Midea, one of China’s largest appliance manufacturers, wanted to identify growth opportunities in the domestic consumer market, while focusing on people’s cultural beliefs around health and well-being. During the course of the project, IDEO found that Midea could play a key role in building a healthier nation.

The team set out to design potential future products for Tong (“through, whole, and to understand”) that are built around the basic themes of eating, breathing, and being: an easy-to-use, hassle-free herbal tea dispenser, an air balancer that improves and balances the quality of air in the home, and a body-balancing mobile phone app that encourages users to rebalance their body condition where needed, through movements created with the Chinese philosophies of well-being in mind.

The Tong project was featured extensively in the press, and opened further conversations with Midea about creating new value and extending into new markets.

Put food on the table or keep the furnace running on a frigid day? It’s an unfortunate choice many low-income families in Flint, Michigan, face.

To help customers in Flint and other Michigan towns stay on top of their utility bills and better understand the relationship between their energy consumption and the resulting costs, Consumers Energy partnered with IDEO and utility assistance provider The Heat and Warmth Fund (THAW) to create an innovative pilot billing program called Clear Control in late 2013.

The pilot was designed with three major human-centered changes to the traditional utility experience:

• Instead of monthly bills, participants received two bills per month. Shorter billing periods allowed for smaller, more frequent payments, helping customers match available funds with their ability to pay.
• Daily text updates on energy usage and bill amounts kept consumption top of mind.
• Consumers Energy offered personalized, in-home audits to help customers make low-cost, high-impact changes to their energy bills.

A year later, the results of the pilot are energizing. Clear Control participants accumulated no new debt, while the control group owed $300; pilot customers used 20 percent less electricity, reducing their bills by $200 per year; and 95 percent of participants paid their bills in full and on time, compared with 35 percent in the control group. The utility company simultaneously benefited by avoiding arrearages, late-payment fees, and shutoffs. Consumers plans to incorporate Clear Control lessons into its overall energy assistance program design and development moving forward.

"It’s no longer ‘me’ against ‘them’—now it’s ‘us,’" said one Clear Control participant.

In 1980, Apple asked IDEO to develop a mouse for their radical new computer, the Lisa. Previous attempts at mouse design, by Douglas Englebart and Xerox PARC, yielded results that were too expensive and hard to make. The Apple mouse needed to be more reliable and less than 10 percent of the cost of the earlier versions.

To start, the design team created a cheaper, much-improved mechanism that would operate the mouse, and found that a complex, plastic "ribcage" would hold the pieces together. The team similarly tested and refined the mouse’s other key components, from the audible and tactile click of the button to the rubberized coating on the ball. A record turntable spun for days, logging “mouse miles” to check the reliability of the electromechanical assembly.

The resulting mouse proved mechanically and economically sound and was changed only slightly when adapted for use with the first Macintosh computer. The basic mechanism design is used in virtually all mechanical mouses produced to date.

Food is the heart of most cultures. In China, one of the oldest cultures in the world, food is central to family gatherings and celebrations. It’s what binds people, a tangible way of showing love and respect. But in recent years, the Chinese food industry has suffered from concerns around safety.

Two siblings, Harn and Anmao Sun, set out on an ambitious venture: to create a trusted source of food in China and, by setting an example, to instigate a movement around conscious farming practices. The American-born entrepreneurs launched Hunter Gatherer, a restaurant and retail food space built around a transparent supply chain, from farm to table to grocery shelves. The venture is based on growing and serving what they call real food: The ingredients are chemical-free and come from known and trusted sources—food they’d eat themselves. The purpose of the venture is simple: to serve people real food that is their right.

Having studied and worked in the US, Harn and Anmao grew accustomed to browsing farmers markets on Saturday mornings or picking up a burrito at Chipotle. But when they returned to China, they were unsure about the safety of the food they were eating.

“In China, you wouldn’t go to a food stand, because you’d be concerned about the ingredients,” Anmao said. “You can’t take the safety for granted.”

Hunter Gatherer’s very existence challenges bedrock assumptions about how food is produced in China. A long and depressing list of scandals—milk contaminated with melamine, pork produced from diseased pigs, used cooking oil repackaged and sold as new—has rocked the public trust.

“In China, agriculture is going through a huge change,” Anmao said. “In the US, agriculture operations are regulated. Farmers’ practices are regulated. If they use pesticides, there are limits because these farmers understand that once a certain threshold is hit, additional pesticides will not yield more crops. But in China, pesticide use came about 30 years after the US and Europe, and because of a lack of full understanding, farmers in China incorrectly operate under the assumption that more pesticides means more crop yields. Also, with over 250 million farmers in China, it becomes immensely difficult to properly regulate everyone.”

