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.

Fast forward a few years and the big whiteboard has been replaced by a nimble digital tool that allows us to track and collect data about our projects, leads, and teams. Fantastic—except we lost the communal hoopla of physically erasing the board in front of our friends. Somehow clicking to archive didn’t have as much pizzazz.

What could we create that would provide that same, satisfying sequence of tangible action and group celebration in our now purely digital reality? Enter the Big Green Button.

It’s exactly what it sounds like—a massive green button that says “Push to Celebrate,” affixed to the wall next to the large monitors that track our projects. When a project is complete, a team member hits the button and a ridiculous animated gif overtakes the displays while music from "The Price is Right" plays over the speakers. It’s not confetti cannons, but it's fun and triggers the same enthusiastic cheering we enjoyed at the whiteboard.

So how did we do it? Here's the step by step.

The button itself is from Adafruit, and it’s huge. (Think the size of a grapefruit). The housing for the button is a 3D printed cowling that encases the button and the wiring and connects via an aesthetically pleasing audio cable. The audio cable allows us to unplug the button easily—no complex wiring to worry about.

At the other end of the cable is the brains—an Arduino with Adafruit’s ethernet shield. It receives the signal from the button, then sends out a POST request to the website’s server, which runs on IDEO’s network. Because multiple people can view the website at any given time, the user must locally “arm” the button on the AngularJS website with an option box. The option box tells the website that this website will respond to button presses. The go server running the server can then route the incoming request to the large screen’s website only.

This whole setup uses only a few lines of code to add a physical layer and a heightened level of excitement to our project completion ceremony—and everyone loves it.

A button like this is just asking to be pushed, but we added the sign to give people an extra nudge, and a hint as to what it actually does.

Few things are more satisfying than wrapping a months-long project. Back when the New York office tracked its active projects on a whiteboard in our kitchen, we’d celebrate these completed projects at our weekly meetings. Each team would walk up to the front of the room and—as the rest of the studio clapped and cheered—triumphantly erase their project from the board. It was a small thing, but it was ours, and it was pretty satisfying.

What was IDEO’s contribution? Giant beach balls. But not for the beach. More like magical floating orbs that made music when you touched them.

“We wanted to build an instrument with play as an interface,” said creative director Peter Hyer. “An interactive environment in which anyone can play music without giving it a thought.”

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How do they work? Here's the layperson’s version: The team fitted the balls with sensors that mapped the force of the impact to notes. Those notes were then matched to an algorithmically-generated backing track.

For the more technical version, keep on reading.

The process

Ideation

We knew that we wanted to channel the spirit of Bob Moog in our installation, so we began with a brainstorming and prototyping phase where we focused on bridging music and technology with creativity. We really wanted to break the barrier that prevents people from expressing themselves musically, and we also wanted to capture something of the Moogfest zeitgeist. Two ideas emerged—one around music, and one around narrative and synthesis based on the statements of the people at the festival. We loved both and wanted them to coalesce, but we were concerned they might be oil and water.

To find out, we began prototyping. We made a quadraphonic phase-music vocoder sampler in hopes of making spoken phrases musical; a computer-vision Post-it® Note step sequencer to bring musical life to an unintimidating object; and generative word games to try to tease out a crowd-sourced narrative arc of the festival. But nothing felt quite right, so we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves, what is it that we want people to feel?

A Step Back

To get more perspective, we looked for reference points. We found inspiration in large scale installations from artists like Zimoun, where a simple idea like the sound of a cotton ball hitting a cardboard box took on new effect and meaning when scaled. It prompted us to wonder, what if we scaled the acoustic sound of balloons? What are the sounds the balloons should make, where should the sound come from, and how might that capture or express the narrative of the festival?

Iteration

Quickly and tragically, we discovered that combining a bunch of large balloons with an industrial fan was not quite as mind-blowing as we had expected. But, still, their innocuous beauty made balloons seem like a magical invitation to play.

We sought out people who had worked on similar projects, and who were not steeped in our brainstorming assumptions. We talked to Jack Gale from CCA, who had created an interactive balloon project, invited a group from San Francisco's Exploratorium to brainstorm and test out a rough prototype of balloon word games, and worked to find balloons that were big enough and robust enough for us to embed light elements and sensors in them.

Flexibility

Originally, we had based our design around an 8-foot by 16-foot box. Instead, we chose a covered outdoor basketball court. Huge! Central! Beautiful!

