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.

This is what it’s like to drink liquids in space. Ugh, right?

In space, a pouched drink is a simple and functional solution that prevents liquid from spilling and floating around the station. However, drinking coffee isn’t just a means to hydrate—it’s an experience. And for some astronauts, that experience has been lacking.

In 2008, Don Pettit, a NASA astronaut on his second mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS), casually prototyped a cup by folding an overhead transparency film he found aboard. Taking advantage of the behavior of liquid in zero gravity, he calculated the folding angle so that the coffee climbed up the transparency to the edge of the cup. The result was a teardrop-shaped Zero Gravity Cup that provided a familiar drinking experience, this time with a magnificent view of Earth.

Until now, space agencies have worked to maximize safety and minimize the cost of crewed missions. But as private companies begin to send civilians to space, they’ll need to provide a better experience for their customers and double down on adding curiosity and delight to our explorations into the unknown.

Designing a space travel experience

Imagine that you’ve just won a ticket for a three-day trip to the ISS. Once aboard, you feel thrilled to float around in zero gravity and gasp at the majestic view of Earth beneath you. But after a few days of bumping into walls and your fellow travellers, eating packaged meals, and using tube toilets, your precious out-of-this-world vacation starts to feel like an ordeal.

Inspired by Don’s playful curiosity, a team of colleagues at IDEO decided to tackle the zero gravity environment through some out-of-this-world design exercises to explore the untapped potential of the burgeoning space travel market. Here are some of the guiding principles we’ve come up with to create unforgettable experiences that elevate the everyday in space.

1. Lead the way through play

Zero gravity—technically microgravity— is a stressful and even harmful environment for earthlings. Simple movements require you to use your body in a completely different way. To enable a truly delightful visitor experience, visitors need to acclimate and relearn how to use their bodies. By helping people navigate this new environment through the lens of play, they can get creative about hacking their bodies to befriend zero gravity.

As children, we all learned through play. Creatively confident, we embodied a curious mindset that empowered us to explore and push the edges of what we were capable of. Remember when we played lava in our living rooms and decided that the floor would burn our feet? Imagine what the emotional foundation for space travel would look like if we returned to these playful mindsets.

2. Elevate the whole journey

The climactic moment of space travel might well be the very first moment you reach orbit. But that also implies that the excitement can diminish over the course of your stay.

As we grow older, we learn to optimize the path between places and forget to enjoy the journey itself. However, many other unforgettable moments await you on your journey around Earth. Moments such as watching the sunrise every 90 minutes, soaring over different continents at an incredible speed, or witnessing the Aurora Borealis from above. Let’s take a nod from game design and storytelling crafts, which skillfully utilize pacing to create a sense of adventure and build narratives that stick with visitors. Or from experience design, by proactively asking how visitors might be emotionally transformed by their journey. There are opportunities to build continuous excitement over the course of the journey, gracefully transitioning from each experience into the next, from launch to landing.

3. Default to designing inclusive experiences

The world’s first all-commercial astronaut mission to Earth’s orbit aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon includes passenger Hayley Arceneaux, a childhood cancer survivor with a prosthesis in her leg. While traditional astronaut exams preclude her, private spaceflight allows more flexible requirements. Soon, people with different physical and mental abilities will visit space, and some conditions might even be advantageous, such as deafness, which typically makes people immune to motion sickness.

Even those considered able-bodied on Earth should expect to experience their abilities differently during space travel. We are not made for zero gravity environments. As Miriam Kramer aptly put it in her article for Axios, “Designing spacecraft for people with disabilities would make life easier for all astronauts, even those considered able-bodied.” Through designing from the lens of human experience, we have a chance to reset expectations and intentionally create moments where more of us feel welcome into the experience.

Our increasing ability to travel in outer space is already changing people’s mindsets around stewardship of the Earth, and we need to design travel experiences to align with and spotlight this paradigm shift. While initial access to space may be limited to wealthy people, designing an enjoyable and impactful experience ensures long-term prosperity of the space tourism industry, and paves the way for more of us to bring world-changing learnings back to Earth.

In space, our earthly common sense no longer holds true. As the music band OK GO elegantly put it, “Gravity is just a habit.” Up there, we must fundamentally change our approach to design. Up there, the lack of gravity exposes the true human value of an experience and every experience is now ours to reimagine.

