Increasingly, digital spaces are proving detrimental to youth mental health. By co-designing with youth, Kooth and IDEO set out to flip the script, creating a positive digital space for young people to safely explore their mental wellbeing. 

When Kooth, IDEO, and Blackbird, IDEO’s longtime development partner, first started working on the project, the window of opportunity was narrow, and the stakes were high. The group was up against a nine-week deadline to create a working proof of concept app. Also on the line: a $188 million contract with the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS)—one that would open an entirely new line of business for Kooth. 

The app needed to do more than demonstrate functionality—it needed to prove its value. To ensure that they were creating an asset that truly fit the needs of young people, the team turned to an initial cohort of 13-25 year-old co-designers who explored early features, created video diaries, and shared their questions about and experiences with mental health. These young people often gravitated toward self-service tools that helped them take action based on their feelings. With their feedback, the team created new expressions of clinically-validated behavioral health tools like journaling, breathwork and white noise—and built novel tools, such as Starboard, an expressive drawing tool and a nod to art therapy. 

The team took inspiration from content the co-designers liked to consume, such as story-driven video games that enable freedom of exploration, deepened by a unifying mythology. That led them to a constellation theme, which made the experience more intriguing and playful. The co-designers also recommended a dark color palette, because they preferred exploring the app at night. 

With these insights, the team refined the proof of concept, and then conducted a one-week pilot with another 50 young people across California. Their positive feedback gave the State the confidence to invest in a $188 million, four-year contract for Kooth to bring the app to a platform at scale. 

Over the next year, the team engaged another 150 young people to help design, shape, and test the app. At the same time, Kooth and IDEO created a clinical oversight group, which included a pediatrician, therapists, and other clinical specialists. This group anchored the platform in the practices of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), cultivating psychological flexibility—the mindful acceptance of positive and negative emotions. Young people are invited to complete short reflections and surveys throughout their journey with the app, which includes rigorous, science-backed measurements to assess the therapeutic benefits.

Behind the scenes, the team developed a clinical-facing service and digital platform that empowers Kooth’s peer specialists, social workers, community curators, and clinicians to support the youth experience, all while protecting privacy and confidentiality. They also navigated a complex landscape of state requirements and government legislation, ensuring that the platform could cover topics like substance abuse and gender identity, and that users could access coaching within 24 hours, and choose from a diverse set of experts. 

The last step was to select a name that worked across multiple languages, trademarks, and competitor branding, and didn’t come off as a mental health service, something the youth co-designers believed was critical. IDEO and Kooth landed on Soluna, a name that alludes to the app’s presence in both the bright (“sol” for sun) and the dark times (“luna” for moon). 

Now, Soluna is available for free to all youth in California, and the state has set ambitious targets for reaching all young people at scale. Soluna is a living platform that will continue to receive product and design updates for years to come, all deeply rooted in youth co-design.

The US Surgeon General named mental health “the defining public health crisis of our time,” and cited social media, online bullying, and the isolation exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as major drivers that have significant negative outcomes for youth.
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In California alone, more than 284,000 youth cope with major depression. 66% of kids with depression do not receive treatment. Between 2019-2020, the suicide rate for kids ages 10-18 increased by 20%.
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In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health set aside $4.6 billion to increase access to mental health and substance abuse support, the largest commitment to youth mental health ever made by a state.

94%

of proof-of-concept app users would recommend the Soluna app to a friend, and believe that engaging with the app would be a positive addition to their daily/weekly routine

6 million

young people in California had access to Soluna at launch in January 2024

Creating a better cervical cancer screening experience is an important mission, but also a challenging one. Not only would Teal have to address the regulations that face healthcare device companies, it would also need to build a comprehensive telehealth platform and a physical product—a wand that could easily collect an adequate cell sample, even in the hands of an untrained person. 

The first challenge was to create the wand. The device would need to do a lot: It’s impossible for a person to see their own cervix, so the user would have to be able to find the cervix blind, collect the sample themselves, and remove the wand from their bodies without contaminating it on other parts of their anatomy. Because this is something users are likely to do in their bathrooms, where there is no space to lie down, they would need to be able to use the device while standing—and with one hand. From the beginning, the IDEO team set out to design functional, testable prototypes to make sure the idea was viable, and incorporate diverse voices into the research process, including trans, minority, and disabled women. 

