The IDEO team quickly discovered that the challenge of designing a Digital@FEMSA super app for tens of millions of customers was matched only by the operational complexity of bringing together different teams that had already created various apps with separate value propositions. Not to mention the 22,000 stores specifically tailored to local communities.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team built on FEMSA’s already deep understanding of its customers by meeting them in their homes and communities. The team discovered that users didn't care about long-term rewards; instead, they wanted everyday help to thrive long-term. Connecting omnichannel rewards to regular spending would allow them to save time and money—something they said was particularly important. Along with market research, insights like these directly informed the app's design, ensuring that it was compatible with users' everyday habits and preferences.

Meanwhile, the project team also worked to ensure the app fit the priorities of the various teams inside Digital@FEMSA, designing a comprehensive process for testing joint value propositions. Together, the team created a new design system, iconography, and set of unifying principles. IDEO also worked closely with the Digital@FEMSA teams to ensure that the app's design was in line with their strategic goals and technical capabilities, and built the app's initial information architecture. They incorporated secure transactions, effortless coupon redemption, personalized offers, and a cohesive loyalty program.

From there, the IDEO and Digital@FEMSA teams quickly transitioned into the design and development phase, producing prototypes of the new app, dubbed Spin Premia. With the help of user testing, they were able to continuously iterate to improve the app's features and functionalities, creating a user experience that was both seamless and intuitive. In just 10 months, they went from a small digital team with an ambitious idea, to a 150+ people product organization and an MVP launched in one region. And thanks to a tight partnership, the teams were able to seamlessly integrate Spin Premia into Digital@FEMSA's existing systems, resulting in a scalable implementation nationwide just a few months later.

The introduction of Spin Premia was a milestone in FEMSA's digital transformation path. Following a true ship and iterate model, just a few months into the project, the company released a smaller, focused version of the app in just one city in Mexico to quickly learn from customer experience before expanding to new regions. Since then, the Spin Premia app has quickly gained popularity, offering a safe and user-friendly platform that millions of Mexican consumers have embraced. It has also allowed FEMSA to broaden its digital portfolio and extend its customer base throughout Mexico, elevating customer satisfaction and fueling business expansion.

13 million Mexicans visit FEMSA’s OXXO convenience stores every day. But the company had ambitions to leverage digital experiences to increase customer engagement.

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To get there, Digital@FEMSA needed to deliver exceptional digital products with the agility to serve an entire population.

4.7 stars

Spin Premia’s app store rating

22.8 million

active Spin Premia program users

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Midscale hotel brands are the fastest-growing hotel segment in the US, attractive to both travelers and hotel owners. But often, their messaging feels repetitive, and travelers have a tough time differentiating between them. With a warm, thoughtfully designed midscale brand, IHG had an enormous opportunity to distinguish itself in a crowded market. 

IHG’s goal was to deliver a guest experience that felt genuinely unique and resonant—and quickly. With costs on the rise, many owners were motivated to turn toward conversion brands, which allow them to refurbish hotels under a new brand rather than invest in construction, a way to grow their portfolio in a tight financing market. Meanwhile, IHG’s competitors were set to introduce new conversion brands of their own. The company was looking for a partner that could work swiftly and iteratively to deliver a distinct brand.

For the IDEO team, the answer lay in communicating the brand’s value, starting with a custom logo rendered by hand. Inspired by vintage sign painting and modernist typography, the team sketched different versions of the letterforms, reviewing them with IHG until they had a set that brought to life the generosity and sense of invitation associated with the hotel’s spaces. They also worked to ensure the wordmark was visually balanced and would translate well across a variety range of scales. From there, they built an expansive brand world, including bespoke navigation icons, a full interior and exterior signage system, and a video to support the Garner launch.

The result is a hotel brand that stands apart in its category for both travelers and owners: thoughtful and well-designed yet affordable. As competition in the midscale segment continues to increase, Garner has been central to IHG’s growth strategy. Launched in the fall of 2023, Garner opened 100 hotels worldwide in just 16 months, making it the fastest-ever IHG brand to scale globally. The brand’s increasing popularity among owners and developers is driven by the growing demand for conversion properties, which accounted for 52% of IHG’s room openings in 2025. Garner plans to continue its rapid expansion with nearly 80 additional hotels in 12 key markets, including the US, Mexico, Italy, and Japan.