Before you start reading, make yourself a cup of coffee. Got it? Great. Now dump it in a plastic bag, and try to drink it with a straw.

But Damian Thompson, then a cashier, approached the man without thinking twice. Thirty years ago, Thompson was the first Black teller at the bank where he worked, and sensed that certain customers did not want to be served by him. That experience taught him the value of ensuring that everyone was included and given the same service.

Over time, by listening to that customer’s needs and gaining trust, Thompson managed to secure a major investment for the bank. This habit is something that he carries with him today as the Group Managing Director of Retail at UK-based Aldermore. He is always looking for ways to improve the bank's service.

Thompson’s practice of listening is an art, and one of the most undervalued skills in business. Soft skills may seem inessential when compared to tangible ones, like product development. But when organizations actively listen, they gain insights about customer needs that can make the difference between a resilient, future-fit organization and one that withers on the vine.

To heroize employees who listened well and went the extra mile with customers, Thompson launched an “Experts with Empathy” campaign at Aldermore, asking teammates to nominate each other to win prizes. He regularly picks up the phone to heap praise on high performing representatives. The bank has become known for lending to those with less than perfect credit, earning it high NPS scores and loyal customers. Understanding how stressful owing money can be and listening with compassion, Thompson argued, must always come before slapping someone with an overdue penalty.

Carlos Rodridguez Pastor, President of the Peruvian conglomerate Intercorp, admires Thompson’s style of leadership. Pastor has long encouraged all ranks of his organization, from top executives to front-line workers, to stay close to customers. He, too, models active listening tactics, like welcoming and serving customers, and walking the aisles of stores. So, when the time came to send Intercorp’s top brass on an annual inspiration trip—which, until COVID, took executives to faraway locales—Intercorp asked IDEO to create a remote experience on the theme of Escucha Activa, or Active Listening.

In May, 2021, 30 CEOs, 12 board members, and 130 other leaders signed onto Zoom for a four-day global “tour” to learn from some of the best listeners in business. Damian Thompson was our first speaker.

As the future of work becomes increasingly remote, putting employees at a greater distance from customers, active listening will become increasingly important. Here’s how to design your own remote learning experience on active listening:

1. Never waste a crisis

While COVID prevented us from climbing aboard tour buses and trying new foods in distant locations , the remote learning experience removed other constraints, allowing us to bring Active Listening luminaries from around the world to Peru. We tapped our networks to bring in guests from Nigeria, China, the UK, Brazil, and Denmark, as well as the US. C-suite speakers joined from Pillpack (Amazon), Lloyds and Aldermore banks, African fintech startup Piggyvest, and established retailers like IKEA and LEGO. Our IDEO team was distributed as well: based in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, and Munich. It was simultaneously the most ambitious and least expensive business trip the two companies had ever put together in their 10 years of collaboration.

2. Over-prepare

To make the experience of learning how to listen better feel like traveling to visit distant oracles, we prepared each leader for the main event with several pre-session interviews to fine-tune the stories and wisdom they imparted. The prep work paid off: zeroing in on a clear message for each session helped participants follow each step of the learning journey.

3. Design for immersion

No matter how good a listener you are, a two-and-a-half hour Zoom call can feel like an eternity. Knowing that, we tried to strike a balance between learning and entertainment—quick exercises that focused on employee listening and longer, immersive talks. We used travel metaphors to keep the pep in our step and kept the experience to two consecutive weeks, on Thursday and Friday mornings (Peru time). The time limit allowed executives to put aside their phones and truly take in the content, knowing they’d have the balance of the day to get work done.

4. LEGO the learning

Our sessions were set up to build on each other like LEGO sets. Each day kicked off with leaders sharing stories. They explained what it takes to “Commit to Active Listening,” like asking high performing employees about their listening methods and sharing with others at the company. Day 2 was about “Scaling Active Listening,” from individual initiatives to company-wide movements, like a weekly survey that gathers feedback about how close you feel to customers at any given time. Day 3 was spent on “Expanding your Toolkit for Active Listening,” by adding new tactics to the mix, like listening to customers on social media and responding quickly. The 4th day concluded with a lessons on how to “Use Listening to Drive Decisions,” or to act on what you hear in a continuous cycle of improving business offers, like allowing customers more flexible payment plans during financial distress.