Because the product is meant for people who aren’t medical professionals, the team worked to design something as simple, intuitive, and unintimidating as possible. They used a 3-D printer to create multiples of every prototype, autoclaves to make sure that the designs they were creating were sterile, and leaned into shapes women are already used to, like the cylindrical shape of a tampon. The wand they created has that same basic form, but with a soft sponge that the user can deploy with the turn of a dial to collect the sample, then close to protect it from contamination on the way out of the body.

With working prototypes in hand, Teal set out to test their efficacy. In an initial study with 220 participants varying in age, race, socioeconomic status, and geography, Teal found that not only were participants able to successfully self-collect samples, they also preferred them over the speculum, the device doctors typically use during a screening. Some 92 percent said if they knew the results were equal they would prefer self-collection, while 87 percent reported they would stay current with screening if Teal Wand was an option. Self-collection took the vast majority under two minutes to complete, and 97% of study participants reported it was very easy or easy to use. The Teal Wand recently received a patent for its unique design.

The IDEO team also worked on the packaging and unboxing experience, which plays an important role in supporting the user through the self-screening process. The team built in thoughtful design cues to give users reassurance that they are using the wand correctly, and to provide the same level of confidence they would have in the results of an in-clinic screening. 

In January 2023, Teal raised an $8.8 million seed round from Serena Ventures, Emerson Collective, and Metrodora, and later that year, launched a nationwide clinical trial with leading health organizations including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of Colorado, Washington University, and others. In 2025, The Teal Wand became the first FDA-authorized device for at-home cervical cancer screening, with virtual medical provider support. Today, it's available in all 50 states. i’s an enormous step toward its North Star: catching cervical cancer earlier and saving lives.

Cervical cancer is nearly 100% preventable when it’s caught early, yet one in four women in the US are not up to date on their screenings.
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More than 12,000 people in the US are being diagnosed with cervical cancer every year, and more than 4,000 people die of the disease, which disproportionately impacts Black, Asian, and Hispanic women.
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More than half of cervical cancer cases are found in women that are not up-to-date on their screenings.

97%

of clinical study participants said the Teal Wand was very easy or easy to use.

87%

of participants said they would be more likely to stay current with screening guidelines if Teal Wand was an option.

94%

of participants said they would choose to collect their own sample from home rather than the current standard of care where a clinician collects it in-office.

2025

The Teal Wand becomes the first FDA authorized device for at-home cervical cancer screening, with virtual medical provider support.

Cities United already had a strong foundation with its stated mission, vision, and values. IDEO brought those to life with a new visual and verbal brand identity system that celebrates Cities United’s inclusive approach to building relationships and reimagining public safety.

To help Cities United with its verbal identity, the IDEO team defined the organization's voice, tone, and key messages, making it easier to tell its story more consistently and clearly, a crucial step toward engaging stakeholders.

To define the new visual identity, the team created a new logo, a letter C composed of interwoven shapes that represent the three tenets of their vision—“safe, happy, and hopeful;” a new design language that references city grids; and a typographic system anchored by the typeface VTC DuBois, inspired by W.E.B. DuBois’s own custom lettering and designed by the Black-owned Vocal Type Co. The team also designed a color palette that embodies the textures of city life with hues reminiscent of asphalt, sunrise, and brick. 

To amplify the refreshed branding, the team designed a new responsive website, citiesunited.org. The intuitive site shares the organization’s mission, resources, ongoing projects, and partner network, inviting stakeholders to join in their transformative work. IDEO also created a video to humanize Cities United’s mission and showcase its nationwide impact. It underscores the unity, resilience, and hope embodied by the organization through a chorus of voices.

This comprehensive rebranding widens Cities United’s reach and impact, helping the organization share its goal of creating safe, healthy, hopeful communities for young Black men, boys, and their families, and reintroduces the organization to a national audience. 

The Cities United work was supported by IDEO’s Racial Justice Impact Fund, part of a commitment IDEO made in 2020 to ​​address systemic racism and advance equity within our own organization, our client work, and beyond.

