Obesity exists at the complex intersection of a clinical condition and a cultural force. Clinically, it comes with a diagnosis and treatment plan. Culturally, it is influenced by beliefs, identity, and self-worth, making it deeply personal and often taboo. Families, healthcare providers, and experts tend to avoid the fraught “o-word,” opting for euphemisms instead. For families on Medicaid, these challenges are even more pronounced. Award-winning health-tech startup Clarity Pediatrics, together with designers from IDEO, IDEO.org, and with support from Rise Together Ventures, sought to uncover the obstacles to healthier lifestyles and create a free report for US pediatricians who want to bend the curve on the childhood obesity epidemic.

Research with kids and parents on Medicaid in Dallas, Texas, and California’s Bay Area, along with interviews with healthcare providers and experts across the country, uncovered stories of stigma and frustration. Parents spoke of the daily challenges of balancing multiple jobs, sourcing affordable healthy food, and finding time to make necessary lifestyle changes. They described rushed pediatric visits that left them with unclear next steps and feelings of blame. Provider conversations echoed these struggles, noting time constraints and limited follow-up options.  

Ultimately, food had become a daily torment for these families. Eating was unavoidable and also one of the few affordable indulgences low-income parents were able to provide. Once kids left their own homes, they were surrounded by unhealthy temptations, making it feel impossible for parents to maintain control. The popularity of costly new weight-loss medications and surgical procedures added another layer of complexity for families who had been underserved by—and therefore distrustful of—America’s healthcare system. With so much of the responsibility placed on parents to self-direct care, inequities deepened, adding to the burden of families already at a breaking point.

To design a path forward, IDEO and IDEO.org mapped a family’s needs before, during, and after pediatric visits. This work revealed critical parts of the journey where families needed more support: recognizing early signs of obesity, navigating provider conversations, and sustaining healthier habits at home.

These insights informed a theory of change framework that provides actionable guidance for stakeholders involved in obesity care. Grounded in three opportunity areas along the patient journey—building awareness, confidence, and capacity—the framework highlights how trust, dignity, and systemic support can lead to lasting outcomes.

IDEO and IDEO.org also developed 10 user-centered concepts spanning digital, physical, and service offerings to reduce stigma and empower families to sustain healthier lives. These ideas address dignified diagnoses and structural inequities, among other pressing issues. Complementing these concepts, IDEO created a short documentary of a mother discussing her family’s experience navigating childhood obesity to help pediatric providers—many of whom have had very different lived experiences from the families and patients they serve—better understand the realities of the daily struggles of many families on Medicaid.

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Designed for the public good, the interactive website and free downloadable report, Reimagining Childhood Obesity, contain research findings, design recommendations, and a theory of change framework. The goal: provide practical, actionable guidelines for pediatricians, educators, healthcare organizations, and innovators to meet families and kids where they are and support them as they move toward a healthier future.

21% of US children are obese. 40% of Latino youth are either overweight or obese.

26% of kids on Medicaid experience childhood obesity, compared with 11% on private insurance.

525,600 minutes: Total time per year parents spend caring for their children. 17 minutes: Average time a pediatrician spends with a child during their annual exam, a small window to address a complex chronic condition such as obesity.

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user-centered ideas to help pediatricians reduce the stigma of childhood obesity in an accessible report

3

opportunity areas for building trust with young patients and providing family support

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With its reach, Acer saw an opportunity to power positive choices in the billions. ‍

But new products and services won’t succeed if consumers don’t want them, no matter how sustainable they are. A few years go, the Harvard Business Review’s report, "The Elusive Green Consumer," found that about two-thirds of those surveyed said they wanted to buy brands that advocated sustainability. But only a quarter actually did.

Meanwhile, the market for climate era products is only growing: In 2022, Forbes found that nearly 90 percent of the Gen X consumers they surveyed said they’d be willing to spend more on sustainable products, compared to just over a third two years before. The desire was only higher among Millennials and Gen Z; they just didn’t like what was on offer.