Conversions account for 12% of the global hotel pipeline, enabling hotels to switch brands and refurbish, boosting revenue without expensive construction.
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The US midscale hotel segment, valued at $14B, is expected to reach $18B by 2030.

100 new Garner Hotels

in less than 3 years—the fastest-scaling brand in IHG's history

500 Garner Hotels

planned in the next 10 years; 1,000 over the next 20

Alzheimer’s and dementia are notoriously difficult to treat—and scientists estimate that some 50 percent of people who have dementia are undiagnosed. Recognition of symptoms and early intervention are key. Together and IDEO set out to conduct user research to inspire new products that would help patients with cognitive decline take charge of their brain health.

The first priority was to expand the reach of the Moving Together program, which combines group movement exercises with mindfulness techniques, led by a trained group instructor. The IDEO team conducted remote and in-person interviews in Florida, where one in five residents is age 65 and older, and rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia are among the highest in the country. One of the key insights the team discovered was that many older adults didn’t understand how behaviors like smoking, exercise, and diet can be risk factors for cognitive decline. Their input inspired a new design principle for the program: “No naked feedback.” Any time participants received health coaching advice about modifying their lifestyle, they would also be given resources on why and how to do it, so they would have a pathway to boosting their brain health. 

The IDEO team folded insights like this one into the design for four new product offerings, including personalized brain health education, new online community engagement tools, partnership programs, and health coaching services, as well as a new user interface to illustrate them. Along with Together they also developed an implementation roadmap of next steps to bring the new digital product offerings to market, such as hiring a brain health coach and creating a new course curriculum. Now, Together has enrolled 165 people in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial, which is looking at outcomes such as reduced risk of Alzheimer's and maintenance of cognitive function for the Brain Health Together program. With trial completion in Q3 2024 and product launch in early 2025, growing numbers of people with MCI will have access to this exciting program. Together incorporated almost all of the elements from the IDEO roadmap into the final curriculum, and the team often refers back to insights the team gathered as guiding design principles.

Fighting barriers to diagnosis

With its online program growing, Together wanted to take on an even bigger problem: dementia underdiagnosis. Co-founder Dr. Deborah Barnes had recently developed an algorithm that uses patients’ health records to calculate their risk of undiagnosed dementia, called the electronic health record Risk of Alzheimer's and Dementia Assessment Rule (eRADAR). Together was looking to find creative ways to equip and empower providers to use risk scores like eRADAR in primary care settings.

One piece of the puzzle? Many primary care doctors are unaware that better management of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia can have a positive impact on other chronic health issues—like diabetes, hypertension, and depression. So by encouraging providers to prioritize dementia care, they can help support the overall health of older adults with cognitive decline. The IDEO team recommended a curriculum for continuing education courses for doctors that make that link clear—another step toward increasing dementia diagnosis and improving overall health.

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Better help, sooner

To understand the patient experience, Together and IDEO decided to work directly with patients and caregivers to uncover what was stopping them from asking for dementia screening. The IDEO team quickly learned many patients were afraid of facing a diagnosis that signified a loss of agency and control, especially when they didn’t believe there were good treatment options. Often, they were unaware that there were things they could do to improve their brain health. They needed to know what steps to take after a diagnosis, and who could provide actionable advice. In response, the IDEO team designed a digital activity toolkit and physical booklet to guide patient families through the early stages of a dementia diagnosis, including recognizing the signs and symptoms, having better conversations with their doctor, and getting connected to support groups and programs like Moving Together.

Solving the problem of dementia underdiagnosis involves complex systems-level thinking and designing for the entire health ecosystem of patients, providers, and insurance payers, and solutions for Alzheimer’s and dementia care are still in their infancy. But already, this work is empowering patients and doctors to prioritize brain health and get screened sooner, and Together, which has since been acquired by Linus Health, is still working to move dementia care forward.

Approximately 12-18% of people aged 60 or older live with mild cognitive impairment, while memory loss, Alzheimer's and dementia affect more than 50 million people around the world.

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An estimated 50% of people living with dementia are undiagnosed.

165 enrolled

in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial

Many companies view culture-building initiatives as nice-to-haves. At Moderna, Mindsets are a business imperative, crucial to its plans to develop breakthrough products quickly.

