kate spade new york has been an iconic fashion brand since the early 90s, when its handbags first stormed the Manhattan fashion scene. Since then, the company has expanded and evolved into a global lifestyle brand.

With e-commerce reshaping the retail landscape and redefining the role of brick and mortar stores in recent years, kate spade new york leadership asked: How can we make the kate spade new york specialty store experience, well, more special?

kate spade new york already held the key to a new way of thinking about a multichannel customer experience: a brand promise “to inspire her to lead an interesting life.” Hoping to bring that promise to life in store, they engaged IDEO to help make it happen. The solution was for kate spade new york to take the brand message from words to action in the form of a customized guest journey. The team created more than 100 design concepts and strategies for building a retail experience that rewards curiosity and sparks artistic and literary exploration.

“In partnership with IDEO, we spoke extensively with our customers and associates to better understand how we can provide the most engaging and fulfilling in-store experience,” said Mary Beech, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Spade & Company. “The new store elements that we introduced speak to our customer’s personality and appetite for adventure while aiming to enhance engagement with new and existing customers.”

The team knew that striking the right balance of digital tools in in-store interactions was pivotal in allowing two people to have a more rich and collaborative face-to-face connection. The concepts include things like “pack a purse” to test drive how many everyday items can fit in different style handbags, cheeky “dare cards” that challenge customers to go on an exciting adventure with their new purchase, and digital moments like the “shoe selfie” platform that would allow a guest to share “I’m thinking about them” heels or just-purchased flats with her social network. IDEO live-prototyped a selection of concepts in stores around the country and saw a high correlation between customers’ positive reactions and their subsequent purchasing decisions.

“At kate spade new york, our brand promise is to inspire women to live a more interesting life,” said Jenica Myszkowski, Vice President of Stores at Kate Spade & Company. “Our new and improved guest journey experience puts our customers at the center, allowing us to more fully deliver on our brand promise in our retail stores with a stronger vision and purpose for our stores and our store teams.”

To deliver the newly envisioned guest service experience, the role of the sales associates needed to be redesigned, as well. The kate spade new york and IDEO team created a new role: the Muse, whose job is to live the brand promise of an interesting life and to inspire customers to do the same. The reimagined role ultimately shifted the focus in specialty stores from selling to inspiring and building long-lasting relationships with guests.

Athletes’ Performance and its subsidiary, Core Performance, were both founded on a single mission: to enhance human performance through a holistic approach to mindset, nutrition, movement, and recovery. Athletes’ Performance focused on elite professional athletes, and Core Performance provided corporate fitness programs and workouts for employees hoping to lead more healthful lives, and both found a footing in the competitive health and fitness market.

Faced with a challenge to redefine the brands, IDEO designers collaborated with the founder and integrated marketing team to unite Athletes’ Performance and Core Performance under one name that would cut across the health, fitness, and wellness markets to reach a full breadth of audiences and partners. Under a new name, EXOS, the teams created a brand identity system unified by its founding mission and focus on human performance.

For the new EXOS brand, IDEO designers created a visual language using “x” and “+” to highlight the progress from goals to achievement, as well as a system of interaction for athletes of all performance levels. The team also created a bespoke digital tool, outfitted with custom software, which gave designers both guidance within the brand guidelines and creativity to explore new products and contexts.

Imagine this: Your company has just gone through a $2 billion merger. You show up at work to find an invitation from the CEO asking you to help shape the bank’s future. This is what happened when Umpqua acquired Sterling Financial Corporation in 2014, doubling its size and resulting in the creation of the West Coast’s largest community bank overnight. With a mission to be “the world’s greatest bank,” CEO Ray Davis seized the moment to reinvest in design across the organization.

Umpqua asked IDEO to help examine the brand they had and take it to a new level. They wanted to find out: how can we leverage our strength and reputation by activating the brand in new ways to deepen employee and customer engagement and foster continued growth?

IDEO identified three core brand opportunities and a newly articulated purpose statement that became a launch pad for more than 15 different concepts to express the brand internally and externally.

Inside Umpqua, company evangelists handed out notebooks with tips on “how to be better-makers,” and associates now participate in collaborative design challenges through an internal tool built on IDEO’s OI Engine, software that fosters open innovation. The design challenges are drawing unprecedented participation of 84 percent among employees and are having a real impact on the organization. Of the five they’ve run in two years, the company has implemented three winning ideas including a buddy program for new hires or transferees that upwards of 1,000 associates could experience over the next year.

