Commonwealth Bank of Australia was interested in helping customers and businesses build close connections. They believed the way to do this would be by creating richer interactions around different forms of payment. The bank approached IDEO to explore these opportunities, and the result is a new retail business platform—Pi—and a portable payment device—Albert.

Pi brings a new level of flexibility, functionality, and customization to the face-to-face interaction between a cashier and a customer, improving everything from the process of splitting the bill in a restaurant to helping a guest find more personalized experiences at a hotel.

Insights

In the team’s research in Australia, the UK, and Germany, they found a few key insights that informed the design. First, they saw that an ideal platform should support the full spectrum of human behaviors around payment. Second, platforms can add value by improving the relationships among banks, merchants, and customers. And third, the payment experience should be customized to fit a specific setting, working one way in a luxury boutique and another in a gas station.

IDEO, CBA, and Wincor Nixdorf worked together closely to steward the design of Pi And Albert through product development and implementation, and to gather feedback from merchants during rapid, iterative cycles.

Results

The platform is flexible enough to benefit organizations of all sizes: Larger merchants can incorporate Pi as part of their existing network, while smaller merchants can grow their business using powerful business tools. And customers of all kinds can easily access a variety of payment methods and helpful applications.

Albert offers a large touchscreen that’s intuitive to use, the safety of virtually encrypted PIN entry, and a variety of ways to access data connections. A large battery provides power when retailers are on the go, and a modular housing means that Albert can be used in all kinds of situations. The device is built to handle current card payment methods but can also adapt to how cards might be accepted in the future, and even eliminates the need to swivel a screen from cashier to customer during the payment process.

Forty million Americans became newly eligible for health coverage when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was fully implemented in 2014. Some enrolled in health insurance for the first time, while others were able to get better access to affordable health coverage.

In preparation for the millions of applications, states were required to develop ways for people to sign up for health insurance online for plans that were operated by state and federal governments under the ACA. To help public and private agencies to meet the requirements, a coalition of nine national and state-based foundations, led by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) developed a digital enrollment prototype, and hired IDEO to lead the consumer research and design effort.

After a yearlong collaborative process, the resulting 300-page design manual and design reference prototype illustrates a customizable approach to public and private health insurance enrollment.

The flexible set of design standards developed for Enroll UX 2014 aims to make online health insurance enrollment simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate at scale.

To encourage PhD candidates to think differently about how they tackle tough science problems, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and IDEO embarked on a fruitful collaboration.

Three PhD candidates were tasked with the following challenge: Cultivate new audiences and uses for a microscope. Drawing inspiration from cell phone microscope CellScope, the trio arrived at a prototype that was less reliant on technology and easily disassembled and reassembled. How? By using the most basic building blocks: Legos.

Made of custom 3-D-printed parts and standard toy building blocks, the LegoScope, which functions as a microscope, can easily snap pieces in and out to hold different components. Both the device and the team-based process are now being used in various other campus projects to change how researchers think about conducting and advancing scientific research.

“The best work in the future is going to be done by teams of people with very different expertise, who know different things and think about things in different ways, who come together to focus on one big problem,” said Keith Yamamoto, vice chancellor of research at UCSF, who led the initiative.

Arye Barnehama and Laura Michelle Berman wanted to take their invention—a headband that measures brain wave activity, focus, and concentration—to the next level. As a part of IDEO’s startup-in-residence program, Barnehama and Berman collaborated with IDEO on the product’s rebranding, hoping to refine and emphasize the product’s promise: When people improve their focus, they feel more mindful, confident, and productive.

With IDEO’s help, the company changed its name from Axio to Melon, delineated their brand, refined its product, developed its user experience, and prepared a Kickstarter campaign that garnered considerable press coverage. The new name, Melon, reflected the friendly, scalable character of the company. The name also suggested the intent of the product—using neuroscience data to inform a personal activity.

To distinguish Melon as a standout in the crowded quantified-self category, IDEO designers made the logo a faceted orb that references the gear-shifting mind, with “Melon” written in a distinctive font born from that same logo. The team went with fruit colors—cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon—to evoke the sweet, refreshing experience the Melon headband promises.