But the scale was drastically larger and the lights we had planned to embed couldn’t compete with daylight. To make it work, we scaled the beach ball diameter from 2.5 feet to 8 feet to better fit the space (we had already swapped the balloons for beach balls, since the materials are more robust), eliminated light elements, and put the emphasis on sound derived from beach ball interaction. Since we were at a music festival, it was poetic for sound to be the primary feedback mechanism.

Our friends at the Exploratorium invited us to do a trial install at their museum, which quickly brought the interaction questions to the forefront. You learn a lot quickly when the public kicks the tires. When people walked up to the beach balls, their first instinct was to hit them. But we didn’t want the beach balls to just work like a button—we wanted the installation to be more nuanced, and produce different sounds based on where and how each ball was hit. To do it, we used the nine degree of freedom inertial motion unit to map directional acceleration to pitch, which worked as though there was a keyboard wrapped around each beach ball.

How it works

The Beach Ball Sensor

Each beach ball has a sensor package in a custom made mechanical holder that is held captive by a carabiner. For sensing and communication, we used an Arduino with WiFi, a nine degree of freedom inertial motion sensor that detects acceleration in X, Y, and Z directions, rotation about X, Y, and Z directions, and magnetic field in X, Y, and Z directions. We also opted for an external antenna for added WiFi robustness.

This package communicates raw sensor data via OSC messages over WiFi to a computer that processes the sensor data. A USB battery designed to recharge your smartphone on-the-go powers the hardware and provides enough energy to run each system for about 14 hours—more than enough for an entire day of uninterrupted play.

Signal Processing and Gesture Recognition

On the computer, Max processes the streaming sensor data, recognizes gestures, and outputs a MIDI note with velocity whenever it detects a beach ball impact gesture. Ableton Live takes the MIDI data from all the beach balls, filters the notes to work with the current harmony, and triggers instrument sound.

Feedback

We wanted to be certain that participants could hear how they were changing the music, so while the background music played evenly throughout the installation, each individual beach ball generated a sound in the speaker closest to it—kind of like stage monitors that bands use playing live. That feedback encouraged everyone to play more.

Collaborative Music Design

To set the stage for musical confidence, we wrote algorithmic music that acted as a backing track, so no one felt the pressure to play the first note. Depending on where a beach ball was hit, one of 15 possible chromatic notes was generated. So, we filtered the beach ball notes so that they always fit consonantly with the backing track—you couldn’t play a “wrong” note. Even still, six different instruments playing over background texture can be too dense. So we opted for a section approach—three sets of two instruments. A trio with backing felt like the right balance of individual voice without cacophony.

Rigging

When we got to the venue, we had to invent a rigging system to get the beach balls to hang at the right place and height. In a divine moment of MacGyver-like inspiration, Diem Ho devised a hierarchical beach ball wiring system that could be lowered and raised quickly with precise control. When we were swarmed with little kids, this system allowed us to raise the beach balls just enough so people could see little kids behind a beach ball and avoid hitting them; things became a lot safer.

Improvisation

The most important design practice throughout the entire process was to stay nimble and improvise. We repurposed problems into constraints that catalyzed our evolving platform. In a sea of unknowns, improvisation allows you to find generative ways to translate even the simplest knowns into a compass toward meaning, and have fun doing it.

Lead engineer and composer Aaron Soloway couldn’t help but smile as he watched festival attendees interact with the balls. “Whether it was a huge bearded dude into modular synths, or a 5-year-old who just wanted to hit things, everyone was into it.”

For Hyer, that universal spirit of play was key. “It created an opportunity for people to connect with music that was unexpected and in the spirit of the festival,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s about celebrating the convergence of art and engineering. That’s what that Bob Moog was all about.”

Moog hit the big-time when his company started producing portable versions of his giant synthesizers (aka the Minimoog). For now however, the beach ball synth will remain enormous.

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The name Moog conjures up images of retro-future machines and space-age sounds. In the mid-60s, Bob Moog created the synthesizers that unleashed an era of electronic experimental music. Today, as a tribute to Bob, we have Moogfest, a gathering of musicians, DJs, performance artists, and technologists. This year’s performers ranged from Gary Numan and Grimes to a classical guitarist having his toenails painted by a cybernetically-augmented accomplice, and an 8-hour DJ set during which the audience slept in provided beds.

