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.

For a decade and a half, the group has built a global reputation for pulling stunts like the Grand Central Terminal freeze. If design is about the capture and channeling of attention, Improv Everywhere has a lesson for us in how to achieve that. We spoke to founder Charlie Todd to get some backstory on his benevolent guerrilla art troupe.

How did Improv Everywhere start?

Charlie Todd: I totally blundered into it. I was 22-years-old, and moved to New York to be an actor in improv comedy. I said to some friends, let’s go play a prank in a bar tonight. We did it for five years, and then when YouTube was created, I already had a library of content. A thing we did in Grand Central Station got 10 million views in the first week alone. I’ve spent the last eight years following that viral breakout.

What’s the audience meant to take away from such stunts?

When a load of people turn up at Coney Island in eveningwear and jump in the ocean, and people ask why, the answer is that there is no why. We’re all conditioned to assess for some extrinsic motivation, like the thing was for charity or a comment on global warming. It’s okay to just do a thing because it’s silly.

So, it’s simple whimsy with no purpose?

Well, I’d like to think that having that experience maybe alters people’s perception in some small way. We’re encouraging people to express themselves in a public space, in an unauthorized manner. In this post-9/11 security world we live in, we’re trying to make people realize that they don’t have to ask permission to express themselves creatively.

Is it also important to be connecting people?

I grew up in South Carolina, in a small city. I was used to people making eye contact and smiling. Moving to New York, everyone is busy and has a smartphone. It was like the only time you made eye contact was if something bad was going on: a train being delayed, or a crazy person shouting. People would unify around shiftiness. So we thought: can we create something that is positive in nature, something so unusual and joyful that you have a positive connection with someone?

Do you always get a positive reaction?

During one of the No-Pants pranks we had some police trouble. An officer stumbled across the event, and didn’t like it. Our people stayed in character and said they had forgotten their pants. The officer took the train out of service. But everything was eventually dismissed. It turns out that there’s no law against being in your underwear. When we did the event the next year, the police were there, to help escort us and make sure people had a good time.

What do you do when you’re not freaking people out on the streets of New York?

I get hired by brands to create surprise moments or spectacles, or brainstorm ideas for a brand campaign. I get to direct and produce TV. Last year I was the show-runner for a show on MTV. I’ve also been at the Upright Citizens Brigade for 15 years, as a performer and teacher.

Tell us about the teaching. Can you teach someone to be funny?

All you can teach is for people to learn how to be themselves—to be honest, and react in a truthful way. Everyone’s unique personality and viewpoint is funny. It’s counter-intuitive: when trying to be funny, people often try to be something that they’re not, by imitating stuff they’ve seen on television and so on. Instead of trying to be something you’re not, you need to be more authentically connected to what you are. That applies to creativity too: instead of reaching outside and trying too hard, focus in on what truly inspires you.

Photos courtesy of Improv Everywhere.

In the dead of winter, 2001, a woman riding the New York subway looked up from her book and saw a passenger wearing no pants. She was puzzled, but ignored him. At the next stop, another pantsless passenger joined him. And then more. By this time, she had put her book away. A hidden camera captured her reaction as it evolved from confusion to delight. She traded looks of amazement with the other passengers—a group called Improv Everywhere was responsible for breaking their routine.

1. A deeper understanding of 3D relationships

These puzzles teach how different shapes fit together in three-dimensional space. M. C. Escher would have no advantage: there is no cheating the puzzle, and all the rules of physics and gravity apply. In order to solve the puzzle, you have to understand how the shapes fit together. This is important for designers, especially when so much is being designed on a computer. If a product is being designed for the physical world, it needs to play nice with the rules of physics.

2. Forward and backward problem solving

Once you understand how the pieces are supposed to fit together, you actually have to make it happen. Often this involves both forward and backward problem solving. The internal monologue might go something like this: “So I am going to start with this piece because it is the biggest and is easiest to deal with, if I work around it. This smaller piece is probably the second half of the left side. And this piece has to be the last piece."

Sometimes you know the last step first. Sometimes you know step 1, 2, and 5 but then have to solve for steps 3 and 4. That can be scary in a linear world, but as designers that is sometimes the reality we face. It’s helpful to have the confidence that steps 3 and 4 will become clear, even if initially they are hard to see.

3. Hand-eye/Hand-brain problem solving

There is something very rich about holding a problem in your hand as you work with it. By holding the puzzle, you have a deeper understanding of the spatial relationships that must be solved. While it is possible to understand these things on a computer or on paper, being able to physically handle an object allows you to reach conclusions and iterate solutions in different ways. Fluency across mediums can only help us arrive at these solutions faster.

Others lessons might include balancing the details with the big picture, and reading context clues. But I found that I had an even deeper appreciation for these puzzles when I learned how to make some. I would encourage any interested designer with access to materials and tools to try making one for themselves.

For most of the puzzles, the pieces seem very simple. The simplicity is deceptive, however. Take the star puzzle: a configuration of six roughly rectangular identical pieces with two “triangular” notches cut out of each that slide together nicely (when you know how to do it.) But the pieces aren’t exactly rectangular. The notches are not simple triangles. In fact there are 12 faces, and only a handful of right angles. Plus, most commonly these pieces are only a few inches long—not safe to cut on most power tools without jigs—but which jigs? And to add to all that, they have to be precisely made in order to actually work, especially if you want them to look good. Again, there are simple solutions to all of these problems, but it takes some figuring to make it work. But that’s the point of a puzzle, right?

