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.

In an effort to be more conscious of our own health and the health of our planet, we’re being told to eat a plant-based diet, while, at the same time, lab-grown meat is gaining traction. How do we wrap our heads around all of it?

We think design can help. But a few things have to shift if we’re going to drive the global food system toward greater sustainability. At the consumer level, it’s about supporting people to make healthier decisions about how they eat. At the level of large companies or complex systems, it’s about helping organizations reinvent themselves, ask bigger questions, and make more thoughtful changes from within.

In either case, change isn’t easy. To help our clients in the food space get inspired and energized, we often recommend looking for insights in unexpected places—we call it “analogous inspiration.” It’s easy to get caught up in what you already know and mired in the same cyclical ways of thinking; to innovate, you have to break out.

Here are a few ways for folks to innovate in the food landscape (and beyond):

1. Design for emerging behaviors

During a recent project to help a global beverage company think beyond its current business, we set up interviews with people outside the industry, including one with a company that makes charging stations for electric vehicles. When the car charging company was just starting out, leaders assumed they would follow the model of gas stations by building stand-alone charging stations spread throughout a city. That’s how people had fueled cars for decades, right?

But it turns out consumers don’t want to stand around for 30 or 40 minutes while their cars charge; instead, they want to fold charging into another errand, such as a trip to the grocery store. Because their lives are increasingly complex, they want to streamline wherever they can. This insight prompted the charging company to completely rethink its approach.

Though the beverage businesses has nothing to do with cars, seeing the charging company’s abrupt change in tactics to address a human need inspired our client to think far beyond existing consumer behaviors and to advocate for big changes in the business model.

The takeaway: Instead of taking the established route, innovators should be on the lookout for new and emerging behaviors that indicate an alternative path to designing for the future.

2. Get up close and personal

A lot of living happens outside of conference rooms and surveys. In order to capture what’s really on folks’ minds, we often spend days or weeks shadowing people and looking for unconscious behaviors that can influence how we design for them.

Recently, we were working with a baby food company looking to expand its line of products. We met real customers and shadowed them for days—at home, on their commutes, while shopping, and when preparing food. By traveling on the subway with them during feeding time, watching them buy groceries, and sitting with them in their homes, we noticed how many workarounds they used when feeding their infants and a few common issues they faced with existing baby food.

These insights, while seemingly small, helped inform how we designed our client’s food packaging. It was the little observations we made by diving in head-first with parents that enabled us to create a feeding experience that feels a bit more parent-centered.

The take-away: Double down on real human interactions and don’t overlook the small stuff. Sometimes, subconscious behaviors and common workarounds indicate the need for a redesign.

3. Look beyond your industry

When you walk into a hotel room, you’re often greeted by signs encouraging you to save water by reusing your towels or foregoing a change of sheets. While no longer new to most of us, these reminders were fairly revolutionary when they first appeared and have helped to save millions of gallons of water since.

When we set out to help the Rockefeller Foundation find ways to reduce food waste, we looked for examples of waste reduction in other industries, including hospitality. Hotel signage cueing visitors to reuse towels is more than just a pesky reminder to save water; it’s a way for people to incrementally change their behavior while feeling like they’re a part of something bigger for the betterment of the planet. In this case, understanding what motivates people resulted in a drastic drop in water waste.

With the Rockefeller Foundation, we tapped into data around food waste and were able to use it to predict human behaviors and test subtle changes in a number of industries. Hyatt Hotels prototyped some of this thinking in their buffets—by switching from whole cakes to individual sweets, for example—resulting in a 10 percent cost savings for the company and an enormous reduction in food waste.

The take-away: Instead of looking within your own walls for inspiration, look outside to other industries and sectors to see how they’ve solved similar problems.

We've found these three design approaches useful. Have other ideas? We’d love to hear them! Tag @IDEO and use the hashtag #designforfood.

The world of food contains all kinds of internal tensions: On the one hand, we’re faced with hunger and food shortages, while on the other we’re fighting an obesity epidemic.

