Have you ever had that gnawing feeling, just as you’re sitting down to your computer at work, that you’ve left the central heating on at home? You’re not alone. Rising concern about wasted energy and the financial cost of unregulated thermostats, as well as the convenience of a connected and cozy home, all point to the rise of the smart thermostat. Berg Insights projects it’ll grow 64.7 percent over the next five years.

Founded in Munich in 2011, tado° is Europe’s biggest maker of smart thermostats and air-conditioning controls. Looking to grow, tado° approached IDEO, a longtime collaborator, with a late-stage prototype for a new, wall-mounted gadget to connect any air-conditioning unit to the web so it could be controlled remotely through a smartphone app.

Dubbed tado° Cooling, the device recognizes when people leave their house and heats or cools the house upon their return. The brand tasked IDEO with a three-fold goal: gauge interest in the device, raise brand awareness, and work out product/market fit.

After stakeholder interviews, research, and prototyping, IDEO supported tado°’s team in refreshing the industrial design of the hardware and creating a distinctive yet unified user-interface language for the brand’s existing and future products.

To work out what potential customers thought of tado° Cooling, tado° turned to a novel research medium: Kickstarter. Its ultimate goal? Knowing whether people would part with their money for one. The IDEO team provided an overarching crowdfunding strategy, including funding goals, giving tiers, and marketing, and shot the brand’s Kickstarter campaign video.

As a result, the campaign burst through its $150,000 funding goal to $200,000, and scored coverage in a raft of tech media outlets including TechCrunch, GigaOm, TheNextWeb, Engadget, and PC Magazine. After hitting its “stretch goal,” tado° is adding non-A/C device controls, a Windows Phone app, and IFTTT and Jawbone Up integration.

In addition to media coverage, and showing the public’s appetite for the device, the Kickstarter community’s conversation unearthed further user insights that fed into product development, according to tado° head of design, Jens Pohl.

Buoyed by that success, tado° enlisted IDEO to translate user insights and a big-picture overview of the connected home sector into new services to enhance the device’s UX, and introduced new business models to strengthen its European brand strategy. Early visual concepts, learnings, and evidence from this exploration supported the brand’s investor pitch, securing a further round of $15 million venture capital.

Dr. Reddy’s, a 36-year-old global pharmaceutical company headquartered in India, was growing at a rapid pace. Over the years, the company’s main focus had been on producing affordable generic medication. But with more than 24,000 employees and seven distinct business units operating in 100 countries, there was an urgent need to identify a core, unifying purpose—one that would articulate a set of shared values and align leaders on key business decisions and goals.

G.V. Prasad, the company’s Co-Chairman and Managing Director, knew that the vision had to be simple and elegant–an emotional drive that every employee across the company could relate to and act upon.

Prasad partnered with IDEO to distill the focus that would align the company. Over the course of several months, Dr. Reddy’s team worked with IDEO to learn about the needs of everyone, from shop floor workers to scientists, external partners and investors. Together, they defined and distilled the essence of the company, paring it down to four simple words that center on the patient: Good health can’t wait.

The simplicity of these words belie their power. According to Prasad, the newly articulated purpose has resonated across the company, changing the whole culture of the organization. The idea of infusing a sense of urgency and nimbleness to their systems as a means of serving their customers has had a direct application in almost every corner of the business. Employees connect the message to their own experience, and each of the different business units are now moving towards a common goal.

A Shift Inside

“Good health can’t wait” has become a powerful recruitment tool and employee rallying cry. It makes clear that the company is in the business of serving patients, not just creating products, no matter how innovative or affordable. This has given a new sense of meaning to all personnel, from frontline sales representatives to senior leaders to scientists. Many key decision-makers, including new CEO Erez Israeli, share that the purpose statement inspired them to join the company.

Articulating Dr. Reddy’s purpose has empowered these employees to take risks, experiment, and work together. For example, the marketing department has refocused its efforts on finding solutions that improve patients’ consistent use of their medications. And motivated by the idea that patients can no longer wait for a cure, employees from different disciplines are coming together to find inventive ways of bringing new products to market in record time.

“The website medznat.ru required immense collaboration between various teams—medical, information technology, marketing, and analytics,” says Mvsma Raja, Head of Strategy and Marketing for Emerging Markets. “This served as a platform to bring the latest happenings in the area of pain management to doctors in Russia, who we learned are looking for the latest medical updates on the go.” Building on this cross-functional collaboration and momentum, Dr. Reddy’s established an internal design studio dedicated to using consumer insights and rapid prototyping to drive innovation.

New Offerings

“Our brand belief has inspired how we’ve thought about our future growth,” says CEO Erez Israeli. The new purpose unlocked a series of initiatives, including the aforementioned website for Russian physicians and innovative pill packaging that helps patients better understand their instructions.

