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

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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

“You had to build serious cred with them for them to give a sh*t at all, because there’s no consequence,” she says.

Her solution: Making lessons less about the curriculum, and more about engaging kids in the scary, quickly-evolving events shaping our lives. “I’d show some slides and ask if anyone had heard about [the event] and what their questions were. We’d talk about the facts of the situation,” she shared. “I tried to get them excited about their knowledge of [current events].”

In 2020, America’s students and teachers experienced a full-blown disaster, and teachers were the front-line responders. As they and their students were reduced to rectangles on a screen, they had no choice but to lean into innovation, coming up with solutions like having students create hype videos about their favorite books to encourage classmates to read them, leveraging home kitchens to create lab lessons, and using data to evaluate how their students are doing with learning from afar. Under the worst possible circumstances, they came up with solutions that will improve education for the better, in this moment, and for the future.

IDEO and PowerSchool were so inspired by their work that we partnered to research the way teachers hacked, persisted, and made do to uncover clues to innovation. Last year, we interviewed teachers, administrators, teacher coaches, and education experts to get a close up look at how teachers innovated in 2020 and 2021, and how we as designers and makers might learn from their work.

Breaking down silos in the name of collaboration

When this crisis thrust even first graders out of their classrooms and stuck them in front of computers with varying degrees of Wifi—and supervision—teachers had to throw out the rule book. Both expert and mentor teachers alike were caught on their heels, and their only option was to innovate.

To meet this extraordinary demand for real-time innovation, they turned to one another—peers in their buildings as well as online learning communities. Teachers were no longer experts, they were almost “lead learners”—humbly fostering collaboration with one another and pushing forward to develop an entirely new way of working in real time. "The pandemic has enabled so much more collaboration than before,” explained Christine, an elementary school art teacher in Massachusetts. “I've seen techniques done in new ways, skills taught in ways I never would have thought to teach them. This is an opportunity to see how each other teaches!" What’s more, when even seasoned teachers were getting used to an entirely new context, mentor/mentee relationships began to shift, as everyone had ideas to share with each other. A new teacher manager in a district in California told us that “there were a number of examples where the mentor was certainly a more experienced educator, but not nearly as experienced or fast at learning technology, so there was an exchange of skills.”

Teachers were forced into this situation, but their reaction is one that makers and designers should learn from. You might ask yourself—who is it absolutely nuts that I don’t already work with? Who would you call for help if everything fell apart? It might be a person you think of as a friendly competitor. Or it could be someone whose work context just seemed too different—maybe they are more junior, or work in a non-profit setting. At this point, what humanity really needs is connection with one another. To create it, we must break down the silos we’re keeping up. It’s time to rethink the divisions we have between departments, companies, and even sectors to speed up our collective innovation.

Building tighter learning loops

One of the biggest challenges that teachers faced in experimenting with so many new tools was determining what was actually working. After all, rapid prototyping is only as useful as the learning you can apply to the next prototype. Teachers couldn’t afford to wait until grading periods to analyze how it was all working out.

The remote setting opened up the opportunity to work more closely with individual students one-on-one and to personalize learning experiences and methods to meet their needs. Technology also helped them better understand each student’s progress, enabling them to tailor their instruction the next day. More teachers began leveraging instant feedback tools, even as they faced more variability in student knowledge and skills.

Hannah, a secondary math teacher, dove into new apps and services she started using to track student progress to make instruction more personalized, explaining that rather than going on gut feel, “I can genuinely say I know which kids aren’t making the right progress.” When students and families could see educators iterate on lesson plans each week, and make feedback immediately actionable, everyone was able to take a collective breath and feel the progress. Even if the changes were relatively small, they knew that they were being listened to. Teachers built new processes and improved trust.

Maybe you already do rapid prototyping in your work and have formed tight learning loops. Consider how you might use them as a means of not just learning, but showing your users that you’re learning. Internally, we all could be using technology to do daily micro-check moments with our teams and collaborators, and get even more serious and actionable after receiving real time feedback. Imagine a working world where the last five minutes of every meeting or collaboration were dedicated to asking ourselves how did that go? What could we do better next time?