And as with any technology, AI can have a dark side, too. Whether it's Cambridge Analytica exploiting personal information for political gain or Northpointe developing prejudiced algorithms for bail and sentencing hearings, danger lurks.

This is a moment for design. A moment for us to imagine the kind of future we want to see. What might it feel like?

To explore those questions, and give shape to the immense benefits that intelligent machines can bring to our lives, work, and society as a whole, we created a speculative design exhibition for Munich Creative Business Week called Hyperhuman.

Here's a peek at the products:

The Purpose Compass

What if a machine could help you better understand your strengths? What if it could help you succeed in a machine-augmented future?

Armies of robots already populate the factory floor and digital lawyers write our contracts. As intelligent machines become a fixture in every aspect of our work and lives, they inevitably start challenging our contribution to society, begging the question, do humans still matter? What is our purpose?

The Purpose Compass helps you determine your unique worth in the future. It understands what you are good at and helps you decide what to focus on to stay relevant, productive, and happy in the long term. Turn towards larger purpose goals—teaching, leading, inventing, or caring—to set a course and learn which skills you'll need to pick up to get there. Over time, many skills will be automated, freeing you up to learn new ones.

Purpose is shaped, not given.

The Expertise TV

What if a machine could identify gaps within an organization’s knowledge and help you figure out how to fill them?

We have unprecedented access to information, but the sheer volume of it prevents us from gaining deep understanding of a wide range of topics. We either specialize in a specific field or become generalists, making assumptions to fill the gaps in our expertise.

Enter Expertise TV: Twist its knobs and it instantly directs you to experts whose knowledge sheds light on unanswered questions that are holding your organization back.

Knowledge resides in people, not machines.

The Creativity Mixer

What if you could describe your personality, and ‘mix’ a visual identity that expresses you?

Even with a creative mindset, people often lack confidence and ability to shape and express their ideas at the highest level.

What does your brand look like? Turn the dials of the Creativity Mixer (produced in collaboration with creative.ai) to set your personality ("playful," "stubborn") and it calls up images, fonts, and colors for you to use when executing ideas. When settled with your choices, hit print for your very own brand style guide.

Creativity is latent, tools make it accessible.

The Empathy Writer

What if you could find the exact right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

Our globally connected lives mean we’re frequently brought into contact with people from different cultures and backgrounds.Despite the opportunities these networks present, we often struggle to communicate, as we are not equally fluent in the other’s language and don’t share the same cultural
mores.

What if you could find just the right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

The Empathy Writer helps you convey what you mean in a way that will be easily understood. Using the character trait tiles, I describe myself and you, then the machine helps me compose a message in a way that reflects who you are.

Empathy is amplified.

The Belief Checkout

What if tomorrow’s supermarkets considered your values and ethics when automatically buying products for you?

We outsource more and more tasks to AI. But how do we know that the decisions AI makes on our behalf are aligned with our beliefs and values? How do we impart them to the machine?

The Belief Checkout’s shelves are full of products that represent values. Pick the ones that reflect you to help steer the supermarket’s algorithm. Say you value sustainability. While eating red meat may not sound like a sustainable choice, eating an overstocked steak might be. The supermarket can help you make choices that square with your values.

We let go of control, but our beliefs stay in tact.

Hyperhuman was a collaboration between IDEO Munich, London, and Chicago. To find out more about our Protopian perspective on augmented intelligence email europe@ideo.com.

We’re in the midst of a revolution. Intelligent machines are able to augment our humanity in ways that seem lifted straight out of science fiction. Self-driving cars, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, even our thermostats learn from us and get smarter over time.

I took this picture at the train station right next to our Palo Alto office. At first glance, I thought it was an unusual fashion statement, but then I realized that the woman in the picture solved a common problem in an elegant way: When your bike lacks a chain guard, your pants can easily get stuck and you risk destroying them—or even causing an accident. By wearing a cut-off sock above her pants she kept them protected from the chain. By going with a chartreuse sock, she made sure she wouldn't be overlooked in the aggressive Bay Area traffic.