Purple Pack is a new type of pill package that ensures that vital information like the expiration date is not torn off and thrown away. Born out of Dr. Reddy’s in-house design studio, Purple Pack allows the pharmacist or patient to mark their daily dosage and reminders on the packaging itself, as paper prescriptions are often misplaced.

A Business Boost

“Good health can’t wait” has not only attracted and unified talent and inspired new offerings, it’s boosted both sales and profit. For example, Dr. Reddy’s generic oral diabetes medication, Metsmall, has become the fourth largest brand in India based on the number of pills sold. The medication is distinct from competitors’ versions in that the pill is smaller and easier to swallow—a clear embodiment of product development oriented around the patient. With its signature Purple Pack convenience packaging, the medication has been one of the fast-growing Indian pharmaceutical brands over the last two years.

Looking ahead, both Prasad and Israeli hope to continue building a purpose-led culture that influences the business from the inside out, inspiring employees to be empathetic and responsive and realizing its mission to deliver good health to all.

In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation made what became a big bet about the future of education, shifting its attention away from the traditional school-based model of reform toward a more youth-centered approach.

By 2014, the bet was starting to pay off, but for it to really succeed, it needed an innovative path to scale and an entrepreneurial approach to sustainability. That’s when MacArthur came to IDEO for help in designing a new organization.

Together, IDEO and MacArthur set out to transform the foundation’s efforts into a self-sustaining enterprise that could balance the social responsibilities of a nonprofit with the lasting viability of a business—an opportunity that was as much about designing a new infrastructure as it was about creating a new culture.

Using a novel prototyping process, IDEO created three illustrated scenarios to tell different versions of LRNG’s possible future, each with an alternative portraiture of its purpose, vision, operating structure, product portfolio, and business model. Through a playful, modular storytelling structure, the stakeholders considered the potential trade-offs of the different approaches and how to prioritize their organizational goals with clear definitions of success.

These different future-forward scenarios helped funders and partners grasp a radical organizational vision, as well as a clear operational model that was go-to-market-ready.

In October 2015, the MacArthur Foundation launched Collective Shift, the organization behind LRNG, with $25 million in seed funding and 30 partners, including Arizona State University, Gap Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs, Electronic Arts, and musical artist John Legend.

Based on the scenarios created by IDEO, LRNG is dedicated to creating a “learning as a lifestyle” movement that will transform the learning landscape and close the equity and opportunity gap for young people.

Hundreds of millions of people, from excitable teens driving their first hatchback, to new parents going in for a minivan, have driven Fords off lots around the world since the first Ford Model A was produced in 1903. And cars have changed how we shop, travel, and work; they’ve reshaped our homes, towns, and the world’s infrastructure.

Today, Ford, along with the entire industry, is at an inflection point. As millions around the world move into gridlocked, polluted cities, the allure of owning a shiny new car has dulled. In some places, young people are driving less, and getting their licenses later or not at all. Lightening their load, city dwellers are relying on ride-sharing services and other alternatives to individual ownership.

Technology underpins that shift from ownership to usership. Smartphones, sensors, and open data have enabled new ways of getting from point A to B: from car-sharing services like Zipcar to taxi services like Uber or clever transport apps like Citymapper that help people skip effortlessly between the bus, a shared bike scheme, and renting a car.

While the owner of the very first commercially available Model A—Chicagoan dentist, Ernest Pfennig—couldn’t see more than a century ago how cars would change the world, Ford is squinting into its future by prototyping it now. Building on a longstanding relationship with IDEO, the carmaker approached us, along with a number of other partners, to undertake two of 25 experiments exploring a car company’s place in the changing world of mobility.

The first, Data-Driven Insurance, investigates a new pay-as-you-go insurance offer based on people’s driving behavior, as measured by a small adapter plugged into the car. The second, Infocycle, plots a snapshot of how bikes traverse the city and interact with cars and public transport by using Ford’s open source API, Open XC, to track cyclists around San Francisco.

Tackling the tangled ecosystems of bike sharing, private cars, and open city data proved an international effort. The two projects brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers, hardware and software developers, data scientists, and interaction, industrial, and business designers from IDEO’s San Francisco, Palo Alto, Chicago, and London studios.

Have we cracked the future of mobility? Probably not. And that’s okay, says Fields. Smart mobility is simply part of Ford’s journey of evolution. Along with global competitions, collaborations with universities, and opening up their hardware and software platform Open XC, these experiments help Ford meet the needs of a fast-changing mobile world. “As we drive innovation in every part of our business,” Fields said, “we are determined to learn, to take risks, to challenge custom and question tradition, and to change our business going forward.”