WATCH: Umpqua Bank on using the OI Engine platform

IDEO also worked with Umpqua’s team to conceive digital products including a new digital app called Raindrop that lets people bank in the way that they think about saving and spending, not the way a bank does. It’s due for release in 2016.

To introduce all of this work, IDEO set up an immersive exhibition at Umpqua’s headquarters in Portland. Teams large and small, including the executive and associates from across the company, walked through the exhibit and witnessed how the brand impacts every aspect of their business, from employee engagement to product development. It was signed on the spot by Davis, who invited employees to sign their names, too.

The sweltering summers in China can be insufferable—especially for people who like to wear jeans.

Lee Jeans, in its quest to boost its brand differentiation among an expanding market of apparel brands that also use fabric performance as their unique selling point, like Uniqlo and Levi’s, developed denim that’s cooler to wear during hot weather. It found a novel solution in an ancient material: jade. When woven into denim, crushed jade particles maintain the coolest temperature and, alongside other technological enhancements made to the fabric, pull sweat away from the body. The fabric dries quickly, creating a refreshing cooling sensation.

The immense popularity of jade in China makes the denim a natural fit for Lee’s Asian market, and although Lee’s jade-infused fabric was entirely unique, the company needed to differentiate its inventive new product from a rapidly expanding market of high-tech fabric alternatives made specifically for hot weather.

Lee and its parent company, VF Corporation, saw an opportunity to create a new product that helps position the company not just as a premium brand, but one that leads with innovation. Lee came to IDEO to help design the go-to-market and launch strategy for the new line of jade-infused fabric. Looking for insight, designers conducted research in multiple cities in China and India, seeking out those who were committed to wearing jeans despite the most extreme circumstances—the denim-clad bicyclists pedaling through sweltry city streets, the basketball players on the court, commuters who stripped to their underwear while driving and wriggled back into their jeans upon arrival. The common thread: They were all steadfast in their preference for thick, heavy denim, no matter how hot it got.

The resulting strategy for product launch: positioning jade—a traditional material that has strong cultural and spiritual meaning—as a high-tech solution for the contemporary lifestyle of young people. IDEO helped Lee name the new line JadeFusion and created a system of messaging to communicate that these aren’t just jeans—they’re jeans with a fascinating narrative woven within; a hierarchy of messaging that blends jade’s exotic premium significance with a very modern technical story. Lee salespeople learned how to share the story with customers, encouraging them to talk about jade-cooling technology at work, on the streets, and even on the basketball court.

The JadeFusion line sold out within seven weeks of its debut. The launch, which was originally limited to mainland China and Hong Kong, was expanded to India, Malaysia, and Thailand, and sales orders doubled for the following year. Along the way, Lee developed a new understanding of how to incorporate customers’ input and be open to discovery and inspiration from the very start of planning a product launch.

1. Choose your creativity apps wisely

Try as many as possible, then edit them down to the few you use regularly and that can fit on your home screen.

If you're a writer, there are many notes apps that offer distraction-free writing (IA Writer, Daedalus). Day One is a great choice for people who use journaling as a creative practice. For photographers, there are a wealth of tools (pro-quality editing apps like VSCO, exotic image-modifiers like Prisma). My personal favorite is Over, which allows you to add text your photos via a simple, fluid interface.

For those running brainstorms in the non-digital world, 3M's Post-It app is a surprisingly effective way to capture a wall full of notes, then reorganize and export them to others apps. For doodlers, Procreate is the gold standard. (You might prefer to use this app on an iPad, unless you have eerily-thin fingers).

2. Curate inspiration feeds

Aside from tools, you’ll want apps that supply a steady stream of inspiration. Some obvious ones: the Kindle app for reading, Audible for audiobooks, and a well-designed podcast player (we recommend Overcast). Other good sources of waiting room material are the various read-it-later apps, such as Instapaper or Pocket, and if you’re still reading this post, the Longform app. One note of caution here: don’t overwhelm yourself with a pile of material that feels like work to get through. Delete regularly.

3. Audit your distraction

Ok, time to get real. How are you really using your phone? Are there certain apps or websites that you check repeatedly every day? Do you have habits that are vaporizing your time (We're looking at you, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit).

