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

Two years, two photography classes, and a few countries later, I did a deep clean of my hard drive. Between filing away evidence of big parties in tiny apartments and hundreds of nearly identical photos of elephants, I realized that I had taken a lot of pictures of couples. Not five or 10, but closer to 100. And not of people that I knew, but of complete strangers.

On their own, these photos could have been easily overlooked amidst thousands of snapshots of friends and family, but seeing them all together gave me a rush of giddiness and warmth. So, I set out to gather more and began posting the shots on Instagram.

As soon as I launched the account, publicly declaring my habit, I found more and more moments of tenderness in everyday life. I shot from a distance to maintain a layer of anonymity and focus on the transfer of emotion rather than the individuals themselves. My intent wasn’t to get the story behind the shot, but simply to collect these unprovoked and unpolished moments. And as I collected, my definition of public displays of affection expanded to include heads on shoulders, joint selfies, synchronous footsteps—even the imagined closeness of two people standing in proximity to one another. I've found love on street corners, in subway cars, and at national monuments. Instead of walking around with my head down, I was discovering tiny moments of joy in the world.

And the more I found, the more I felt like at any given moment, anywhere in the world, hundreds of people are holding hands, or touching arms, or leaning in to each other. The act of looking for love led to finding it, which led to actually feeling it.

Head to @lookingforloveblog for your fix.

A few years ago, I spotted a tear-off paper flyer stapled to a telephone pole that read LOOKING FOR LOVE. Every tab had been pulled.

However, more data means more time spent managing data. So about four months ago, I pulled together this little helper, an automated assistant that I coded to save our design team a little time. We even gave it a little personality to make living with it more fun.

The bots

The inspiration for this bot came from our Chicago team, which was working to develop a health monitoring app for smartphones and watches, and wanted to include a prototype messaging system. Rather than spending time coding a system that would automate responses, they hooked up the Slack interface to a service that would send and receive text messages. The result was a system that allowed a non-technical design researcher to send targeted messages directly from Slack, freeing up the developers to work on the next challenge.

Meanwhile, in London, we were tracking the daily travel of more than 40 people. During the course of the project, we recorded more than 160,000km of driving, so we built a bot to help us keep tabs on our fleet. Each time a journey was complete, the bot would post a note into a special channel, allowing the whole team to see the activity without having to log in to a separate system. The bot also helpfully included a direct link to a separate dashboard, in case anyone wanted to dig deeper into the data.

The tech stacks

Chicago's bot was part of a loop that connected each of the participants’ smartwatches directly to a design researcher:

Each day, participants would log their activities using Siri’s voice-to-text feature. Siri then transcribed the voice message, and the text was sent to the database, where it was time stamped and stored. From there, a copy was sent to Slack, where each participant showed up as a team member in the chat interface.Then the whole stack reversed, allowing any member of the team to send a message to the participant. Each day, the design researcher simply had to send a normal Slack message and it appeared on the participant’s smartwatch.

We found their workaround really inspiring, so when we started our travel behavior project, we looked for similar ways to save time.

To start, we opted to store each trip in Parse. Once a drive was complete and recorded, we used Parse's Cloud Code functionality to send a message to Slack using the Incoming Webhook integration. The result was a message from the slackbot each time a drive finished. Cloud Code allowed us to format the message with a link back to the data, so it was easy for researchers to click to learn more about each trip. We could format the message however we wanted, so we gave the bot a small bank of phrases to use to add a little personality. We also gave it a few emoji so that it would fit in with the Slack communication style.

These messages popped up in a specific channel. Our team could choose to listen in, or mute it. Over the course of the project, it became a useful reminder that there were real people behind these driving patterns.

What we learned

The Chicago bot showed us that we don’t always need a technical person to manipulate complex systems. Not only did our bot save us time, we were also able to add a little magic to the prototype, which gave our participants a better experience. It also gave all parties—the design team, the client, and a technology partner—a better sense of what was going on, and a quicker way to jump into the data. We’re constantly working to find better ways to collaborate with our clients, and small touches like these make it easier to act on our research. Perhaps the most revealing thing about our adoption of these tools was how quickly we assimilated them into our teams. The new tool went from novel to normal surprisingly quickly.

The future

While adding intelligence to the bots seems like an obvious next step, it could be a dangerous move to outsource too much of our process. After all, we’re here to learn. I'd rather have a legion of simple "toolbots" shaving time off repetitive tasks than software that makes decisions for us, which could cause us to miss valuable insights. Our goal is to empower our teams, not to replace them.

See the London Bot on GitHub here.

Special thanks to Ben Syverson for his help on this post.

We’re always looking for smart ways to learn more in less time. This mentality has led our researchers to push the boundaries of the data we can record in our research process. Alongside the qualitative data we gather from interviews, we also pull together behavioral data collected over longer time periods. We might record someone’s steps per day, or the route they take to work, in order to find insights into the patterns of everyday.

A self-proclaimed “sports guy,” Marc first tried archery at 12. By 18, he was a competitive archer, training 4-6 hours a day and traveling across Spain to shoot arrows alongside the country's best bowmen and women, including members of the current Olympic archery team in Rio, Miguel Alvariño, J. I. Rodriguez, and Antonio Fernandez. (Although the modest interaction designer is quick to shun any comparisons.)

Marc left his custom-made, Olympic-grade bow at home when he relocated to IDEO Chicago for a 7-month internship, but he cheers on his country’s team remotely every night, binge-watching Spanish videos of the day’s competitions on his home laptop thanks to some clever, scrappy, and—ahem—ingenious online “workarounds.”

