Before Eat Real can advocate for better school meals,  it has to connect with school leaders—and donors. As the organization expanded its work beyond school certification, it needed an updated soup-to-nuts branding redesign that represents its purpose.

To get started on the five-week sprint, the IDEO team conducted a brand audit and interviews with Eat Real staff, board members, and donors. The team learned that Eat Real’s brand messaging and voice showed up inconsistently, and that board members wanted greater clarity around communication to prospective donors. Several people expressed a desire to change the original logo centered on a fork to a more culturally-inclusive symbol, and for the logo to be separated from the Eat Real Certified stamp, since the organization had evolved to do much more than just certification.

The IDEO team worked in close collaboration with Eat Real to deliver comprehensive brand guidelines, including Eat Real’s brand purpose and core values, positioning and personality, logo and wordmark, visual expression, verbal expression, and brand showcase. The brand’s new tagline, Nourish the Future, speaks directly to how real food access unleashes the possibility for a healthier society and a healthier planet. A new mark combines three elements that signify much more: a welcoming bowl (joy and ritual), the serving spoon (generosity and nourishment), and a sprouting leaf (a future where children and the planet flourish). The team also landed on an unapologetically vibrant color palette, to bring surprise and energy to the brand. From this foundation, Eat Real created a new website, completed a photo shoot with IDEO's art direction, and launched the brand with new messaging and collateral within a year. Now, Eat Real has the tools it needs to scale its operations and affect real change.

To scale its program and be at the center of sustainable food systems change, Eat Real needed branding and messaging to reach a new set of philanthropists.

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Almost 30 million US kids depend on public school lunches for more than 50% of their daily calories. These meals are frequently made up of ultra-processed, unsustainable foods that contribute to type 2 diabetes and obesity.  

2023 funding goals reached

with its new branding, beating its end-of-year fundraising goals, and putting the nonprofit on track to serve more schools in 2024

129M

meals served to 360,000 students every year at schools that have gone through the certification program

Most end-of-high-school experiences, like the Chinese gaokao exam, the global IB Extended Essay, or the US-based AP Capstone program, are focused on testing and academic, classroom-based activities. Yungu School, a private K–12 school in Hangzhou, China, founded in 2017 by Jack Ma of Alibaba and funded by Alibaba partners, wanted to take a different approach.  Yungu’s vision: combine the renowned Chinese National Curriculum with an international, competency-based learning mindset.

Designing a new capstone course that brought together the perspectives of Yungu School’s many stakeholders was a complex challenge. The solution? IDEO formed a “co-creation council” composed of eight Yungu School middle- and high-school educators who held different positions within the school, spanned tenures, and came from diverse educational and cultural backgrounds, including Chinese, European, and American. Bringing together educators from a range of backgrounds and points of view fostered alignment and sparked new ideas. In addition to the council, IDEO and Yungu educators gathered additional input from students and parents and crafted the objectives, design principles, and blueprint for the change-making 18-month capstone program.

The collaboration resulted in a tailored, insight-driven capstone course that progressively builds learners’ confidence and agency via five modules: “Get Inspired,” “Find Yourself,” “Dive Deep,” “Go Big,” and “Give Back.” The learning cycles, which range from one week to half a year in length, teach students how to move from ideas to impact in topic areas they are passionate about and which have a bearing on pressing issues like climate change, digital privacy, and reducing food waste, among other global challenges. The goal of this iterative approach is twofold. Equip students for “global citizenship” by identifying personal ways to make a positive impact. And foster “entrepreneurship” by learning to be critical, creative, and optimistic systems thinkers who embrace a growth mindset.  

To ensure a solid foundation for the new course, IDEO also created a week-long design-thinking training program for Yungu’s teachers. The professional development experience boosted their creative problem-solving and taught them how to move from being “expert instructors of curricula” to “encouraging guides” of capstone students who would need to demonstrate their proficiency through a final product, presentation, or performance rather than a final exam. The collaboration concluded with an immersive exhibition that allowed all stakeholders—educators, students, and parents—to experience the content modules and transformative course for themselves.   Since launching its capstone program in 2022, Yungu High School has added lectures from social entrepreneurs and workshops that teach communication skills to the innovative course, garnering awards from media outlets like Fast Company. Most importantly, the signature program has enabled The Yungu School to embody its noble and audacious mission—empowering students to become future innovators for social good.