For companies working on solutions as vital as a COVID-19 vaccine, delays and mistakes don’t just mean missing a product launch date—they’re life-or-death, and on a large scale. Moderna had to ensure that its employees knew how to make the right decisions, evaluate risk, and move quickly—even if they came from organizations with more bureaucracy and less risk tolerance. In 2021, IDEO sat down with longtime Moderna veterans to hear stories about moments that exemplify the company's culture, like the day a critical piece of equipment arrived but was too big to fit through the door. Taking it apart would have added days to their timeline. So employees took sledgehammers to a wall instead. Stories like this one fed into the crafting of the list of Mindsets, such as “Act with urgency: Action today compounds the lives saved tomorrow” and “We behave like owners: The solutions we’re building go beyond any job description.”

To gather feedback, the team shared the draft Mindsets with a diverse set of employees—new hires, veterans, folks already closely aligned with the culture, folks for whom it wasn’t the most natural fit, and a plethora of employee resource groups. CEO Stéphane Bancel and the leadership team took crafting and iterating on the Mindsets very seriously, wordsmithing and tweaking them with the team until they were ready to share them officially. Now, new hires learn about the company’s Mindsets in Moderna ONE, an onboarding process that IDEO helped revamp, while existing employees attend a workshop to ensure everyone at the company knows not only what to do but also how to do it effectively. In a matter of weeks, IDEO helped Moderna codify its culture for employees and set the company up for continued success. Moderna continues to embed these Mindsets across the entire employee lifecycle to systematically scale its culture.

For employees new and old, the clarity of the Mindsets has made it easier to understand expectations and to understand the company itself. Long-term veterans responded with comments like, "These really help explain why we're working this way,” while one newbie said, "It feels like a homecoming to hear the culture that we’re trying to bring through.” But more than just solving a cultural issue, the new Mindsets have fulfilled a business imperative: Holding on to the secret sauce that made Moderna successful to begin with, setting the stage for its next five years of breakthroughs.

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 health crisis a pandemic in March of 2020, Moderna had fewer than 1,000 employees. Four years later, it’s more than five times the size.

Ranked #1

BioSpace Best Place to Work, large company in 2024

Ranked #6

Boston Consulting Group’s 50 Most Innovative Report in 2023

Ranked #4

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 List in 2023

The question tossed out at checkout has become such a common refrain that it can feel like background noise. Perhaps you say no—worn down by membership fatigue, especially for stores you rarely visit. Or perhaps you say yes, lured by a one-time signup perk, only to join the 35 percent of shoppers who say they belong to a loyalty program they’ve never used.

Nearly 80 percent of Gen Z and millennial consumers believe a high-quality digital experience is essential for loyalty programs. But these reward systems, typically built around points, discounts, or tiers, rarely reflect what the brand actually stands for. And when the behavior being rewarded feels disconnected from the brand’s promise, it creates a subtle but powerful disconnect. We think of this as brand dissonance: a type of cognitive friction between what a company claims it values and how it invites people to engage.

When we design loyalty programs at IDEO’s Play Lab, we begin by recognizing that a brand exists at the intersection of what it says about itself and how people experience it, across hundreds of small, accumulated interactions. Done well, loyalty programs don’t just reflect a brand’s values—they embody them, shaping how people experience the brand in the countless moments that add up to brand loyalty.

On a project with JetBlue, for instance, we were tasked with introducing a new premium service that could compete with first-class perks—but without undermining their mission to “bring humanity back to air travel.” Rather than replicate a tiered status model, we grounded the work in a different philosophy: speak to modes of travel, not travel classes.

We designed for different player types—offering “power-up” benefits like faster security, better access to overhead bins, and higher quality food and beverage options. These upgrades honored JetBlue’s inclusive ethos and resonated more with the airline’s loyal passengers.

The result? The new offerings, introduced in 2011, drove its EvenMore line of perks, generating $230 million per year, with a 30 percent annual growth rate, and increasing revenue per customer by 20 percent. That success didn’t come from gamification for its own sake—it came from building a loyalty experience that reflected JetBlue’s values and aligned with travelers’ intrinsic motivations.

Designing for the next generation of consumers brings added complexity, as brands must account for shifting behaviors, rising expectations, and evolving definitions of loyalty. Programs that feel overly transactional or inaccessible often fall flat. Younger, digitally native audiences are highly discerning and research nearly every product online before buying—not just to find the best deal, but also to assess whether a brand aligns with their values and feels worth supporting. They gravitate toward brands that feel authentic, expressive, and purpose-driven. Think REI Co-op or Trader Joe’s. Earning their loyalty means creating experiences that reflect who they are and who they aspire to be—rather than how much they spend.