Maybe it’s their old school charm or the fond memories I have of solving them at Cracker Barrel, but I am a fan of wooden block puzzles. And after learning how to make them, from my wizard-like teacher at North Bennet Street School, I have come to appreciate the true elegance of these puzzles, and the lessons they have for designers.

Dix, a photojournalist, got on a plane for what he thought would be a 10-day trip. He ended up staying for four years, working at the United Nations to help find food and shelter for 300,000 displaced locals. It was during that time that Dix first came across Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel charting Spiegelman’s father’s experience in the Holocaust as a Polish Jew.

Before Maus, Dix’s only exposure to comics came from reading Calvin and Hobbes and Asterix. But as he huddled in bunkers during air raids and artillery fire, Dix was struck by how simply and powerfully Spiegelman was able to render the complexities of identity, memory, and trauma in graphic form.

With violence between government and Tamil forces intensifying, the Sri Lankan government ordered the UN to evacuate the region in September 2008. Dix returned to London with post-traumatic stress disorder and a fierce determination to tell the stories of those he’d left behind.

He travelled to meet refugee families and record their experiences, and worked with illustrator Lindsay Pollock to conceptualize them into a graphic storyline. Dix also embarked on a Ph.D. in anthropology to systematically research the production of the comic. The result of all his work? The Vanni, a 200-page graphic novel about the conflict, told through one Sri Lankan family’s eyes, and an accompanying thesis on the methodology and ethics of producing such a complex piece of graphic literature.

Dix has since brought to life stories about crack-cocaine addicts in Guinea Bissau, a Nigerian woman trafficked to London (Abike's story, below), and the plight of African and Asian migrants in the Persian Gulf. At every stage, Dix works alongside his subjects to ensure he’s best reflecting their experiences, and their stories have become a powerful educational tool, illustrating complex, often abstract issues including migration, human trafficking, and drug addiction at the most human level.

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A chance meeting with an IDEO designer led Dix to our London studio, where we collaborated on a three-day long pro bono sprint to develop his stories into scalable, interactive teaching tools for classrooms. We designed and prototyped a WhatsApp-based multimedia story about Merha, an Eritrean refugee fleeing to London to escape persecution, as well as an app-based version of Merha’s story, including buttons and swipes on each frame of the story, so readers could learn more.

Dix’s next step is to secure funding to build out the app and develop lesson plans to roll out across schools internationally. But in the meantime, he’s not standing still. Dix is already testing a lo-fi version of the educational tool—an interactive PDF—in 300 schools across 26 countries including Brazil, Sri Lanka, Democratic Republic Of Congo, the UAE, and many others. His next comic? Capturing the story of the Yazidi community fleeing ISIS in Syria.

It was Boxing Day 2004 when Ben Dix, founder of British literary comic publisher PositiveNegatives, got the call. A university friend, stationed in the Tamil Tiger-held region of Vanni in northern Sri Lanka, was asking if he'd come and help. It was the day of the tsunami that killed 230,000 people, one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.

It turned what would be a humdrum brand mark into one that was tongue-in-cheek and playful. Optimistically, I wondered if it helped lift the spirits of the Great Croft residents. I also started looking for more typographical serendipity.

There are plenty of examples of signage that has degraded to the point of being unreadable, but a beautiful accident is where the change looks intentional and, ideally, adds to the meaning and character of the neighborhood.

I saw my second example at Unity Kitchen Cafe in the new Olympic park in East London, where residents and Londoners further afield are drawn by attractions such as the children’s adventure playground, nature park, or velodrome. The cafe contained a diverse mix of nationalities, so it seemed rather fitting that this broken C was reminiscent of a cedilla (ç), a nod to any European visitors. Please don't fix the sign, I love it the way it is.

I became obsessed. Searching everywhere for more evidence of meaningful mistakes, even engaging my family in the hunt, and it was on one such hunt that I found the Pelican restaurant in Peckham, south London.

I’ve been wondering about how we might design for beautiful accidents: if wear and tear isn't a thing we can control, how we can make accidents appear elegant? At Wired magazine they call such intentional accidents Wrong Theory. Inspired by Edgar Degas’ painting, Jockeys Before the Race, in which the artist defied the conventional composition of his day by inserting a grey pole that bifurcates the scene, slicing right through one of the horses’ heads. The same could be said of Marcel Duchamp’s act of turning a urinal on its head, signing it R. Mutt, and deeming it art. Wrong Theory celebrates the act of breaking the rules.

But part of the beauty of Beautiful Accidents is that they are rare. If you find one, please share it with me! Check out my Instagram or tag your photos with #beautifulaccident.

I first spotted a beautiful accident when I saw the sign for the Great Croft housing estate in London. The A swinging down against the Akzidenz Grotesque type worked so well, in part aided by the horizontal seam in the concrete, that I had to think was that serendipity or intentional?

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.