If so, engineer some limits on usage. One simple approach is to put all the apps that distract you on a separate screen, or even to hide them away inside a folder—putting a bit of friction between you and your addiction. Use that brief moment of additional swiping as a reminder to ask yourself whether you *really* want to go down the rabbit hole. Might there be something better to do with your time?

4. Support your focus

When you do decide to commit to a creative task, there are a number of apps that can help support you. Many swear by the Pomodoro technique, which involves a commitment to focus for 25min chunks, with 5min breaks in between. There are many Pomodoro timers in the app store, though Apple's stock clock app works just fine, too.

If you’re easily distracted, try a white noise app. Rain Rain provides a vast array of variations on the sound of raindrops falling from the sky, alongside airliner and washing machine soundscapes.

For a slightly less boring selection of background sounds, fire up Spotify and search “ambient playlists”. Brian Eno's Music For Airports is an excellent writing companion.

5. Change your morning ritual

With all your apps organized on your phone, you should be all set for a more creative relationship with your device. You only need one more thing: discipline. One trick is to think about your "first apps.” When you grab your phone in the morning or after getting on the bus, what are the first apps that you open? Do you have a set pattern? Are those really the apps that you want to be opening or are you a slave to habit? Try opening a creativity enhancer first and see how that changes your perspective for the day.

And sure, we know you're not going to write a novel while waiting in line for an ATM. But instead of losing yourself in a Facebook fugue state, maybe you could take a minute to construct a groove in Figure, or play around with a photo in Prisma. There. Didn't that feel good?

Illustrations by Felicia Chiao.

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Is the iPhone the greatest tool for creativity ever invented, or its worst enemy? The answer is... both. On the one hand, the smartphone is the Swiss Army Knife of writing, research, photography, and planning tools. On the other, it is an attention-sucking black hole, consuming all of your free time in a gaming and social media vortex. Here are a few ways to make that computer in your pocket best serve your creative goals.

That's starting to change. With 76 million Baby Boomers gazing down that long, winding road, aid-in-dying laws gaining ground (California's passed in June of this year), and an epic list of recent bestselling books on the topic, many written by doctors, death is having a moment.

Which led us to ask: How can design play a role?

To find out, we teamed up with local hospital network Sutter Health, the Helix Centre in London, and the Ungerleider Palliative Care Education Fund to launch OpenIDEO’s End of Life Challenge. Thousands of people around the world participated, submitting ideas for tools, services, and platforms that might improve the way we prepare for and navigate the end of life.

Some incredible ideas came across the transom. Imagine the relief of a soundscape that cancels out the maddening noise of bleeping machines in hospitals, or a digital platform that provides respite vouchers for family caregivers who desperately need a break.

Struck by the volume of ideas the challenge generated, we wanted to make sure the momentum didn't end there. A team formed to send out a call to a loose network of healthcare professionals, designers, artists, storytellers, organizations, and individuals to see if it made sense to join forces and build a public event.

Re:Imagine End of Life kicks off Monday evening, October 24th, 2016, and runs through the week in San Francisco. With multiple events every night in San Francisco and the East Bay, there are plenty of opportunities to join the conversation.

Tonight (10/24), at Grace Cathedral, Dr. BJ Miller, Dana Cho, and I will lead a workshop on how design can play a role in the way we die. OpenIDEO Challenge participants Brad Wolfe, Ken Rosenfeld, and Yoko K will share the ideas they are developing.

Other highlights include:

• Death over Dinner at the Battery
• An immersive VR art experience
• How Doctors Die, with Dr. Ira Byock and Dr. Joon Yun
• An evening of stories and music with You're Going to Die
• Open conversations at Zen Hospice Project

Want to know more? The event's organizers can be reached at hello@letsreimagine.org.

No one knows when it will happen. Could be 30 years. Could be next week. What we do know is that we are all dying. And that how we die—perhaps the most important event human beings share—is something we never talk about.

Featuring commentary from leading thinkers in art, philosophy, business, and design, the publication draws out the modern day relevance of the period’s most iconic paintings. Paul's essay reflects on Pieter de Hooch’s work, "A Mother Delousing Her Child’s Hair", also known as “A Mother’s Duty.” I asked him to tell us more about the book, and why it should be on every designer's wish list.

How did you get involved in the book?