New Ventures

Harn and Anmao wanted to restore trust in the simple act of eating in China, and they came to IDEO to build a scalable business based on that vision. This was essentially a startup, a shared commitment between IDEO and Hunter Gatherer.

“I’ve lived in Shanghai for the past seven years, and as a relatively active and health-conscious person, I’ve had to invest quite a bit of time in finding food that I trust,” said Charles Hayes, managing director of IDEO Shanghai. “That investment has been both in the time it takes to research the sources of ingredients but also a literal investment in paying a high price for imported food just for that extra peace of mind.”

Anmao and Harn took up residence in the IDEO Shanghai offices to incubate their business. Together with IDEO designers, they tested packaging, cooked countless meals, and found ways to introduce unfamiliar ingredients to Chinese consumers. They discussed different concepts of lunch and dinner, and how notions of freshness in Chinese culture might affect cold-storage systems. In IDEO’s prototyping kitchen, the teams tested all manner of different foods, flavors, colors, mixes, and price points, and they brought consumers in to try them out. IDEO designers, along with the founding team, also worked on the brand and positioning of what would eventually become the Hunter Gatherer enterprise—its location, human resources, and marketing strategies.

As the restaurant concept came together, finding the right food sources had to be addressed. Traditional agriculture couldn’t be trusted; organic certifications were available on the black market, and safety protocols around chemical use were nonexistent. Anmao and Harn decided to invest in their own farms. They met with farmers, asked questions about their methods, and walked in the fields to see for themselves. Eventually they settled on two plots of land outside Shanghai and began developing more than 80 different crops to be used in the restaurant.

From Seed to Table

When it came time to find the right space for the first location, Anmao and Harn discovered an open, airy storefront on Anfu Road in Shanghai’s tree-lined former French Concession area. They designed and built a retail space and kitchen, and along with IDEO designers, they trained the staff and organized workflows. The staff set the tables with Mason jars filled with flowers, hung photographs of the farmers who grew the food, and put up a sign that showcases the percentage of vegetables coming directly from the Hunter Gatherer farms, already more than 70 percent in less than a year after opening.

Customers can shop for fresh vegetables, locally sourced and imported canned and jarred goods, bins of cereal, freshly made smoothies, artisan sauces, and exotic chocolates. Upstairs, they can feast on delicious dishes in the homey restaurant.

Reviews have been glowing. One customer raved about the machine that grinds fresh nuts. Another loved the open space, the “good vibes,” and the refreshing cucumber water. Young people go there on dates, and families return for the delicious menu variety.

The convivial space has blossomed into more than just a restaurant and grocery store. It’s become a gathering place of sorts, both for the community and for partners who share the same vision. Farmers and food purveyors are invited to showcase their products at seasonal events and to mingle with customers and share recipes and stories.

“Hunter Gatherer has come to symbolize a kind of lifestyle the Chinese people have been looking for,” said Eugene Lin, an IDEO business designer. “A place they can enjoy hanging out with friends, as well as a movement and mission they can stand behind.”

A Digital Future

This is just the beginning of the venture. The plan is to open 40 more locations throughout China. But the vision for Hunter Gatherer’s growth is bigger than brick-and-mortar restaurants—where the business will truly scale is in the digital space. Eventually, the plan is to launch a Hunter Gatherer online grocery store from which anyone can buy food grown from trusted sources.

“We have to create trust with the consumer. It’s the most difficult and most valuable thing to do in China, especially with food,” Anmao said. “Our brick-and-mortar locations will establish that increased trust. Then we can go online and grow the idea to the rest of the country.”

Will Hunter Gatherer have a hand in changing the way that the world’s most populous nation thinks about food? Its principles are already spreading, from neighboring farmers adopting more sustainable planting methods, to a growing market for products like wine.

But the true sign of success will be almost invisible—the moment when an increase in demand will result in safe food for everyone and when real food becomes commonplace.

1. Choose your creativity apps wisely

Try as many as possible, then edit them down to the few you use regularly and that can fit on your home screen.

If you're a writer, there are many notes apps that offer distraction-free writing (IA Writer, Daedalus). Day One is a great choice for people who use journaling as a creative practice. For photographers, there are a wealth of tools (pro-quality editing apps like VSCO, exotic image-modifiers like Prisma). My personal favorite is Over, which allows you to add text your photos via a simple, fluid interface.

For those running brainstorms in the non-digital world, 3M's Post-It app is a surprisingly effective way to capture a wall full of notes, then reorganize and export them to others apps. For doodlers, Procreate is the gold standard. (You might prefer to use this app on an iPad, unless you have eerily-thin fingers).

