Designing a new car takes years and requires strong collaboration between thousands of people. So when the Lincoln Motor Company began developing the luxury crossover Lincoln MKC, they invited IDEO to share key design-thinking methods to employees and departments to improve the process and to land on a better product.

IDEO built a pop-up studio inside an old manufacturing bay at the company’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters, and organized a collaboration between IDEO designers-in-residence and Lincoln employees from different departments. During the six-month collaboration, the IDEO team built a full-scale interactive car prototype to make various in- and out-of-car experiences tangible, and collected user feedback along the way. And they shared key design-thinking methods, which helped galvanize action across different teams, and sped up understanding of design thinking.

The MKC is credited with helping the Lincoln brand outpace growth in the luxury segment by more than two-to-one over competitors. Next up is turning the heads of luxury customers in China, where Lincoln plans to open 60 stores in 50 cities by 2016.

"By bringing together all our key internal stakeholders, the MKC meets and exceeds customer expectation," said Scott Tobin, Director, Lincoln Product Development.

Despite recent advances in Peru's banking infrastructure, the Peruvian public remains largely disengaged with its country’s banks. About 75 to 80 percent of the population lacks a bank account, preferring to safeguard cash at home versus entrust it to any institution. This represents a huge challenge—and opportunity—for Interbank, one of Peru’s largest financial-services firms.

Interbank and IDEO designed a customer experience that would differentiate the Interbank brand and capture a larger share of market. The result, an experimental space called Interbank Explora, is intended to serve as an “innovation lab,” where the company can continue to try the most advanced financial service offerings and get feedback from clients.

This fun and expressive environment—designed for customers, with customers—provides a sharp contrast to competing banks in Peru, which tend to be sterile, formal places that look like hospitals and have long lines. In its initial 60 days of operation, Explora exceeded expectations: Sales more than doubled overall, customer satisfaction rates improved from 33 to 84 percent, and profitability grew, including a 138 percent gain in non-interest-income activities.

Whether it’s the receptionist’s smile at check-in, the tasty snack at the bar, the thoughtfully designed lobby, or an easy-to-use mobile app, a hotel is no longer just a place to sleep—every detail plays a part in how much customers enjoy their stay.

Multinational hotel company IHG asked IDEO to help revamp its Holiday Inn Express brand in Europe—everything from public spaces to food and beverage, digital, and guest room interiors. Through their research, designers learned that the brand’s guests are independent and value-conscious, and appreciate a human touch. And yes, they prize good design.

Designers created a series of principles that informed every part of the hotel chain’s next-generation experience—things like a to-go concept for breakfast, an easy way for guests to stream their own media through their room’s TV, and assigned quiet floors for business-weary travelers.

As IHG rolls out the next-generation guest experience in the UK and across Europe, smart travelers can expect to check in to a high-touch, well-designed hotel.

“A hotel room is no longer just a place to sleep. This investment in guest insight and innovation is enabling us to stay ahead of the game,” said Mike Greenup, Vice President, Brand Management, Holiday Inn Brand Family, Europe.

Dealing with medication can often be a bigger pain than the ailment itself. Standing in long lines at the pharmacy, keeping up with expiration dates, making sure you take this medicine with food and that one on an empty stomach—it can be overwhelming.

An online pharmacy called PillPack had a mission to make it easier. PillPack worked to build a prescription home-delivery system that takes the pain out of the whole process. The venture brought their business to IDEO’s Cambridge office as a startup-in-residence, and worked with designers to fine-tune their offer and showcase it to the world.

Here’s how it works: Your doctor sends your prescriptions straight to the pharmacists at PillPack, who organize the medications—including refills, over-the-counter drugs, vitamins, and supplements—into presorted, personalized packets. These tidy little packets are labeled by date and time and delivered to your doorstep. Every 14-day supply of medication fits neatly into an IDEO-designed durable dispenser that is meant to become part of customers’ routines and fit seamlessly into their homes. IDEO also designed a travel pouch that makes taking medicine on-the-go simple and discreet. For those who need a human to talk to, pharmacists at PillPack's pharmacies are available anytime via phone or email to answer questions.

PillPack was the second startup-in-residence to work with IDEO Cambridge. Company founders Elliot Cohen and TJ Parker joined forces with the design team to redefine how consumers engage with their pharmacy. During the three-month residency, the teams focused on making sure that every customer interaction with PillPack—from signing up for the service online to using its product daily—was straightforward and reassuring.