Cities United is committed to reducing the epidemic of homicides and shootings among young Black men and boys ages 14-to-24 by 50%.

Between 2009 and 2019, the number of Black children who “did not go to school at least one day in the past month because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school” increased by 84%, according to Cities United.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for Black men and boys from birth to age 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2023 SF Design Week Award

In recognition of IDEO’s brand work with Citizens United

Sleep is a critical resource for shift workers—and their employers, too. Together, IDEO and Somni worked directly with people with acute and chronic sleep challenges to create concepts that could support their sleep goals, and provide employers with the means to improve employee health.

When IDEO and Somni first partnered, the startup was an early-stage company, so the team started small, with focused sprints and workshops to redesign the core aspects of the company and product offerings. The team interviewed shift workers about their sleep patterns, which can vary quite a bit. Even when people keep to a specific schedule on work days, they often have to change their patterns on days off to spend time with family and friends, leading to a very disruptive sleep cycle. Research revealed that many third shift workers were dealing with sleep and health issues, but also a pervasive “machismo” culture,  pressure to “tough it out,” and a reliance on energy drinks to deal with lack of sleep. 

To address those issues, the team designed a digital experience for sleep cohorts, support groups where members could share their experiences and sleep strategies, and work with a coach and sponsor who already had been through the program. The platform analyzed workers’ data, and provided AI-enabled recommendations for improving their sleep. The big takeaway? Data by itself wasn’t necessarily helpful, and could be confusing for folks who were less digitally-fluent. Providing context, like a calendar that displayed sleep experiments at a glance, was crucial. 

The IDEO team also created a new user experience for a genetic testing program that could uncover factors associated with sleep issues. Somni aims to use a saliva-based genetic test to monitor for DNA damage caused by circadian disruption, then leverage its sleep improvement program to prevent further damage. Because biomarker testing is a differentiating offer for Somni, it was extremely important that the team get it right, both to make sure that users could understand its utility, and for Somni to provide real value. The design challenge was unique—and not just because of data privacy concerns. Presenting data about DNA damage in a non-human-centered way could increase the anxiety workers had around their sleep.

At the end of the project, Somni leveraged the insights the IDEO team surfaced to improve products like its sleep coaching service, and to refine its biomarker testing offering. Based on this work, Somni has also created a pilot with a Fortune 100 company, which is currently in progress, as it works to mitigate the ill effects of disrupted sleep for employees and the companies they work for.

In the short-term, circadian rhythm disruption leads to an array of jet-lag-like symptoms, and in the long-run, it may contribute to weight gain, obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

It also impairs people’s ability to work, affecting productivity, creativity, and the overall work environment. Productivity loss can lead to employer baseline healthcare costs that are 26% higher, and over time, insomnia can result in an average cost of $4,267 more per employee per year.

In June 2019, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified shift work as a probable carcinogen.

75%

user retention in Somni's sleep program

$2,450

savings per year per employee for users who complete the program

33%

improvement in sleep quality, and 41 more minutes per night

What they found through their conversations took them a bit by surprise. There was a deeper malaise afflicting everyone they spoke to—something under the surface, under the symptoms.

Loneliness.

Months into a pandemic, the isolation that’s always been below the surface is even more extreme. It was in this context that I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Murthy. We spoke about what leaders can do to facilitate connection, and why it is mission-critical for organizations to address loneliness and support relationship-building, even when we’re physically distant. Especially when we are physically distant.

I'm sharing some excerpts from our conversation here. I hope they inspire you and prompt useful explorations into the health of your communities.

Three types of loneliness

The feeling of being isolated from each other, Dr. Murthy discovered, is at the root of so many of our deepest ailments. He reminds us that we are social creatures, and that community heals us. Especially in these divided times, the way to a more happy and healthy society is both obvious and profound: human connection.

Connection in the workplace

Our professional lives—the experience of working and the quality of what we do—is heavily influenced by what’s going on in their rest of our lives. Yet there’s a hesitance to be vulnerable, share challenges, and ask for help. As a result, colleagues sometimes miss opportunities to help one another. It’s a loss, because through helping each other, we deepen our bonds. Empowering employees to help each other can be one of the most powerful ways for organizations to strengthen their teams.

