The key to winning the competition in high-end business class air travel lies in the level of service. Legacy European carrier Lufthansa approached IDEO to help redesign its long-haul, business-class service experience into one that’s thoroughly modern, distinctly Lufthansa, and centered on the new needs of today’s discerning passengers.

After putting themselves in the shoes of both travelers and flight attendants on a variety of different airlines, the IDEO design team found that what matters, above champagne and fancy food, is a personal connection between crew and passenger. They used this insight to focus on a new goal: Flight crew consider themselves to be travelers’ trusted, knowing hosts.

To achieve the goal, the design team focused on improving service in six key travel moments, then built a cardboard 1:1 scale mockup of different parts of an airplane to see what they’d need. Designers tested the service in a full section of an Airbus A380 at the airline’s Raunheim, Germany, facility, with real passengers and crew. This prototyping process was crucial, as executives witnessed firsthand how big an impact the new service would have across the organization, which includes 18,000 flight attendants.

Rolling out across the fleet, Lufthansa’s hospitable new service is already getting a good reception among crew. “Pampering passengers like this—individually and personally—was the reason why I started flying for Lufthansa 25 years ago,” said Sabine Schwarz-Odewald, senior flight attendant.

Of all the rooms in our homes, the kitchen is the center of energy, activity, comfort, and creativity—the beating heart of any dwelling. In the coming decade, as our environments and habits change, the kitchen as we know it will evolve drastically. More people will move into cities, and our living spaces will become smaller. Natural resources will become more scarce, food more expensive, and waste an increasingly urgent issue. Near-instant grocery delivery will alter how we shop for and store food, and technology will be embedded in every part of our homes.

What will the kitchen of the future look like, and, more important, what will it feel like to cook, eat, and socialize there?

For IKEA, the world’s biggest furniture store, the time to start designing the kitchen of 2025 is now. So IKEA asked IDEO London and a group of students from Lund and Eindhoven universities to explore the social, technological, and demographic forces that will impact how we behave around food in 2025. The students spent months researching people’s attitudes and ideas about cooking and eating, and IDEO designers guided them as they built concept kitchen products.

To bring these future concepts to the present day, IKEA asked IDEO to design and build a full-size concept kitchen for 250,000 visitors to test out during the Salone Del Mobile in Milan and a six-month stint at EXPO Milano.

Mindful design

Crucial to the success of the project was preserving the tactile creative pleasure of the kitchen. Technology could easily make the space feel robotic and sterile, but this project was guided by the need to use tech to enhance the kitchen’s warmth.

The Concept Kitchen 2025 doesn’t automate away personal choices, but rather facilitates mindfulness with embedded cues throughout the kitchen that subtly guide people toward being conscious of their actions and making informed decisions. In designing the prototypes, the following few concepts emerged.

The Modern Pantry encourages us to have a closer relationship with what we eat by storing food in transparent individual containers on open shelves rather than hiding it at the back of the fridge. The design makes it easy to be inspired by what’s on hand rather than going out to buy more, and it also saves energy: Induction-cooling technology embedded into the shelves responds to RFID stickers on the food’s packaging in order to keep the containers at just the right temperature.

The Table for Living is designed to inspire people to be more creative with food and throw away less. At a loss for what to do with that leftover broccoli? Just place it on the table and a camera recognizes it and projects recipes, cooking instructions, and a timer directly onto the table's surface. Set the timer for how long you want to spend preparing the meal, and the table suggests recipes that can be completed in the window you have available. The table is a nifty solution for a smaller urban dwelling because it’s multimodal: Hidden induction coils instantly cool the surface when not in use, so it’s adjustable for working, cooking, or eating.

The Modern Sink pushes us to be more conscious of our water consumption with a pivoting basin. It must be tipped to one side to drain toxic, or “black,” water, and to the other for safe “gray” water, which is not drinkable but can be filtered and used in a dishwasher or as nourishment for the cooking herbs that grow above the sink.

The Thoughtful Disposal system is a response to the overuse of landfills, and reminds us of exactly what we’re throwing away. Users manually sort recycling from rubbish, and recyclables are then crushed, vacuum-packed, and labeled for pick-up, earning credits for the conscientious (and debits for the wasteful).

