Life Technologies, a global biotech company that supplies scientists with products and services, needed to grow big, from a $4 billion to a $10 billion enterprise. So it hired IDEO to help seed innovation across the company.

"When we started out, it was an R&D thing for driving innovation in new products. Now it’s not just R&D; user-centered innovation is a central part of our culture. It’s what we do throughout the organization," said Amy Cuneo, Associate Director, Customer Insights.

Over a three-year engagement, IDEO helped transform Life Technologies’ corporate culture through the introduction of User-Centered Innovation (UCI), an optimistic, experiential approach to problem-solving. Far outperforming its ambitious goal, Life Technologies is now a $13.6 billion company and uses UCI to inspire innovation throughout the 10,000-person organization.

After working with Life Technologies, IDEO designers came up with three products that have gone to market, including, a new bottle that showcases superior handling and storage, easier identification, and additional room for supplements. And Life Technologies has transformed from a company that aspires to focus on customers to one that truly does.

Unplanned pregnancies are a big problem in the US, especially among unmarried 18- to 29-year-olds. Seven in 10 pregnancies in this demographic are unplanned, a statistic that applies to women of all ethnicities and socioeconomic levels. Complicating matters are the social tension between abstinence-only and contraception-inclusive education, and the difficulty and expense associated with obtaining prescription birth control.

Since 2009, IDEO has worked closely with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit NGO, to address this pressing social challenge. One of the first insights on the project was identifying the need for comprehensive birth control support. Designers looked at ways to transform birth control from a prescription (a piece of paper that is handed to you by a doctor) into a subscription (a program that ensures you start using birth control, use it correctly, and migrate to more effective methods).

Given the complex and potentially overwhelming subject matter, the IDEO team interviewed women in the target demographic; talked with doctors, counselors, and other experts with varying opinions about birth control; and hosted roundtable discussions. They developed several concepts and scenarios that allowed members of the National Campaign to see sex and pregnancy through the eyes of the young women they’re working to reach.

Research and prototyping efforts led to the design of Bedsider, a multi-touchpoint birth control support system with a carefully crafted sex-positive brand, which is uncommon for the healthcare industry. Bedsider focuses on five key areas (awareness, motivational drivers, digital offerings, services, and loyalty) and acts as a vehicle for behavioral change that’s flexible, with room to grow into a much larger movement.

The Ad Council and the National Campaign debuted a multiyear, multimedia public service campaign in November 2011. The Bedsider website offers comprehensive education about existing birth control methods. This includes opt-in reminder services, personal stories from women across the country on why they chose a particular method, a phone service that provides information in both English and Spanish, features such as “Fact or Fiction” (hilarious animated clips debunking popular myths), a “Frisky Friday” newsletter, and more.

Bedsider has launched nationally with the help of an Ad Council campaign that drives sexually active women ages 18–24 to Bedsider.org. The multimedia Public Service Announcement effort includes television, radio, print, web, and nontraditional advertising, as well as an integrated social media program.

“We hope that Bedsider will be a useful tool for women to learn about their birth control options, better manage their birth control, and in the process avoid getting pregnant until they’re ready,” said Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast in its monthly newsletter. Planned Parenthood and Philliber Research Associates joined forces with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to help test and evaluate Bedsider.

Through a social media campaign called #ThxBirthControl, people are voicing their thoughts about what birth control has made possible for women, men, families, and society. It’s all part of Thanks, Birth Control Day, launched in November 2013 as part of a continuing initiative to encourage positive conversations and more consistent use of birth control by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. To celebrate the movement, IDEO wrote, scored, and performed an animated musical featuring condoms and pill packs dancing the cancan.

According to an independent evaluation of the program, Bedsider is the first digital intervention in reproductive health in the U.S.—with adults as an audience—that has shown to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Turns out that when women and men have the ability to plan, prevent, or space pregnancies, they’re more likely to finish school, achieve their goals, and ultimately have healthier families, according to the nonprofit organization.

Chicago’s federally funded, citywide bike-sharing service, called Divvy, makes a fleet of bicycles available to commuters and tourists 24 hours a day. Alta Bicycle Share (which runs bike-sharing systems in Boston, the Bay Area, DC, and New York City) collaborated with IDEO to spread Divvy’s message, “Divide and Share!” to the cyclists and would-be cyclists of Chicago through the brand.

The new brand would appear on its bikes, stations, company vans, member fobs, and website—and it needed to be ready to hit the streets in just six months. IDEO partnered with local brand strategy studio Firebelly Design to collaborate on a solution. IDEO led the early research, conceptual brand development, and naming phase of the project; the Firebelly team led the visual design and developed the brand guidelines.

The brand has become a functional and fun part of Chicago’s transportation landscape and has been embraced by Chicago commuters. Just three weeks after it launched, the City of Chicago called the Divvy Bikes program the busiest bike-sharing system in the world. Six months into the service, enthusiastic cyclists have racked up over 780,000 trips and 1.7 million-plus miles, and over 12,000 Chicagoans have become members.

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After watching her husband suffer from cancer, Tomoko Namba, founder of Japan’s leading mobile internet company, DeNA, wanted to empower people with better health information to aid them in making medical decisions. DeNA partnered with IDEO to help with the design of a genetic test that had mass-market appeal.

Together, IDEO and DeNA designed all the consumer touchpoints from the ground up for the expanding new business, called MYCODE. The aim was not only to create a functioning, usable product, but also to introduce the notion of genetic testing in a privacy-sensitive country that for the most part, hadn’t yet considered it an option. What would make MYCODE resonate with mass-market Japan? How could genetic testing results be shared in a way that was accurate but also actionable and motivating?

The team worked with doctors, nutritionists, medical governing bodies, and more, setting up fast, iterative cycles, and conceptualizing and prototyping almost every aspect of MYCODE in just 16 weeks. Data design, home testing experience, purchase flow, and how the service would be used over the long-term were all considered, along with traditional branding elements, like name, logo, and visual identity.

The result is a product that puts reliable genetic information into the hands of Japanese consumers, helping them to make more informed healthcare decisions. MYCODE went to market in August 2014, just nine months after the engagement with IDEO began. Not only did MYCODE fulfill Namba’s mission, it helped the company find new ways to grow: Upon announcement of the new service, DeNA’s share price jumped 6.7 percent.

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.