When you’re under 40, buying a life insurance policy may seem about as practical as buying a Humvee. That makes insurance a tough sell for a 165-year-old company like MassMutual. To find a way to become relevant to this generation, MassMutual partnered with IDEO with a mission to get young people interested in their own spending habits.

Over the course of two years, the teams set out to learn about how people across the US spend and save their money, and they uncovered a simple theory: you either have a smart money mindset or you don’t. When it comes to being mature about financial issues—chipping away debt, saving to buy a car—it doesn’t always come naturally. If anything, many feel disconnected from money-related matters, even if it’s in their best interest to know more.

"I hate going to a bank and not really knowing what I am doing when it comes to money," said Simon Bowers, a 31-year-old who works in public relations, featured in an article in Fast Company about the MassMutual-IDEO collaboration. "They don’t seem to take into account that this might be scary for us."

So how to invite this wary demographic to the table? Design an accessible way to meet them wherever they are: online and on their phones. IDEO helped build the new venture from the ground up—designing a brand identity and experience focused on transparency, meeting users where they are, and helping people navigate complicated financial situations so they can live life on their own terms. It’s called Society of Grownups, and you can think of it as a sort of master’s program for adulthood. Each piece of the program builds on a common vision that continues to iterate every day.

After building and testing full-scale, live prototypes, the brick-and-mortar Boston location opened in 2014 and operated much like a supper club—a warm, inviting space where young people could hang out, feast on delicious meals, attend talks, and learn about things like 401Ks, living on a budget, and how to pick good, cheap wine. After two years of continued prototyping, MassMutual recognized that the digital channel has the most potential to grow and closed the brick-and-mortar location to focus their investment in building out the bespoke online financial tools to reach more people across the nation.

From leeches to gene therapy, how we treat sickness has changed beyond recognition over the centuries. But one question asked by ancient healers and modern doctors alike remains the same: “How are you feeling?”

“We’ve had the ‘quantified self’ for a number of years—sensors that measure steps, weight, blood pressure,” said Bruce Hellman, cofounder of UK-based digital health startup uMotif. “But by only focusing on the quantitative, we miss the whole picture of a person.”

Hellman cofounded uMotif in 2012, inspired by the self-awareness he gained when tracking his sleep after his baby was born. uMotif gives people the tools to record and track their mood, sleep, and clinically relevant symptoms like dizziness or breathlessness on their mobile phone app, and share the resulting data with their doctor and care team to better inform appointments, and treatment plans.

Named as one of 50 UK "scale-ups" that could grow to over £100m in revenue by not-for-profit organization Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, uMotif’s software and apps have been deployed in dozens of hospitals, and profiled in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The London Times. With a view to scaling strategically, Hellman applied to IDEO Europe’s first Startup in Residence, a three-month-long program to accelerate companies through design thinking. “We brought the whole of uMotif to IDEO: product, organization, branding, approach, and business model,” said Hellman. “We were keen to re-consider just about everything.”

During the residency, the uMotif team embedded with IDEO’s London studio to work closely with an eclectic team of interaction, business, and communication designers, and design researchers, to explore every aspect of the business.

The team found that although uMotif’s organic growth had reflected the rapidly expanding digital health market, the offer was somewhat fragmented as a result. In response, uMotif decided to tighten its sales focus from 14 branches of medicine to just two: oncology and cardiology (with mental health as an R&D area).

In-depth interviews with patients, nurses, doctors, and executives revealed a clear opportunity: “simple symptom tracking for people going through an acute or serious period in their health, to activate and extend the patient-care team relationship,” Hellman says. The focus switched from the Quantified Self to the Qualified Self, coined by the team to reference uMotif’s unique approach to measuring how people feel.

Designers set about reconfiguring and prototyping aspects of the brand, product, business, and organizational model for delivery. Whereas the original uMotif product had been designed with a single clinician in mind, the team designed a new dashboard catering for the reality of modern healthcare—multiple caregivers.