To drive sales and growth, and meet its sustainability commitments, Acer needed to capitalize on desirability, deepening the connection between Acer’s sustainable options and consumer needs, lowering the barrier to purchase. To that end, Acer and IDEO created the Acer Climate Lab, a cross-organizational team and initiative, to launch the company on a transformative journey to deepen the connection between Acer's conscious technology and the realities of people's lives and needs across four strategic areas.

Together, the combined team conducted extensive research to better understand consumer attitudes and behaviors toward sustainable products, and identified everyday areas where Acer’s conscious technology might be able to have the most significant impact: living, working, moving, and learning.

• Living: Envisions homes as hubs of energy efficiency and climate resilience, leveraging technology to optimize energy use, enhance air quality, and enable proactive climate management. These concepts include technologies like smart energy systems, adaptive air solutions, and integrated home management platforms explore how technology can support sustainable daily living.
  
  
• Working: Reimagines the workplace with flexible, sustainable technology solutions that prioritize resource optimization and circular practices. Concepts such as Acer Loop could provide a subscription-based model that ensures access to the latest technology, supports remote work, and reduces electronic waste through effective recycling and rehoming practices.
  
  
• Moving: Focuses on the transformation of urban mobility by integrating technology into systems that promote sustainable transportation. Concepts could include e-mobility hubs that highlight how urban spaces could offer seamless access to shared, low-emission travel options, reducing reliance on traditional carbon-heavy methods.
  
  
• Learning: Explores pathways to sustainable education by imagining environments where technology supports circularity and accessibility. This includes ideas like refurbished devices for students, repair and reuse programs, and educational spaces designed with climate-positive principles, nurturing eco-conscious habits in future generations.

Together with Red Peak and Sid Lee, the team launched the culmination of the work at COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, positioning Acer as a pioneer in climate positive technology. The exhibit included immersive experiences and interactive displays demonstrating how Acer's sustainable solutions seamlessly integrate into everyday life. Visitors could engage with scenarios depicting sustainable living, working, moving, and learning, emphasizing the practical benefits of Acer’s innovations.

Acer's journey through the Climate Lab project underscores a commitment to sustainability that goes beyond mere compliance. With this new cross-business team tackling the real-world barriers faced by consumers, Acer is paving the way for a more inclusive, sustainable future. This initiative not only aligns with global climate goals, but also sets a precedent for the tech industry, demonstrating that with the right approach, sustainability and innovation can go hand in hand.

In a survey, 65% of respondents said they want to buy brands that advocate sustainability, yet only about 26% actually do. 

Nearly one in two consumers say they either don’t know what information to trust, or that nothing can influence how much they trust a business’s commitment to sustainability.

1 cohesive strategy

for climate era products across 6 different fields

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With the introduction of generative AI, Ethiqly and IDEO saw a unique opportunity to help teachers, by cutting down the time it takes to provide each student with feedback on their writing assignments. But to get there, they had to learn from the experts themselves. To kick off the project, the team headed into the classroom to co-design with students and teachers.

One of the first problems they discovered? Traditional methods of grading essays are laborious and inefficient for high school teachers, who are already notoriously busy and overworked. What teachers really wanted was to spend time giving each student the personalized feedback that helps them grow. Meanwhile, students really struggled to get started on their writing assignments, overwhelmed by looking at a blank page.

Together, the team started to think about how it could harness AI to make personalized instruction more accessible for all students, helping teachers provide better feedback at scale, and giving students the support they need to not only get started on their writing assignments, but improve their work. 

With insights directly from students and teachers, the IDEO team built working prototypes, allowing them to beta test the product in schools, and demonstrate value to investors. They also developed a brand identity and style guide for launch, which came to life in a pitch deck, landing page, and other brand expressions.

The resulting product is a sophisticated blend of AI technology and user-friendly interfaces that empower teachers and inspire students. The goal isn’t just to get to a finished essay, but to assist students in developing critical thinking skills. Ethiqly's tools help students organize their thoughts and get writing by providing contextual prompts and suggestions—without doing the work for them. And the AI assistant supports teachers by suggesting comments based on evaluation criteria they have set, and teachers choose which feedback is relevant for their individual students. Students never see it without teacher approval.