Designers worked to refine the company’s brand vision, strategy, and identity across channels, and used this framework to completely redesign PillPack’s website, as well as a private dashboard for customers and a suite of physical products.

The result was a set of tools that reflected a true understanding of PillPack’s customers, a well-articulated product and service, and a human-centered approach. PillPack is still the only independent pharmacy in the U.S. that serves customers nationwide.

“PillPack has revealed the massive potential of combining design thinking and the drug market... This simple innovation makes life easier for seniors who can be a bit forgetful and have difficulty with bottles,” Wired wrote in an article about the company. “Younger patients with active lifestyles and chronic diseases can just pull as many packets as they need and go. All told, PillPack means you’ll never have to help your grandma sort pills into a tacky day-of-the-week organizer again.”

In June 2018, Amazon outbid other retailers to acquire PillPack for $1 billion.

At least that's what the listeners of Studio 360 said when host Kurt Andersen asked them to suggest places or experiences that could use more joy as part of the WNYC radio program’s Redesigns series. Inspired by IDEO Design Director Ingrid Fetell’s Aesthetics of Joy blog, our New York team did an extreme Monday makeover—in three weeks.

But first, the team interviewed the founder of a pet-therapy program and explored the physical and emotional benefits of chuckling with a laughter yoga teacher. A teammate’s 5-year-old daughter, quickly dubbed the “giggler-in-residence,” upped the joy quotient, as only a small child can do.

The result is MonYay!, a collection of objects and digital concepts designed to make Mondays fundays.

Listen to the Studio 360 episodes and check out our microsite to get a behind-the-scenes peek into the design process.

‍

The shrill beep of an alarm clock. The rush-hour commute. A calendar that looks like a failed game of Tetris. Of all the weekdays, Monday looks most like a problem in search of a solution.

Part of Project Literacy, a campaign founded and convened by Pearson, the installation is intended for large, influential gatherings like the General Assembly of the United Nations, the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, and the Social Good Summit, so the concept needed to scale to different physical contexts. But because the goal was to reach a much wider audience, there had to be a way to distribute the work easily through digital channels.

IDEO had just eight weeks to research the topic, develop ideas, test them with users, and build both physical and digital prototypes. Along with Toronto-based content studio Secret Location, who executed the concept, IDEO and Pearson launched a stunning virtual reality installation at Davos in January. In conversation with Ed White, designers Martin Brown, Kate Burn, and Jure Martinec reveal the backstory of prototyping with the new technology, including software and storytelling tips for others beginning to work in the medium.

What inspired you to use VR?

Jure: It was clear that we would have to find an engaging way of stepping into the shoes of those challenged by illiteracy. It wasn’t just about showing some confusing scrambled text on a website, which is forgettable in seconds. The problem is often marginalized, so we had to do more than just show it. We had to make people really feel it. VR seemed like a natural choice.

Martin: Chris Milk and Spike Jonze have done some great stuff with their VR platform Vrse, particularly “Clouds Over Sidra,” which is the story of a girl living her life in a Syrian refugee camp. The feeling that you’re actually, physically there in the camp with her is intense. Chris Milk calls VR “the ultimate empathy machine,” and he’s right. No amount of statistics or explaining can substitute for the visceral empathy that VR is capable of creating. Though the medium is still very much in the experimental phase—a bit like the early days of film—we felt there was a very compelling opportunity to use it to create empathy for a situation like illiteracy, which many people find impossible to imagine.

What other avenues did you explore to express this story?

Martin: We looked at a lot of different possibilities. We really wanted people to experience illiteracy from the inside, so we thought about immersive theatre, in the vein of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, or You Me Bum Bum Train, or even physically immersive games or puzzles that the audience would need to solve, similar to Hinthunt. We really felt that we needed a physical aspect to the experience, because no matter how good a digital-only solution might be, the age of truly viral content seems to be over, and without a huge marketing push, it would be incredibly hard to cut through all the cat videos on the Internet.

Why was VR a good choice for the presentation and distribution needs of this project?

Martin: Because VR is so new, it really suits an exhibition context where users can experience it for the first time in a guided and controlled setting. At the same time, the availability of Google VR, Samsung Gear VR and even YouTube VR meant that it was also something that could spread beyond the initial exhibition and be experienced anywhere.

What was your process for prototyping in VR?