Ultimately, uMotif’s offer is not just about helping patients understand their own health; it’s about providing meaningful insights that enable them to have richer conversations with their care teams—allowing them to work together to improve care plans and outcomes.

“We are a much more focused, confident, and clear organization, truly prepared to scale sales, delivery and clinical impact,” says Hellman, referring to the impact of their participation in the Startup in Residence program. Now back in its own headquarters, the team takes with it a toolkit of IDEO systems and processes with which to run their business and to apply to new projects, products, and services.

“Health systems around the world are quickly adopting digital channels,” he said. “We aim to be at the forefront of this inevitable shift, using design thinking to put people at the centre of their care, improving quality of life, treatment outcomes, and healthcare experience.”

WATCH: uMotif: Sam's Story.

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IDEO designers wanted to take on a challenge: How might we help kids make better decisions around food and being active?

Designers moved forward with three concepts that addressed this challenge from three completely different directions:

• Top Chops, a hands-on cooking adventure that builds kids’ confidence in the kitchen by working toward becoming a Top Chop “master chef.”
• Daredevils, a wearable device that measures the intensity of energy exerted, but doesn’t prescribe the activity, which kids can use to dare each other to reach activity goals.
• Presso, a set of child-size kitchen tools that slice and dice fresh food in imaginative ways, making cooking fun and helping kids feel they have a role in making their own healthy food.

The design team behind this work was featured on 60 Minutes, and some of the resulting concepts were featured on CBS This Morning.

In updating the popular and industry-defining PalmPilot, Palm Computing wanted to reposition the next-generation Palm V as a high-design accessory to set it apart from its many imitators.

Together with IDEO, it crafted a sleek, elegant device, half the thickness of the original in an anodized aluminum housing. Incorporating an internal lithium-ion battery that recharges in the dock, the side rails act as an open architecture to provide attachment for a variety of styluses, cases, and other add-ons.

Name: Ben Syverson
Location: Chicago
Role at IDEO: As a senior software designer, I apply an interaction design lens to software development (or vice versa?) to take our prototypes further faster. Our development needs are as diverse as our projects. Lately, I've been helping our team prototype concepts for the operating room using VR.
Joined IDEO: 2014
Instagram: @bensyverson
Titillating Fact: I've always been into typography, and after I joined IDEO, I started drawing letters after work. It's very meditative! Before I knew it, I had designed two large type families. Unbeknownst to my fellow IDEOers, I've been able to sneak those typefaces into every one of my IDEO projects, in some form or another—from wireframes and prototypes to client presentations.

1. Unison

Unison is a textile design company that I really admire. They often collaborate with local artists and designers, and I just love their taste and sense of style. Unison has a great little store here in Chicago, and a beautifully shot catalog that my wife and I absolutely pore over.

2. Rotring Rapid Pro

My Rotring Rapid Pro lead holder is my security blanket. I take it everywhere. It's mostly brass and steel, giving it the satisfying weight and premium feel of a classic Leica. The 2mm lead can give you fine marks or subtle shading, and can stand up to more pressure than thin leads. I bought two Rapid Pros, in chrome and matte black, because YOLO.

3. John Sheppard

I recently learned that my friend John Sheppard quit his job as an art director at the Wall Street Journal to fully focus on his gorgeous ceramic work, and I couldn't be happier for him. He has this amazing way of subverting the clean minimalism of his geometry with organic cutouts, intricate textures, and unexpected surfaces.

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In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Ben Syverson.

I’ve been a fan of my friend and colleague Nick Dupey, a member of Young Monster, for years. He and I once collaborated on a poster for Moogfest, and the first night we got together, he pulled out a stack of multi-colored construction paper and began cutting out shapes. That moment stuck with me—it brought back memories of elementary school art class, a time without computers and inhibitions.

So as my holiday break began, I committed to return to that headspace. For over a decade I had kept file drawers of old clip art, temporary parking passes, owners manuals, security envelopes, and other ephemera that caught my eye. I guess it’s a kind of graphic designer kleptomania, pocketing found type and imagery to display or repurpose. I fumbled through the stacks, tore apart some junk mail and magazines, and began reassembling.