Today’s high-school seniors learn how to memorize academic content and pass tests but aren’t prepared to make a real-world impact after graduation.

196 college offers

and $1.442 million in scholarships received by over 40 graduates from Yungu High School’s class of 2023

2023 Finalist

Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards, Learning category

Design thinking was embedded in the creation of Omada Health from the earliest phases, and Omada has taken that forward as a strategy for success.

Over the past decade, the digital health company has grown from a couple of early career IDEOers testing concepts at the very frontier of digital health, to a company with nearly 2000 employers on its customer roster and more than one million users of its healthcare products.

Omada’s origin story began at IDEO in 2011, when its now CEO, Sean Duffy, an MD/MBA student at Harvard, joined IDEO as an intern, after a partner found his resume on the copy room floor. What was supposed to be a summer internship led to an exploration of the potential impact of digital tools on chronic health problems. IDEO partner Dennis Boyle gave Duffy and his co-founder and fellow IDEOer, Adrian James, the time and funding to do human factors research, meeting with people with prediabetes and metabolic disease in their homes to learn more about the care they were getting. What they heard was that no product or service was meeting the realities of their daily lives.

Five months after he landed his internship, and with the company’s blessing, Duffy and James spun Omada Health out of IDEO. Together, they raised a seed round, and continued to lean on design thinking methods, prototyping early versions of their product, then testing it with real patients. Duffy himself even served as the company’s first health coach. By sticking with the mindsets they had learned at IDEO, they avoided the pitfall of falling in love with the popular approaches to digital health of the era—like detailed food tracking or bluetooth enabled pill bottle tops. Instead, they stayed focused on creating what patients were asking for: a digital product that provided support, accountability, and evidence-based solutions. 

Today, Omada Health is a virtual-first, integrated care solution that provides patients with clinical care plans using digital tools and one-on-one, personalized coaching. It helps users manage chronic conditions including pre-diabetes, diabetes, hypertension, joint and muscle health, and behavioral health. More than a decade after its founding, it counts nearly 2000 employers as customers, has more than one million users of its products, and has published 24 peer-reviewed studies on its outcomes. Not to mention a $1.3 billion IPO in June of 2025. But it’s still going after its North Star: to bend the curve on preventable chronic diseases nationwide.

About 60% of adults in the US live with a chronic disease. According to the CDC, 90% of the nation’s $4.1 trillion annual healthcare expenditures are for people with chronic and mental health conditions.
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Diabetes is the country’s seventh leading cause of death—and the most expensive. Diabetes accounts for $1 out of every $4 in US healthcare costs. In addition to the cost of care, diabetes costs employers $90 billion annually in lost productivity.

Nearly 2,000

employers now partner with Omada

1 in 10

commercially-insured Americans have access to Omada through their health plan or employer coverage

$1.3 billion

valuation at Omada's IPO

Finding the right beauty product online isn’t easy, as shoppers are deluged with choices.

On top of information overload, our research unearthed varying emotional and functional needs when exploring beauty products. When looking for makeup, for example, shoppers are interested in self-expression and open to exploration. But when buying skincare products to fix an acne problem, say, people feel a bit more vulnerable. That insight led to rethinking the retail environment as a space that offers both free range exploration and trial spaces along with engagements that address the individualized needs of customers at different life stages.

Acknowledging that entering a new phase of life can make people feel insecure about their looks, we asked research participants, What does “beauty power” mean to you? Responses suggested a lack of trust in unbiased voices online about how to look and feel powerful. Digital shoppers are continuously bombarded by ads and influencers who are incentivized to push brands who hire them. Shoppers love Sephora for being a neutral space that showcases multiple brands, so we leaned into that strength, designing displays that offer product reviews and details that enable consumers to make informed decisions.