Jure: We tried many different experiences, from simple gimmicky Cardboard apps to quite strong Gear VR narratives and cutting-edge Oculus Rift examples, also using extensions such as Leap Motion. I spent a lot of time tripping over things and waving my hands around the office. Once we had a somewhat good understanding of the dos and don’ts of the medium, we made the first script, recorded some sound on a laptop, and played it over Google StreetView’s VR view to see what a first person, in-the-scene narrative feels like and got some quick feedback. Then we tested interactions to find out how the story would feel if we broke linearity. We took a basic Cardboard example in Unity and tweaked it to show a static scene with interactive hotspots. This let us finalize the script as well as define the assets we needed for final production.

Kate: We invited a few of the people we'd met during our research interviews to help us test, iterate, and develop the prototype. This was potentially very nerve-wracking! We were very conscious of how easy it might be to misrepresent, patronize, or trivialize the issues surrounding illiteracy, and we sought feedback from pre-literate people and our expert adult literacy teachers at a midpoint in the design to ensure we were communicating people's experiences accurately and respectfully.

What hardware, software, and coding languages did you use, and why?

Jure: The scene had two major requirements: It needed to feel realistic and the hotspots had to be in optimal positions. So although live-action video would have been great, it would be hard to iterate on it quickly. Instead, we went for a fully custom photorealistic 3D render to set the direction for the feeling and interactions of the story. We hit a bit of a wall with Unity, but luckily there was an Android developer floating around. Since at that point it was clear what we needed to make, we wrote a pretty dirty Cardboard/GearVR app directly in Java. Just to put it in context, I think it took us around a week and a half for all of this.

What were the technical challenges that came with designing in VR?

Jure: The medium is fairly new, so unlike when you design apps or websites, there are few approachable tools that help you prototype and learn quickly. None of us had really worked with VR before, but that was just another excuse to go for it. Luckily there is a lot of talk online about how to design for the medium, and pioneering companies like Google are sharing tools like Cardboard Design Lab. Their Cardboard SDK is also quite accessible, so it was easy to get started. If you’re familiar with game engines like Unity, you can quickly create advanced experiences for many different platforms, including the Oculus Rift. As WebVR is being pushed, frameworks are starting to pop up and many web developers are suddenly in the VR world as well.

What were the storytelling considerations you faced in VR?

Martin: Everything is so new that there is no rulebook. Google, among others, is starting to codify what the language of VR filmmaking should be, but no one really knows. For example, who or what is the viewpoint you’re looking from? Is it invisible, like in film? Possibly, but that somehow feels weird, like you’re a voyeur. We intuitively felt like you had to be experiencing the scene from the first person.

What are your technical tips for coders prototyping in VR?

Jure: Be smart and inventive. Yes, you can make very complex things, but it's really fun to think about how you can learn with smart interactions and storytelling. Also, be mindful of the platform you're designing for. A Google Cardboard app will be much less immersive than an Oculus Rift app, but on the other hand, it will be much more accessible to people. Think of who you're designing for and why.

What about filmmaking tips for budding VR directors and videographers?

Martin: Prototype and test everything. Traditional filmmaking took decades to figure out the basic tropes. I think that as VR filmmaking evolves, things will become standardized, but it’s the Wild West at the moment. For now, simplicity wins. The audience is so wowed just to be there, inside a movie, that you don’t need to resort to a lot of tricks to keep people entertained.

What do you see as the most exciting potential for the technology moving forward?

Jure: VR is becoming big. Technical standards are being established, making development and prototyping tools more powerful and accessible for developers. As platforms like Google Cardboard and Oculus grow, their distribution channels are lowering the barrier of adoption for developers and viewers. The medium is maturing, so the content is becoming much more engaging, with rich storytelling, which almost forces big production companies to move into the field. Things are definitely happening soon.

Martin: There’s that story about the Lumière brothers in 1895, screening a film of a train arriving at a station. People in the theatre, who had never seen moving pictures before, ran away because they thought they’d get hit. That’s where we’re at with VR. It’s raw and unsophisticated but still incredibly visceral, and because of that, it’s powerful. I think it has the capacity to be the dominant art form of the 21st century—like film was for the 20th. I really think it will be that big. We just might need a few decades to figure out how to make it work best.

If you’re reading this now, chances are you have no idea what it’s like to navigate the world without full literacy. In May 2015, Pearson asked IDEO to design an experience that would inspire empathy for the struggles of people with illiteracy.