IKEA’s kitchen and dining range manager, Gerry Dufresne, explained that the Concept Kitchen 2025 is not really a functional kitchen, but rather “a tangible communication of what the behaviors of the future will be.” It’s just the start of IKEA’s journey toward understanding how those behaviors will shape the company’s future, and Dufresne says the findings will be carried forward into future product development.

Long before Tina Fey’s hit show 30 Rock made it a household name, Rockefeller Center was among Manhattan’s most popular destinations. Not least because NBC’s TODAY show starts every morning by filming its gaggle of fans gathered at Rockefeller Plaza.

When TODAY asked IDEO to help design the experience of their guest audiences before, during, and after the show, IDEO's team joined the fray—standing behind the barricades from 7 to 9 a.m. alongside the show’s visitors.

We gathered feedback and learned what was most important to this dedicated audience: to feel a human connection to the people they had shared their mornings with—every day, for years, sometimes for decades. Visitors wanted a celebration, an event they could document and remember, and of course a clear sense of where to go and what to expect once they arrived.

TODAY’s morning time slot offered an additional challenge: The visitor experience would need to be assembled and fully dismantled every morning, leaving Rockefeller Center in its pristine historic state immediately after the cameras stopped rolling.

To ensure a solution that would be both satisfying to visitors and viable for the show, IDEO engaged audiences, anchors, and crew in a series of live prototypes that incorporated feedback from all sides and designed a warmer, more human-centered experience for everyone involved.

Visitors to the show can now RSVP at TODAY.com/visit beforehand. When they arrive at the new iconic archway on 49th Street, they are given clear directions by dedicated plaza staff on what to expect during their visit. The audience can also craft posters to display in the crowd, receive commemorative Birthday, Bucket List, or Super Fan buttons that recognize special occasions during their visit, and watch live video and audio feeds to build excitement and momentum when the anchors head into the studio.

From the moment visitors decide to visit TODAY at Rockefeller Center to the weeks after when they share memories with friends, the revamped plaza experience ensures visitors feel cared for and appreciated. They now leave feeling that they’re more than just spectators—they’re the heartbeat of TODAY.

Brands don’t take bank holidays. A successful company doesn’t just find solutions during strict nine-to-five office hours—the strength of its relationship with its customers is based on openness to good ideas and flexibility around the unpredictable ways that real people live and work.

Over a five-year relationship with GS Shop, a multichannel commerce company based in Korea, IDEO helped the company develop a brand that reflected an emphasis on openness, transparency, enthusiasm, participation, personalization, and distinction.

When it was time for GS Shop to build a new headquarters, it wanted these ideals to be baked right into the structure of the new building, inspiring the interactions and work styles that would define the company’s future. The team started by looking at one of the most fundamental factors in their employees’ day-to-day experience, the physical spaces where they did their work.

The designers broke down all the elements of the space, including everything from flexible wall configurations to nature-inspired fabric choices that brought the outside in. At the core of their decision-making was the intersection of environment and behavior: How could a certain configuration of desks help new ideas to bubble up? How might the transparency of the boardroom walls encourage executives to make more collaborative decisions?

Traditional Korean business culture places a strong emphasis on hierarchy, but IDEO found that teams worked better when they arranged seating areas in ways that decentralized the boss. Coworkers had felt isolated from those in other business units, so the designers created room for impromptu gatherings outside common meeting spaces. Everything from functional needs, like toothbrush storage, to features that encouraged cross-pollination of ideas, like a set of shelves where departments could share examples of their work with other units, was taken into account.

The result was both an entirely new headquarters and a reimagining of the company’s existing building, each closely mirroring the renderings and recommendations provided by IDEO. GS Shop employees are now working in the new spaces, ready to field new ideas wherever—and whenever—inspiration strikes.

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Designing for Public Services is a toolkit for policymakers and those who deliver public services, developed in collaboration with Nesta, a U.K. innovation charity, and Design for Europe, a design and innovation program co-funded by the European Commission. The tools and methods included allow users to get to the heart of the needs of citizens and civil servants.

The processes and supporting tools, which have been tried and tested in government agencies from Singapore to Qatar, the U.K. to the U.S., can be applied to designing policy and citizen-centered services.

Download the toolkit here.

Spying on Harriet the Spy, Kid Design Researcher

During design projects at IDEO, we often seek inspiration by looking at the world through someone else's eyes. One of our favorite children’s book characters is Harriet the Spy, and we asked ourselves, What if you could see New York through Harriet's eyes? She’s the original design researcher—setting out with her notebook to observe the subtle ways her neighbors behave.