That’s where game design offers a powerful blueprint. The best programs go beyond transactions, building ecosystems of engagement that give people agency, align with their intrinsic motivations, and evolve over time. Not to be confused with basic gamification, which adds a superficial layer of points, badges, and leaderboards as a way to incentivize customers, game-inspired programs can go deeper and reward engagement in ways that are rooted in brand values and reflective of real-life consumer behavior and identity. Here are three ways we could design a more sophisticated game approach to loyalty programs across three industries: retail, restaurants, and hospitality.

Pokémon Go for retail

Imagine the goal for your brand is to tap into self-expression, identity, culture, and community through your loyalty program. Your app could include an AR feature that lets users scan physical environments—like storefronts, catalogs, or product tags—to reveal hidden offers, collect digital rewards, or unlock exclusive quests. Shoppers could level up based on their interests or shopping style (e.g., “Sustainable Shopper" or "Sneakerhead"), earning rewards that reflect their values and deepen their connection to the brand. Think Pokémon Go meets personalized product discovery.

Gamify the wait at restaurants

Every parent dreads the restless stretch between sitting down at a restaurant and the food arriving. It’s often when screen time rules go out the window—and then backfire when the meal arrives and a tantrum ensues as you try to pry the screens away. Now imagine you operate a chain of family-friendly restaurants. When families are seated, they can scan the table to unlock secret menu items or interactive mini-games that reward adventurous eaters (“no repeat dishes for two weeks”). Better yet, what if your kids could feel like they’re helping prepare the meal through a restaurant simulator game, synced to the real-time cooking process—turning wait time into a playful, immersive experience that reinforces family connection and the fun of dining out together?

Turn hotel stays into an open-ended travel adventure

Let’s say you run a hospitality brand that caters to travelers who care about connection, creativity, and belonging—not only price or convenience. Imagine if guests could earn recognition beyond the number of nights they stay, reflecting how they make travel a part of their lives. Like the cozy game of Animal Crossing, rewards are given to players for consistently returning and doing small, meaningful things over time—earning recognition for sending postcards, documenting hidden gems to help fellow travelers, or simply enjoying breakfast in bed. Each stay becomes a chapter in their story, where they can log snippets of music, photos, journal entries, and even scents as mementos to savor and relive later. Over time, their loyalty profile becomes a rich, emotional artifact of their journey and identity as a traveler—not just a status tier.

Gaming culture has reshaped how people shop, connect, and stay loyal to brands. The most effective loyalty programs operate like games: they offer agency, build a sense of progression, and create emotional resonance. Grounded in a brand’s core promise, they reward behaviors that reflect what the brand truly stands for and show up in the everyday moments that matter. And while they’re inspired by game design, they don’t need to look like games to make people want to keep playing.

So let’s build something better. Let’s co-create the future of loyalty—one that feels like a game your customers actually want to keep playing.

“Are you a member of our rewards program?”

On the one hand, product development processes are built for good reason: They bring structure, reduce risk, and ensure that what goes to market is feasible and viable. I’ve seen this firsthand across various industries, including mobility, real estate, home goods, and consumer products. Rigor is essential when you’re investing in a launch.

But here’s the rub: Those same processes that build confidence often constrain the ambiguity and risk that innovation demands. Design thinking is often touted as the solution, a concise methodology to inject creativity. But how does that square with a stage-gate model built to de-risk and control?

Is it a matter of choosing one or the other? Or is there a way to bridge the gap?

Here’s how one team figured it out.

The familiar question

“How can we integrate design thinking into our product development process?”

It’s a question I’ve heard many times in my career, and this time, it came from an engineer I was coaching on the R&D team at the headquarters of a globally renowned retailer in China.

The team leader had an ambitious vision: leverage their proximity to China’s robust supply chain and dynamic consumer market to build the world’s leading retail R&D center. A critical step was enhancing the engineers’ creativity and critical thinking skills, moving them beyond task execution toward collaborating more closely with their cross-functional partners to design solutions that meet real consumer needs.

That’s where IDEO came in. Building on an earlier innovation project, we embedded designers as advisors and coaches directly into their product development process.

In one of our sessions, the engineers had mapped out their four key development stages on a whiteboard:

• concept discovery
  
  
• product development
  
  
• product qualification
  
  
• launch
  
  

They had also been taught that design thinking contains four key steps.