5. Create a meal out of bite-size chunks

Sending participants into breakout rooms of 5-10 people allowed us to design activities that brought home the day’s lessons. One favorite was to write and collage a “Postcard From the Future” about a new product or service your business might launch based on an insight gleaned from active listening.

6. Make the stage bigger

Here’s one thing you could never do in person: travel from China to Nigeria to Peru within minutes. It was morning in Lima, evening in Lagos, and 11 p.m. in Shanghai, but we were all listening and learning from each other as if we were sitting side by side.

When we stood up this learning experience, Peru was in the midst of a political crisis and had suffered the largest dip in GDP in the world the previous year. It was a very tense moment that had stretched out for months. After the tour wrapped, feedback from participants suggested that it had an enormous positive emotional impact, giving leaders the injection of inspiration and optimism they needed to overcome burnout and mental distress. It came just in time.

Beyond the morale boost, we learned a lot about how to listen better ourselves. One of the best bits of wisdom came from a lovable bear who has never worked a day in his life. “If the person you’re talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient,” said Winnie the Pooh. “It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”

If the person you’re talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.

- Winnie the Pooh

To make sure we’re listening for how we can make our work better, we must continuously remove fluff—not only to close the gap between companies and customers, but also to allow for the free flow of listening-based insights inside organizations.

Why? Because insights are only powerful if put to use. When employees feel empowered to act on what they hear, marshalling resources and prototyping new ways to deliver great service, you can be sure no one will be left alone in the lobby.

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The bank reps had seen the man lingering in the lobby more than a few times. No one ever thought to ask if he needed help. He looked a bit rough, honestly. The seams of his jacket hung low. His hair was an angry cloud.

For more than two years, with the help of a group of designers from IDEO, we and our colleagues from the Drucker Institute had been planning and developing Bendable, a lifelong learning system that would allow the 100,000 residents of South Bend, Indiana—regardless of their age or background—to acquire new knowledge and skills through online courses as well as in-person classes. The goal was to foster a significant increase in better jobs, civic participation, and overall well-being for the community.

In June 2020, we finally unveiled the system. And month by month, backed by an aggressive marketing campaign, we watched the tally of unique local visitors to the Bendable digital platform steadily climb: from 2,161 to 5,160 to 8,040. Our plan to tackle the first order of business—bringing eyeballs to Bendable—was working. By mid-November, we’d crossed the 10,000 mark.

But as we headed into 2021, we began to notice a different trend taking hold: Growth was slowing.

This wasn’t totally surprising. We’d launched Bendable in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, rendering a nonstarter our elaborate plans to supplement the online learning with a slew of face-to-face events. But Covid-19 couldn’t explain everything. In this way, we found ourselves in the same situation that many organizations do when they bring a new digital product into the world: a meteoric start that quickly fades. To try to reverse the slide, we needed to look in the mirror. And that meant getting more serious about how we’d leverage the metrics we were collecting.

Over the past nine months, we have implemented what we call a 4-D approach to continuous improvement: data → decision-making → design → deployment. Now, our team from the Drucker Institute and the St. Joseph County Public Library—our key partner in South Bend and the home of Bendable in the community—gets together every four weeks or so to dig into the metrics, discuss what they mean, figure out what we should do about it, and assign a champion to be accountable and follow through.

To be sure, the numbers alone can’t give us a fully rounded picture; we always temper the quantitative data with what we are observing and hearing from Bendable stakeholders on the ground across the city. But the stats have become the place to start, giving our team a common way to frame whatever situation we are sizing up. We have used the data to shape our strategy for attracting new users, as well as for making Bendable stickier for those who've checked out the platform—goals that every digital product team can relate to.

Tracking the right data

Before we could take full advantage of the data, we had to make sure we were scrutinizing the right stuff.

Our first instinct—and likely the one many teams lean into—was to pull in all of the data that we could from Google Analytics and our own platform. What we ended up with was a mountain of metrics, but not a lot of meaning.

It didn’t take long before we realized that a better place to start was to sharpen our objectives for the program and then find the specific metrics that would shed light on whether we were getting there. We eventually landed on four overarching goals for Bendable in South Bend: to activate learning, drive a depth of learning, cultivate in people a habit of learning, and ensure that Bendable is inclusive of the whole community.

Today, we track statistics across 13 different areas (through Google, along with a few add-ons put together by our own software developer and key performance indicators passed on by our content providers). Each is organized under one of our four main goals.