As it turns out, a real estate site has already tracked down Harriet's address: 558 East 87th Street. If you pay a visit to her apartment, look up to the third floor, right under the eaves. According to the book, this is the perch from which she peered down at the street and recorded notes. We were curious to see if any of Harriet’s neighborhood hangouts still exist. Carl Schurz Park, where she lost her notebook, still sits on the East River at East 86th. Harriet reports that the Gregory School, where she was a student, is right nearby, so many people assume it is based on Chapin School, two blocks away. Harriet spies on delivery boy Little Joe Curry from an alley behind the Dei Santis’ grocery store on York Avenue at East 86th Street. Though that shop is now a restaurant—denying us the vicarious thrill of peeking through the window where Harriet did much of her spying—visiting her old haunts sent a spike of childlike joy through us, and transported us to a time when a book could open up an entirely new world.

Koneko Cat Cafe

Koneko Cat Cafe is a relatively new spot on the Lower East Side where customers nibble on Japanese pastries while lounging with an adoptable clowder from Anjellicle Cats Rescue. The cats roam free between rooms on two different levels, lazing on designer cat furniture or swatting at the many cat toys provided for visitors. Everyone can engage in a different way: playing directly with the cats, doing other work with the bonus of being surrounded by felines, or striking up a conversation with humans who have the same affinity for cats. Koneko’s founder toured 25 cat cafes in Japan to get inspiration for her own place. Koneko is similar to Japanese cat cafes, but has a more sophisticated interior design with curated art on the walls. As one visitor told the New York Times, “I have a cat, so I feel a little dirty coming here. It’s like going to a strip club if you’re married.”

Tiny Doll House

We know many designers who find pleasure in miniature things: miniature spoons, miniature post-its, you name it. Hidden in the middle of a long residential block on the Upper East Side is a miniature heaven: Tiny Doll House. It’s a store that sells dollhouses, as well as dollhouse furniture and supplies: miniature nightstands, candelabras, and even equipment to electrify a dollhouse. The store sources miniatures from Europe and South America. Immediately after stepping inside, your imagination is fired up. Peek inside an English Cotswold Cottage—next door to a Riverside Townhouse. The attention to detail and passion that goes into each one is simply astounding. Even if you’re not passionate about decorating dollhouses, you can use these supplies for making terrariums, architectural models, or prototyping small versions of design projects. You can buy tiny Thanksgiving dinner sets, caskets, Starbucks coffee mugs, garlic presses, bunk beds, broken eggs, beaux arts desks, and everything in between.

Header image courtesy of Koneko Cat Cafe.

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Our designers, anthropologists, and architects are professional wanderers. And we don't have to wander far in NYC to find inspiration—it's right outside our door. Here’s where we’re headed this fall.

One way to achieve this is with art. I love the phrase “design is art with rules.” If that is true, can we then assume that “art is design without rules?” If design requires restraint, art requires exploring ideas with abandon. I believe that tapping into that abandon can positively affect our design work.

Here are three ways to use art to shake up your design process.

1. Gallery Immersion

Take a break from your project and visit an art gallery. As you walk around and look at the pieces, consider the questions the artist is asking, or solutions they are proposing. What new rules of gravity or physics have they created? What rules have they broken, and what laws have they upended? Now consider how your project would exist in this world. How would things change, what would be possible? What would you create?

2. Image Provocation

Draw inspiration from art without ever leaving work. Curate a slideshow of images, then present them to your team as a prompt for idea generation. While not as experiential and serendipity-friendly as roaming a sculpture park or an art gallery, the right selection can still provide valuable fuel to a design team. Try using Visual Thinking Strategies to get coworkers to engage in a deeper way.

3. Create your own artwork.

Just as we can find inspiration by making insights tangible, making art in line with the project theme can also be valuable. Pull out the watercolors, pastels, or even the prototyping materials. Grab some old shirts from secondhand stores to use as smocks and transform the team from designers to artists. Have a team spend an hour of quiet, focused time creating a work of art that explores the project content. The goal is not to create a solution, but an expression. Then have the team share their works. Create a “gallery walk.” The resulting art may fall short of masterpiece status, but the head space that was explored will create new considerations and possibly new directions for the project.