Maintaining a laser focus on what’s most relevant

In some ways, students had their own form of a “Great Resignation” in 2020. They had previously been held captive in school rooms that weren’t catering to them, and their new at-home context meant teachers had to rethink how they were reaching students. “We’re messing around with our schedule,” explained Evan, a middle school principal. “We’re trying to create more space for more things that we say we value.”

Teachers had been operating under a 180-day school year for decades and have optimized their content to fit standard school hours—maybe you’ve been doing the same with your five day work week. During distance learning, teachers had no idea how much time they would actually get with students on any given day, leading them to simplify their content and get strategic about making every minute count.

In an essay from 2003, Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, stresses the importance of “subtracting.” “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit.” It isn’t just about prioritizing what’s most important; it’s about not holding on to the parts that don’t serve us anymore, even if they have already cost us years of effort. We need to consider how to do more with less, and how to subtract what’s not serving us and those around us.

Be human first

Teachers have always been concerned about their students, but the pandemic brought that concern to a new level. (You, too, might have experienced more personal stories, tears, and vulnerability at work!) We saw teachers get creative about meeting students’ emotional needs—trying things like swapping out detention for meditation, or having a weekly “campfire” in class to circle up and share how everyone was doing. They extended deadlines, accepted late work, and allowed students to retake exams. Teachers brought more of themselves to school, showing up as humans first and foremost and prioritizing care before content.

As Jennie, a high school teacher in Ohio explained, “I just have more grace for everyone. Are you lying to me about homework? Maybe. Do you have a reason to be lying? Maybe. I think it’s made me a better teacher. I’m more compassionate. Life’s hard."

As innovators, we too need to build in flexibility for the fallibility that comes with being human, and find ways to bring more humanness to our leadership. We must find ways to prioritize the health and wellness of the people we work with above everything else.

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At both of our organizations, and hopefully at yours, teachers are inspiring us to break down arbitrary siloes, cut the fluff, show we’re listening, and be more human. But they’re not the only innovators we should be watching right now. The heroic, hard-working, dynamic first responders of the pandemic—nurses, social workers, librarians, counselors—are also on the front lines of innovation. They are adapting, growing, testing, and changing at a rapid pace in a way that all business leaders could be taking lessons from.

Read the full Teaching in Flux report, authored by Jen Halls, Ridima Ramesh, and Brian Standeford.

When COVID-19 lockdowns were in full effect, Amanda, then a reading coach in a California school system, was faced with an impossible challenge: figuring out how to get kids, home alone, to log into Zoom for lessons, when no one would be there to make them do it.

In the first phase of our work, we tackled what some might consider “low hanging fruit” in the work toward Net Zero: we estimated our carbon footprint, offset our greenhouse gas emissions, switched to renewable energy, experimented with a modest carbon tax, and improved our responsible retirement investment options.

While these strides are significant, there is still so much more to do—and time is of the essence. There are countless ways forward, but we’re eager to share four next steps we have in mind.

1. Track and manage emissions (Part 2)

Building on our previous exploration, we’re ready to tackle phase two of emissions accounting. At the top of our priority list is identifying a comprehensive emissions accounting solution to track and manage down our Scope 3 emissions. It’s difficult to imagine how we will empower IDEOers to make sustainable decisions without giving them access to data about the environmental impact of those choices. Afterall, what’s the point of managing down your emissions if you don’t get credit for working with Clean Co. over Dirty Co.? Investing in an emissions accounting platform will help get us one step closer to estimating IDEO’s carbon footprint and identifying viable climate-friendly alternatives at scale. From there, we hope to experiment with things like internal carbon taxes or incentives for individuals and teams to manage their carbon footprint.

2. Embed sustainability throughout the project cycle

Despite the increase in climate-forward projects IDEO has taken on, we are still not fully set up to account for the downstream implications of our work. With that in mind, we’re exploring what it would look like to introduce sustainability at every touchpoint of the project lifecycle—from initial client conversations to final deliverables. In practice, this might look like sustainability design reviews with external experts or developing design principles and toolkits like The Circular Design Guide to support climate-conscious work. Ultimately, we hope to foster a culture where teams feel equipped to explore and develop best practices around sustainable work. Regardless of what form this takes, we need to develop a way to track the downstream impact of our projects and deliverables. Ideally, that system would plug into our emissions accounting platform—neither of which we have today.