The potential for something better

While our present moment lays bare how technology can isolate us and ideologies can divide us, it also shows us that new ways are possible now and in the future. My conversation with Dr. Murthy explored the role design can play in creating human-centered systems that make us all feel more connected—from the scale of individuals and teams, all the way up to systems, institutions and governments. We all have the power to design conditions that prevent loneliness, cultivate community, and foster good health.

The strain on our systems caused by COVID-19 reveals an opportunity to take new approaches to our work and our infrastructure— from how the government sets policies to how businesses empower employees. In rebuilding the world post-pandemic, we need to keep in mind the tangible benefits that human connection can support: mental health, physical wellbeing, academic and professional success. We can design policy to optimize human connection, ensuring our government recognizes these principles when thinking about housing, public health, or education, for instance. The question for leaders is, what changes are required to create connection and maintain cohesion, even as our structures and processes shift? The opportunity for leaders now is not to go back to how things were, but to imagine something better…and make a new “normal” built upon what supports us as, as Dr. Murthy points out, social creatures who need care and connection.

Original photograph by Meredith Nierman

There’s a story in Dr. Vivek Murthy’s book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, about the tour he made across America in 2015, while he was U.S. Surgeon General. One of my colleagues at IDEO, Ann Kim, served as his Chief Design Officer and joined Dr. Murthy’s team as they set out to learn about the health crises gripping the nation—opioid addiction, chronic disease, violence—from the people who were suffering the most.

As pixels become a hidden quality, what would it be like to expose and celebrate this tiny landscape? Maybe it’s some sort of nostalgia for the pixel, but I thought it would be fun to prototype a game where part of the gameplay is uncovering this “hidden world” of pixels inside these new displays—and so the world’s smallest pixel art game was born.

Looking through the loupe

To start the project, I needed to see these tiny pixels up close. I bought a cheap jeweler’s loupe—basically a magnifying glass—and pressed it up against an iPad. Things looked promising with a 10x loupe. The level of magnification allows you to see the individual pixels, but still see a decent amount of the play area around the character. However, if your eye is pressed against the eyepiece of the loupe, it would make touch controls a challenge because you can’t see anything but the small area in the magnifying glass. To work with this constraint, I wondered if I could make the loupe itself the controller for the game.

The way iPads and most tablets sense touch is using a “capacitive touchscreen.” This type of display creates a grid of areas that hold electrical charge. When a fingertip touches the screen, the charge at and around the point of contact decreases, communicating where the finger is to the tablet. Electrically conductive gloves and styluses are able to work on these screens because they allow the properties of your finger to extend through the conductive material. So using the same idea as a conductive stylus, I put some aluminum tape on the loupe to transmit the capacitance from your fingers to the display. This allowed a player to move the loupe around the screen, and through doing so, interact with the game.

Exploring a tiny world

Next, I needed to develop the game. I borrowed from some of the classic role-playing-game tropes from games I played as a kid, building out a landscape that included many different climates—a desert, a lake, a forest, a deep forest, an ice tundra, and more. I created a tiny character that the player guided around the landscape by moving the loupe.

The idea is that the whole game is played on a single static overworld screen that never moves—you can explore an entire tiny world without ever moving more than a few inches. There are even a couple of fun ways the character interacts with the environment. For example, the player can force the character to fall into the lake, where he splashes around and quickly jumps out. I also created a hidden cave that shows how a game might work with inside and outside spaces that can be explored.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the way the experiment turned out. There’s something about looking through the magnifying glass and into this new world that brings back some of the awe and wonder that came with exploring new worlds on my Nintendo when I was growing up—it just goes to show that screen technology doesn’t need to be pixel perfect to transport us.

Chart your own pixel territory

Want to try it for yourself? Here’s how to get your own version of this experiment up and running:

1. Build the loupe controller

Get a loupe, and some aluminum tape. I made two separate “T” shaped pieces of tape, and wrapped them around the edge of the bottom of the loupe. This metal transmits the capacitance of your body down to the edges of the loupe, simulating two-finger touch.

2. Load the game

There are two ways to do this. First, make sure you have Unity, then download the project from Github. You’ll also want to install the Unity Remote app on your tablet.

