducted comprehensive interviews that led to a deep understanding of patients as whole people, not just conditions or sets of symptoms.

For Dr. Danielle Schlosser, lead researcher on the PRIME project at UCSF, collaborating with IDEO and applying design thinking to her research on mental health was illuminating. "[It] showed us that in order to engage our users, we needed to provide a safe and supportive community that directly catered to their needs. The insights we gained enabled us to create an experience that inspires patients to improve their quality of life by emphasizing their strengths. Working with IDEO helped us make powerful, creative leaps in our process, and build a digital health platform that’s already deeply impacting patients’ lives.”

The success of PRIME in treating schizophrenia has led to additional federal research funding, and the platform is now being expanded to treat a wider range of mental health conditions.

For example, in this recent, peer-reviewed study, PRIME helped patients with moderately severe depression experience a 50 percent reduction in symptoms, with a noticeable difference in just two weeks—far faster than the average of four to six weeks it takes for traditional medication and therapy to yield improvements. By the end of the depression study, 90 percent of participants said they had achieved their treatment goals, such as to “become happier” or to “feel less lonely.”

Numerous patients with schizophrenia and depression have already benefitted from PRIME’s unique offering, and the team is exploring ways to commercialize and scale PRIME to reach more people with mental health conditions.

New Yorkers are a tough lot, but damaging coastal storms will continue to test their resilience. More than 400,000 people live within the city’s floodplain and are at physical and economic risk. In the face of both natural and manmade challenges—from superstorms to confusing insurance regulations—many New Yorkers are not aware of their flood risk, or even that they should be thinking about it at all.

The Center for NYC Neighborhoods‚ a nonprofit that champions affordable homeownership for middle- and working-class families and communities, engaged IDEO to create a resource that could help New Yorkers keep their homes and finances safe. Launched in September 2016 with funding from New York State's Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, FloodHelpNY is an expansive platform that dismantles the complexity surrounding flood insurance and gives homeowners clear and simple guidance for assessing their flood risk and taking action toward resiliency.

Facing the complexities of insurance policy, shifting flood regulations, climate change, and citizen engagement, the design team began by engaging two vastly different groups of New Yorkers—those who had been battered by past storms and those not yet affected. Homeowners in the first camp were angry and frustrated by a system that had let them down after Superstorm Sandy. Homeowners in the second camp were simply unaware of their risk and had little idea of what might happen. The right design solution needed to encourage both groups to take action and learn about flood risk and insurance regulations, while also addressing divergent levels of need and preparedness.

To co-design solutions with homeowners, IDEO set up pop-up stations at neighborhood meetings in Canarsie, Red Hook, and Gerritsen Beach, and had flood-affected residents create paper prototypes of the resources they wanted in place the next time a storm hit. The team learned how residents contextualized their individual risk, which information they prioritized, and how their frustration could inform a better outcome. In Lower Manhattan, where residents are less aware of flood risk, the team set up a pop-up station with virtual reality viewers that simulated water rushing into the surrounding streets, a visceral wake up call that got them talking about flood recovery.

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Less than a month after launch, FEMA began promoting FloodHelpNY as a key resource for building flood resilience. The platform helps all New Yorkers learn what flood zone they’re in, or will be in, how that affects their insurance rates, and what steps they can take to mitigate their risk. It features a first-of-its-kind flood insurance rate calculator that can help homeowners get a rough idea of the costs they could face as insurance prices go up. It is also the main conduit to apply for the Home Resiliency Audit, a New York State-funded program that equips at-risk homeowners with vital documentation valued at over $800 that confirms their actual elevation and insurance costs—all with the personalized assistance of an engineer and housing counselor team. In the coming months, FloodHelpNY will expand further to offer homeowners free backflow valves that reduce the chance of sewers backing up during flooding, as well as access to more existing benefits for resiliency.

