Once considered one of Boston’s best-kept secrets, Boston Harbor Islands National Park was looking to increase visibility and entice visitors to its network of 34 islands, a Civil War–era fort, historic lighthouses, and more than 50 square miles of bays, harbors, and rivers within the Boston Harbor basin.

Together with the National Park Service, Boston Harbor Alliance, architecture firm Utile, and landscape architecture firm Reed Hilderbrand, IDEO and the National Park Service came up with a plan to design a pavilion on the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway, which reconnects the city’s historic waterfront to the downtown area. The team believed a successful pavilion would sell boat tickets, attract passers-by, and enable a positive encounter with the islands. Today, the structure serves as the primary gateway linking Boston to the Harbor Islands, equipping the city with an experiential anchor to better connect visitors with Boston’s coastal gems.

The Boston Harbor Islands Pavilion was officially unveiled on June 2, 2011, and honored with an Honor Award for Design Excellence from the Boston Society of Architects, the 2011 Grand Honor Award from the Associated General Contractors of New England, and a Silver Award from the 2012 ACEC/MA Engineering Excellence Awards.

The Boston Harbor Island Alliance, which acts as a steward for the 34 islands, anticipates that the pavilion will positively impact the number of visitors this year.

In 1901, Charles R. Walgreen, Sr., opened up a small neighborhood pharmacy on Chicago’s South Side. Today, Walgreens is the largest drug retail chain in the US with more than 8,200 locations in all 50 states. As healthcare reform has become top of mind in the US and patient-centered care increasingly the norm, Walgreens sees its scale as an opportunity to rethink the role of the community pharmacy in the 21st century. The company collaborated with IDEO to redesign its pharmacy experience in order to foster rich, trust-based relationships between customers and the most highly trained medical professionals on staff—pharmacists.

Most Americans—75 percent—live within five miles of a Walgreens. With the Affordable Care Act bringing millions more Americans into the healthcare system, Walgreens’ proximity and reach provided a big opportunity to become a convenient and trusted touchpoint for patients outside of hospitals and doctors’ offices, especially those suffering from chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. The challenge: Use design to shift customer perception of Walgreens from just another convenience store to a local place at “the corner of happy and healthy,” where customers could receive everyday health and wellness advice. In other words, bring Charles R. Walgreen’s vision of a community pharmacy to unprecedented scale.

IDEO built out two full-size prototypes of a reimagined Walgreens pharmacy designed to cultivate better relationships between customers and pharmacists. Key to building good relationships were private consultation rooms that allowed for close conversations, and friendly health guides that helped customers browse over-the-counter medications or schedule “take care” appointments. Pharmacists, usually barricaded behind their high counter at the rear of the store, were now positioned out on the pharmacy floor, ready to listen and—most important—ensure continuity of care.

"Patients are engaging with pharmacists even more often to ask about everything—including their medication, health conditions, and prescription regimens," said Nimest Jhaveri, Divisional Vice President, Pharmacy Transformation.

The new Well Experience format was launched in two pilot locations in Chicago just a few months after the prototypes were built. Combining IDEO’s pharmacy work with Walgreens’ new approaches to beauty products, fresh food, and online shopping, 750 Well Experience locations have opened in the US and Puerto Rico—including 14 flagship stores in major cities—and an additional 1,000 are planned for the coming years.

Walgreens is also expanding the scope of its Take Care Clinics, which are usually staffed by nurses or physician’s assistants, to include the diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring of chronic diseases such as diabetes that are typically handled by doctors. The company considers its Well Experience pharmacies a work in progress and plans to keep evolving the design based on customer feedback.

Opening a bottle of wine is typically a moment of no return, because what remains after the first pour almost immediately begins to oxidize.

But Greg Lambrecht knew there was a better way. He came up with an idea to pour the wine without opening the bottle. With a new device, a slender needle is inserted into the cork, and argon, an inert gas, pressurizes the bottle to pour a single glass. Remove the needle, and the tiny puncture in the cork naturally reseals, maintaining the integrity of the wine in the bottle.

Working with Lambrecht, IDEO refined the look, feel, and user experience of his device, designing and building a prototype that captured the expression of his eureka moment. Using this prototype, Lambrecht raised significant seed funding for his startup, and launched the Coravin System in July 2013. The company continues to grow year after year.

Lambrecht introduced the only product of its kind sold in the global market, and preliminary sales have far exceeded expectations. What’s more, for wine lovers everywhere, there’s finally a solution to savor and preserve every last drop.