As one teacher told the team, “With leveraging AI more in education, there’s this fear that it’s deprofessionalizing the field or it’s a direct replacement of a teacher in a classroom. I think it gives us meaningful data, so that we can actually teach the way that we want to in order to support our students.” Now, Ethiqly is in use in classrooms in 25 countries, positively impacting students across the globe.

Teachers know 1:1 interaction is key to student success, but an EdWeek survey found only 46% of teachers’ time is spent teaching, while 25 hours/week goes to other tasks like grading and making lesson plans.

25 countries…and growing

Ethiqly’s reach in classrooms around the world

Designing a piece of a city, like a park, doesn’t start with a blank slate. There are always traces of the past and the present, and the lived history of its residents.

To create a full picture of that story, the IDEO team built workshops for the community centered around questions about the unique experiences of living in Frisco. They invited them to reflect on the communities they grew up in, the city of today, and the public spaces that have played formative roles for them. 

From their answers, a common value emerged: heritage. Frisco is a rapidly growing city, with residents whose families have lived there for centuries living side-by-side with more recent neighbors from diverse cultures and ethnic groups. Participants shared a vision of Grand Park as a unifying, shared space, a backdrop where many families can form foundational memories in Frisco.

Next, IDEO brought in multisensory design prompts to help participants further conceptualize the park. How did they want it to feel, sound, and smell? In the built-up, suburban city of Frisco, residents imagined a space that was less planned, enabling guided wandering and exploration. They also hoped that the park would inspire loved ones and descendants to feel a sense of curiosity and wonder.

At the end of workshops and sessions with community groups, the IDEO team took Polaroids of participants, asking, “What’s one word you want to describe Grand Park in the future?” Those words informed the collective vision that IDEO delivered to the city of Frisco, which included spatial concepts, user journeys, and branding for the park, all designed to showcase its unique landscapes. In January 2024, Frisco City Council approved the vision statement, and officials expect to break ground in the second half of 2025.

The population of Frisco is growing rapidly; its population is up 516% since the year 2000.

At more than 1,000 acres, Grand Park in Frisco is even larger than Central Park in New York City.

Less than 1% of Blackland Prairie soil remains in the region, and some of it is in Grand Park.

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Frisco residents were engaged in the process, from City Council members to high school students

200+

respondents shared anonymous feedback on what they imagined the park should be

Name: Ben Syverson
Location: Chicago
Role at IDEO: As a senior software designer, I apply an interaction design lens to software development (or vice versa?) to take our prototypes further faster. Our development needs are as diverse as our projects. Lately, I've been helping our team prototype concepts for the operating room using VR.
Joined IDEO: 2014
Instagram: @bensyverson
Titillating Fact: I've always been into typography, and after I joined IDEO, I started drawing letters after work. It's very meditative! Before I knew it, I had designed two large type families. Unbeknownst to my fellow IDEOers, I've been able to sneak those typefaces into every one of my IDEO projects, in some form or another—from wireframes and prototypes to client presentations.

1. Unison

Unison is a textile design company that I really admire. They often collaborate with local artists and designers, and I just love their taste and sense of style. Unison has a great little store here in Chicago, and a beautifully shot catalog that my wife and I absolutely pore over.

2. Rotring Rapid Pro

My Rotring Rapid Pro lead holder is my security blanket. I take it everywhere. It's mostly brass and steel, giving it the satisfying weight and premium feel of a classic Leica. The 2mm lead can give you fine marks or subtle shading, and can stand up to more pressure than thin leads. I bought two Rapid Pros, in chrome and matte black, because YOLO.

3. John Sheppard

I recently learned that my friend John Sheppard quit his job as an art director at the Wall Street Journal to fully focus on his gorgeous ceramic work, and I couldn't be happier for him. He has this amazing way of subverting the clean minimalism of his geometry with organic cutouts, intricate textures, and unexpected surfaces.

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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: Ben Syverson.

I’ve been a fan of my friend and colleague Nick Dupey, a member of Young Monster, for years. He and I once collaborated on a poster for Moogfest, and the first night we got together, he pulled out a stack of multi-colored construction paper and began cutting out shapes. That moment stuck with me—it brought back memories of elementary school art class, a time without computers and inhibitions.