Together, the Melon and IDEO teams also developed an app that shows increases in concentration after performing certain tasks and features a game in which you “fold” origami through mental focus to hone concentration.

Melon’s new brand strategy and UI set it apart from your typical fitness tracker, engaging the user in an elegant, joyful, and customized experience with every interaction.

Melon: a headband and mobile app to help you measure focus.

The purpose for these hybrid safety specs is threefold: I can post images of our projects or build steps to my Snapchat account, save the videos for internal documentation, and also create more structured build logs.

I’ve been using them for the past week; they're super fun. Here’s how you can modify your own pair:

1. Buy the Snapchat Spectacles directly through their website.
2. Get some $29 clear replacement lenses for the tinted ones that come with the Spectacles. I bought mine from GlassesUSA. If you require a prescription, you can have them made with prescription lenses for the same price!
3. Get some protective side shields.
4. Modify the side shields to fit the glasses. This means you will need to cut the tops and center-front part off of them like so:

You can now use the supplied O-ring to attach the shields to the Snapchat Spectacles. They should now look like this:

The Snapchat app makes it really easy to edit 10-second Snaps into a build story. I even made this display rack to show them off:

Check out this video (recorded using the Spectacles!) that shows how I made the display rack:

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A few weeks ago, while I was in our workshop, I had an idea: If I could modify Snapchat’s Spectacles into a pair of safety goggles, I could document our projects without ever picking up a camera.

In one sentence, who are you?

I'm a 37-year-old Tokyoite with a mane that's swiftly moving from Pauly Shore to Kenny G.

What do you do? How did you learn to do it?

I do interactive design and Japanese literature. I learned the former at NYU's ITP program, and the latter from my amazing high school Japanese teacher Susan Tanabe.

What are your 3 favorite possessions?

1. The Twitter app
2. My mint copy of Zik Emmy's "Perfect Change"
3. My engraved Tamagoyaki frying pan

What does a typical work session look like?

To me, code is like jazz, man. Improvisation. I've got a synth—a Korg MS-20—and I run the input through Max MSP. Max interprets frequency to the nearest quarter tone, and white keys are mapped to reserve words in my current coding idiom, while black keys spit out numbers. There's not a lot of reserve words in programming, so all I need to do is throw on a fatback beat and just jam.

(J/K—coding is mostly just copy-pasting stuff from Stack Overflow.)

Pierre Menard and the infinite monkeys. Created using openframeworks, a series of openGL shaders, and about 48 hours of processing. The image is drawn using images Googled from the lyrics to the album "Irresistible."

How do you get over creative block?

I'm not "real-time" at all. I'm useless in a brainstorm, and even worse at a Q&A. First dates are a disaster, and job interviews are even worse. Whenever I'm asked something, I wish I could pause the world and go on a nice walk through Shinjuku Gyoen, because I know that right around the fifteen-minute mark, when the blood starts moving, I'll find the right idea, the right reply. Working alone is great because you have this affordance, but sometimes in groups it's hard to say, "Hey y'all, keep brainstorming, you're doing a great job. I'm just going to go take a lil perambulation, if you can just hold that thought until I get back?"

I'm also usually most creative when I'm working with some idiom or technology I've never touched before. Figuring something out for the first time is the best way to have ideas about how to use it. People like to rap about reinventing the wheel, but I feel like reinventing wheels is how we come up with bicycles.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

I have this great translation I did of Aida Makoto's novel, Youth and Perversion. I need to nudge him about rights, because it's really a sterling translation.

How do you see the world in 2078?

(Assuming a Werner Herzog mien.) I must confess, I'm pessimistic. I think we'll either have a benign socialist matriarchy, or else it will be a hellscape. My expectations have not been appreciably bolstered by the last year of world history.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I'd like to get into hang-gliding or some other flying sport. I'm banking on somebody from IDEO designing an affordable, eco-friendly personal flight module.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Mohri Yuko, a great Japanese interactive installation artist.

Kevin Freeny, funniest man alive 16 years running.