Wells Fargo, one of the United States’ largest banks, wanted to enable customers get to the ATM functions they wanted faster. The updated interface needed to be different enough to have a tangible impact, and had to appeal to an extremely broad audience. What’s more, any changes made to the interface had to be compatible with the existing hardware of all of the ATMs in operation nationwide.

Wells Fargo and IDEO worked to enhance and customize the ATM user experience by making it innovative, fast, and easy—without requiring any new hardware. The interface’s entire layout is personalized, based on what a user does most at the ATM. It gives users an immediate glance at their account balances (which they can also hide) and highlights the touch screen 'buttons' that they use most (by putting them at the top of the screen in green). New data hierarchy also facilitates skimming for fast decision-making and provides messages and notifications based on a customer’s priorities. “[The design] shows an intense attention to detail,” noted American Banker.

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE LYNN, IMAGE COURTESY OF BIZJOURNALS.COM

Name: Andrea Oh
Location: San Francisco
Role at IDEO: Front Desk Concierge, Experience team. Steward of magical work-life experiences. Gatekeeper of the guest Wi-Fi. (She guards it with a Gandalf staff made out of Twix chocolate).
Joined IDEO: August 2015
Instagram: @fermdaza
Titillating Fact: Matcha is my life! For someone who doesn’t drink coffee, a dose of matcha powder mixed in with water in the morning is my saving grace.

1. Isaiah Rashad: "The Sun’s Tirade" (2016)

There are a couple albums I’ve been gravitating towards in the past month, but the one that’s been in constant rotation—and I mean constant—is the debut release of Top Dawg Entertainment-signed rapper Isaiah Rashad, The Sun’s Tirade. His earnest, poetic musings on butter-smooth production make for perfect late-summer listening. Roll the windows down while you’re at it.

2. Drumming around with Pyle-Pro PTED01

I used to take drum lessons when I was younger and regrettably fell out of the habit of playing as I got older and distracted by high-school-Andrea things. I’ve had an itch to take it up again so I recently just purchased this electronic drum kit to practice exercises and learn new grooves and fills (YouTube tutorials are your friend). I don’t have the space to house a real set and classes in the city are steeper than I can afford, so this is a good alternative to keep that itch scratched.

3. Warsan Shire

I’ve been reaching a lot for Warsan Shire these days. She is a Somali-British writer, activist, educator—and one of my favorite female voices in contemporary poetry. She explores themes ranging from love, sexual violence, religion, war, displacement, and the immigrant experience. Her words are often sharp and unapologetic. I love that her writing is a celebration of womanhood and the female body, as well as a tribute to Somali culture and her ancestry.

Watch: Warsan Shire reads her poem “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)” from Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth.

Header image by Markus Spiske.

‍

In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Andrea Oh.

1. Free Writing

Creativity manuals like the Artist's Way talk about the power of the "Morning Pages"—a ritual in which you start writing just after waking up, and bang out some prose before your conscious, self-critical self has fully come online. Conveniently, there's an app for that. Flowstate is a word processor with a twist: You set a timer, then write until it dings. If you hesitate for more than a couple of seconds, the app will delete everything that you've put down so far. Although it sounds like torture, the app can actually help you let go of editing and enter a state of uncritical flow.

2. Phone Denial

Before going to bed, move your phone charger to another room. Then, put a pencil and paper in its place on your nightstand. Now, when you wake up, instead of looking at Google News or Facebook, write down some thoughts that are related to how you're feeling, what is important for you, and how you're going to make a creative impact today. If that feels too involved right after waking up, draw a picture of something instead. Either way, don't let yourself get distracted by your phone until you've engaged your creativity.

3. Disposable Poetry

When Kurt Vonnegut was 84, he received a letter from a high school student, asking him to visit his school. The writer refused, claiming that he was now so old that he now "resembled an iguana." Instead of visiting, he sent a letter that contained a creative exercise. "Write a six-line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can." Then, Vonnegut said, the poem was to be torn up and discarded. "You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow." As a tribute to the great Mr. Vonnegut, try his ritual every morning.

4. Creative Collaging

Collect any old magazines or catalogues lying around your house. Leaf through them and cut out any interesting pictures or headlines. Assemble these into a collage. Take a photo of the collage and post it to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever social media site you use. Doesn't that feel better than posting a picture of yourself playing with your dog, or the avocado toast that you had for breakfast? Of course it does. You just stepped away from the ordinary world for a moment and created something original. For bonus points, download the Boomerang Gmail extension, and you can email your pictures to your future self—in a month or even a year. Think of it as a way to remind future you to stay creative.