There was nothing precious about it. In fact, it was so quick that it felt like whiplash. My intent was simply to reassemble the mass of trash on my tabletop. It was an intuitive, thoughtless act that allowed my fingers to be free to make new movements. My sense of touch was back. I could hear the pink noise of tearing paper. I could smell the tape and glue. I had escaped the box.

Every day during the holiday I made a collage in an empty notebook I had long forgotten. I would slip away into my home studio during a lull and assemble another combination of type, images, and textures. I got lost in it. My creative freedom awakened. The feeling of creative wonder from my childhood was rediscovered.

I’ve kept it up since then. Early in the morning before I fill my mind with calendar to-dos, email, and other grown-up activities, I make something. It’s 10-20 minutes that sit somewhere between meditation and puzzle solving. My visual skills are sharper. My fingers are smarter. My ability to find resolution from chaos is faster. And even though I still don’t love my laptop any more than when this obsession began, I no longer feel trapped by it.

So how can you escape the box? Here are a few suggestions to help you rediscover your 8-year old self:

• Reframe junk mail as an endless stream of new mediums. Security envelopes from credit card bills, retail catalogs, and poorly designed postcards get me excited about checking the postbox when I get home.
• Begin with only a few elements—faces are the easiest starting point. Put three items together to get yourself going. The more you do, the easier it is to build complex creations.
• Don’t start with intention or a desire for meaning. Meaning will reveal itself as you create. The majority of what I’ve collaged is meaningless. It’s an exercise in associating form, color, and lines. But there’s the occasional moment when a story comes through.
• Always be willing to call your session a failure. I do these quickly and sometimes I just throw them away because they don’t resolve well. This isn’t an exercise in making something precious—it is a process that happens to have an occasionally stunning result.
• Save your scraps. I have drawers of them now and they often are the starter for my next image.
• Travel with a glue stick. Every hotel room has a stack of lifestyle magazines with luxury perfume ads. Tear them up in your downtime, then reassemble. Impress your friends on Instagram with your artwork instead of what you ate for dinner.

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Two years ago, I began to fall out of love with the computer. It had become a claustrophobic box that dictated how I communicated and how I created. I felt like I was losing my design sensibilities, and treading a well-worn trail through the same digital menus, with my fingers commanding the same virtual assets.

We wanted to change that, and in the process, to help our community learn how to do it better by paying close attention to how great writers wield language. So we invited our colleagues to take a close look at powerful opening sentences, all drawn from novels.

We called it The Sentence Gallery. Inspired by writer, editor, and friend-of-IDEO, Allan Reeder, the project takes to heart a quote by journalist William Zinsser that Reeder shared on his blog: "Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it."

To bring The Sentence Gallery to life, communications designers Jason Baker and Sera Koo built a wall out of foamcore and mounted it in our main community space. Over a few weeks, they showcased a series of sentences, writ large. They also laser-cut thought bubbles from Post-it pads and invited people to reflect on what made each sentence effective. The sharp point of the bubble operated as a marker that allowed passers-by to draw attention to whatever effect they’d noticed, placing their comment at a specific moment in the sentence.

What’s the effect of this word followed by that one? How does the rhythm and pacing of a sentence make the reader feel? Those were the kinds of question we wanted the Gallery to provoke.

At IDEO, great writing emerges from an admixture of instinct, craft, inspiration, learning, and unlearning. That’s likely true for most any design artifact worth our attention.

As designers, we treat sentences like any other prototype. We get them out quickly, and then we get to work on them, refining our writing until it takes us where we need to go.

Writing sharpens our thinking. And as human-centered designers, we rely on it to communicate unspoken human needs. But the craft of writing is itself somewhat hidden; it can seem like a secret art, all furtive fingertapping behind the screen of an open laptop.

Conversational UI is getting a lot of buzz out in the world, and for good reason. SMS is going through a renaissance, and its immediacy and accessibility make it an ideal channel for building services at a time when apps are no longer the medium for digital experiences.