“Maybe there’s a one-to-one match?” one engineer asked, hoping I could align each development stage with a corresponding design thinking step.

It was a reasonable guess, but not quite how design thinking works.

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Getting past process

That day’s focus was prototyping and testing. At first glance, it seemed to align with the third stage of their product development process: product qualification.

“How does IDEO do prototyping and testing?” they asked. “At what stage should we use it? What role does it play?”

Instead of jumping into an explanation, I suggested an experiment.

“Let’s forget about process labels for a moment,” I said. “Write down all the questions you want to explore through prototyping, regardless of which stage or methodology they supposedly belong to.”

Before long, each engineer had a handful of sticky notes with their questions written on them.

“Now map these to your actual development stages based on when you’d naturally ask them.”

When they placed their questions across all four stages of their product development process, something clicked. They could suddenly see that design thinking wasn’t competing with their process.

“Can this product store spices?” belonged in the early concept discovery phase, where prototyping could help define the product.

“Does the product stay stable during movement?” fit into the product qualification phase, where prototyping could test structural performance.

Prototyping was clearly valuable across all stages. 

The same is true for all the other so-called steps of design thinking: finding inspiration in consumer needs, translating needs into design opportunities, and generating concepts. They’re not fixed stages to complete in order; they’re ways of thinking and working that help teams ask better questions, explore possibilities, and make informed decisions, regardless of where they are within their own internal processes.

A mindset shift, not a process replacement

Back to the original question: “How can we integrate design thinking into our product development process?”

The answer, it turns out, isn’t about fitting one process into another.

Through the sticky note exercise, the engineers understood that design thinking and product development aren’t competing methodologies. Design thinking could add value by bringing curiosity, questioning, testing, and making ideas tangible throughout their existing process.

This insight shaped our collaboration model: embedding consultation sessions into real projects rather than trying to overhaul their established ways of working. We weren’t disrupting cross-department collaboration or the high-stakes requirements of mass production. We were expanding the potential for innovation and experimentation within their existing framework.

The results are still unfolding, but the engineers are already applying design thinking mindsets to ask meaningful questions, explore solutions, and test ideas, helping them think more expansively, make thoughtful trade-offs, and push concepts further.

That’s the bridge between structure and creativity: not new processes, but new ways of thinking within the ones you already have. Practiced over time, those habits make innovation both sustainable and rigorous.

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“The Making of...” is a series of behind-the-scenes articles written by IDEO Shanghai designers about our innovation methods and work with major clients across industries in China.

As companies grow and their internal processes mature, the concept of innovation can start to feel like a contradiction.

Over the past decade, particularly through two pregnancies and deliveries, I have learned to navigate and deeply appreciate the complex network of healthcare providers and services that comprise the NHS.

I am far from alone in that deep appreciation. In England, the NHS is a national obsession. It determines election campaigns, shapes the budget, and perhaps most importantly, colors how we think about and act on our health. But alongside that feeling of national pride is an understanding that the institution is under far too much strain. There are currently 6.34 million people waiting for NHS treatment. Cutting waiting lists by making better use of the private sector is front and center of the Prime Minister’s latest NHS proposals. It is a top priority for the government as it looks to deliver on a promise to ensure that 92 percent of patients in England wait no longer than 18 weeks for treatment.

Over dinner recently, a close friend asked me: “You’re a designer. If you were going to fix the NHS, where would you start?”

My answer: “Anywhere but the NHS.”

The NHS is a world-class problem fixer. An emergency and acute care service that kicks into gear when we need it most. However, the NHS cannot purify the air we breathe, encourage us to move more, improve our relationships with others, help us develop healthy working patterns, or change the food we eat. To preserve our health, we need to address the causes of preventable lifestyle diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease at their source.

That means turning to the spaces where our health must be built, maintained, and nurtured. Our workplaces, our schools, our communities, our supermarkets. That’s why the best way to improve the NHS actually lies outside of it.

Rethinking the way we generate health in the UK might sound ambitious, but for a designer who has focused on health for 20 years, it is very clearly the right brief.

So, where might we start?

1. Paint a new picture of health

My mentor, IDEO founder David Kelley, used to say, “Paint a picture of the future with your idea in it.” This is where design excels. We need to imagine a future where health thrives outside of healthcare settings, a future where preventable illnesses are dramatically reduced, and people live longer, healthier lives.