3. Balance what’s impactful with what’s visible

In order to meaningfully reduce IDEO’s global emissions, we prioritized action that tends to be impactful for our carbon footprint, but invisible to everyday IDEOers and our clients. For example, while switching to renewable energy did not trigger obvious changes to the everyday experience at IDEO, it reduced our global carbon footprint by 4%. These changes can seem at odds with changes that are highly visible yet are often less impactful (e.g., eliminating single use plastics across IDEO). In order to ensure our everyday experience at IDEO does not undermine the climate commitments we have made, we need to balance what is impactful and what is highly visible. This might look like developing frameworks to help project teams weigh the tradeoffs between client travel and environmental impact, holding inter-studio competitions to switch to sustainable food vendors, or identifying a broad set of replacement suppliers for more sustainable goods throughout our studios.

4. Reset industry norms

Let’s face it. If a competitor is willing to get on a plane, we almost certainly will do the same and vice versa. To create the conditions for IDEO to thrive while meeting its climate commitments, we need to reset industry norms and work alongside other creative consulting firms to reimagine the ways of doing business in the 2020s and beyond. This may look like joining or starting a creative climate pledge for companies operating in a climate-forward way, or inviting direct competitors to join our kyu climate action learning group.

As we make progress toward IDEO’s climate commitments, we will continue to experiment, iterate, and learn. Most importantly, we’re eager to learn alongside you. Time is precious and we all need to collectively accelerate toward our respective commitments. In the spirit of co-creating a more sustainable future, we invite you to continue the conversation with us by contacting our team. We’re eager to learn about the steps you are taking, the lessons you’ve learned, and what’s next.

Over the past year, IDEO has been working toward meeting a series of wide-ranging climate commitments.

The report outlined that over the next decade, we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% annually, a daunting reality that has been reiterated in recent IPCC updates. That means reducing our emissions by over half in less than 8 years. This is one of the most critical challenges of our decade, if not century.

As part of IDEO’s Net Zero strategy, we knew we couldn’t just invest in carbon offsets, we also had to do our part in removing emissions from the atmosphere. In many ways, the pandemic accelerated us toward that path. From 2019 to 2020, our emissions were slashed from ~14,500 t CO2e to ~6,400 t CO2e respectively. But we knew we needed to do more, especially with IDEO’s shift to embracing hybrid working models and their unknown travel-based emissions implications.

In 2021, we implemented three interventions to further reduce our carbon footprint. We switched to renewable energy, incentivized reductions in project-based emissions, and made improvements to our responsible retirement portfolio. Some of these efforts were successful, others less so. We’re eager to share what worked and what didn’t.

Intervention 1: Switching to renewable energy

There are several options for switching to renewable energy, including purchasing rooftop solar grids, participating in community solar programs, purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs), and more.

In evaluating these approaches, we ran into a few setbacks. Since IDEO doesn’t own any of its buildings and each of our studios consume about as much electricity as a couple of big houses, we optimistically hoped that we might be able to sign up for community solar programs across the board. But we quickly learned that community solar wasn’t available for all of our locations. To make matters more complicated, many of our locations didn’t even have the ability to choose their electricity suppliers.

Our next best bet was to either purchase RECs for our global energy consumption, or opt for location-specific solutions. In pursuit of progress over perfection, we purchased 750 MWhr’s of RECs from Bonneville Environmental Foundation to cover energy consumption across all of IDEO’s locations. This not only reduced our carbon footprint by 360 t CO2e, but also meant that effective January 1, 2021, IDEO switched to renewable energy globally.

Looking ahead to 2022 and beyond, we will continue to evaluate and implement the best renewable energy solutions on a local level. To date, we have switched to renewable energy in two locations:

• Chicago: We switched our energy supplier from ComEd and enrolled in community solar through Solstice. Solstice also offers a renewable energy program for employees to mitigate energy impacts from working from home. For every employee that signs up for Solstice’s community solar program, Solstice donates $100 toward their nonprofit arm, Solstice Initiative, to make renewable energy accessible for underserved communities.
• Munich: We switched our energy supply from Stadtwerke München (SWM), Munich's municipal utilities company, to renewable hydropower from Polarstern, a Munich-based renewable energy pioneer and social business promoting the energy transformation in Germany and worldwide.