5. Walking and Observing

Everyone from Beethoven to Steve Jobs relied on the inspirational powers of a walk. Neuroscience backs up their belief: A walk will remove you from the distractions of conversations and technology, freeing the mind to explore new associations between the ideas already in your head. Why not skip breakfast altogether and walk to work? Look around as you do so, and see if you notice anything unusual or surprising in the environment. Take a gander at other people too. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and imagine what they're thinking or feeling. Remind yourself that everybody sees the world differently, and that this kaleidoscope of human perceptions and viewpoints is a wonderful thing. Remember that inspiration is all around you—you just have to stop occasionally to breathe it in.

Illustrations by Megan Crabtree.

‍

Benjamin Franklin used to spend his mornings naked. Sigmund Freud would trim his beard. Marcel Proust smoked opium. There are many ways to start the day in a creative frame of mind. If you want an alternative to being nude, beardy, or high, here are some of our favorites.

‍

‍

This post is a source of parody and is for entertainment, education and commentary purposes only.

You may have heard: Designers like fonts. They dream in Helvetica. Letterforms may play as central a role in a designer's life as their favorite bands. Knowing this, our Tokyo studio threw an event called "PLAY - Creativity at The Intersection of Design + Music." We needed posters to promote it, and asked ourselves: How might we bring music and design together? The exercise quickly devolved into a competition for who could come up with the worst font-band pun. There's a slim overlap in the venn diagram of people who appreciate both Frank Zappa and Zapf Dingbats, but that is exactly who we were aiming for. Got your own #ideobandfont? Do share.

What was the spark?

I’m the type of person who always has a plan B. For my entire working life, I’ve had a side hustle. It made perfect sense to me, then, that in 2006, while I was working as the Chicago editor of Flavorpill, I’d accept the challenge to be a local producer for Mortified, a grassroots comedy show started by Dave Nadelberg in Los Angeles five years earlier. Even though, at that time, I was more comfortable behind a laptop than on stage, the show’s premise — everyday people reading their childhood diaries in front of a live audience — had everything I liked in comedy and storytelling: It was awkward, cathartic, redemptive, and totally relatable to anyone who was once a kid. It turned regular people into comedy stars. I jumped at the chance.

Most memorable Mortified moment? (Say that five times fast...)

For this year's Valentine Schmalentine show, we surprised one of our favorite performers, Kerstyne Kromer, by inviting her childhood celebrity crush Eden Riegel to Skype in and read the part Kerstyne had created for her in one of her childhood soap operas. In the early 2000s, Eden played Bianca Montgomery, the first openly lesbian character on All My Children. Watching Bianca's struggles on daytime TV helped Kerstyne eventually come out to her family and friends. Kerstyne almost passed out from happiness.

For a decade, my friends and I have been "sharing the shame" in Chicago.

What keeps you going?

We just celebrated Mortified Chicago’s 10th anniversary, which is astounding to me. I never thought we’d be around this long, or that I’d still be co-producing six Mortified shows a year at big venues like Lincoln Hall and The Promontory while working at IDEO. (Or that Mortified, which is now 15, would expand into books, a podcast, a TV series, a film, etc.) What energizes and inspires me is meeting new people and helping them unearth long-lost stories from their childhood. It’s an incredible privilege to have total strangers open up to you and tell you amazing and sometimes painful stories from their past. The night of the show, I love to sit in the A/V booth, hear the waves of laughter, and watch as the audience falls in love with our performers. It’s immensely gratifying to know I had a hand in making that moment possible.

What lessons from your after-hours project do you bring into your day job?

Three things immediately come to mind: I’m a better listener, I’m more empathic, and I’m a stronger storyteller. Human-centered design is all about having empathy for the end user in order to design a more desirable product, service, or fill in the blank. I also draw on many of the same techniques I use on our performers to help our designers prep for big client meetings and public speaking opportunities. Although, in the case of IDEOers, I hope nothing about their experience will be mortifying.

Annette Ferrara has been publicly embarrassing people for a decade. As a producer of Mortified, a live comedy show, she spends nights and weekends coaching people on how to get up on stage and read from their deeply personal, purple-prosed, and yes, mortifying childhood diaries. We asked her about the side project, and how it has influenced her 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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.