These include things like the number of South Bend residents coming to Bendable both for the first time (activating learning) and returning (cultivating the habit of learning). We pay close attention to how much progress they are making through content providers’ courses, as well as through Bendable Career Collections—employer-backed learning pathways intended to prepare people for some of the most in-demand jobs in South Bend.

We also analyze the range of resources that people are clicking on. One of our theories is that if people are able to rely on Bendable to unearth all sorts of content, it will help instill in them the habit of learning. And so we assess how many South Bend residents want new work skills and how many are looking to enhance other aspects of their lives (by finding a class on, say, personal finance) or fulfilling a passion (like music or art).

We also pull information from our account sign-ups and parse which zip codes Bendable learners are from, which helps us make sure we’re reaching traditionally underserved areas.

Turning insight into action

From the data, we’ve learned that marketing matters—a lot. When the library lets up on its social media posts about Bendable, traffic to the platform falls, sometimes precipitously. When it leans into social media, traffic swells.

This is a crucial lesson: You have to sell a social innovation not unlike the way you would sell toothpaste; just because something meets a genuine need doesn’t mean that interest in it will magically materialize. It takes a real push.

As we delved into the data with the library, we discovered that to have the greatest impact, Bendable must be timely, which caused us to adjust our plans. One way we do this is by highlighting various Community Collections—personal learning playlists put together by local residents on a wide variety of topics. For instance, in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, the library promoted a Community Collection titled “Discerning fact from misinformation online.” More than 100 residents clicked on it that week, nearly nine times more than the next-most-opened Collection. As the weather started to warm this spring in South Bend, the library put the spotlight on a Community Collection called “Getting started as a gardener,” and it became the most popular.

Thanks in part to this insight, we have started to see our unique visitor growth pick back up, rising from its nadir of 481 in March.

“It’s the combination of pushing trusted learning content along with its relevance to our community's day-to-day life that brings more value to our patrons and translates to more engagement," says Norah Alwalan, who oversees the library’s Bendable outreach.

Turning visitors into regular users

The data also turned our attention to another challenge: getting people to sign up for a Bendable account. To date, about 1,500 have done so—just 10 percent of the nearly 15,300 unique local visitors who have now come to the platform.

Account sign-ups are tricky terrain for many digital products. You want to give a certain amount of freedom so that users can get a taste without potentially alienating them by coming on too strong and asking for their personal information. But you need that information to follow up with them and maximize their experience.

In the case of Bendable, this tension is especially pronounced. We want people to have friction-free access to much of the content on the platform so they can jump right in and begin learning. And yet if they don’t sign up for an account, we can’t communicate with them through email or text, making it difficult for us to support their efforts. What’s more, without an account, Bendable users can’t obtain course seats that have been pre-paid with philanthropic dollars, including a lot of the meatiest content that can help them advance in their careers.

So, how can we inspire more people to sign up for a Bendable account?

Thus far, we’ve tried several tactics, including an email blast to library patrons, urging them to make an account. In March, we added a welcome video to the top of the Bendable homepage, helping onboard new users to the platform and encouraging them to create an account from the get-go.

The pace of account sign-ups has shot up since April. But we know that we need to do much more.

Getting out into the community

As South Bend residents have gotten vaccinated and things have started to open back up, we have been working with librarians to get those walking into the 10 branches around the city excited about Bendable. We ask these people about their learning dreams, and then put their aspirations up on the branch wall, along with each person’s photo. (At the LaSalle Branch recently, we heard from men and women who were eager to re-learn math, become proficient in Photoshop, start a business, see their houseplants flourish, and more.) We then ask them to sign up for a Bendable account and give them guidance on how they can use the system.

Of course, we know that the toughest thing for many of these learners and any others who use Bendable will be persistence.

It’s not that Bendable users aren’t committed to learning. According to several of our content providers, including GCFGlobal and LRNG, those coming from Bendable.com consistently spend about twice as much time on their sites as do those who find their way there through a general search engine.

But it’s a different story for the courses that require hours of dedication to get all the way through, including those offered by Penn Foster, edX, and others that can lead to industry-recognized credentials or college credit. Of the 340 or so of these classes that have been started, fewer than 20 percent have been completed.

If the data has proven one thing above all, it’s that learning is hard.