While it took more time and resources to explore local renewable energy solutions than to purchase RECs, we felt it was important to switch to local alternatives wherever possible.

Intervention 2: Incentivizing reductions in project-based emissions

“But what about the emissions from our project operations?”

In our journey to Net Zero, this question came up time after time. It turns out, over a third of IDEO’s non-wage-based expenses come from project-based expenses like flights, food, prototyping materials, and research incentives. When we estimated IDEO’s carbon footprint, we saw that a significant fraction of our emissions came from everyday decisions made by project teams.

After some digging, we saw that consulting firms similar to IDEO approach emission-reduction incentives differently. Some impose strict travel guidelines, while others set a steep internal price on carbon. The concept of a carbon tax as an incentive was appealing, but would clients go for it? We decided to find out.

Inspired by 1% for the Planet, we started a pilot that added new language about emissions reductions in all of our statements of work. In addition to our standard language about project-based expenses, we added:

Expense invoices will include an additional 1% of all billable expenses to offset greenhouse gas emissions arising from this work.

For a project with $100,000 in expenses, we would add a $1,000 fee to fund carbon offsets. From our preliminary estimates, this would sufficiently cover the emissions from our projects and allow us to purchase ever higher quality emissions over time.

While promising in theory, the execution has been difficult. Of the 33 statements of work signed over the past 6 months, only 4 of them included the 1% fee. In some cases, clients objected to paying for IDEO’s carbon offsets and the language was negotiated out of the contract. In other cases, the language was never included to begin with. Many IDEOers were apprehensive about broaching the topic with clients.

Despite the slow start, we are continuing this pilot so that we can gather more data and design an informed approach to reducing project-based emissions.

Intervention 3: Improving our responsible retirement portfolio

While IDEO will continue to vote with its dollars to reduce our emissions, many of those dollars have their own environmental and social implications. With ESG frameworks and ratings agencies scrambling to answer calls to action from BlackRock and beyond, there are a dizzying number of ways to evaluate responsible investments.

Our third intervention involved scrutinizing our existing 401(k) portfolio. Alongside Fossil Free Funds, a non-profit that grades investments using a variety of social and environmental considerations, we evaluated IDEO’s existing 401(k) and came up with a system—or score—for each of the available funds in our portfolio. We then supplemented this analysis with data from Morningstar Sustainability Rating to provide another perspective on how our investments were, or were not, meeting environmental, social, and governance challenges.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many funds in IDEO’s 401(k) were poorly rated. Our portfolio, like most, is dominated by index and mutual funds that track the market. Since the Fortune 500 account for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and only 11% of these organizations are hitting their emissions goals, our portfolio wasn’t tracking in accordance with the climate commitments we’d set.

Our Talent team sprung into action. Together with our Empower Retirement administrators, they identified new funds that we could add to our investment mix. In addition to the Vanguard Social Index Fund that was already in our portfolio, we added two new funds: Calvert Balanced Fund (R6) and Calvert Short Duration Income Fund (R6).

A year later, about 1% of IDEO’s $140m 401(k) assets are in these ESG funds. While this is certainly a move in the right direction, we are continuing to explore how we can improve our responsible retirement portfolio even further.

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More than anything, these three interventions have highlighted an intrinsic dilemma of reducing emissions at scale: distributed behavior change is challenging and incremental. We’re still grappling with questions like: Are we focused on the right things? How might we design better incentives that accelerate emission reduction? How might we incentivize our partners to change alongside us?

But this is a design challenge that cannot wait to be solved. We’d love to learn alongside others and hear how others are tackling behavior change within their firms. Please share your reflections, questions, and insights by getting in touch here!

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

In 2019, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released an updated climate report reiterating how critical the 2020s will be in curbing wide-ranging and destructive climate impacts.

That was the question that we woke up to from our colleague, EJ Baker, on IDEO’s #climate Slack channel in mid-September. For months, Anna Varnai, Jenny Gottstein, Mike Sakowski, and I had been evaluating potential providers and projects to offset IDEO’s carbon footprint in our journey to becoming Net Zero.