To quickly test the project, you can plug the tablet into a USB port on your computer and open the Unity Remote app on the tablet. In Unity on the computer go to Edit > Project Settings > Editor and select the tablet. Then press the play button at the top of the main Unity window and the game will appear on your device. This will let you try things out but it will be very slow to react and move the character because it’s running on the computer and sending each screen as an image over the USB connection. More detailed instructions can be found on the Github project page.

Alternatively, if you want to run the application natively on a device at a reasonable speed, you will need to follow the directions on building for mobile to set up your device with Unity.

Either way, once you’ve gotten the game up and running, you’ll have a good sense of the game mechanics and can go into the project to edit it to create your own tiny world—changing things like the landscape and character actions, creating new characters and interactive objects, and even extending it into an actual game. Happy exploring!

A quick shoutout to some of the great resources I used to create this demo:

• Tiled: A fantastic tool for creating tiled backgrounds for 2D games. This was extremely helpful for putting together the overworld.
• Tiled2Unity: This tool helps bring the tiled data into Unity seamlessly.
• opengameart.org: A great repository for free to use game art assets. My main tiles were modified from surt’s Blowhard Chronicles.
• rm2kdev’s 2D Unity RPG Development series: A super helpful video series on developing 2D games in Unity.

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When’s the last time you had to design for something as small as a pixel? In recent years, with the advance of retina displays on computers, tablets and phones, it’s easy to forget that pixels are still the building blocks for everything you see on the screen. (These new displays still use pixels; they’re just so small they can’t really be seen.) In the past, user interface designers had to build to pixel-perfect precision to avoid blurry aliasing effects and issues with displaying fonts on lower-resolution screens; today, this is all but a thing of the past.

Designers prototype everyday. It’s an essential part of the design and development process that involves translating early ideas into tangible prototypes that we can test in real life with real users. Prototyping is about being able to understand a challenge or an opportunity and find creative ways to move toward a solution, step by step. Essentially homing in on “building the right thing,” before “building that thing right.”

But the prototyping process doesn’t have to be limited to what you do for work. In fact, bringing this approach to your everyday life has the magical effect of turning common challenges into moments of playful exploration. It’s not necessarily about finding the ultimate answer, but enjoying the opportunity to experiment, improve, and learn along the way. You can prototype anything as long as you have the right mindset and get creative with your tools.

Here’s what it looked like when a sous-vide experiment took me down a prototyping rabbit hole (and how it could take you down one too).

Step 1: Get inspired

Inspiration can come from many places, like frustration with tools or objects that are not easy to use or the simple joy of creative exploration. For me, the latter happened when I stumbled across a recipe that used sous-vide, the technique of slowly heating meat or fish to its perfect core temperature so it doesn’t become dry or overcooked.

I thought it would be fun to try out for a dinner party, but didn't want to invest in a professional sous-vide machine. A typical moment where my prototyping obsession kicks in…

Step 2: Start out low-fidelity

An essential step while prototyping is identifying the simplest way to obtain the intended result—to achieve more with less. Isn’t the sous-vide technology just slowly heating up ingredients and stabilizing the temperature over a long period of time? That seemed pretty simple. So I gathered my materials: heat-proof bags, an electric thermostat, and of course, a couple of beautiful steaks.

I sealed the steaks in the heat-resistant bags, put them into a pot of water and used my oven to heat them up to 53°C/127 °F (the perfect core temperature for a medium rare steak). Unfortunately, the thermostat of a regular kitchen oven is relatively inaccurate, with the actual temperature being ±10°C/18°F compared to what it shows! That can make the difference between your meat being bloody as hell and completely overcooked.

That meant I had to place myself in front of my oven for over two hours, staring at the tiny LCD display of my electric thermostat and manually balancing the inaccuracy of the oven by turning the temperature up and down.

Step 3: Analyze your results

The good news: the meal was perfect—the meat medium rare—and my friends were impressed. But sitting in front of my oven, watching a thermostat for multiple hours, was less than ideal. This was the perfect starting point for the next iteration—looking into ways to automate and refine the temperature stabilization and improve my personal user experience.

Step 4: Iterate on key features

That’s how I found myself on a Saturday afternoon hooking up a simple heating rod, my electronic thermostat, and a milk stirrer with an Arduino board.