Those displays started as prototypes in a Sephora concept store that filled an entire floor of IDEO’s Shanghai office. In our bright, modern space, consumers of all demographics explored a self-led experience designed to delight. A “Play Table” allowed visitors to freely explore products, using digital platforms to access product details and reviews. Beauty consultants were close at hand to offer assistance. At another pitstop, the “Sephora Beauty School,” offered a spectrum of classes and community activities, providing hands-on guidance and enabling participants to test out beauty bloggers’ techniques. The “Care Table” addressed more personal skincare needs, providing a semi-private setting for individuals to remove makeup, try out products, and consult with experts. Here, digital tools helped consumers understand their skin type, facilitating personalized consultations akin to professional medical care. These innovative features aimed to create a unique, exploratory experience, blending digital convenience with concierge in-store service.

The feedback garnered from that prototype helped the team iterate quickly and gave Sephora the confidence to launch its first “Asia Store of the Future” in Singapore in 2022, followed by a second store in Shanghai in 2023. The Singapore store, situated in Raffles City, offered consumers a free-flowing, interactive beauty playground with a blend of digital and personal services, much like our early prototype.

The success of these two shops validated Sephora’s “Store of the Future” strategy. But experiences must evolve to stay fresh, so the team set up an “engagement indicator” tracking customers’ interaction with digital touchpoints to provide Sephora with valuable insights. Based on those insights, Sephora can continue to iterate its in-store experience and foster loyalty as its customers’ preferences shift.

As hoped, Sephora’s revitalized storefront blends digital and physical experiences in a way that gives every person who enters the store the feeling that they are stepping into their own “beauty power”.  By getting close to its customers, building early prototypes, and learning as it goes, Sephora has redefined the in-store experience, ensuring its relevance and appeal in a rapidly transforming retail landscape.

E-commerce has created tremendous challenges to companies whose core business revolves around retail stores.

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Online consumers struggle to make informed decisions with the deluge of choices online.

2

“Stores of the Future” launched

107%

traffic increase within four months of Shanghai store launch

Fast forward to fall of last year. Adobe announces an update to its Lightroom iOS app that allows users to capture RAW photos using their smartphone camera. Slowly, I began experimenting with on-the-go editing techniques similar to those I’ve developed over time using Lightroom on desktop. Could the iPhone, with its tiny image sensor, actually be the magic gadget I craved?

I’ve long wanted to do a project that celebrates the diverse architecture of my adoptive city, and my newly augmented smartphone camera provided just the opportunity. So, I set out to answer my own question with a specific aesthetic in mind and a simple design constraint in place: I would use my iPhone, alone, for both photos and edits.

I have now captured and shared more than 40 photos—one each day since April 1st—and will continue to do so until the series tops out at 100 images. The constraints I held myself to and the consistency of daily publishing have allowed me to quickly refine and iterate the technique—an accidental outcome as happy as it was unforeseen.

As designers, we often yearn for carte blanche freedom to explore and create as we see fit. What we forget is that our best solutions often come from imposing limits on that freedom, and seeing what comes of it.

How I did it: all photos in the series are captured using an iPhone 6S, and all edits were performed in roughly 60 seconds using some black and white alchemy in the Color tab of Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile app for iOS.

Want to see more of Burton’s work? Check out this, a NATO & G8 protest he attended in Chicago in May of 2012. And this, the stations of the Moscow Metro he captured during a visit in the fall of 2015.

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When I first moved to San Francisco, I spent every free moment exploring my new locale, camera in hand, with a backpack full of lenses and a tripod. With time, however, the weight of my DSLR and pack felt more like an albatross than an accessory, and I adopted the usual photographer’s lament, yearning for a magical gadget that could output images of a quality inversely proportional to its bulk.

These days, I frame my life less as a sensible narrative with a rise and fall, and more as a series of small, densely packed moments that leave sweet and sour aftertastes. These moments are the ones I choose to draw in my sketchbooks, usually several months after they’ve actually occurred. The unimportant things, I forget. What’s left for me to draw is what matters: moments of wisdom, aged by feelings that have grown more complex and multi-dimensional over time.