Imagine a future where waiting lists for heart surgery are a thing of the past, not because the NHS has magically become more efficient, but because fewer people need surgery in the first place. Or where at-home cancer screening frees up time for healthcare workers, and gives patients more control over their own health. One of our clients, Teal Health, partnered with us to create safe and accurate cervical cancer screenings that would allow patients to collect their own samples at home, giving them more agency over their own health.

Or consider mental health. Across the UK and the US, children and young people are in crisis. In California alone, more than 284,000 youth cope with major depression. Sixty-six percent of kids with depression do not receive treatment. Between 2019 and 2020, the suicide rate for kids ages 10-18 increased by 20 percent. These numbers are shocking. Imagine a future where children, their families, and schools had easy access to tools designed to combat those mental health challenges. This was the vision driving IDEO’s collaboration with Kooth, the State of California, and cohorts of young Californians to create Soluna, a digital mental health resource kids could access anywhere, anytime.

To drive a step change in the state of our health in the UK, we must allow ourselves to rethink the ways in which we keep ourselves and our families healthy. The National Health Service cannot be our sole partner in this endeavor.

2. Break taboos and engage in hard conversations

Taking health beyond the hospital will require us to confront awkward topics—conversations which we have become used to leaving at the door of the doctor’s office. We need to learn how to talk about menstruation, aging, mental health, and—dare I say it —poo, out in the open.

By normalizing these discussions and listening with empathy, we can begin to uncover the human challenges that impact our health, opening up opportunities for new products and services that improve health and drive economic growth.

Menopause is a great example. In our work with QVC, we learned that nearly 40 percent of menopausal women are being prescribed antidepressants to help manage their symptoms, despite four out of five describing the treatment as “inappropriate.” We also heard that nine out of 10 British menopausal women feel society and brands overlook them. Recognizing that its customer demographic makes QVC uniquely positioned to surface conversations and provide support to those dealing with menopause, the video commerce retailer partnered with IDEO to determine how it could not only meet customer needs but also flip the conversation about midlife, reframing it as a time of vibrancy and exploration.

3. Fix incentives to combat health pollution

The true financial cost to society of excessive sugar, saturated fats, and pollution is largely hidden. The sticker price is nothing compared to the cost of lost productivity, medicines, procedures, and NHS waiting lists they create.

Policy makers need to inspire innovative new alternatives and reward manufacturers who can create attractive products that do not come at the expense of our health.

In the US, an organization called Eat Real is working to scale access to nutritious, sustainable foods through healthier meal programs in public schools. Almost 30 million children in the US rely on public school lunches for more than 50 percent of their daily caloric intake, but these meals are often comprised of ultra-processed, unsustainable foods. IDEO collaborated with Eat Real to develop its branding and messaging in order to reach a new set of food philanthropists and scale their impact.

4. Be radically collaborative

Once we relinquish the notion that the healthcare system is solely responsible for our health, we are free to design a new system of collaborative forces to promote, maintain, and foster good health. What opportunities might we unlock if we brought together food producers, educators, employers, city planners, tech leaders, and content creators to co-design a new approach to health with policymakers? Already, some public/private partnerships have led to change. A few years ago, IDEO partnered with the NHS’s health tech unit and a company called Public Digital to create a suite of digital resources that enabled organizations across the NHS to transform their own services, allowing them to provide mental health support for the most vulnerable children and young people.

The opportunities extend far beyond the NHS

A healthier society is more productive and pays more taxes. It requires less healthcare funding and is less poverty-stricken. It can help us all to live happier, more fulfilling lives.

The tensions getting in our way—the short-term incentives to sell unhealthy products, reduce environmental regulations, and the challenge of breaking unhealthy habits—do not necessarily require a revolution in medical technology or vast sums of money to resolve.

They require a designer’s toolkit. A willingness to imagine a different approach to health in the public and private sectors, the courage to talk about health in the open, a realignment of incentives, and the willingness to experiment.

They also present a huge opportunity for any organization interested in building a business centered on improved health outcomes.

It’s time to take our health out of the hospital.

When I relocated from the US to the UK ten years ago, one of the biggest differences I experienced was my sudden access to the publicly funded National Health Service (NHS).

But in the middle of last week’s Signals of TEDAI event at IDEO’s San Francisco studio, where we explored the worth and value of AI in the future workplace and what corporations can learn about leveraging IP from battles currently playing out in the art world, Pat Pataranutaporn, technologist and researcher at the MIT Media Lab, surprised the panel he was on with a far more critical question: “What is AI doing to us?”