Beyond the buzz, conversational UI shows us that everything in design should be considered a conversation. All elements in an experience are exchanges between people, brands, businesses, services, and, increasingly, machine-powered intelligence. Conversation is the primary design material for designers — and its general purpose is to impact people’s behaviors and emotions.

Designing Conversations

The ambiguous design process.

These days there’s a strong focus on chatbots and conversations as end products, but in our IDEO New York studio, we’ve been using conversations as a prototyping tool to test assumptions, learn, and inspire design. Chatbots are exciting, but we’re also excited about what they unlock for us as a learning medium, not just because they’re the next big thing.

Here's one of our experiences using chatbots as a design tool.

Walkbot: Prototyping Content and Engagement

In 2014, together with a Japanese electronics manufacturer, IDEO designed a device and smartphone app that captures a woman’s activities in order to generate thoughtful, actionable insights about her fitness choices.

At the time, wearable devices were heavily marketed towards men. The women we were addressing wanted meaningful content, and were far more focused on competing with themselves than with others. It also turned out that our product was too data-heavy.

"I like that it’s there if I need it. It’s kind of like a little friend." [anonymous user]

Walking alongside our participants during field research.

The dashboard created to communicate with users and track responses.

To uncover what meaningful content looks like for these women, we went to the women themselves.

A software designer on our team built a custom tool leveraging Twilio’s SMS API, and created an SMS platform that a team of people could use to manage and direct messages. We recruited a panel of women, and during their workouts, a team member would send messages like “great workout, keep going” or “you’ve walked ___ steps today, add a 5 minute walk to reach 10,000.”

Lisa: “Ugh, he wants me to pick up my intensity and burn more calories.”

IDEO: “How do you know it’s a man?”

Lisa: “Because I’m mad at it right now."

An example of our real-time SMS prototyping — a team member would secretly text messages to our participant during her workout.

The responses were surprising. For one thing, women who participated in the design research would project gender and personality on to our bot. In moments of frustration, the bot was referred to as a “he,” when, in fact, the messages were coming from our female colleague. For another, not only did the women want to share their activities, they also wanted to share their failures. For them, fitness wasn’t purely about achieving a goal, but also the process it took to get there.

What we learned:

• The best way to understand what a conversation needs to be is by starting it. Figure out tone of voice, pacing, and interactions  as it unfolds.
• It’s possible to make conversations feel more personal with only a few data points. Be intentional and creative.
• Every participant will project an identity onto the bot — regardless of whether the design team gave it one.
• Bots allow for a nuanced interaction that might bring surprising elements to your product. Be willing to pivot in response to happy accidents.

Our Chatbots Protocol

During the past few years, the interaction design and design research teams at IDEO New York have worked closely with real people to test value propositions and the desirability of digital products and services. Together, we built ad-hoc tools that helped us design conversations with users, and engage with them in real-life contexts.

As we planned and ran these prototypes, we developed a set of principles we now rely on in our research.

• A prototype is a question, embodied. What are you trying to learn? Who are you learning from?
• Hack existing tools. There’s no need to build from scratch.
• Iterate in real-time. The beauty of SMS is that you can adapt quickly.
• Be explicit about the intentions of your work, and make sure that your actions are in line with the ethics of field research
• Consider all the stories, anecdotes, and insights you gathered through your chatbot to inspire the design.

Meet Stanley

There are several services that can help you set up an SMS-based platform. Alternatively, you can create your own conversation bot following the instructions we shared for Stanley, the SMS-based platform that we use.

You can find the source code, and the instructions to setup Stanley here.

For some more on using bots for design research, read this article on IDEO Labs.

The above is an abridged version of a longer Medium article that details three case studies where we’ve used chatbots to prototype services and products. Read the full article here.

Illustrations by Amy Wang.

The below is an abridged version of a longer Medium article that details three case studies where we’ve used chatbots to prototype services and products. Here, we'll focus on the hows and whys of using chatbots to prototype content.

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.