The New York City floodplain, which is expected to grow as tides continue to rise, threatens neighborhoods that are among New York’s oldest and most historic. The people who live there make the city work: teachers, police officers, subway operators. Many of these homeowners will watch their flood insurance premiums surge, year over year. It’s a troubling future, but one that FloodHelpNY is designed to help New Yorkers face, by guiding them toward greater resilience and assuring them that they aren’t alone.

Athletes looking to score big on game day could hit the gym, but they’d probably be better off hitting the sheets instead, according to Rise Science, a sleep analytics startup. Harnessing the latest sleep science, Rise helps players significantly improve reaction time and decrease false starts, lapses, and injuries, among other benefits.

While attending Northwestern University, the co-founders of Rise Science created a simple sleep app and light-touch coaching service, which they prototyped on the school’s Big Ten football team with positive results. They came to IDEO to optimize their customer experience and scale the business, and joined IDEO’s Startup in Residence program.

While observing coaches and players using Rise, IDEO saw the opportunity to better integrate the digital and hardware experiences and design a more robust, intuitive, and service-heavy on-boarding experience during the first few weeks using the system, when breaking old habits and incorporating new ones are most challenging.

At the end of the residence program, Rise left IDEO with a rebranded and optimized sleep training system. Here’s how it works: Players and coaches receive a short, in-person introduction to sleep coaching by a Rise employee. Players who opt in to the service receive a sleep-training kit that includes the Rise Coaching App; adaptive sleep plans tailored to their chronotype, age, game schedule, and training load; a part-human, part-machine sleep coach that continuously supports each player, monitors progress, and gives timely feedback; in-context education that provides daily and weekly sleep insights; and products like UV glasses, sleep mask, and bed sensor. In just a week of using Rise’s full sleep program, 97 percent of players report getting 54 more restorative minutes of sleep per night.

Recently, Rise Science added the Chicago Bulls, Miami Dolphins, and the University of West Virginia to their sleep-training roster, enhancing their performance, one good night’s sleep at a time.

“Coming into IDEO, we knew our service was letting customers down. When we left, we had the blueprint for the next version of Rise. We were able to solve and optimize sleep at a much larger scale,” said Jeff Kahn, co-founder and CEO of Rise Science.

While those can be useful tools, the true beauty and power of workshops is in being pushed out of your comfort zone: a group of adults struggling to share opinions openly, dive into group activities, and ultimately enjoy the mindset change that comes through participation.

Since the pandemic began, we’ve been forced to bring workshops online—and fundamentally rethink the way we conduct them. Hosting online workshops is not about bringing what we used to do in the physical space to the online world: it’s something new, and we should create completely new tools to adapt to the online world.

Over the past several months I’ve started to prototype new tools for remote workshops. They’re still experiments rather than tools, but that’s okay: designing workshop tools is the same as designing anything else—it’s about prototyping quickly, and iterating for improvement over and over again. Here are four insights we’ve gained in the process.

1. Let the unexpected overflow from the screen

Creating an atmosphere that is strange, weird, and slightly unusual is key to achieving impact through workshops: it gets people out of their comfort zones and opens their minds to new ways of doing business. In the digital realm, most participants will be calling in from home (i.e., their #1 comfort zone), and you need to intentionally haul them out of their day-to-day.

Virtual backgrounds are an easy win: they can create visual interest and curiosity while also functioning as a tool for individual expression. One great ice breaker is to start by asking participants to create their own virtual backgrounds in teams, using Google Slides.

Throwing in a custom-made Snap Camera filter is also a great idea, because it offers participants a chance to hide a part of their face if they feel uncomfortable with experimentation. Instead, they can addd something new like donkey heads or puppy ears. As a facilitator, these tools allow you to get in on the fun with participants. It allows the group to feel that you are on the same team as you explore new territory together, rather than a facilitator insisting they do something uncomfortable.

2. Pick up non-verbal cues from participants

In a physical workshop, one of the key roles of the facilitator is to “read the room.” This is one of the hardest things to do online—all you can see is a participant’s torso with facial expressions, which may not be truly reflecting their emotions. Another way of looking at this, though, is that the online environment can create psychological safety, allowing for more open and honest communication.