As a longtime resident of Tokyo, Matt Fargo finds ways to make Japanese culture more fun for everyone. He's written books about speaking dirty Japanese, created dynamic audio and visuals for musicals featuring dancing dogs, and built games for Tokyo train riders. He’s one of those restless creative people who just goes forth and makes. Before living in Tokyo, he spent time creating interactive experiences for Second Story in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He's since continued his quest to build weirdness into technology through his work at Party. Let’s peek into his brain, shall we?

Sometimes the questions are serious (“How might we better design for equity—inclusion, diversity, ageism, access, technology, etc—for all?) and sometimes they’re playful (“What’s your favorite restaurant in the Bay Area?”). But no matter what type of question goes up, the responses are always intriguing.

Our latest bathroom installation asked: “What book are you currently reading?” I’m always on the hunt for a good read, so I couldn’t be happier with the bonanza of recommendations. Dig in:

4321 ◆ A Fine Balance ◆ A Man Named Ove ◆ A Manual for Cleaning Women ◆ Amazon Beaming ◆ Americanah ◆ Barbarian Days ◆ Being Mortal ◆ Beyond the 100th Meridian ◆ Big Magic ◆ Borne ◆ Brida ◆ Celine ◆ Commonwealth ◆ Como Agua Para Chocolate ◆ Danny the Champion of the World ◆ Dark Forest ◆ Devil in the White City ◆ Dolly - My Life and Other Unfinished Projects ◆ Dreamblood Duology ◆ East of Eden ◆ Essentialism ◆ Exit West ◆ Facebook ◆ Faith of the Fallen ◆ Far from the Tree

Gut ◆ Heat ◆ Homo Deus ◆ Life Over Cancer ◆ Lovie ◆ M Train ◆ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ◆ Moon Tiger ◆ Mustache Shenanigans ◆ My Life on the Road ◆ My Year of Meats ◆ Neuromancer ◆ On Booze ◆ Origin of the Species ◆ Other Minds ◆ Pachinko ◆ Reality is Broken ◆ Sapiens ◆ Shoe Dog ◆ Stealing Fire ◆ Stories of Life and Others ◆ The ABCs of Real Estate Investing ◆ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ◆ The Circle ◆ The Collapse of American Criminal Justice ◆ The Drowned World

The Ethical Slut ◆ The Gene ◆ The God of Small Things ◆ The Gunslinger ◆ The Harry Potter Series ◆ The Incal ◆ The Interestings ◆ The Labyrinth of Spirits ◆ The Language of Food ◆ The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck ◆ The Lightbringer Series ◆ The Name of the Wind ◆ The Orphan Master’s Son ◆ The Quran ◆ The Sellout ◆ The Sixth Extinction ◆ The Sympathizer ◆ The Travels of Ibn Battutah ◆ The Unbanking of America ◆ The Unseen City ◆ The Vegetarian ◆ The Violet Hour ◆ Third Plate ◆ Topics in Calamity Physics ◆ Trials of Apollo II ◆ Yes, Please

What have you read (or listened to) on the list? And what are you curious to read? Tag your response on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with #bathroomread.

Visuals by Jane Ha.

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There’s one IDEO tradition you’ll only get to witness if you stop by our San Francisco office with a full bladder. Every few weeks, a new question goes up on the bathroom wall. IDEOers pop into the loo throughout the day, spend a few moments minding their own business, so to speak, and the wall fills up with answers.

The podcast talks about how mycelium and mycorrhiza give plants a natural network for absorbing and sharing nutrients in soil. The fungi create connections with the rootlets of individual trees and grow further out to connect with the root networks of other plants. These networks create an “underground economy” by which trees can trade and share nutrients.

This method of sharing is a good lesson for business: A lack of connections can create inefficiencies and tensions between potential collaborators. Looking at these networks raised a question for us: How can we facilitate connections between real-world businesses that would allow them to share resources?

We got so excited about the idea we jumped right into building something: a prototype called Myko, a smart scale and sensors that create a mesh network allowing two businesses to share streaming data that benefits both parties. We took the opportunity to build with Nomad, an open source streaming protocol Reid Williams and Gavin McDermott have been developing at the CoLab.