2. Curate inspiration feeds

Aside from tools, you’ll want apps that supply a steady stream of inspiration. Some obvious ones: the Kindle app for reading, Audible for audiobooks, and a well-designed podcast player (we recommend Overcast). Other good sources of waiting room material are the various read-it-later apps, such as Instapaper or Pocket, and if you’re still reading this post, the Longform app. One note of caution here: don’t overwhelm yourself with a pile of material that feels like work to get through. Delete regularly.

3. Audit your distraction

Ok, time to get real. How are you really using your phone? Are there certain apps or websites that you check repeatedly every day? Do you have habits that are vaporizing your time (We're looking at you, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit).

If so, engineer some limits on usage. One simple approach is to put all the apps that distract you on a separate screen, or even to hide them away inside a folder—putting a bit of friction between you and your addiction. Use that brief moment of additional swiping as a reminder to ask yourself whether you *really* want to go down the rabbit hole. Might there be something better to do with your time?

4. Support your focus

When you do decide to commit to a creative task, there are a number of apps that can help support you. Many swear by the Pomodoro technique, which involves a commitment to focus for 25min chunks, with 5min breaks in between. There are many Pomodoro timers in the app store, though Apple's stock clock app works just fine, too.

If you’re easily distracted, try a white noise app. Rain Rain provides a vast array of variations on the sound of raindrops falling from the sky, alongside airliner and washing machine soundscapes.

For a slightly less boring selection of background sounds, fire up Spotify and search “ambient playlists”. Brian Eno's Music For Airports is an excellent writing companion.

5. Change your morning ritual

With all your apps organized on your phone, you should be all set for a more creative relationship with your device. You only need one more thing: discipline. One trick is to think about your "first apps.” When you grab your phone in the morning or after getting on the bus, what are the first apps that you open? Do you have a set pattern? Are those really the apps that you want to be opening or are you a slave to habit? Try opening a creativity enhancer first and see how that changes your perspective for the day.

And sure, we know you're not going to write a novel while waiting in line for an ATM. But instead of losing yourself in a Facebook fugue state, maybe you could take a minute to construct a groove in Figure, or play around with a photo in Prisma. There. Didn't that feel good?

Illustrations by Felicia Chiao.

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Is the iPhone the greatest tool for creativity ever invented, or its worst enemy? The answer is... both. On the one hand, the smartphone is the Swiss Army Knife of writing, research, photography, and planning tools. On the other, it is an attention-sucking black hole, consuming all of your free time in a gaming and social media vortex. Here are a few ways to make that computer in your pocket best serve your creative goals.

That's starting to change. With 76 million Baby Boomers gazing down that long, winding road, aid-in-dying laws gaining ground (California's passed in June of this year), and an epic list of recent bestselling books on the topic, many written by doctors, death is having a moment.

Which led us to ask: How can design play a role?

To find out, we teamed up with local hospital network Sutter Health, the Helix Centre in London, and the Ungerleider Palliative Care Education Fund to launch OpenIDEO’s End of Life Challenge. Thousands of people around the world participated, submitting ideas for tools, services, and platforms that might improve the way we prepare for and navigate the end of life.

Some incredible ideas came across the transom. Imagine the relief of a soundscape that cancels out the maddening noise of bleeping machines in hospitals, or a digital platform that provides respite vouchers for family caregivers who desperately need a break.

Struck by the volume of ideas the challenge generated, we wanted to make sure the momentum didn't end there. A team formed to send out a call to a loose network of healthcare professionals, designers, artists, storytellers, organizations, and individuals to see if it made sense to join forces and build a public event.

Re:Imagine End of Life kicks off Monday evening, October 24th, 2016, and runs through the week in San Francisco. With multiple events every night in San Francisco and the East Bay, there are plenty of opportunities to join the conversation.

Tonight (10/24), at Grace Cathedral, Dr. BJ Miller, Dana Cho, and I will lead a workshop on how design can play a role in the way we die. OpenIDEO Challenge participants Brad Wolfe, Ken Rosenfeld, and Yoko K will share the ideas they are developing.

Other highlights include:

• Death over Dinner at the Battery
• An immersive VR art experience
• How Doctors Die, with Dr. Ira Byock and Dr. Joon Yun
• An evening of stories and music with You're Going to Die
• Open conversations at Zen Hospice Project

Want to know more? The event's organizers can be reached at hello@letsreimagine.org.

No one knows when it will happen. Could be 30 years. Could be next week. What we do know is that we are all dying. And that how we die—perhaps the most important event human beings share—is something we never talk about.

Featuring commentary from leading thinkers in art, philosophy, business, and design, the publication draws out the modern day relevance of the period’s most iconic paintings. Paul's essay reflects on Pieter de Hooch’s work, "A Mother Delousing Her Child’s Hair", also known as “A Mother’s Duty.” I asked him to tell us more about the book, and why it should be on every designer's wish list.