To capitalize on this, I created a tool called the Mood Checker, which allows participants to rate their mood on a scale of 1-5, anonymously and in real time. Their responses are constantly aggregated on the facilitator view, allowing the facilitator to always keep track of how the participants are feeling. Initially I wanted the participants to use the slider throughout the day at any time, but after a few trials, we quickly learned that we should designate a few moments in the workshop where we ask the participants to reflect their thoughts on the Mood Checker.

A tool like Mood Checkers lets the facilitator read the digital room. Think about other ways you can utilize the anonymity of the online space to get honest, real-time feedback from your participants and to make your workshop the best it can be.

3. Incorporate physicality

One of the things that I watch out for most during online workshops is making time for everyone to move their bodies. Getting up and moving away from the computer makes everyone feel much more connected and has a positive effect on their wellbeing. Since I tend to do a design-themed workshop, it also helps us remember that good design can not be achieved without the notion of physicality.

An easy way to achieve this is to have the participants go for a walk, either by themselves or by staying in the call through their phones. We can leverage the fact that they are dialing in from different locations: with the phone’s camera, we can have the participants hunt for creative inspiration in their neighborhood. For example: “Take 3 pictures of new behaviors you see in the neighborhood,” or “Find and share your favorite typography that you can see from where you are.”

I also created a Remote High Five system, which, as you may have guessed, tracks the participants’ hand positions through the computer’s camera and plays clap sounds when your onscreen hand “high fives” someone else’s. While this was initially made as a fun experiment, it became an end-of-workshop ritual thanks to its physicality and joyfulness. It quickly became one of the iconic moments of the workshop.

4. There are always ways to realize ideas. Just start small.

Some of these examples may seem too wild or unfeasible depending on your technical know-how. But the important point here is to start small, prototyping ideas quickly and with the least risk. It doesn't have to be perfect on the first go; in fact, it will never be perfect on the first go. Just remember that there are always ways to make an idea happen: give it a shot, and iterate with small tests to improve your idea. It’s actually much easier to try out new ideas online because there’s really nothing to shy away from when, at the end of the day, all you’re facing is a computer screen.

Ultimately, the goal of a good workshop is to get participants to step out of their comfort zones and adopt a new mindset. It’s a shame that many people underestimate the creative potential of workshops and often opt for a generic format: when you tackle a workshop just like you would tackle any other design challenge, the outcomes can be quite transformative and magical.

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Workshops are everywhere, from training programs at big corporations to urban planning sessions at local town halls. Given how formulaic many workshops have become, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re all about colorful Post-its and saying “yes, and...”

They were in search of a feature that would excite Card Members, especially millennials coming of age financially. Everything was in place, but their project whiteboard had one last empty box.

The IDEO and American Express teams paired up for a design sprint, and in the first few weeks of research, after extensive qualitative interviews, an idea emerged: a new, transparent and easy-to-use way to split large purchases into equal monthly payments, with a fixed fee and no interest. The feature, called Pay It Plan It, launched in the market in 2017. Since then, it has been used to create five million payment plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in lending. It represents a notable, widespread behavior change. Card Members are spending differently, by design.

But getting here took more than just a bright idea. At a large organization like American Express, in a complicated and highly regulated industry, and in a smartphone-first environment, transforming an insight about consumer behavior into a beloved tool for Card Members required a particular flavor of corporate agility. At the time, there was nothing like Pay It Plan It—at American Express, or elsewhere. Bringing it to Card Members would require a substantial technical and financial investment, affecting everything from payment terms to the way the smartphone app handled swipes. All of that was doable, but leaders still had to do it—they had to make the heavy lift to usher a concept sketch into becoming a meaningful part of customers’ lives. The success of Pay It Plan It as a feature driven by emotional insights—while driving the bottom line—has made it a beacon inside American Express. For many, it marked a new way of working within the company, a transformational shift in the way ideas are conceived and implemented.