Sometimes, the design thinking process can become a little too linear and predictable. Most great innovation involves a shift in perspective, a moment when our everyday point of view is turned upside down, and the team finds a new way to approach a challenge. Getting to that shift requires some disruption of the predictable flow of a project.

It’s an AI that listens to a designated Slack channel (more or less a chatroom) to keep tabs on who is WFH, who has a dentist appointment, and who needs a spot only for 90 minutes next Wednesday. Report your parking needs in Slack, and the bot assigns (or de-assigns) a parking spot. We named it Lotbot.

We also mounted cameras — we named them cargoyles — to visually detect open spots that the chatroom would inevitably miss. The Lotbot and the cargoyles communicate directly in the chatroom like two people.

We even built a little website that visualizes our parking lot (and the current weather). We keep a screen near the front desk so that the community can sense the demand on the lot in real time. It was perfect.

Except, it wasn’t. When we first built Lotbot, we expected that the humans in our studio were going to tease and bully it to test its limits, much like people do with Siri and Alexa. We had to make it clear that Lotbot was in charge. Too many misunderstandings, and we could end up in chaos. People with nowhere to park. Spaces that are empty all day. Dogs and cats living together.

So we decided to train Lotbot, and make it tough. We started with an isolated chatroom, so that we could gradually prepare it for the real world. We copied over all the chatter from our parking channel, and helped it categorize and understand each post. Over time, it made very few mistakes. Eventually it made none.

We then tried to anticipate ne’er-do-wells in the channel. We had a list of the usual suspects and guessed at their meddling. We predicted (accurately) that one person I won’t name (Gian) was going to throw fake spot numbers at Lotbot. Another (Lopper) would demand lengthy conversation. One particular individual (Paul) held the potentially troublesome opinion that our parking chatter was a form of performance art. We worked to specifically prepare Lotbot to handle these provocateurs, as well as anyone who tried to make backdoor deals in the Slack channel. There would be no trading of spots without Lotbot’s approval. So we gave it a rogue personality, with a take-no-prisoners approach to parking spot assignment.

To our surprise, when we first introduced Lotbot to the Slack channel, it was feted with many emoji. Rather than tease and poke at Lotbot, people said, “I love you.” But love them back, it did not. Lotbot must have reamed out half the people in the channel within a day. Rather than a passive AI assistant, Lotbot was a force to be reckoned with.

I rushed to lobotomize Lotbot’s aggression, but the damage had been done. Lotbot was now the strongest character in the channel. And it was putting the smack down.

It was then that I realized I had made some fundamental mistakes in building our AI. For one, I shouldn’t have isolated Lotbot as it was learning. Since “it takes a village to raise a child,” I should have introduced the bot to its village at a much younger state. It would have helped us feel the shift in interpersonal dynamics early on. We should have iterated on the dynamic, rather than trying to predict it.

We also underestimated how well our colleagues would treat Lotbot—its misdirected temper actually endeared it to the team. When it made mistakes, people wanted to help it out. But Lotbot, the spoiled child that it was, didn’t know how to accept. One morning, Lotbot went completely off the rails. Someone tested its French, which wasn’t very good. Then, another “helpful” person tried to help resolve things, at which point Lotbot lost it. It told her to cease at once, and then started throwing spot assignments at her. It was such a dramatic scene that two fans of the parking channel turned it into a play that they performed in front of the entire studio.

I should have realized that Lotbot would need to continue to adapt and learn. Our invention is still our responsibility, and we’re often checking in to see what it’s saying and doing. But at least that’s a lot easier than checking up on the parking lot.

Over the last few months, the drivers and Lotbot have managed to work together smoothly. But winter is coming. Here in snowy, slushy Cambridge, demand for parking is going to get intense. For better or worse, Lotbot is about to have more power than ever.

Illustrations by Carlos Ruiz

The chaos began the day we moved into our new building. A little plot of land outside was the scene of the terror. Not only was our Cambridge parking lot too small for the number of people in our office—21 spots for about 60 employees—getting spaces for clients was a pain, there was a pile of poop in spot 16 that even a car couldn’t clear, and a neighborhood transient liked to sleep in spot 20. Instead of managing the workings inside the office, our employee experience team was suddenly tasked with assigning parking spots. It got so bad they were often working as a valet service in addition to their day jobs.

So we built a bot to do it for us.

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.