EJ’s inquiry brought us back to a question we had been debating for months: Is it better to invest in voluntary offsets or invest more deeply in reducing emissions? While there are legitimate arguments to be made for each path, we felt that emissions reductions weren’t enough. We urgently need to remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. And since we are driven to design the world we want to live in, we chose to meet in the middle—both reduce our emissions and offset what we are unable to reduce. Despite its limitations, offsetting offers a way to strengthen our climate commitments as we ramp up our emissions reduction efforts.

In principle, voluntary carbon offsets appear simple; in reality, they become complicated very quickly. We reached out to offset providers and offset purchasers to learn about their approach and experiences, but instead of walking away with clarity, we realized that no one had really figured it out yet. Even the experts were still grappling with questions like what types of offsets should be used and when, or whether offsetting is even a credible means of achieving Net Zero.

In search of answers, we set out on a quest—diving into academic literature, researching industry best practices, and following countless startups in the space. We learned about the permanence, additionality, and vintage of an offset and how each relates to the quality of an offset project. We learned about the potential social benefits—from community employment to energy access—that come from different projects. We learned about the entities that verify and certify offset efforts. And, we learned that the more we uncovered, the more questions we had.

Should IDEO invest in high-quality and expensive carbon sequestration solutions aligned with our ambitions for the future? Or should we invest in readily available and affordable nature-based solutions? How much geographical representation should we have? How do we know that our investments won’t go up in smoke? How should we think about the intersection between our offsets, climate justice, and IDEO’s DE&I commitments?

The considerations for what to invest in went on, and the dilemma was paralyzing. On the one hand, we wanted to do it all. On the other hand, we had a finite budget and the clock was ticking. What was the right way to get started?

We contemplated having employees vote and help us pick offset projects. While this approach empowered employees to directly shape our company investments, in an area as complex and opaque as the voluntary carbon market, it would be hard for all participants to have an informed perspective in voting.

We contemplated creating a committee that would select projects based on a set of established needs and values. While simple in practice, we weren’t confident an internal team could navigate the magnitude of the task in a manner that fully represented IDEO, and the inevitable scrutiny that comes from decisions like this.

We contemplated seeking advice from third-party experts, but found that many of them sold offsets themselves, raising all kinds of questions about their motives and whether there was a conflict of interest (even though they were extremely generous with their perspective—thank you!).

We needed to get reasonably smart about this space to make informed decisions.

Enter the Oxford Offsetting Principles, a series of guidelines put together by Eli Mitchell-Larson et al., that outline how offsetting should be approached to achieve Net Zero. Informed by these principles, we were drawn to two start-up offset providers, Lune and Patch. These providers stood apart for several reasons. First, they allowed us to select a broad portfolio of high-quality carbon offset projects. Second, their projects had an international reach. From the get go, we knew we wanted our carbon offsetting efforts to reflect IDEO’s global presence, impact, and responsibility. Both Lune and Patch offered a way for us to do so.

From there, having estimated our carbon footprint at around 4,950 t CO2e for 2021, we intentionally over-offset our emissions by purchasing 5,500 t CO2e.

Based on the Oxford Offsetting Principles, we spread those offsets across:

• Global renewable energy projects for Type I (22.5%)
• Forestry protection projects in Asia and Latin America for Type II (22.5%)
• Methane capture at landfills in the United States for Type III (5%)
• Reforestation projects in Africa and North America and regenerative agriculture projects in the US for Type IV (45%)
• Enhanced weathering projects in Europe for Type V (5%)

Overall, we spent a little over $20 per tonne of CO2e with about 92% of those fees going toward the projects themselves. (You can see a visual breakdown of our project bundles with Lune, here.)

Are we confident that our offset strategy is the gold standard? Not quite. But we do feel confident in our approach, and as the voluntary carbon market matures, we will continue to iterate alongside it. We’ve learned that climate action, like design, requires us to get started with curiosity and humility. It demands a learning mindset that seeks progress over perfection.

To those who have purchased or are considering purchasing offsets of your own, we’d love to hear about your approach and what you’re learning.

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

“Genuine question: are offsets a useful thing?”

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.