The following story recounts the development of Pay It Plan It, told through the voices of the IDEO and American Express team members who worked on it.

1. Plus, and...

In 2015, Amex was looking for something new to engage consumers—particularly younger professionals who wanted to avoid the pitfalls of credit card debt. Innovation within the consumer lending space had traditionally been all about rewards and cash back perks, but Amex was committed to finding something different that empowered their Card Members. Was there something else? And if so, what?

Kyoko King is currently VP, Global Commercial Services at American Express; at the time of Pay It Plan It, she worked on consumer products, focused on new product innovation.
“It felt like a race to the bottom. We kept throwing more rewards at the customer, so they win out, but there's no actual edge. That was the challenge we set out to solve.”

Leigh Cohen is a Design Lead at IDEO, and a team member on the original design sprint.
“I remember we wrote on the white board, plus, and, next to an empty box. The reward structure of this new card was already defined—but then what? What goes in the box? What is this thing? It can be very daunting to come up with something that not only makes sense to Card Members, but also makes sense to American Express, and is also a smart way to help people spend appropriately and confidently.”

Jenny Shum is currently VP, Head of US Small & Mid Market B2B Marketing at American Express; at the time of Pay It Plan It, she was VP of Consumer Lending Products.
“We had aspirations to reinvent what a credit card could be, and the role it plays in a consumer’s life. But this is a very regulated industry, and we were afraid that we would come up with a brilliant idea we couldn’t deliver. And yet we didn’t want to be constrained by that.”

2. An emotional insight

Over a series of consumer interviews conducted across the country, the team honed in on a key set of desires: credit card users wanted more flexibility and transparency in how they paid for big purchases, and they wanted to feel like they had autonomy in how they pay for the things they buy.

Kyoko King, Amex: “We had done the side-by-side comparison of Amex versus other cards, we had done task forces looking at debit versus credit. We always had the knowledge that customers don't like our credit cards, but I don't think we ever went so far as to say, ‘They just emotionally don't like it.’ I remember IDEO saying to us, ‘It makes them feel bad. You guys make them feel bad. Customers have no control, no transparency.’ But here IDEO just said, ‘It's an emotional problem, therefore, the solution has to be emotional.’”

Travis Lee is Managing Director and Partner at IDEO, and guided the initial sprint.
“American Express is a service company. They think of themselves as trying to serve their customers as human beings—and the card is a means through which they provide service. It’s not their product. And that’s very different from a lot of companies. So what if we can think of lending as a service?”

Kyoko King, Amex: “Our team at Amex was all about growing lending—lending, lending, lending. That was even what it said on my business card. And then IDEO came in and said, ‘Well, it's all about paying. No one is thinking that Amex is lending them money. It's all about when they can pay.’”

3. We could really break things!

As clear as it was that credit card users wanted more flexibility and control—not just more rewards and perks—so too was the realization that the Amex/IDEO team had let the genie out of the bottle: implementing this wouldn’t be easy. This wasn’t just another lending feature, but would require a fundamental rethinking of how Card Members paid their bills.

Dory Butler is VP, Digital Product Management; she led the digital team that implemented Pay It Plan It.
“People were nervous. We could really break things! It involved significant changes to our payment hierarchy, our accounts receivable systems, how we calculated what customers owed to us, and so on.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: “We were certainly aware of the potential this product could have—and we’d sized the financial benefits—but what was different here was the process of understanding true customer needs.”

Kyoko King, Amex: “You know when you sign a car lease or a mortgage, and there’s a stack of papers that you have to sign with ten different signatures, every couple pages? That's what we were trying to put onto our credit card. I remember our compliance person sitting me down and saying, ‘You're trying to put a closed loan into an open credit product.’ That was the first time I realized we were creating something so complicated—even if to a consumer it made complete sense and felt so simple.”

Dory Butler, Amex: “As a company, we've identified opportunities and gone after them in the past. But many times those opportunities are highly driven by business outcomes, and not as highly driven by customer outcomes. Pay It Plan It was all because of a customer need, but we could see that the business benefit of that would flow and follow.”