So as my holiday break began, I committed to return to that headspace. For over a decade I had kept file drawers of old clip art, temporary parking passes, owners manuals, security envelopes, and other ephemera that caught my eye. I guess it’s a kind of graphic designer kleptomania, pocketing found type and imagery to display or repurpose. I fumbled through the stacks, tore apart some junk mail and magazines, and began reassembling.

There was nothing precious about it. In fact, it was so quick that it felt like whiplash. My intent was simply to reassemble the mass of trash on my tabletop. It was an intuitive, thoughtless act that allowed my fingers to be free to make new movements. My sense of touch was back. I could hear the pink noise of tearing paper. I could smell the tape and glue. I had escaped the box.

Every day during the holiday I made a collage in an empty notebook I had long forgotten. I would slip away into my home studio during a lull and assemble another combination of type, images, and textures. I got lost in it. My creative freedom awakened. The feeling of creative wonder from my childhood was rediscovered.

I’ve kept it up since then. Early in the morning before I fill my mind with calendar to-dos, email, and other grown-up activities, I make something. It’s 10-20 minutes that sit somewhere between meditation and puzzle solving. My visual skills are sharper. My fingers are smarter. My ability to find resolution from chaos is faster. And even though I still don’t love my laptop any more than when this obsession began, I no longer feel trapped by it.

So how can you escape the box? Here are a few suggestions to help you rediscover your 8-year old self:

• Reframe junk mail as an endless stream of new mediums. Security envelopes from credit card bills, retail catalogs, and poorly designed postcards get me excited about checking the postbox when I get home.
• Begin with only a few elements—faces are the easiest starting point. Put three items together to get yourself going. The more you do, the easier it is to build complex creations.
• Don’t start with intention or a desire for meaning. Meaning will reveal itself as you create. The majority of what I’ve collaged is meaningless. It’s an exercise in associating form, color, and lines. But there’s the occasional moment when a story comes through.
• Always be willing to call your session a failure. I do these quickly and sometimes I just throw them away because they don’t resolve well. This isn’t an exercise in making something precious—it is a process that happens to have an occasionally stunning result.
• Save your scraps. I have drawers of them now and they often are the starter for my next image.
• Travel with a glue stick. Every hotel room has a stack of lifestyle magazines with luxury perfume ads. Tear them up in your downtime, then reassemble. Impress your friends on Instagram with your artwork instead of what you ate for dinner.

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Two years ago, I began to fall out of love with the computer. It had become a claustrophobic box that dictated how I communicated and how I created. I felt like I was losing my design sensibilities, and treading a well-worn trail through the same digital menus, with my fingers commanding the same virtual assets.

We wanted to change that, and in the process, to help our community learn how to do it better by paying close attention to how great writers wield language. So we invited our colleagues to take a close look at powerful opening sentences, all drawn from novels.

We called it The Sentence Gallery. Inspired by writer, editor, and friend-of-IDEO, Allan Reeder, the project takes to heart a quote by journalist William Zinsser that Reeder shared on his blog: "Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it."

To bring The Sentence Gallery to life, communications designers Jason Baker and Sera Koo built a wall out of foamcore and mounted it in our main community space. Over a few weeks, they showcased a series of sentences, writ large. They also laser-cut thought bubbles from Post-it pads and invited people to reflect on what made each sentence effective. The sharp point of the bubble operated as a marker that allowed passers-by to draw attention to whatever effect they’d noticed, placing their comment at a specific moment in the sentence.

What’s the effect of this word followed by that one? How does the rhythm and pacing of a sentence make the reader feel? Those were the kinds of question we wanted the Gallery to provoke.

At IDEO, great writing emerges from an admixture of instinct, craft, inspiration, learning, and unlearning. That’s likely true for most any design artifact worth our attention.

As designers, we treat sentences like any other prototype. We get them out quickly, and then we get to work on them, refining our writing until it takes us where we need to go.

Writing sharpens our thinking. And as human-centered designers, we rely on it to communicate unspoken human needs. But the craft of writing is itself somewhat hidden; it can seem like a secret art, all furtive fingertapping behind the screen of an open laptop.