Nomad works as a decentralized messaging system, an open source protocol to discover, publish, and remix live data streams from anyone, anywhere. Nomad is built on IPFS, a distributed network, engineered as universal infrastructure to be open, scalable, and durable.

The Nomad API is based on a publish and subscribe system. When someone creates a node, it can either publish data to peers on the network, or subscribe to other peer nodes on the network. Publishing nodes are called “atomic” nodes, while subscribing nodes are called “composite” nodes. When someone creates a node on the network, it’s given a unique ID. For a composite node to receive data from an atomic node, all that’s needed is this ID. From then on, any data that the atomic node publishes is delivered to the composite node in real time.

Warning, nerd paragraph:

Using a couple Particle Photons and force-sensitive resistors, we quickly set up two atomic nomad nodes capable of broadcasting real-time data from two connected objects. I used the particle event stream API to output data in a JSON format, so I could easily parse event objects just like I would with any REST API.

Since the Photons can broadcast anywhere with wifi and a power source, these nodes will always be running, providing a constant stream of data no matter how far apart they are.

In this prototype, we built two connected weight-sensing plinths for coffee pots to rest on. The weight data from the plinths allowed us to determine when new coffee was brewed, how old it was, how many cups had been poured, and how much was left (we could even see the cups being poured in real time). One pot sat in our office at the CoLab, and the other sat in a nearby coffee shop.

When the CoLab pot was old or out of coffee, and when the cafe’s pot was fresh or about to be emptied (which happens every 45 minutes at our local cafe — they’re serious about freshness!), a signal on the plinth at CoLab was activated to tell would-be coffee drinkers to head to the cafe for a walk outside and a fresh coffee. At the same time, a signal was activated on the cafe’s pot, letting them know that IDEOers were being sent over.

The partnership possibilities created by this workflow are endless. For example, what if CoLab diverted some of its monthly studio coffee budget to create a steady income stream for the cafe? Could the cafe institute dynamic pricing on its coffee to reduce food waste? What about baked goods that go stale the next day? Could neighboring cafes use infrared sensors to share their current occupancy to load-balance their wait times in line or their occupied seats?

These questions sparked a lot more ideas and another experiment, in which we used Nomad to reduce coffee and food waste at the cafe. When a barista brewed a fresh pot of coffee, they simply pressed a button to send a notification to customers with the app. After 15 minutes, the price of a cup of coffee dropped by 10%. After 20 minutes, it dropped by 45%, and so on. Since we knew the cafe threw out its coffee after 45 minutes, we could set a timer to reset the price to normal levels when a fresh pot was ready.

In our prototype, coffee drinkers could see dynamic pricing via an app. This website was a small nomad web app powered by data from the Myko button in the cafe.

Whenever the user viewed the app, it displayed the current price of the coffee and a “buy now” button that used Stripe to create a purchase. When a user purchased a coffee, they received a unique code to redeem for the cup they purchased at the shop. The app operated off of a simple set of events whose time and content could be customized.

Something I didn’t have time to implement in the experiment was customization. Ideally, a cafe owner would be able to create new events themselves, adjusting elapsed time, content, and price with just a few taps. While this example isn’t a perfect design, we’re inspired by the live connections it can form between the cafe and its patrons.

Coffee isn’t a life-changing mechanism, but these prototypes represent a developing form of communication between objects and organizations. As we create digital twins of real world objects, our world becomes a living, breathing network, driven by data that we generate by going about our daily lives. Will smart cities be able to divert traffic through different routes based on live congestion data? Can a group of sensor-outfitted machines in a factory automatically organize a group-buy of replacement parts at a discount to the facility owner? These are questions that I’m hoping to answer through these digital fungal relationships.

Adapted from IDEO CoLab’s post on decentralizing chat here.

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At IDEO CoLab, we love thinking about what nature can teach us about emerging technology. Recently, we revisited an old podcast from a source we adore: Radiolab. Their episode From Tree to Shining Tree inspired us when we were thinking about naturally-occurring mesh networks.

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.