Kyoko King, Amex: “After that initial sprint it was kind of a no-brainer. If we could do this, we should do this. But it was very clear that we should do it only if the experience stays as simple as what we’re proposing. If it becomes a series of terms and conditions and things you have to click and fill out, then we’ll lose the essence of what it is we're delivering.”

4. Buy-in for the buy-in

Given the complexity of the implementation—and the simplicity of the desired result—the Amex/IDEO team planned an unusual internal communications strategy, rooted in the emotional insight at the heart of Pay It Plan It.

Leigh Cohen, IDEO: “Executives across American Express had to understand the value this product was going to bring—the emotional value to Card Members, and the financial value to its business. We wanted them to see the overlap between the financial confidence Pay It Plan It could bring, and their brand values of trust and security. And they had to see how it was delivering upon their internal objective as an organization to be thinking about smart lending, and what lending looks like for their current members.”

Kyoko King, Amex: “We couldn't pitch this in a PowerPoint deck. We had to translate that consumer insight to the pricing team, the technology team; we had to change minimum due, payment hierarchy, grace—three different components that are extremely difficult to touch. It was like a house of cards: everything could fall down. Usually if you touch any one of them, all those teams are like, ‘No, no, no, it's not worth it!’ It just wasn't something you could understand in a really rational format; there was so much emotion to it, there was a customer need we were solving for. Usually we had bullet points and boxes with words, and a P&L or business case that’s about the numbers. But here we began with sketches and drawings of what this could look like. That was very different than how we operated before. It was new. And it incited interest.”

Kelly Bjork is a Senior Design Director at IDEO; she helped lead the team that designed and implemented Pay It Plan It.
“These are rational people! You were talking to C-suite level folks who have their bill on AutoPay. They don't think about these things. So our work was putting them in the shoes, if you will, of the Card Member who this was targeted for. It's kind of that simple.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: “The magic of Pay It Plan It is that it gives consumers the confidence that they have a lending solution if they need it. I don’t think we necessarily went in with this intention, but that directly aligned to Amex’s brand heritage, of giving consumers control. The brand team saw how exciting this was, even before the business unit decided to invest in making it real.”

Dory Butler, Amex: “You have to continuously sell-in these ideas internally to have the level of investment that you need to do them right.”

Travis Lee, IDEO: “Innovation at this scale can't happen purely grassroots. You can't just get a single team leader excited about it, and expect it to happen. You have to get everyone’s buy-in, you have to get everyone’s excitement, you have to make sure they understand why it matters to do it, even if it's gonna be hard. And you also have to get the CMO pumped. All of these people have to greenlight it in their own way.”

5. How it spurred organizational change

In 2017, Pay It Plan It launched under a strategy nicknamed “Big Bang,” rolling out to 21 million customers in 30 days. As of August 2020, it is available to almost all US consumer Card Members, who have collectively created nearly five million Plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in purchases, with an average Plan size of $789. But as much as they have embraced Pay It Plan It, so too did Amex executives. The unique story of its implementation became company lore: here was an emotional insight that unlocked significant business outcomes.

Kyoko King, Amex: “The internal teams could see it: this was reflective of all the data and information we have seen and heard for years and years. But this is a new way to approach the problem! I often talk about it in terms of learning a new language. Amex internally thinks of itself as a rational company based on CBAs and models. The breakthrough—and the thing I'm most proud of—was bringing that customer emotion into internal decision-making, seeing Amex become emotional rather than purely rational.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: “Kyoko and I joke that we feel like we walked through a doorway to an alternate universe that we can’t turn back from. This is a long-term strategic investment that would have been hard to write the business case for—but that was also the exciting part, because it is transforming a business, versus delivering an incremental product. The challenge now is whether we will be able to galvanize the organization in a similar way, towards solutions for our customers.”

