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.

Creativity Challenge #8: Empathize with customers, employees, and other end users.

One way to develop more empathy with—and gain new insights about—your customers is to look beyond the narrow definition of your offering and consider the customer’s total experience. The more broadly you define the customer experience, the more opportunities you can identify for improvement through design.

Say, for example, you make interior house paint. You could focus narrowly on the characteristics of the product itself, on making the paint less drippy or making it cover a surface in a single coat. But you’ll find many more opportunities for innovation if you think about the arc of the customer experience. In something as simple as repainting a bedroom, there are probably a dozen steps (each one of which is a chance to innovate): from getting the customer to realize that it’s time to repaint, to helping them choose the color, to shortening the preparation and cleanup time, to keeping track of which colors are on which walls for future reference when it comes time for touch-up.

A journey map helps you think systematically through the steps your customers—internal or external—have when they interact with your product or service. We use maps to synthesize what we learn from interviews and observations. (Or, during field research, you can also try asking your end user to map out his or her own journey.)

Tool: Customer Journey Map
Participants: Solo or groups of two to six people
Time: 1-4 hours
Supplies: Whiteboard or Post-its

Instructions

Step 1: Choose a process or journey that you want to map.
Step 2: Write down the steps. Make sure to include even small steps that may seem trivial. The goal is to get you to consider the nuances of the experience that you may normally overlook.
Step 3: Organize the steps into a map. Usually we display the steps sequentially in a timeline. Your map may include branches to show alternative paths in the customer journey. You could also use a series of pictures or whatever method fits your data.
Step 4: Look for insights. What patterns emerge? Anything surprising or strange? Question why certain steps occur, the order they occur in, and so forth. Ask yourself how you might innovate each step.
Step 5: If possible, show the map to people familiar with the journey and ask them what you’ve overlooked or gotten out of sequence.

Tips from the Field

Here is an example using this method:

Think about a trip to the hospital’s emergency room. Of course the most important moment is at the point of care, when the doc is diagnosing the problem or delivering treatment. But when people complain about (or, less commonly, rave about) their emergency room experience, it’s not usually the skill of the doctor they are talking about. A simple version of the patient journey might include moments like these:

• Experience the pain or discover the symptom
• Consider home treatment versus going to the hospital: the go/no go decision
• Choose transportation to the hospital
• Arrive and park (or pay the taxi, etc.)
• Enter the hospital and find the emergency room
• See the triage nurse
• Fill out the insurance forms
• Wait. And wait some more.
• Get ushered to the treatment room
• Put on an uncomfortable hospital gown, and wait some more
• See multiple preliminary nurses and technicians
• See the doctor for an assessment and sometimes preliminary diagnosis
• Undergo additional blood tests, X-rays, and so forth
• Receive a firmer diagnosis, which can lead to getting: instructions for home care, an outpatient procedure, a prescription, a follow-up appointment with a general practitioner or specialist, or admission to the hospital

As you lay out every step, ask yourself how you might cost-effectively innovate and turn the ordinary experience into something extraordinary.

Because emergency healthcare is often high-anxiety, we’ve discovered that patients are calmer if you spell out the journey ahead. We sometimes call that “journifying” the journey—taking an amorphous or scary process and breaking it down into tangible, predictable steps. We’ve found “journifying” helps people not only in the emergency room, but in any number of healthcare situations: taking your newborn home from the hospital, going in for surgery, or beginning a new treatment regimen.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems, or read more from this series of creative exercises on the IDEO blog.

Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

I spent my afternoons on a small wooden pier, relaxing and staring up at clouds, looking for shapes. That pursuit is an exploration of pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. It was in that leisure time, trying to make sense of the clouds, that I found the comfort that I’d been seeking.

Nine years later, I found myself back in America, interning at IDEO Chicago, where I had far less opportunity for leisurely cloud gazing. Without the spare time to hang out on a pier, I wondered if I could engineer the same kind of comfort. Could I design an experience that brought back those long dreamy pareidolia days with the help of an app?

After all, people in my age bracket, between 25-34 years old, only spend an average of 13 minutes per day relaxing, according to the American Use of Time Survey, and experts say that we need to acknowledge and accept that we’re leisure-limited. Maybe this could be a shortcut to that leisure we’re missing.

So I created “Pareidolia,” an app that searches the sky on my behalf. It’s my way of trying to keep a part of my mind exploring, even when I need to be inside, working. If the app thinks it sees something in the clouds, it pings me to take a look.

To create Pareidolia, I set up a Raspberry Pi and a camera on the terrace of our Chicago studio, and programmed it to look continuously at the sky, searching for interesting shapes. The project uses computer vision, tensorflow, and keras to perceive images in clouds, then snaps an image, generates a drawing of what it imagines it might look like, and shares them via Slack. (The code can be found and downloaded from this Github repo.) It tells us what it sees in the sky in real time and invites us to go out and look for it.

As I started to share Pareidolia with colleagues and friends, my creation was met with mixed reviews. Ross Weijer, a data scientist here at IDEO Chicago, thought that it created efficiency while offering a different perspective. “Technology is something that speeds up your life and, lets you do things quicker,” he said. “So I think it’s subversive and helpful to have the aim of this project be to spare your imagination. It’s saying, ‘Stop, stop, take a moment to consider this.’”

Others, though, felt that the payoff wasn’t seeing images in the clouds, but actually, the act of searching for them. “I look at the sky so little, that when I do it’s because I am looking for an escape,” said Kevin Matuszeski, regional director of business operations “There are very few places left without the presence of screens or where you have to read something. So the pure joy of staring at something just for its beauty should be respected."