Each mythic tool/medicine could be used to combat common childhood ailments and illnesses in a way that celebrates each malady from beginning to end.

We are big fans of design fiction as a means to push our thinking and to explore what the future could look and feel like. For this design fiction exercise, we challenged ourselves with finding ways of turning kids into the heroes of their own young lives. We set out to create empathetic tools for childhood ailments and illnesses that recast painful, awkward and embarrassing experiences as rites of passage, spirit journeys and superpowers. To that end we asked ourselves a few questions to get started:

How might we turn embarrassing childhood moments into badges of honor?

How might we empower kids to celebrate the sometimes awkward illnesses of childhood?

How might we design for rites of passage, or inspire rituals that spark a contagious creativity?

So, we let our imagination go into a world with monsters in the closet, serpents under the bed, and yellow eyes peering out of the darkness. And we asked ourselves how to take the trauma and the terror out of routine childhood experiences. One thing we knew for certain: solving problems technically and explaining them rationally wouldn’t get us very far. First, we had to address them on an emotional, even mystical plane.

Childhood can be full of play and promise, but also pain. What might seem like a temporary annoyance to grownups can be felt as an unending bout of humiliation and suffering for young hearts and minds. Pink eye, lice, ear infections, zits—the barrage of indignities can wreak havoc on even the most self-confident kid.

But what if these childhood ailments were recast as rites of passage and superpowers? What if the telltale itchy scalp or bloodshot eyes could be framed as something to embrace, even be proud of? That’s what Phantasy Pharmacy seeks to capture in its design fiction collection of mythic tools that could be used to combat common childhood ailments and illnesses in a way that celebrates each malady from beginning to end.

To get the full, unadulterated experience, check out phph.ideo.com.

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Did you ever have lice as a kid? A bunch of us here at IDEO Cambridge did and we haven't forgotten how awful and embarrassing it felt. And when designers are faced with never-ending, wish-I-could-forget-you experiences, they start looking for ways to fix them. Recently, the studio banded together to create Phantasy Pharmacy, a bit of design fiction to help us stretch our imaginative limits and wrestle down unhappy childhood memories.

1. More than meets the eye

Tracking shots of winding country roads, and lingering peeks of sheet metal: car ads might seem as lifelike as it gets, but they’re often surprisingly realistic CGI, particularly for new cars that might not be public yet. To keep up that realism, post-production house The Mill’s neat solution has been to create a Transformers-like rig, with adjustable wheelbase, height, and driving style, to help its artists mimic pretty much any car, without costly shipping and availability worries. Take a closer look at the rig here.

2. The weird satisfaction of a close shave

For the crafty and OCD-inclined people—like us—who find pleasure in perfectly cubed fruit, watching cans being crushed, or a Leica body being painstakingly filed, relax and enjoy these slightly hypnotic videos of master Japanese ceramicist Abe Haruya at work.

3. Welcome to our open house

Kitchen of the future exhibitions stretch back half a century, but Arduino founder Massimo Banzi and acclaimed sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling have gone one further: they created Casa Jasmina, an open-source apartment in an old factory in Turin, to test what a connected home might look like in the future. Furniture and fittings are modular and hackable, and artists and companies are invited to submit ideas for connected appliances. Eventually, you’ll be able to rent the space out on Airbnb, says Banzi.

4. Getting conversational with computers

When Google’s AlphaGo deep learning software beat Go champion Lee Sedol, the world saw, via the media, a firsthand view of the power of artificial intelligence. But we’re still a long way from solving real problems, in part because interacting with AI is stuck at the computer science level. But an intrepid gang of interaction designers are building clever new ways for humans to better interact with these systems, argues computer vision and machine learning expert Greg Borenstein on Medium. Read the article here.

5. Go local with Airbnb

Fancy dining with a sumo wrestler, feeling frisky at a burlesque show, or getting your hands dirty with an urban farmer? Airbnb is helping travelers belong anywhere with a new product they’re testing. Called Experiences, it helps adventurous guests book escapades with local hosts. Check out Airbnb Experiences here.

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In this week’s Creative Caffeine, IDEO London serves up a quintuple shot of inspiration: post-production house The Mill’s transformer car; the weird soothingness of shaving ceramics; a visit to Arduino’s open-source apartment; designing with artificial intelligence; and drinks with a sumo wrestler, courtesy of Airbnb.

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.