While firing arrows at a bullseye 70M away might be a thing of the past, archery taught Marc many lessons he pulls out of his quiver as a designer today: honing your technique, being honest about your strengths and weaknesses, staying open to new ideas and strategies, and improvising in the moment. Lessons that also apply to successfully launching a Finger Blaster to nab a coveted banana 10 yards away.

WATCH: The ever-hungry intern takes aim at a midday snack. Video by Sophie Feng.

But, then again, if this design thing doesn't work out, there's always Tokyo 2020!

Marc Exposito was born for the Olympics. Literally. The Barcelona native arrived into the world during the heyday of the city’s 1992 Summer Olympic Games.

Zimbabwe-born Natsai studied architecture at Edinburgh University, then at Central St. Martin’s Material Futures course. There she learned about synthetic biology, and met Dr. John Ward, a professor from UCL’s microbial molecular biology lab. He became a supporter of her scarf project, called Fold.

Natsai is at the forefront of an emerging field, biodesign, that aims to tackle the climate change problems caused by textiles and farming. Fueled by advances like the gene editing technique CRISPR, which is making designing with DNA simpler and cheaper, scientists and designers are looking to harnessing nature itself to ‘biofacture’ everything from leather, to meat, to medicine.

Companies like Bolt Threads are spinning synthetic spider silk, while Modern Meadow is growing meat in labs. Meanwhile Autodesk is creating design tools for the field—think AutoCAD for DNA.

Natsai joined IDEO’s London studio as part of our two week-long Fortnight residency, collaborated with the community here, and shared the resulting scarves. As part of her final presentation, she brought to life the potential of biodesign with a series of five tweets. Here, she explains the speculative future they’re framed in. It is a future in which synthetic biology is shaping brands, products, businesses, and people’s behavior.

Future Craft

“Hyper-specialized hybrid technologies signal the rise of the niche maker. #DIYbio #biomakerspace”

Natsai: I’m really interested in the dialogue between craft and technology. This tweet depicts my own reality: my craft is so specialized that I have to design the tools to create it, and I also have had to learn how to maintain the life that co-creates it, without any precedents to learn from. Imagine a world where our materials are alive or derived from living systems. Every maker will intimately know the biochemistry of their chosen species, and will find new ways of transforming those organisms’ behaviors into truly unique products and processes. We’ll be using other living systems and even amalgamating layers of digital technology to biofabricate.

Service Design

“Who owns your wardrobe? #panasonic4nike”

Natsai: I had a conversation with a colleague about how one might go about democratizing the production of ‘bio-factured’ products. At the time I was thinking about how to streamline the process for scaling up this technology, but he challenged me to think about new models of distribution that tap into DIY culture. Ultimately, his question was: if you can grow your own textiles, then who owns your wardrobe? The hashtag #Panasonic4Nike points towards a future that sees unlikely stakeholders coming together to offer true innovations in designing the products we use, as well as the services and hardware that enable us to do this in a personalized way.

Convergence

“Digitized biology has democratized the creation of complex biological consumer products. #autodesk #synbio #AI #IOT”

Natsai: I understand that not only do I work with a pigment-producing bacteria, but that medium is also a biological sensor. Producing pigment signals a crucial stage in the bacteria’s life cycle. This made me ask: how could we harness living sensors and build them into our everyday environments? The notion of technology convergence is definitely something I see happening further into the future. Wearable technology, household electronics and the Internet of Things, in my view, will expand and come together to create mutually-beneficial ecosystems of bacteria and digital technology.

Metabolic Materiality

“Biofacturing process & biological characteristics of an organism now define a brand’s identity and its business model. #bottomupprimacy #IP”

Working in a fashion context, I am hyper aware of how a brand’s identity communicates. The product itself needs to hold true to the values of the brand. This is the part that gets tricky working with a living technology: at some point I relinquish control to my bacterial colonies to finish the garments—conceptually speaking, I provide the structural parameters. The lack of control is a challenge and an opportunity to design interventions that end up in line with the brand identity. Creativity therefore becomes crucial, to push the aesthetics and craft processes in the development of each garment. Although it’s true of any industry, fashion is a particularly interesting space to consider a business model based on that uniqueness. Even before we think about synthetic biology as a way of manufacturing, designers can and should push innovation beyond a simple “genetically-modified organism 1 fixes problem A.”

Beyond Monoculture

“Happy Kombucha shares rally as merger with Kvadrat announced. #symbioticventures #closedloopsystem”

This really looks at future business models and ecosystems of information and skill exchange. Happy Kombucha actually exists and it’s my go-to for food and beverage bacterial cultures in the UK. They mainly sell starters and toolkits for brewing your own kombucha, kefir water and kefir milk. This tweet is a little tongue-in-cheek: it imagines that their business strategy has evolved to sell the SCOBYs (the symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that ferments tea, to make kombucha) as fabrics, leading to a merger with major textile manufacturing brand Kvadrat. It also speaks of the current and future reality of the trade of living organisms.

IDEO Fortnight with Natsai Audrey Chieza from Alexandra Whiting on Vimeo.

Vivid pinks, blues, greens and yellows form beautiful, organic abstract shapes on Natsai Audrey’s delicate silk scarves. But they’re not drawn by her, or silkscreened in a print studio. Instead, the shapes are the life and death of streptomyces bacteria writ colorful on silk, folded into a petri dish, in a lab.

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.