Unfortunately, I discovered this helpful little hack the day after I ruined my favorite yellow pants with chain oil. But don't pity me too much; in the end my dry cleaner saved my day, and from now on, I'll always carry a cut-off sock with me.

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.

In exploring the topic, I soon realized the issue was not the lack of stuff he would leave behind when he passed away, but rather quite the opposite. Today, a digital information overload is present for almost all of us.

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As the techie of the family, I’ve taken on the role of digital archivist for two close loved ones we’ve lost over the years. My brother died in 2003, and 15 years is a very long time ago in technological terms. Nonetheless, I was able to build an archive of his photos, MP3s, school papers, personal documents, and other digital fragments. I felt closer to him because of this.

Today of course, we have social media, and it’s a cultural trope to say that we live out our lives publicly on it. But social data only represents a limited and curated self that we share with the world. Our digital footprint is vast. Beyond our social data, we have our emails and chat histories, the photos and videos we take, the photos and videos others take of us, and our web searches—all of which are rich with metadata, including time, date, and location.

IBM estimates that humanity is generating 250 billion gigabytes of data every single day, and that 90 percent of all the data ever created by mankind has been generated in the past two years alone. In just two years, we’ve surpassed the volume of the entire record of human knowledge from cave paintings up until the end of 2015.

Consider that we’ve only had photographs for a few generations. I can look back at this photo of my young grandfather and his rugby team in County Sligo, Ireland, but we have no photos of his grandfather. Until quite recently, most of humanity never had any record of how their ancestors looked—something we take for granted today. Even the written word was not always ubiquitous; just 200 years ago it’s estimated that only 12 percent of the world’s population was literate.

The digital records for people over a certain age are inherently incomplete, but the younger you are, the more complete your picture is, whether you created it yourself or it was captured by your parents as they documented your childhood to share with Grandma. In the historical blink of an eye, our digital footprints have gone from spotty to distinct—a complete picture of our online lives.

This begs the questions: What if we left our digital footprints behind intentionally? How might we curate, filter, or amend our digital records as we plan for our own end of life?

There are a number of emerging technologies and techniques that can help us design our digital afterlives. If you’re interested in training a chatbot to mimic you, you can begin today with Replika.ai, a bot that learns to be more like you the more you use it. The team behind it has even open-sourced their underlying chat tech on GitHub.

VocalID is a company that allows people to preserve their vocal legacy by recording a set of voice samples. Its primary customers are people who lose their voices—for example those with ALS or Parkinson’s. Could people give these voice samples to family members after their deaths, or request that their voices die with them?

Beyond text, researchers at the University of Washington have shown that with a broad enough set of video samples, we can train an AI to create entirely new video clips of the same subjects. And emerging technology called “deep fakes” can use machine learning to swap faces in online videos.

Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Syncing from Audio. University of Washington.

The collision of our immense datasets with rapidly advancing abilities in machine learning is not only inevitable, it’s happening now. Roman Mazurenko is a digital avatar of the real Roman built by one of his grieving friends after his death. Anyone can download it/him from the app store.

This is not about the singularity or transhumanism; I’m not talking about uploading my consciousness to the cloud to create Virtual Sean. But rather, how might our loved ones experience us differently after we pass?

In the future, we’ll have new ways to preserve more bits and pieces of ourselves— our voices, photos, texts, etc.—and new ways for our loved ones to experience this ephemera. There will be new challenges as well. Much of the data we create is invisible to us and is not under our direct control or ownership. When we pass, this data will live on, whether we like it or not.

I expect that you might be simultaneously intrigued and concerned by this topic; that’s to be expected. But just as we must one day face the end of our lives, we must also grapple with our digital identities and digital legacies.

Let’s get the dialogue started.

A few months ago, my cousin asked me about his digital legacy. He asked how his kids could explore his personal artifacts—his ephemera—in the digital age, when there are no vinyl records, physical photographs, or even MP3s to hand down.

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.