More information on Ford’s Smart Mobility projects can be found here.

1. Create agreements, not rules

For our weekly bits&bites meeting about the intersection of digital and creative technology, we decided to carve out five minutes from an existing office-wide gathering—our weekly Monday lunch—and offer the mic to anyone who wanted to talk about a piece of digital wizardry that's really rocking their world.

For the open mic share to catch on, we created a set of agreements that was structured enough to describe to people what and how to share, yet loose enough to encourage them to take risks.

• Whatever excites you, excites us. Pick a topic that combines digital with another craft, discipline, concept, or anything else that you’re passionate about.
• Keep it real. Talk about something that you either use, or would have loved to design.
• Keep it short. Remember, you only have five minutes! Keep it simple—don't overthink it.
• Take initiative. Interested in presenting? Add your name to the calendar!
• Take ownership. Once you’re up, you’re up. If you can’t make it, find someone to take your spot.

2. Design and brand it

Create a distinctive identity. In this world, even meetings need a brand to maintain their appeal. To make bits&bites really stick, we came up with a name, a look, and a jingle, and turned to our community for a design boost. Writer Jason Baker took inspiration from the bite-sized format and lunchtime milieu to come up with the moniker. Communication designer Peter Antonelli lent his talents to a simple, eye-catching visual identity. And design researcher with musical talents Alex Gallafent composed a catchy theme song, seemingly extracted from a 1980s science show. Taken together, the attention paid to designing this meeting has made bits&bites an exciting familiar moment every week (we often catch people absent-mindedly humming the jingle around the office).

3. Make it interdisciplinary and inclusive

Invite people from across disciplines. Our intent for bits&bites was to shift our thinking from digital as a craft to digital as a medium or mindset. This lens prompted people to share work that explored questions like, what does digital mean when it overlaps with the idea of delight? Or protest? Or the sense of touch? How can we explore digital in the context of analog experiences? What lies at the nexus of digital and fright? The interdisciplinary approach not only made the bits&bites meeting more robust, it turned what could have been a closed door session with a few into an inclusive event.

We’re now entering our 9th month of this inspiration part of our regular lunch meeting. We’ve accumulated some of our favorites here, including Selma Durand’s “Digital Magic”, which celebrates digital illusions within industrial design, and “Hello World Wide Web” from Fuzzy Wobble, which looks at the rich history of firsts since the Internet began. Check out this slideshow.

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“Oh god, not another meeting.”

Yes, we know, communication is important. But most meetings end up feeling more like black holes in your calendar—rote check-ins that suck up more energy than they create. And just as with black holes, we who design meetings may not observe how bad they are directly, and only observe their effects—frequent phone checking, a battle to sound like the smartest person in the room, zero follow-through. So, how do you reinvent a workplace ritual so that it truly inspires? Here are 3 tips:

People squint at "Adwoa" and tell me how creative my parents are. But my name is not that unusual in Ghana, where my parents are from. It just means that I’m a girl who was born on a Monday. My mother is also an Adwoa: We are legion. It was hard to explain that growing up, and even harder to fit in with my many cousins when I went back to Ghana for all too brief visits. I had the name, but not the language, culture, or history I’d need to belong.

I spent a lot of my school years apologizing for that name; it felt like an albatross around my neck. I used nicknames, and prefaced my response with, “it’s a long one!” whenever anyone asked me to spell it out. And then I got to high school.

Over the years I’d become keenly aware of the long pause that ensued on the first day of school, as the teacher taking attendance nervously approached the end of the Gs. So I was shocked to find that when she did pause, it wasn’t just on my name. Oluwakemi Adegoke. Shuchi Dwivedi. Chloe Jhangiani. Fungai Machirori.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the only one weird one. Who was this magical tribe? It turned out they were all, like me, first generation Americans. They got it. Here were my people.

My life was upended by the realization that there were more of us than I’d ever thought possible. We held America within us, but we also had one foot on other shores. And the water between all of our feet was alive with shared experience.

East Asian friends and I laughed ourselves sore about our parents’ hyperzealous focus on education. (Overheard in my household: “Unless you are at death’s doorstep, you are going to school today.”) At the end of the year, we shared knowing glances when perfect attendance awards were given out.

Indian friends and I lamented our low tolerance for spice; Filipino friends teased me about our mutually lengthy names. I am still in disagreement with Nigerians about whose jollof rice is better (Ghanaian, obviously). As an undergraduate, my experience in the U.S. left me uniquely prepared to be a stranger while studying abroad in Italy and Portugal—I already knew all about shapeshifting to accommodate people’s expectations.

