Sealy and IDEO first collaborated in 2008, to rethink the design of its Stearns & Foster line. For years, Sealy, the largest mattress manufacturer in the world, had taken the standard industry approach to selling mattresses and watched market share and sales flatten; it knew something had to change. Stearns & Foster evolved from a single product design into a keystone for transforming the organization.

IDEO helped Sealy use actionable consumer insights to develop a scalable design methodology and new brand principles, which it applied to product design, operational and manufacturing decision-making processes, and sales and marketing strategy. This “brand-to-product” framework was subsequently used for three separate and consecutive product launches—Stearns & Foster, Embody, and Posturepedic—resulting in an overhaul of 85 percent of Sealy’s mattress portfolio.

Tempur-Pedic was already working with IDEO on a new mattress design when it acquired Sealy in 2013. It was also interested in how design thinking and human-centered design could improve its business. Once solely focused on the technological elements of designing a mattress, together with IDEO, Tempur-Pedic redesigned the outer shells of its mattresses to reflect the quality on the inside. This design change led to the company to look at new ways to infuse design into their products.

“The initial project was to design the mattress,” said Thomas Overthun, associate partner and design director at IDEO. “But the second project was to create a whole design language from the mattress out to what it meant for any other product, from pillows to blankets and other accessories. It eventually became bigger than just the mattress.”

Working on the Tempur-Pedic/Sealy relationship has been gratifying, said IDEO partner and design director Michael Hendrix, because although home goods can be thought of as simply products, nothing could be further from the truth. IDEO and Tempur-Pedic/Sealy changed the course of the mattress company's business through the transformative power of designing where, and ultimately how, people sleep. And in the process, the organization itself changed as well, moving siloed departments to cross-functional teams, with the brand division central to their cooperation, which led to consistent and aligned decisions across the board.

Some of the projects include:

Stearns & Foster Luxury Mattress
Sealy teamed up with IDEO to develop a design language for Stearns & Foster mattresses that would reestablish what the brand stood for. Through redefining brand principles and rounds of prototypes that focused on evocative details, the new Stearns and Foster mattress was the highest rated in Sealy’s portfolio since it started keeping records, and initial retailer orders were three times what management projected.

Next-Generation Posturepedic
An icon in the mattress industry was brought into the 21st century by developing a new product that delivered on the long-running promise of the brand. Together, IDEO and Sealy designed a product that focused on holistic back health. In its earnings report, the company said US bedding sales for the quarter were up 10.6 percent, to $253.4 million, a figure driven by the new product line’s introduction. According to Sealy’s Q3 earnings report, the Posturepedic launch represented the largest and fastest rollout in the company’s history.

Embody by Sealy
The project began by defining the market opportunities for all-foam beds, and ended with the modern, streamlined Embody mattress as well as a simplified design language, free of industry jargon, to help retailers talk about the mattress to customers. “Sealy collaborated with IDEO to create an approachable and attractive mattress that delivers the simple, healthy rest consumers want with a selling story they can easily understand,” said Jodi Allen, Sealy’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Tempur-Pedic Sleep System
Best known for the revolutionary, NASA-proven Tempur material inside its mattresses, Tempur wanted to transform the exterior of its mattresses to match the caliber of innovation inside. Together with IDEO, Tempur created a new sleep system, including an easily removable and washable fabric mattress cover. “Tempur-Pedic was born of innovation, but we were never a design-driven company until we worked with IDEO,” said Patrice Varni, senior vice president of brand marketing, Tempur Sealy North America, LLC. “Seeing consumer need in a new way through IDEO’s eyes has transformed us. Our product design, our creative psyche, our brand are all fundamentally changed by this sharper focus. This collaboration has given us all a renewed sense of pride.”

The challenge of how we’ll feed the exploding world population in the future—in a sustainable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly way—is seeding an agricultural revolution in Europe.

In 2012, INFARM founders Erez, Guy Galonska, and Osnat Michaeli found that vertical farms could be a solution to urban self-sufficiency. These farms could allow people to grow vegetables and herbs in small spaces, with no soil and far less water.

An approach that’s captured the imagination of futurists for decades, vertical farming involves growing vegetables and herbs in stacked units or inclined surfaces, within which moisture, light, temperature, and nutrients are monitored, and controlled.

After creating their first vertical farming experiment in their apartment in Berlin, the founders brought together plant scientists and industrial designers to explore and develop vertical farming’s potential.

Since then, the startup has created custom growing systems for clients including Airbnb, Mercedes-Benz, and Weber. Most recently, INFARM installed a vertical farm growing herbs and vegetables at the Berlin branch of German supermarket chain Metro, the fourth-largest retail chain in the world, to sell to the public. It’s been profiled in Wired Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, and Zeit.

INFARM collaborated with IDEO to further explore their B2B offer, including concepts for the industrial design of the stackable, modular, climate-controlled units; the interaction design of an accompanying app to monitor and control the units, and its business model.

Urban farmers will sign up for “farming as a service,” comprising the units themselves, as well as a monthly subscription for seeds, cartridges filled with nutrients, and a pH regulator. Because they’re stackable, the modules can be scaled to suit anyone from a home grower to a restaurant chef or supermarket owner. And Erez claims a 1 square meter growing tray can yield four to six mature plants every day, 365 days a year, doubling that of state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouses.

As well as remotely regulating each unit’s climate, the app will educate growers about new vegetables and herbs, selling packs of complementary seeds, with suggested recipes for them, and cooking instructions. Aiming to promote biodiversity, the firm will sell rare-breed and heirloom seeds too.

The startup has funding from the EU’s European Pioneers fund, and is now looking to secure investment to accelerate software development and ramp up their hardware production capabilities. Quite literally, it's growing its business.

Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit educational group that revolutionized children’s television with the launch of the landmark Sesame Street program in 1969. The show, which has since become a household name, is now watched in more than 150 countries worldwide. The Workshop also creates educational content for new media platforms, and partnered with IDEO to design a line of Sesame Street–themed apps for Apple’s iPhone. The Elmo Calls app, which functions as a utility app for parents and as an entertaining behavioral-development app for kids, is now one of the Top 100 paid iPhone apps in the iTunes store.

The collaboration began with a mutual desire to bring the show’s beloved characters to the iPhone platform—and to do so using a human-centered design approach. Child-development experts, educators, toy and interaction designers, and even the Sesame Street puppeteers weighed in on the design decisions. The team also worked closely with families throughout the project—from initial concepts to early prototyping to the final development—in order to stay focused on how children actually use the iPhone for play. The games were designed accordingly. For example, the team omitted menus from the Sesame Street apps to keep the experiences simple, playful, and fun for a young child. And each game features exclusive new Sesame Street videos, allowing players to enjoy “lean back” moments along with interactive ones.

The resulting iPhone applications let children engage with the favorite Sesame Street characters in a whole new way. Kids touch, shake, swipe, and tilt their way through original games featuring Elmo, Grover, Bert, Rosita, and the Count.

The titles, all of which are available from iTunes, include:

• Elmo Calls: Engages 2- to 5-year-olds in listening-skills practice and active participation during everyday situations.
• Elmo’s Monster Maker: Allows kids to create unique monster friends that dance and play with Elmo.
• Sesame Street Video Maker: Lets kids star in their own music videos, mashing recordings of themselves with popular Sesame music videos and adding their own stamps and special effects.
• Sesame Street Makes Music: Helps kids explore an array of instruments as they contribute to new renditions of classic preschool tunes with their Sesame friends.

How do you know when you’re successful in your work? You can check off a list of technical skills and expertise you bring to the table. You can use a career development rubric to make sure you’re hitting the right goals. But often, it’s your behaviors—the intangibles that are the most difficult to articulate—that make the most impact. Things like your ability to stay optimistic or your willingness to adapt when there’s no roadmap.

Because of the nature of our work at IDEO, these intangibles are a big part of what defines the experience of working at the company. So in 2012, a global team of designers from our U.S., Europe, and Asia offices came together to codify these values and behaviors as part of a larger effort to evolve IDEO’s career development platform. More often than not, when IDEOers hit road bumps in their career, it was not about what they were doing, but how they were doing it.

The team agreed that, in addition to identifying the technical requirements needed to progress through one’s career, it was just as crucial to give IDEOers the tools they need to navigate the complex culture. So they captured the values they believed were foundational to the culture and most strongly shared across the IDEO community, and put them to paper in The Little Book of IDEO. The title is meant to reflect its purpose for readers—a handbook that’s compact, useful, and free of any corporate jargon.

For IDEO-ers, this red cloth-bound guide provides a shared lexicon around both the hard and soft skills we need to succeed. It describes things like why IDEO is so loosely structured, where it comes from, and where it’s headed.

Most importantly, the book identifies the organization’s seven core values. These are by design specific, actionable, and integral to the kind of work we do and the environment in which we do it, going beyond common sense and general ethical practice. The intention: to foster meaningful conversations within the community about life at IDEO, and how to achieve success along the way. With each succinct expression comes a deeper explanation of why it matters, and how it shapes our experience at IDEO.

Over the years, the book has been roundly embraced by the IDEO community as an honest articulation of who we are, as opposed to what we aspire to be, and what we appreciate most about working together. When IDEOers first got their hands on it, a movement took shape to create videos that bring each of the core values to life. To depict the value of "Embracing Ambiguity," for example, New York-based designers built a makeshift cardboard rowboat, and while simulating a storm, navigated their way through uncharted territory with teamwork and optimism. San Francisco produced a Jacques Cousteau inspired look at the lifestyle and behaviors of designers in their natural collaborative habitat.

Through the process of making the videos, IDEOers came together to reflect on each of the values, talking through what resonated and what didn’t. It gave them a sense of ownership, and a platform through which to share their interpretations.

A Global Conversation

IDEO has a global presence—offices in two countries in Europe, two countries in Asia, and multiple locations across the U.S. As an organization that embraces a human-centered culture, it felt important to learn if the values resonated with the IDEO community in all of these locations, especially in a country like China, whose working culture is so different from the west. We saw the authenticity and resonance of the values as essential for attracting, motivating, and retaining local talent.

So how did The Little Book of IDEO land in Shanghai? Exploring this question would illuminate insights into how our own clients are often challenged to keep their company culture resonant within the global landscape.

A team of IDEOers in our Shanghai office took on the challenge of exploring the meaning behind each of the values. They were surprised with what they discovered—that despite the firm’s Western origins, locals felt largely connected to the values. It even helped to further solidify their identity as a community, even if it may have been in tension with local working culture, because it was rooted in a set of shared beliefs.

In some instances, the Shanghai team built on the existing values in order to refine the meaning for the local context. For example, the core value "Be Optimistic" rings true, but could sound naive when translated directly to Chinese, implying "rose-tinted glasses.” So in the Mandarin edition, an extra phrase was added to convey the measuredness we mean when we talk about optimism at IDEO. The lesson here: The treatment of something as fundamental and nuanced as our values requires authenticity and emotional connection, and therefore more of a transcreation process than straight translation.

Lasting Power

As an organization, we are designed to be flexible. This means we’re always changing—even when it comes to how we are structured—so that we can respond to the kinds of challenges that clients come to us for. In the midst of our constant evolution, The Little Book of IDEO is as resonant today as it was when it was published.

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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