Marcel was an artist-in-residence at our San Francisco office. He’s a world-class designer and we learned a lot from him. Later, his team approached me about this project. They sent me a list of paintings and asked if any of them sparked anything for me. The de Hooch was the first piece I saw and I picked it straight away. At IDEO, we often take shocking or not-beautiful things and make them poetic. So a girl having her head deloused immediately struck me as a great human truth. I love that de Hooch has made it beautiful and celebrated it and used all this classic technique around it.

You say design acts as a witness to our smallest moments of triumph and tragedy. How do we witness increasingly broad challenges, like poverty and citizenship?

Tackling a big problem doesn’t mean you have to look for the big solution. It’s always the tiniest thing that begins the catalytic chain that unlocks things. I firmly believe that looking for the tiniest moment at the center of the human experience is the place to start. So you toggle back and forth and try to look for things that are both human and universal, and personal and individual.

I was in Kansas City the other day talking about the plight of the citizen, and at the same time we were telling very specific stories of people that we knew or had met that day. We were able to talk about citizenship at one scale, and still refer back to individuals. Nobody reacts to a segmentation study or a bar chart or a number, everybody reacts to a story. You have to find the meta in the micro.

Art does this, too. De Hooch does a fantastic job of telling a story in which I can recognize myself. I remember sitting there and the feel of my mother’s hand in my hair. I think design is about asking people to feel it in their own skin, remember their own experience. Good art makes you see yourself in the frame, and that is our work these days, too—to help join together small and big and to help people see themselves inside the big system.

What was your first impression of the book?

It’s beautiful. I think beauty is very important. Having beautiful things around you makes you feel alive. In the age of digital—which these days has become almost synonymous with disposable—it’s really nice to stop the train for a minute and put something in your hands that has heft, and is an extremely lavish, unapologetically gilded object. To me it’s like holding a piece of jewelry or going to the symphony. The sensorialist in me is awakened by this book and I’m very proud to have been included in it.

Paul Bennett has always had an appreciation of the Dutch Masters: “I love the craft of them, actually, the feeling of the pictures.” So, IDEO'S Chief Creative Officer jumped at the chance to contribute to designer Marcel Wanders' latest project, Rijks, Masters of the Golden Age, a lavishly gilded coffee table book that pays homage to the 17th-century masterpieces hanging in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour.

That was 10 years ago. I was in high school in China, where a comic dork looked like this:

That ego-crushing was followed by a lot of self-loathing and Cheetos. But over time, the taste of Cheetos grew flat, and my hands started itching to doodle in physics class again. I decided to follow the method the editor suggested:

Before long, I was running my first monthly series in a halfway reputable magazine. That helped me edge up in the high school popularity rankings, and I got a few messages of encouragement from reader forums. Above all, though, the method helped me get into a state of comic flow; nothing else mattered when I was drawing. Even when I was failing in life and full of self-doubt, I could always fall back on my sketchbook.

Which brings me to Lesson #1:

But even when you’re following a proven method and trusting the process, there are a few dangers to watch out for when embarking on graphic novel projects. The Pain/Gain index, for example:

If the difficulty index K is too high, terminate! There are four levels of challenge in a graphic novel project:

Creating anything that requires more cognitive load than watching Game of Thrones after a full workday is challenging to begin with, which leads to Lesson #2:

For me, it’s about rewarding myself with things I’m fond of drawing: intricate landscape, fashion, and action scenes. Since I suck at writing dialogue, I’ve kept it to a minimum, and substituted in symbols and visual cues.

Here are four other things I learned while making graphic novels, so you don’t have to go through the same pain:

I’m at work on #6 at the moment, which is the most fun.

Coloring under progress

It’s the last step in a graphic novel I’ve been working on about living in a dystopian San Francisco of the future, where the scarcity of organic food leads its residents to fight to the death at grocery stores. The story is a dramatized observation of the on-going identity battles most San Franciscans face today. It’s a place where one feels simultaneously insider and outsider. You can be both a picky eater and burrito consumer, the root cause and the victim of jacked-up rental prices, and equal parts poseur and satirist of hipsterdom.

“San Franciscocoa” depicts a mundane but impossible feat of grocery shopping—buying a bag of cocoa powder that’s going into extinction.

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“Sorry, but it’s simply not up to the publishable standard.”

The editor handed me back my work, which took hundreds of hours to create. There was a long pause.

“You should try more live sketching,” she said, lowering her voice to soften the blow. “Build a strong foundation before finding your personal style.”

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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.