It was an Iranian-American professor who gave me back my name, shaking aside the abbreviations and waking me up to the fact that it should never have been a source of shame. My undergraduate thesis was about Sex and the City, which always makes people laugh. But it had a deep meaning for me. I used the show as text to unpack the way we construct our identities in urban spaces. When you come from somewhere else, as most New Yorkers do, people can only know you by what you show them. In arriving, you can transform into whoever you’d like to be.

Art that speaks directly to the labor of rebuilding home—El Anatsui’s paintings, the music of Alsarah and the Nubatones—is especially good at conjuring up the longing and resilience of those new beginnings that require us to reconfigure our very selves: our ways of expression, and of being in the world. Moving between two worlds is perhaps the ultimate design act.

Everyone has felt that they were different at some point in their lives; all of us have taken steps into the unknown. If we’re lucky, we’ve found our people there. At a time when the planet holds 65 million displaced people—the highest number in history—seeking out the shifting stories of those who aren’t like us is more important than ever. We may realize, along the way, that we’re all each other’s people.

Illustrations by Lisa Hsia.

In the first week of kindergarten in rural Ohio, I learned to write my name. The teacher probably thought it would be an easy lesson. My classmates had names like Amy Lewis, Leslie Williams, Jennifer Green. I imagine her blithely scanning the attendance sheet, then getting to my name and thinking something along the lines of “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” That was how I first learned I was different: eking out cursive letters long after the others had moved on.

In this picture you see one of my colleagues on her morning trip from our studio kitchen to her desk. She's carrying her morning coffee, purse, and phone in the usual way—so her hands are full. But to save a second trip, she's cleverly stashed her breakfast supplies in the back-pockets of her jeans. A spoon, yes, but would you think it possible to carry a tub of yogurt in your back pocket? This tub has a molded split—intended to keep the yogurt and fruit in separate compartments—but that split creates a perfectly-sized and balanced hook. It's an unanticipated benefit that turned out to be very handy.

Thoughtless acts are fascinating to me simply because I enjoy discovering the details in the everyday interactions around me. They also help me remember that, as designers of products and systems, we will never anticipate everything that people do. It's best if we strive to humbly provide simple, understandable, responsive and reliable things that allow natural human creativity to thrive.

For my latest project, I worked with a Japanese insurance company to explore the mindset of "digital natives." Who are they, and what do they care about? After doing ethnographic research, we made a film to communicate what we learned. Juggling the roles of producer, creative director, and design researcher, I worked alongside Sean, a videographer, to bring the story to life. We looped back with one of our research participants in Tokyo and tagged along with her for a day, asking some targeted questions.

9:30 AM: Arriving at IDEO's Tokyo studio to start the day.

10:30 AM: From the studio we set out to meet our subject, Yoko*, and begin filming.

The purpose of the film was to bring the client closer to the people they want to serve, to help them understand the texture of their lives and what matters to them. We chose film as a medium because of its intimacy—allowing the viewer to feel as if they are hanging out in Yoko’s world for a day.

We had a translator with us to be sure we understood the nuance and intent of what Yoko told us. We tried to get to the heart of things. When people truly feel as though you're listening, they start to reveal themselves. That’s the magic that happens in design research. You are there to listen, not to respond.

1:00 PM: Taking a break to enjoy some authentic local cuisine.

You can learn a lot about a culture's rituals and values through food!

2:30 PM: Capturing B-roll to round out the story.

Doing the research is one thing, but how do we capture and share it in a way that incites action? If we’ve created nothing more than an esoteric emotional piece, we’ve failed. We set out to inspire change in our client organizations.

4:00 PM: Precious cargo.

As a nursing mother, I have to juggle a whole new set of responsibilities on business trips. The ice cooler is the new messenger bag.

5:13 PM: Jet lag is no joke! Catching a pre-dinner cat nap.

Traveling to cool places around the world can sometimes seem more glamorous than it is. But still, I always find myself filled with so much inspiration. I run on adrenaline, and then at some point I crash.

8:00 PM: A happy team moment at the end of a long day.

Want to get to know your team quickly? Travel together! The shared experience of exploring new places while working hard is a great way to bond.

Learning about different cultures and customs is one of my favorite parts of design research. We get to understand so much about people by looking in on the day to day of their lives, their habits and routines. Cultures can vary, but regardless of where we are in the world, human needs are so similar. Uncovering these needs and helping to design for them can feel incredibly fulfilling.

*We've changed the name of our interview subject out of respect for her privacy.

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When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I try to understand why people do the things they do.” What inspires them to act? What motivates them to make certain decisions? What really makes them tick, or what makes them feel understood? Design research is like being a reporter or anthropologist or therapist—you’re given access to people’s lives that feels like a great privilege, and with that privilege comes great responsibility.

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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.