Leigh Cohen, IDEO: “The pieces came together in this perfect storm: the Amex leadership focusing our IDEO team on the opportunities that were strategic within their organization; our team's ability to unpack and uncover an emotional resonance with the Card Member, that really spoke to them wanting to be a more confident spender on credit; and then the internal buy-in and belief that this not only resonated internally, but also could convert externally.“

Kyoko King, Amex: “To be honest, this began as an eight-week engagement of just asking, ‘Okay, let's see what you guys can think of: a slap-on feature to our credit card.’ So for it to then result in something that was implemented across all of our cards—that is a big, big deal.”

Kelly Bjork, IDEO: “Getting something like this to market feels like sort of a small miracle to me.”

Jenny Shum, Amex: What has followed me from this project is really understanding the emotion of the customer—not just the words they tell us, but what worries them and why.

Illustrations by FagoStudio.

In 2015, American Express (Amex) came to IDEO for help putting the finishing touches on a new consumer credit card. Its reward structure was fixed—but what else might it be?

They worried about how they’d feed themselves or their families. Or felt the physical and emotional stresses of want and hunger. Of that number, 11 million were children.

Today, the picture has worsened. This year, a year in which American lives have been ravaged by disease or economic crisis or both, more than 50 million people will have faced the reality of food insecurity; almost half of them will have sought help from food banks and other sources of support.

This pandemic of hunger continues to unfold, year-on-year, across the United States—one of the richest nations on earth.

It is a crisis that moves inexorably forward, but also one that’s rooted in inequities stretching back into our collective history. Our food system, like many of our society’s most foundational systems, is racist by design. The labor of Black and Indigenous workers and people of color (BIPOC) forms the backbone of the industry’s essential workforce—specifically women of color. They serve or cook in restaurants; they perform dangerous, exhausting work in food plants; they labor on farms; and they bring deliveries to others’ homes and apartments. And they have been disproportionately impacted by the knock-on effects of the pandemic, including decreased food security. Additionally, racism—in the form of food systems that are effectively separate from and unequal to those afforded to white communities—has historically denied BIPOC access to preventative nutrition. The result? Disproportionate incidence of chronic health conditions and weakened immune systems, both of which are now further intensifying the devastating impact of COVID.

It is a story of injustice and inaction. And it demands we step up and help create change.

How might food leaders work to dismantle the systemic inequity in our industry and in the communities we operate? And how might we improve the lives of those most unjustly affected? We see three paths where design can drive efforts towards solutions.

Prioritize food workers’ livelihoods

The most straightforward way to reduce food insecurity among food workers? Pay them more money.

The food industry employs roughly 14 percent of the U.S. workforce, with the lowest median wage of any industry. In many states, it’s legal to offer restaurant workers a sub-minimum wage of less than $5 an hour—sometimes as low as $2.13. Black servers are typically not tipped as well as their white coworkers: A recent study revealed that for tipped restaurant workers in New York, white men made almost an $8 an hour more than black women.

Food manufacturers, quick-service restaurants (QSRs), and retailers are largely responsible for producing, serving, and distributing food; but the cruel irony is that their own employees—along with those growing and harvesting the food that they sell—are often food insecure and hungry. One out of six restaurant workers live below the poverty line.

Following the example of brands like Shake Shack and In-n-Out Burger, others must rethink their business models to offer their workers more than the minimum wage. Similarly, they can design competitive benefits, as Starbucks does, offering healthcare and tuition reimbursement to full- and part-time employees.

Improve the quality of mass-produced food

Many low-cost foods are intentionally designed to be sold in mass quantities to people who can’t afford higher quality items. This perpetuates a supply chain that values long shelf-life and cost-efficiency over nutrition. A complete overhaul of existing product formulations is required to maintain the convenience and comfort that people seek, but eliminate ingredients proven to contribute to higher rates of heart disease and diabetes, such as high-fructose corn syrup or processed or refined carbohydrates.