I mounted my thermostat to the top of the pot and coded my Arduino board to activate the heating rod as long as the temperature of the water bath stayed below 53°C/127 °F. Triggering the milk stirrer every once in a while ensured that the temperature stayed consistent throughout the pot. My prototype ran this process every 10 seconds and freed me up to focus on other parts of the dinner preparation while delivering another round of perfectly cooked meat and fish.

Step 5: Repeat until satisfied—or pivot

Each iteration of a prototype will reveal more detailed feedback and help you get closer to an actual solution. That’s why prototyping is the best way to learn while moving forward, and to de-risk decisions on product innovation or bigger investments.

Using my sous-vide prototype several times helped me identify multiple opportunities to improve it, like how to make it as compact as possible for easy storage (a great design and prototyping task in itself!). But most importantly, by using the prototype, I realized that I missed the sensorial experience of cooking. Simply waiting for ingredients to reach their core temperature in the water bath felt like an artificial, chemical experiment and was not the rich sensory experience I was looking for when spending time in the kitchen on weekends.

So I decided to pivot. After not using the prototype for months, I disassembled it and freed up the components for my next prototyping rabbit hole. Even if the sous-vide prototype actually never made it into a final solution, it helped me better understand what I enjoy most about cooking, and taught me something that I’m sure will be applicable to a future experiment—because the prototyping obsessive’s job is never done. Now, on to the next project!

On a Saturday afternoon (pre-COVID), I found myself in my kitchen, hooking up an Arduino board to a heating rod with one hand, and handling an electronic thermometer and a milk-stirrer with the other. How did I end up here? A hunt for the perfectly-cooked steak—and a typical result of my obsession with prototyping.

For years, I’ve watched smart companies buy into big data. Yet despite huge investments, some of them fail to reap the rewards. A 2017 MIT study revealed that 63% of executives expected to see a large impact on their offerings from AI in the next few years. But of the 14% of executives who reported already seeing a large impact, most cited examples in automation, decision-making support, and operational diagnostics for internal capabilities. Those kinds of advances can contribute to higher profits and short-term differentiation, but operational efficiencies do not generally help organizations grow beyond their peers. They also aren’t the deciding factor that will carry you through a yo-yoing economy. So how, exactly, do successful organizations unlock sustained and differentiated value in an AI-enabled world, at a time when immediate change may seem necessary just to survive?

It starts with experimenting and iterating with data—in a responsible way— to find your organization’s unique value proposition. Intentional experimentation mitigates the risks of failure by ensuring that you learn which data skillsets are critical to your organization, while at the same time identifying product-market fit. It’s a process that can happen before, during, or after a broader digital transformation, and there are three different ways to approach these intentional experiments: scaling internal offers, piloting to stretch, and purposeful venturing.

Scaling internal offers

In 2004, a web design company called 37signals needed a project management tool to keep all of its work streams on track. Initially, its solution—Basecamp—was meant to be a tool that would help the company be more efficient, and serve as a single source of truth for all its projects. But the more valuable it became internally, the more the company realized that it could be valuable externally. Eventually, Basecamp became 37signals’ core business; it adopted Basecamp as its name, and folded other offerings under the new brand.

Scaling internal offers is a smart way to create new revenue streams that can also help drive an organizational purpose. It’s a particularly good approach for companies that value creating internal capabilities and investing in their employees.

Another example comes from a liability insurance company that had recently gone through quarterly reviews. The company took a deep dive into large lawsuits, setting case direction and identifying where liability existed and standards had been breached. These observations were used to set financial reserves and, after months of manual curation, create risk-management training materials. While this company had already developed a technique for improving best practices, leveraging data to create a digital tool would give them an opportunity to scale up dramatically. The resulting in-house product allows the company’s claims and risk management representatives to rapidly identify new and emerging trends, as well as strategize case management on the portfolio level, saving thousands of human hours and much more in lawsuit expenses over the course of a year. With a bit more refinement, the firm could offer a version of its tool directly to policy owners, which could allow them to adopt best practices in real-time.