On some level, we knew this going in. Adult learners face myriad barriers, including juggling work and family responsibilities; anxiety about being back in “school,” even if they are now in an alternative learning environment; and struggling with childcare and transportation.

But seeing the numbers has reinforced the fact that to drive a depth of learning—one of our four strategic goals—we need to get beyond the digital platform and equip the community to support Bendable learners. It’s a good reminder that the most important thing that a piece of technology can do is connect people in a meaningful way.

And so, we are now collaborating with stakeholders across South Bend—employers such as Beacon Health, the big hospital system in town; nonprofit organizations like Goodwill; government agencies, including a summer youth jobs program run by the city parks department; educational institutions, including the public schools; and others.

With our help, these partners are weaving Bendable into their everyday activities, seeking to further their own missions by assigning specific courses on the platform to their employees, clients, students, and so forth. To help these cohorts of learners get through the material successfully, we are now running a bunch of experiments that have been designed with input from a social science researcher. Among them: sending out text messages to nudge learning along; making available online coaching; using local university students as in-person coaches; and sharing data so that organizational leaders have visibility into learner progress.

In the end, building a better Bendable—as with any initiative trying to have a deep social impact—will be neither fast nor easy. We anticipate that it will take five years or more before we have a good sense of whether we’re getting anywhere toward our paramount goal: making South Bend more resilient by building a true community of lifelong learning.

Meanwhile, we will also be expanding Bendable through a partnership with the Maine State Library. Although Bendable will be hyper-localized for the people of Maine, with content and features that meet their particular wants and needs, our long-term aim remains the same: boosting the resilience of residents throughout the state.

Which is why we will, once again, rigorously track the most pertinent data. “The idea of resilience can be nebulous,” says Lex Dennis, the Drucker Institute’s director of lifelong learning. “That’s why focusing on the metrics as we go along is so critical.”

From the outset we monitored the numbers—and, at least at first, it was hard not to feel kind of giddy.

The winding streets in the medieval city fabric, the long lunches with wine followed by a nap, and all the built-in transitional time and spaces choreograph a unique quality and pace of life that defy our usual sense of urgency. The city forces its inhabitants to slow down, creating opportunities for the unplanned to unfold.

It’s this intangible quality that has drawn and inspired generations of artists and scholars, and what motivated my partner and I to apply for fellowships to study the act of wandering in Rome early in 2020. Curious about the truth behind the city’s lore, and believing it’s only possible to study wandering by wandering ourselves, we spent three months thinking not too hard about the things that make a place great for wandering and conducive to moments of serendipity.

Our days of wandering concluded when Rome locked down for the pandemic, and our lives shifted from the physical city to virtual space. Most of us have discovered benefits to this new way of working and living, and many elements are likely to remain. But in the rush to replicate the functional aspect of daily life online, we’ve also lost a bit of the spontaneity and chances of encountering the unexpected. Through this project, we want to champion the irreplaceability of physical spaces, and articulate a few design principles that take us beyond the typical pursuit of productivity and efficiency, and toward making environments that encourage and reward wandering.

1. Meta orientation

Rome is built on seven hills. Each day, we would wander from our apartment at the British School on the eastern edge of the city, up and down a hill, across a river, and up another hill to our studio at the American Academy on the west side. Setting out in the morning, we would often arrive just in time for lunch, and take the whole afternoon getting back just in time for dinner.

Curiously, after only a cursory glance at the map upon arrival, we were able to make the trip every day via constantly evolving routes. In the medieval city, the slight inclination of streets offered a meta sense of direction, allowing us to know roughly which way to go even when venturing into previously unexplored areas. In fact, many streets follow old streams; a local rule-of-thumb for when you’re lost is to pour water on the street and follow it down to the banks of the River Tiber.

The joy of wandering comes from its unpredictability, which is always delicately balanced against the fear of being completely lost. Subtle spatial cues such as the street sloping up or down, or glimpses of a monument when you’re crossing an axial boulevard, can offer a meta sense of orientation while preserving the excitement of choosing different paths to explore.

2. Built-in intermissions

At the risk of perpetuating stereotypes (both about Rome and about designers), our days were often strung together by coffee breaks, whether a quick pick-me-up before an appointment or to while away an afternoon. To our surprise, the same cup of coffee in a Roman cafe has two different prices depending on whether you are drinking it standing at the bar (about one Euro), or sitting down at a table (about six Euros). It’s perhaps the clearest evidence that coffee is not only a drink, but also a duration of time—the cheaper option gets you a short respite standing at the counter, while the more expensive option gets you an afternoon watching passers-by sitting at a street-side table.