A June 2020 study revealed that as households stock up on shelf-stable foods, they appear to purchase products with less nutrient-dense ingredients—often ultra-processed, calorie-dense comfort foods. This is setting the stage for an increase in childhood obesity, particularly for economically vulnerable families.

Convenient and nourishing comfort foods are rare. Designing them and putting them on shelves across the nation is an excellent challenge for the food industry’s formidable R&D capabilities.

There are examples to be inspired by, however. Pierre Thiam, a celebrated Senegalese chef and leading authority on African foods, founded Yolélé Foods to bring fonio, a West African grain, to a global audience. Fonio is a versatile ingredient with a nutty flavor; it’s included in the Future 50 Foods List, an effort from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Knorr to highlight foods that support human and environmental health. One of Thiam’s vehicles for fonio is pilaf, and Yolélé Foods’ affordable, microwavable bags of seasoned pilaf are sold online and at brick-and-mortar stores nationally. This product innovation unites what is not only feasible, viable, and desirable; but also more sustainable and nutritious.

If it works for fonio, why not for brown rice? It’s one of the most familiar, nutritious, and affordable food staples in the United States, yet few have attempted to make it desirable and easy to cook. It’s an enormous opportunity. And design is a way to reconceive brown rice into products that are as simple and convenient as the more ubiquitous ramen and macaroni and cheese filling pantries nationwide.

Give more people access to nutritious food

That separate and unequal food system? Karen Washington, a food justice activist, calls it food apartheid. And the evidence to support that frame is all around us. Poorer neighborhoods have fewer grocery stores with nutritious food options; fast food chains dominate instead. There is a need for quick service restaurants (QSRs), retailers, food banks, and federal food assistance programs (SNAP)—all players that influence food access—to design new ways for healthy food to be available to everyone.

Free food is a critical support for hungry people. But there is a stigma attached to accepting it, and it can be a deeply demoralizing experience to stand in long lines and receive a bag of food you don’t like or can’t eat. During COVID-19, we’ve witnessed heroic efforts by food banks and pantries to increase their services. Food banks originally created drive-thrus to overcome the stigma of free food, but now, even more have added this feature to facilitate contactless service.

Northern Illinois Food Bank (NIFB) partnered with IDEO to improve their My Pantry Express program, a digital food pantry service that refers to their customers as “neighbors.” The program offers their neighbors a choice of what food they receive. Typically, food banks determine their success based on pounds of food or “meals” distributed, but NIFB wanted to use more human-centered metrics to determine if their service offers food that people actually want and will eat. The team discovered that offering choice in food selection, even in a limited way, created higher neighbor satisfaction and more referrals—94 percent said they would recommend the program to a friend. We can use design to identify what people value most, then use these findings to improve services, meet more people’s needs, and in this instance, get more nutritious food into more hands and homes.

Learn more about IDEO's partnership with NIFB.

Looking ahead

Given the number of cracks the pandemic has revealed in many of our national and global systems, it can be hard to know where to begin reimagining better solutions. But food is fundamental—and improving the food system is achievable. As we look to the coming year and the post-pandemic recovery period, let’s ask ourselves:

• How might we ensure that the people producing and serving our food have equal access to food for themselves and their families?
• How might we rethink our success metrics to be more human-centered?
• How might we create products and services that are not only profitable, but nutritious and sustainable?
• How might we put our R&D efforts towards creating beloved food products that are convenient and nourishing?
• As a leader in the food industry, how might we look first to the ways we can support our own employees before directing community support efforts beyond our organization?

By prioritizing people’s needs and developing human-centered innovations for business, nutrition, and food access, we can move leaps and bounds toward more food security and access and health for all.

Photos by Rizki Prayugo and Aniketh Kanukurthi

In 2018, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, 37 million Americans didn’t have enough to eat. At one point or another that year, in other words, they struggled to put food on the table.

But if you were to ask someone in China, they’d laugh amiably and follow up with another question: “What part of China are we talking about?” And it’s a good question—whether the food you crave is sweet or spicy, hearty or healing, you can find it in the Chinese kitchen.