Conversational UI is getting a lot of buzz out in the world, and for good reason. SMS is going through a renaissance, and its immediacy and accessibility make it an ideal channel for building services at a time when apps are no longer the medium for digital experiences.

Beyond the buzz, conversational UI shows us that everything in design should be considered a conversation. All elements in an experience are exchanges between people, brands, businesses, services, and, increasingly, machine-powered intelligence. Conversation is the primary design material for designers — and its general purpose is to impact people’s behaviors and emotions.

Designing Conversations

The ambiguous design process.

These days there’s a strong focus on chatbots and conversations as end products, but in our IDEO New York studio, we’ve been using conversations as a prototyping tool to test assumptions, learn, and inspire design. Chatbots are exciting, but we’re also excited about what they unlock for us as a learning medium, not just because they’re the next big thing.

Here's one of our experiences using chatbots as a design tool.

Walkbot: Prototyping Content and Engagement

In 2014, together with a Japanese electronics manufacturer, IDEO designed a device and smartphone app that captures a woman’s activities in order to generate thoughtful, actionable insights about her fitness choices.

At the time, wearable devices were heavily marketed towards men. The women we were addressing wanted meaningful content, and were far more focused on competing with themselves than with others. It also turned out that our product was too data-heavy.

"I like that it’s there if I need it. It’s kind of like a little friend." [anonymous user]

Walking alongside our participants during field research.

The dashboard created to communicate with users and track responses.

To uncover what meaningful content looks like for these women, we went to the women themselves.

A software designer on our team built a custom tool leveraging Twilio’s SMS API, and created an SMS platform that a team of people could use to manage and direct messages. We recruited a panel of women, and during their workouts, a team member would send messages like “great workout, keep going” or “you’ve walked ___ steps today, add a 5 minute walk to reach 10,000.”

Lisa: “Ugh, he wants me to pick up my intensity and burn more calories.”

IDEO: “How do you know it’s a man?”

Lisa: “Because I’m mad at it right now."

An example of our real-time SMS prototyping — a team member would secretly text messages to our participant during her workout.

The responses were surprising. For one thing, women who participated in the design research would project gender and personality on to our bot. In moments of frustration, the bot was referred to as a “he,” when, in fact, the messages were coming from our female colleague. For another, not only did the women want to share their activities, they also wanted to share their failures. For them, fitness wasn’t purely about achieving a goal, but also the process it took to get there.

What we learned:

• The best way to understand what a conversation needs to be is by starting it. Figure out tone of voice, pacing, and interactions  as it unfolds.
• It’s possible to make conversations feel more personal with only a few data points. Be intentional and creative.
• Every participant will project an identity onto the bot — regardless of whether the design team gave it one.
• Bots allow for a nuanced interaction that might bring surprising elements to your product. Be willing to pivot in response to happy accidents.

Our Chatbots Protocol

During the past few years, the interaction design and design research teams at IDEO New York have worked closely with real people to test value propositions and the desirability of digital products and services. Together, we built ad-hoc tools that helped us design conversations with users, and engage with them in real-life contexts.

As we planned and ran these prototypes, we developed a set of principles we now rely on in our research.

• A prototype is a question, embodied. What are you trying to learn? Who are you learning from?
• Hack existing tools. There’s no need to build from scratch.
• Iterate in real-time. The beauty of SMS is that you can adapt quickly.
• Be explicit about the intentions of your work, and make sure that your actions are in line with the ethics of field research
• Consider all the stories, anecdotes, and insights you gathered through your chatbot to inspire the design.

Meet Stanley

There are several services that can help you set up an SMS-based platform. Alternatively, you can create your own conversation bot following the instructions we shared for Stanley, the SMS-based platform that we use.

You can find the source code, and the instructions to setup Stanley here.

For some more on using bots for design research, read this article on IDEO Labs.

The above is an abridged version of a longer Medium article that details three case studies where we’ve used chatbots to prototype services and products. Read the full article here.

Illustrations by Amy Wang.

The below is an abridged version of a longer Medium article that details three case studies where we’ve used chatbots to prototype services and products. Here, we'll focus on the hows and whys of using chatbots to prototype content.

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.