The caffeinated intermissions provide in-between time to remember what we have just seen, and anticipate what we are about to see. It shifts our experience from distinctive blocks of activity to a gradated spectrum that fades in and out, creating opportunities for different ideas to overlap. The bitterness and heat of the coffee, pleasurable to sip but difficult to gulp, establishes a minimum amount of time between things, allowing our thoughts to wander without the need to be somewhere.

Perhaps what the physical environment can better offer and should be designed for is the gentle spacing between things: a short walk to lunch, a stroll from home to work, or some distance between the desk and fridge. That’s often when inspiration strikes.

3. Anchoring ambiance

Visitors to Rome often note the distinctive quality of the city’s light. With its dry and arid Mediterranean climate, the bright and sharp light plays off the solid architecture of stone and concrete to create deep contrasts and shadows. It dictates and changes what we can and cannot see at different times, often revealing only a small fragment of the overall picture.

A quirk of the human mind is its tendency to sprawl. We are overwhelmed when exposed to too much information and bored with too little. What holds our attention best is a partially-revealed picture that anchors parts of our imagination while allowing the rest to hover freely to fill in the voids. The ambiance of a place is often defined by what is concealed—a noisy cafe shifts our focus to the sight and smell, while a dimly lit street might foreground the sound and chill.

The physical space can offer an anchoring ambiance. Instead of the floor-to-ceiling glass walls favored by luxury developments, perhaps a few well-placed windows may allow us to see the outside more closely. By editing what our mind can see and perceive, we leave space for our imagination to roam and wander.

4. Loosely-defined uses

For a city famous for its walkability and public spaces, Rome has an unusual lack of public benches. But there’s always a place to rest, whether you’re sharing a podium with a Roman God, or leaning against the inclination of a once-impenetrable fortress. People intuitively adapt, exploit, and react to the spaces around them as they navigate and occupy the city.

Most modern buildings and spaces are designed for specific functions—a meeting room for meetings and a classroom for classes. Some are even designed to discourage unintended uses, such as segmented benches that prevent people from lying down. In a historical city like Rome, with its accumulated layers of architecture, landscapes, and urban form, few things are used for their original functions, and nothing fits precisely.

While the dictum of form follows function has an alluring logical clarity, it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the function constrained by the tight-fitting form. When we design our spaces to loosely fit their intended uses, we naturally invite exploration and appropriation. As any parent knows, a snowy slope entertains a child for longer and in more ways than a purpose-designed playground slide.

5. Intentional collage

A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says “Five beers please!” The joke works by connecting two previously separate frames of reference: two fingers for two, and V for the Roman numeral five. Inspiration works in a similar way, by revealing a previously unnoticed relationship. We never quite know which two things will resonate, so one of the best ways to generate inspiration is to be constantly exposed to new collages of things and ideas.

Rome is in many ways the perfect collage-generating machine, where the ancient coexists nonchalantly inside, around, above, under, and next to the cutting-edge. Walk past a classical facade marked by graffiti, and you might notice the original Latin inscriptions under the latest tag, both created by the same human impulses. Experiences like these recalibrate our sense of perspective in the vastness of history, while at the same time affirms the universality of our human instincts.

Despite the urge to categorize and organize, we could allow some messiness of life to spill through. In our spaces, instead of insisting on a uniformed look where all the furniture must conform to a color or style, a diverse collection accumulated over time often inspires more stories.

My partner and I have always been drawn to certain spaces with a special spark—places where we feel relaxed, inspired, and curious, and can wander freely. While an anecdote from Rome or other exotic locations often serves as a shorthand for this spark, this project is our attempt to pin down this elusive and intangible quality, so that we may discuss and design for it more intentionally and precisely.

Now, as we emerge from the pandemic, we are presented with the rare opportunity to re-examine the value of our physical spaces. Perhaps we can draw on some of these principles to design future environments, not only as something to be optimized for productivity and efficiency, but as pleasant and inspiring spaces to be in, wander around, and maybe encounter the unexpected.

As a city, Rome is measurably inefficient; the concept of finding the quickest route between points A and B is almost non-existent.

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.