How did you get involved in the book?

Marcel was an artist-in-residence at our San Francisco office. He’s a world-class designer and we learned a lot from him. Later, his team approached me about this project. They sent me a list of paintings and asked if any of them sparked anything for me. The de Hooch was the first piece I saw and I picked it straight away. At IDEO, we often take shocking or not-beautiful things and make them poetic. So a girl having her head deloused immediately struck me as a great human truth. I love that de Hooch has made it beautiful and celebrated it and used all this classic technique around it.

You say design acts as a witness to our smallest moments of triumph and tragedy. How do we witness increasingly broad challenges, like poverty and citizenship?

Tackling a big problem doesn’t mean you have to look for the big solution. It’s always the tiniest thing that begins the catalytic chain that unlocks things. I firmly believe that looking for the tiniest moment at the center of the human experience is the place to start. So you toggle back and forth and try to look for things that are both human and universal, and personal and individual.

I was in Kansas City the other day talking about the plight of the citizen, and at the same time we were telling very specific stories of people that we knew or had met that day. We were able to talk about citizenship at one scale, and still refer back to individuals. Nobody reacts to a segmentation study or a bar chart or a number, everybody reacts to a story. You have to find the meta in the micro.

Art does this, too. De Hooch does a fantastic job of telling a story in which I can recognize myself. I remember sitting there and the feel of my mother’s hand in my hair. I think design is about asking people to feel it in their own skin, remember their own experience. Good art makes you see yourself in the frame, and that is our work these days, too—to help join together small and big and to help people see themselves inside the big system.

What was your first impression of the book?

It’s beautiful. I think beauty is very important. Having beautiful things around you makes you feel alive. In the age of digital—which these days has become almost synonymous with disposable—it’s really nice to stop the train for a minute and put something in your hands that has heft, and is an extremely lavish, unapologetically gilded object. To me it’s like holding a piece of jewelry or going to the symphony. The sensorialist in me is awakened by this book and I’m very proud to have been included in it.

Paul Bennett has always had an appreciation of the Dutch Masters: “I love the craft of them, actually, the feeling of the pictures.” So, IDEO'S Chief Creative Officer jumped at the chance to contribute to designer Marcel Wanders' latest project, Rijks, Masters of the Golden Age, a lavishly gilded coffee table book that pays homage to the 17th-century masterpieces hanging in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour.

That was 10 years ago. I was in high school in China, where a comic dork looked like this:

That ego-crushing was followed by a lot of self-loathing and Cheetos. But over time, the taste of Cheetos grew flat, and my hands started itching to doodle in physics class again. I decided to follow the method the editor suggested:

Before long, I was running my first monthly series in a halfway reputable magazine. That helped me edge up in the high school popularity rankings, and I got a few messages of encouragement from reader forums. Above all, though, the method helped me get into a state of comic flow; nothing else mattered when I was drawing. Even when I was failing in life and full of self-doubt, I could always fall back on my sketchbook.

Which brings me to Lesson #1:

But even when you’re following a proven method and trusting the process, there are a few dangers to watch out for when embarking on graphic novel projects. The Pain/Gain index, for example:

If the difficulty index K is too high, terminate! There are four levels of challenge in a graphic novel project:

Creating anything that requires more cognitive load than watching Game of Thrones after a full workday is challenging to begin with, which leads to Lesson #2:

For me, it’s about rewarding myself with things I’m fond of drawing: intricate landscape, fashion, and action scenes. Since I suck at writing dialogue, I’ve kept it to a minimum, and substituted in symbols and visual cues.

Here are four other things I learned while making graphic novels, so you don’t have to go through the same pain:

I’m at work on #6 at the moment, which is the most fun.

Coloring under progress

It’s the last step in a graphic novel I’ve been working on about living in a dystopian San Francisco of the future, where the scarcity of organic food leads its residents to fight to the death at grocery stores. The story is a dramatized observation of the on-going identity battles most San Franciscans face today. It’s a place where one feels simultaneously insider and outsider. You can be both a picky eater and burrito consumer, the root cause and the victim of jacked-up rental prices, and equal parts poseur and satirist of hipsterdom.

“San Franciscocoa” depicts a mundane but impossible feat of grocery shopping—buying a bag of cocoa powder that’s going into extinction.

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“Sorry, but it’s simply not up to the publishable standard.”

The editor handed me back my work, which took hundreds of hours to create. There was a long pause.

“You should try more live sketching,” she said, lowering her voice to soften the blow. “Build a strong foundation before finding your personal style.”

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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.