Focus on physical, in-person experiences, because that is what people will value.

As technology becomes easier to manipulate through deepfakes, AI-generated content, and misinformation, it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish what is real—and what is not. In that world, Tim Chang, a Venture Partner at Mayfield, argued that human connection may become our most reliable source of truth—and our only form of authentic experience. “Within a year or two, anything digitally created and transmitted will not be fundamentally trustable,” he said. “The only thing I count on is when I see you in person.” In a future where digital content can no longer be taken at face value, people may once again become the most trusted interface.

So, how can these two worlds stop competing and start to enhance one another? Authentic experiences and intelligent technology. Human intimacy and boundless connectivity. The next generation of social networks may not be entirely analog, but neither will they exist solely on our screens.

Why do tech companies get to change the rules?

Speakers like Ed Newton-Rex, founder of Fairly Trained, a non-profit certifying generative AI companies for fairer training data practices, and Amy Karle, an artist and futurist, critiqued the corporate appropriation of artists’ work under the guise of “fair use,” calling out the tech industry’s tendency to shift foundational norms (like copyright protections) without democratic consent. Newton-Rex pointed out that for years, “No AI companies trained their commercial models on copyrighted work without asking permission, because everyone knew it was illegal.” But now that several high-profile companies are doing it anyway, and reaping financial rewards, others are rushing to do the same. “We're doing a very, very bad job of holding those companies to account,” he said.

But we all know tech companies have been undervaluing artists for decades. Spotify pays artists between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream, meaning an artist needs approximately 250 streams to earn just one dollar. In 2015, Google won a 10-year battle with the Authors Guild to display excerpts of works without compensating the creators. The current AI conversation pours gasoline on these precedents. And unless we want to upheave society and consider more radical concepts like universal basic income for artists, as Alvin Wang Graylin posited, tech companies need to change the way they value art and artists; not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because creatives have always helped design the future of technology. We can't have great tech without creatives, and creativity won’t evolve without great tech. There should be mutual benefits for both parties involved in the process.

“Artificial intelligence is not artificial and it’s not intelligent.”

Ovetta Sampson, founder and owner of Right AI, reminded us that AI is only as strong as the people who shape it—and in many cases, they are the marginalized people behind the scenes who are exploited to moderate, clean, and categorize the training data. It’s something we explored back in 2020, when we were working with Mozilla on the consequences of the Surveillance Economy. Back then, we found that “invisible practices enable invisible human exploitation” via the role of mechanical turks. Current LLM practices are similar; that labor is not artificial.

As responsible designers seeking a less biased and more equitable model, we must find ways to shed light on those exploited communities and educate users and organizations on the importance of diversity and transparency in the system.

“Who are the designers?”

Over and over, panelists emphasized that designers must get AI right and create products and systems that meet real human needs while minimizing damaging consequences. Then Rashida Hanif, Founding CEO of RepresentEd, asked a seemingly simple yet fundamental question: “Who are the designers?”

If we consider the scale of impact that “design” will have in this space, then we need to dial up the importance of some of design’s most talked-about shortcomings: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Another interesting moment arose when Chang and Hanif pointed out that too often, the consternation over a lack of female-owned startups overlooks the lack of investment in female founders—not to mention gaps in education and support systems that exist before they even reach that stage. This gender chasm is just the tip of one iceberg. But we need to learn from our past and remember that, “if you invite someone to the table, it’s too late… because you’ve already built the table.” As a design community, we need to do better.

“The revolution has to start, and it has to start with you.”

Sampson reminded us of the most important point of all. It’s easy to say, “the designers need to…” But we all have a say in making this future. “We really need to participate in the AI revolution and not accept the narrative that is given to us by the tech bros,” she said. “We have the resources and the access, and it’s up to us to make the future we’re asking for.”

For us, that’s a future that understands there is no choice between human creativity and technology; and it’s a refrain we’re hearing over and over. We heard it at Figma's AI-heavy Config conference, we've explored it with clients like Ethiqly, and it was clearly resounding in this conversation, for technologists, artists, and business folks alike. AI is going to be able to do a lot, and yes, of course, it will replace jobs and upend entire industries. But its intelligence will only be truly valuable when it’s paired with human creativity to create meaningful human experiences.

So many people are putting so much work (and money) into figuring out what we are going to do with AI.

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.