Piloting to stretch

A classic example of this approach comes from Netflix, which started offering streaming video services in 2007, alongside their penalty-free mail order DVD rentals. When the streaming service was born, it was a digital replica of the video store experience, browsing and selecting movies from a wall. But as Netflix accumulated ever more data about what people watched and their preferences, the streaming service became a data-driven way to personalize and recommend content, better fulfilling its purpose of “entertaining the world.” In fact, developing this data-driven capability in-house has given them sufficient insights into viewers’ preferences, which they are now using to create their own content, dramatically shifting the entire media landscape because of the data they own.

Piloting to stretch is a method of launching a new venture that brings in cash and stretches the organization to more intentionally fulfill its purpose. Often, that can require an entirely new business unit, with a new culture and team, so that it can grow without absorbing existing constraints. This approach is particularly appropriate for organizations that are seeking a new lever for growth, or are looking to disrupt their industry.

For Ascensia Diabetes Care, it was about recognizing a service gap for patients newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Most people, shortly after receiving their diagnosis, are scheduled for a brief consultation with a certified diabetes educator (CDE) who helps them learn the basics of managing the disease. But the short time a CDE spends with a client isn't nearly enough to establish new habits and enable sustained lifestyle changes. Ascensia saw an opportunity to create a new remote care service that would allow people with diabetes to interact with CDEs over a prolonged period of time through a telehealth platform, helping them better acclimate to their condition. To design the right program and path for each patient, Ascensia created data-driven tools that would help CDEs know how and when to interact with users. Initially, the company piloted the app with 60 people, and early results showed that users were willing to adopt and adhere to the program. Only two participants failed to complete the study—a stunning success rate when adherence to therapy for chronic illnesses in developed countries averages around 50%.

Purposeful venturing

Google may have started as a search engine, but in 2015 Alphabet emerged as an umbrella organization that made space for Google to pursue other ventures, some that might seem far beyond the scope of the core business. Alphabet’s interests— everything from life science (Calico) to transportation (Waymo)—are all in service of doing the right thing, and separating Alphabet’s other ventures from Google kept them from getting mired in particulars of the Google organization. This nimbleness has allowed Alphabet to fulfill its broader purpose, even during the extreme uncertainty of a global pandemic; the company quickly launched one venture, Verily’s Project Baseline, to research COVID-19, while Google and Apple have partnered to develop an exposure notification system.

Purposeful venturing is a way for an organization to create new business lines that drive growth. These ventures operate independently, with their own teams and cultures, and may require dramatically different ways of working that would be distracting for the core business’ operations. It’s a good fit for companies that might have many different ways of achieving their purpose, or for firms that can create symbiotic effects with auxiliary offerings.

In practice, it can also look like this: A nimble venture firm called 1848 Ventures (a subsidiary of Westfield Insurance) recognized that staffing is one of the biggest uncertainties business owners grapple with. Over-staffing eats into their already razor-thin margins; under-staffing means long lines and lost revenue. By rooting their innovation efforts in their purpose—to help their customers mitigate risk and uncertainty—the firm saw an opportunity to create a service that would help small businesses better manage their expenses through a tool that combines large data sets and an intuitive interface to optimize operational decisions. This new product was piloted with restaurants to help them offset the thin margins they need to survive.

Regardless of whether you experiment by scaling internal offers, piloting to stretch, or purposeful venturing, there are ample opportunities to simultaneously unlock product-market fit while getting a better grasp of the capabilities your organization needs to grow. Design offers a way to mitigate the risk of missing product-market fit and improve your odds of success in a way that dovetails with your existing capabilities and long-term vision. So after you pick your path, get out there and start prototyping early and often with data products, just like you would with anything else. It’s the best way to make sure that your data investment will push you past operational efficiencies, to sustained and real growth.

Illustrations by Nate Kitch

Over the past six months, the pandemic and the economic uncertainty it ushered in have sent companies in every industry flailing; to survive, many have leapt to major digital transformations. Scrambling CEOs have bought into the hype around data and AI that has been swirling for the last decade, all in hopes of making it to the other side. It’s a smart move. Even in a moment as stark as this one, with no sure path to a return to normalcy, data has the potential to ethically deliver unprecedented value to consumers, organizations, and shareholders. But just because the potential is there doesn’t mean the full value of these investments is being realized.

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.