In other words, for some people, the joy lays in the process, and Pareidolia seemed to eliminate that.

Pareidolia didn’t turn out to be quite the leisure fix that I hoped it would. And it didn’t quite prove to be an antidote to homesickness, either. But it did encourage me to get outside, take my eyes off a screen for a few minutes, and enjoy nature as much as I could from the concrete of my downtown Chicago office. And even if it wasn’t a total fix, it does brighten up my days.

I was only 16 when I moved across the Atlantic to Vancouver Island, Canada, thousands of miles away from my home in Spain. In this strange new world, I found myself struggling to find something that felt familiar, and could give me comforts of home.

We know this is easier said than done, especially for large teams spread across multiple locations. Over the years, IDEO has helped organizations around the globe develop the capacity to innovate, and that work has allowed us to gather data on the behaviors that have the greatest impact on a team’s ability to develop a successful solution.

Here are four insights into the ways today’s businesses innovate—and what you can learn from what they’ve learned.

1. Quick and dirty prototyping isn’t just for software

Though many executives dismiss MVP-style prototyping as a software-only approach, we've found it's actually more effective in other industries.

In fact, rough, low-fidelity prototyping is significantly more impactful when used in industries where it's currently least applied—particularly for companies with long development cycles and long product lifecycles.

When we looked at data from our research, we found that organizations with long development cycles and long product lifecycles saw their chance of successful launches increase by 109% compared to their more nimble counterparts.

Why? And how? Let’s consider a car company: For those teams, the cost and risk of investing in poorly thought-out ideas is much, much higher. Building a high-fidelity vehicle prototype can cost millions of dollars using traditional methods. Instead, low fidelity mock-ups (in this case, using foam core and tape to create a simulated car dashboard) can uncover critical flaws that can save millions of dollars and years of effort.

2. Don’t let your team become blinded by purpose

Purpose statements are incredibly valuable. We’ve seen that organizations without a sense of purpose find it difficult to innovate: They struggle to choose which opportunities to pursue, and they have a more difficult time getting employees excited about developing those ideas. Our data shows that organizations with a strong purpose are 12% more likely to launch new solutions successfully.

But purpose can have a downside. Our research has shown that it lowers the ability to listen objectively to the results of customer experimentation.

What does that mean? A benefit of a strong purpose is that it simplifies decision-making. However, at its extreme, this approach can lead to less flexible thinking, leaving organizations a little less likely to truly hear what a stakeholder or customer is telling them.

Does this mean you should crumple up your purpose statement and toss it in the trash? No, not at all. Purpose is fundamental to innovation: It energizes employees, speeds up decision-making, and leads to more productive collaboration. But beware the line where purpose turns into dogma and diminishes your team’s ability to truly listen to customers and interpret data.

3. Move fast—but not too fast

With the rise of lean startups, companies are feeling the pressure to get moving. But getting started without a plan and a clear idea of your objectives can end up being a drain on resources.

What’s the cost? First, skipping the steps of getting to know your customer and market causes teams to fail 180% more often. Also, organizations that evaluate multiple ways to solve a problem are much more likely to succeed—more than 42% more likely—and, on average, get to market faster.

We’ve seen two significant reasons for this: First, testing multiple ideas in parallel keeps the team’s mind flexible; and second, customers involved in research and testing during development provide more useful feedback when they are presented with multiple ideas.

If your guess is right from the start, great—you've saved a lot of time. But many startup or venture teams don’t have the right idea at the start. Teams that spend the time getting to know their customer early, then testing multiple ideas can take months off of the overall duration of their initiative.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of culture

When you're working to solve complicated problems, it’s natural to rely on process. Process feels tangible, comfortable. Nail that "innovation formula," and success will come.

But process isn’t—and can’t be—everything. Sure, certain methods are helpful for testing assumptions and getting to the right ideas, but it’s people—their spirit, their judgment, and their energy—that ultimately lead to the development of great ideas.

Organizations whose employees consistently state that they understand how to drive ideas forward and feel that they're making significant strides toward their organization’s goals are 16% more likely to have a successful launch.

One of the qualities we’ve measured is whether an organization’s team members describe their culture positively. Do they see their interactions with those in other organizational functions as productive and supportive? The teams who score each other in the top 5% are 30% less likely to fail than those under the 50th percentile.

Methodology and approach matter, but lean too hard on just those elements while neglecting culture and people will quickly lose their passion and energy, and resort to a paint-by-numbers approach that yields unspectacular results.

Countless more insights like these have yet to be uncovered, but one thing is already clear: Innovation leaders can’t fall back into old, stagnant patterns, but instead must continually find new edges for their teams to push.

Illustrations by Beena Mistry

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Creative solutions don’t happen by accident. They aren’t enacted by lone geniuses—they come from diverse teams that work well together and optimize the right methods and behaviors.

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I’m grateful for Chicago’s trains—even amid the crush of people jammed into the morning’s rush hour commute and the thought-clouding clatter and clank that pervades every metal car. It’s a marvel that these hulking workhorses of public transport coordinate at all, and are generally safe, on time, and comfortable. And yet I often notice fellow train-goers challenged, like myself, by something basic: What do we do with our stuff? In my time as a commuter, I’ve seen myriad workarounds. Legs became walls propping up clothes and bags; thighs became resting ports for big headphones. And then there was the man who transformed his suitcase handle into a coat rack. Human ingenuity: It’s one more thing I’m grateful for during my commute.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

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.