For human-centered designers, there is nothing more valuable than discovering what matters to people—what triggers frustration and what provides ease, what brings grief and what sparks joy. That’s why IDEO studies subtle and often unspoken details of daily life: habits, circumstances, thoughts, feelings, and reactions. We rely upon access to people’s unguarded selves. Their trust is precious, and comes with responsibility. How do we seek and share insights about people’s lives in an ethical way?

Three timeless principles guide all our work: respect, honesty, and responsibility. While the concepts are well known, they’re abstractions that resist concrete definition, and applying them to the ambiguities, complexities, and messy scenarios of real life is no simple task. The Little Book of Design Research Ethics provides a practical guideline, along with tools and examples from IDEO's work in the field. It integrates more than a quarter century of IDEO experience with advice and recommendations from ethicists, as well as codes of conduct in related professions, from journalism to market research. Though it was originally created for IDEO designers, the book offers applicable guidance to a wide range of situations in which it’s crucial to build relationships of trust. It’s the first of its kind, and we hope it will facilitate ongoing conversation and reflection about what it means to work with empathy and cultural sensitivity and ensure that interactions are safe, fair, enjoyable, and mutually beneficial.

Download the book here.

Downloaded more than 3,000 times online, Masi’s flowing font has got into the hands of quantified-self posterboy Nicholas Felton, photographer Todd Selby, and our very own David Kelley (founder of IDEO). We sat down to talk about her inspiration for Masi Font, her policeman-calligrapher grandfather, and why she thinks handwriting is one of the last modes of self-expression.

Where did your love of typography come from?

It started in elementary school. Learning to write was an obsession. I thought it was drawing beautiful things, rather than learning how to write words. If I made even a tiny mistake I would tear the page apart and start all over again. I would fill up pages with just one letter, repeated over and over again. Sometimes I would do other kids’ homework so that I had more to write.

Do you come from a family of artists?

My grandpa, Amedeo Masi, was a Carabiniere (a member of the Italian national police force) and a calligrapher. I know, such a random combo, and he made his own house sign (above). Calligraphy used to be a subject in school in Italy. Having a beautiful handwriting was really important at the time—it meant you'd had a good education.

Who inspires you, and why?

Growing up in Italy, I was exposed to so many incredible logos and identities that haven’t changed. Everything stays 60s classic.

When I started my design studies in Rome, Vignelli (who made the original New York subway identity) was my main inspiration. I loved the way he used Helvetica with simple and effective graphics. Bob Noorda, was another great inspiration. When I worked for In Area (the Pentagram of Italy), I refreshed the design of the Milan Underground, and I loved how we made Helvetica cool in Italy.

Munari, was another great inspiration. His friendly and simple style really resonated with me. His kids’ books are so clean but so playful at the same time. His style brings magic to everything, and that’s what I want to do too.

Once I moved to the Netherlands, Experimental Jetset and Wim Crowel also inspired me so much. I loved how they used typography in spaces, books, and museums.

What was the first font you created?

I created my first font, Cerchio Futuro, at university. It was a really rounded/modular font based on one unit (that’s the constraint they gave us). I hated it, but I got the highest mark in the class and was featured in a book Metodologia Progettuale Del Graphic Design (below).

You've talked about how important it is to have your own font. Why?

In this fucking digital world, no one writes by hand anymore. So, having a font is the truest visual expression of your mind and craft. No iPhone can take your handwriting away from you!

How did you develop the Masi font?

I never thought about creating my own font, but people really liked the way I wrote, and they kept asking me to "Masify" things. I realized I could just create a font that everybody could use, but I was overwhelmed by the technicalities of creating one.

Luckily my boyfriend, Alan, showed me this website where you can just download a form, print it, and fill in the blocks. Rescan the form, and—voila—I created my first Masi font. It’s not exactly the same fidelity as the handwritten font, which I hated for a long time, but after a while I liked the fact that the only original Masi font still comes from me.

What does the font say about you?

That I’ve stayed a kid forever, that I don’t want to grow up. Peter Pan, you know. That even if it looks consistent, each letter is different, every time.

Any Easter Eggs buried within?

If you type certain letters you’ll see "tits" (Ö) and "lemons" (]) LOL.

Download the Masi Font here.

Look across the London studio’s stationery boxes, pet projects, and the odd client deliverable, and you can’t miss the handwritten flourish of Enrica Masi. Despite being an interaction designer, Masi is a firm believer in the physicality and imperfection of penmanship. It's a manifestation of personality, she says, which spurred her to lead the London studio in an exercise to create their very own font.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.