Even growing up in a Chinese family, the diversity of Chinese food came as a surprise. I thought there were two types: Panda Express and the Cantonese food that my parents cooked. It wasn’t until I traveled through China, tasting everything from spice-laden cumin lamb to tropical coconut soup, that I realized how much I was missing. With thousands of years of history, 55 racial minorities, and 9.6 million square kilometers of land, China’s food culture is incredibly diverse. I learned to embrace my heritage by learning how to stir-fry, braise, and steam.

And yet the dominant view of Chinese food in the West is not only narrow, but tinged with prejudice. Growing up in a homogenous community in suburban New York, I was no stranger to words like “oily,” “cheap,” and “gross” being applied to the food of my heritage. On the surface, this might not seem like a big deal, but it reflects a deeper judgement about which cultures hold inherent value.

I always saw this as normal—just the way things were. But as COVID-19 has spread across the globe, so has anti-Chinese xenophobia. Across the world, businesses have banned customers of Chinese descent. Racial slurs fly freely. In March, an acquaintance of mine woke up in the hospital after being attacked by strangers for no reason other than his East Asian features.

I wanted to do something to help. But what?

I’m no politician. I’m not an Instagram influencer. But I do have a few skills that turn out to be surprisingly relevant. The first, which I practice on a day-to-day basis here at IDEO, is storytelling. The second is cooking, eating, and writing about food. It turns out, the combination of the two is a powerful thing.

I’m talking about gastrodiplomacy, the promotion of cultural awareness through food. As ingredients like kimchi, harissa, and turmeric have made their way into the mainstream, they’ve become a starting point for people to take an interest in other cultures. But while I’m encouraged to see signs of that trend with Chinese food, it’s nascent at best. And I want to help it grow.

And thus Journey East, a digital zine about Chinese food culture, was born. The name is an play on the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West (西遊記), which tells the story of a Buddhist monk venturing west from China along the Silk Road. It serves both as a nod to my personal journey from America to Asia, and a reminder of my core goal of shedding light on the beauty and diversity of Chinese cuisine.

I have so much to say on the topic of Chinese food that I could easily ramble on forever. To stay focused on my core goal, I wrote a set of design principles for Journey East:

1. Tell a human story. Food tastes better when you know the story behind it (I’ve always believed this, and researchers seem to think so, too). That’s why I start each issue with a history of the region and the reason I find it personally meaningful.
2. Make it a conversation. There are plenty of places that will hand you a list of ingredients and tell you how to cook them. There are fewer that invite you to ask “how” and “why”. Though I don’t claim to be an expert, I always encourage readers to reach out to me personally about the recipes I publish. The resulting conversations have been my favorite part about Journey East. (In particular, one of the highlights has been seeing a friend’s vegetarian takes on the recipes.)
3. Accessibility over authenticity. When it comes to food, it’s easy to get hung up on what's "authentic" or not. But much like design, some of the most innovative home cooking comes from constraints, which are visible in the incredible variety of food from the Chinese diaspora (did you know that you can stir-fry watermelon peel as a substitute for winter melon?) By starting each issue with an illustration rather than a photo, I encourage readers to think of my recipes as inspiration rather than instructions.

Launching Journey East has been rewarding in many ways. I’ve learned to pivot quickly, grown as an illustrator and writer, and expanded my culinary repertoire. After falling in love with the sambal-laden Malaysian oyster omelette and ketchup-infused Hong Kong pork chop rice, I’ve thrown out all my preconceptions about what ingredients “belong” in Chinese food. But the best part has been hearing from readers who learned something new. Opening hearts and minds won’t happen overnight, but if I can do even a little bit to help people see Chinese food and culture in a fresh light, I’ll consider it time well spent.

You can read previous issues of Journey East (and subscribe, if you’d like!) here.

Lo mein. Orange chicken. Honey walnut shrimp. If you ask the average American to name some Chinese food, they might go with some of these. Where I live now, in Japan, the answer could be ramen or gyoza.

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.