Here are a few moments that have stuck with me:

Blame it on the Boba

When I first moved to San Francisco, I started dating someone—less because it made sense to date him in particular, and more because I was enamored with the idea of christening my new city with a new relationship: new city, new boy, new me! Predictably, things didn’t work out, because that’s what happens when you rush into things for the wrong reasons.

Over a year after dumping me, however, he asked me out to boba. Somehow, we ended up seeing each other again. And again, predictably, things didn’t work out. Apparently, I saw things differently the second time around. I rarely drink alcohol, but that doesn’t stop me from attributing my poor life decisions to boys touting sweet beverages.

Most People are Terrible

I met one of my best friends, Cory, over two years ago. Since meeting him, I’ve probably drawn him about ten times. A savvy reporter with a sharp tongue but a heart of gold, Cory has provided me with many invaluable nuggets of wisdom. One of the most memorable nuggets was a sobering reminder that I tend to assume the best in people too quickly.

In some cases, this just means that someone who I thought had excellent taste in clothes, music, books, or food actually doesn’t. In more serious cases, this means that I have a difficult time distinguishing charm from crazy. In any case, and particularly the latter, I keep this axiom close to my heart.

Not Assholes, Just Shibas

In 8th grade, I met a girl named Mira who is now one of my oldest and closest friends. Mira is much more charismatic and social than I am. During our younger years, I always thought were two sides of one coin: she was the outgoing and social one; I was the quiet and taciturn one.

However, a few years ago, she told me that she’s actually a total introvert. I realized two things: First, that our introversion was probably what brought us together in the first place. Second, that I had completely misunderstood one of my best friends. But that’s water under the bridge at this point. Lately, we’ve started characterizing ourselves as shiba inus, who aren’t exactly the cuddliest of dogs. But they’re not jerks, they’re just independent. Just like me and Mira.

At the end of the day, I use these moments to remind myself that I can always adapt when life doesn’t work out exactly as I expect. And if all else fails, finding humor in turbulent moments is the quickest solution for a bad day.

I’m a huge nerd. I grew up watching a lot of fantastical and post-apocalyptic anime, and I’m a former literary history student with a fondness for medieval poetry. Having spent enough time with Chaucer, Boccaccio, Satoshi Kon, and Hideaki Anno—most of whom tend to leave their audiences hanging or uncomfortable—I learned to appreciate stories with ambiguous endings. I’ve carried this same sentiment into my sketchbooks.

Imagine, for example, using parts from an eel to shock the human heart with current when it’s having a heart attack? In an exhibit called Domestic Futures at Nationalmuseum of design, Stockholm Haines showed exactly such a “product”. Goodbye defibrillating paddles, hello electric eel!

More recently, IDEO’s London studio collaborated with Haines for New Old, an exhibit at the Design Museum London. The result was “Spirit,” an AI assistant for the elderly. After working alongside Haines, we found ourselves intrigued, so we caught up with her to ask a few questions about what it means to be a budding biodesigner.

When did you first think about getting into design, and why?

When I was younger, I had many misconceptions about design that I think are still problematic today. You rarely get to see the messy, exhausting, and all-consuming guts of design work, but I think it is an incredibly engaging discipline. I got my masters in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art, and am now undertaking PhD research at Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University.

Who are the designers, artists, writers, and thinkers that have influenced your work?

Noam Toran, my tutor on my MA course, offered many fascinating and unnerving threads of research, along with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who promoted alternative ways of thinking. I also like Floris Kaayk (a bit of enjoyable grossness there!), who always seems to have something fascinating in progress; my close friend designer Soomi Park, who is highlighting sensitivity to emotion in artificially intelligent objects; and recently, I saw a great talk by Hyphen-labs, which probes some really important questions about design.

Tell us what you produced for the “New Old” Design Museum exhibit

For “Spirit,” I made some sculptures of potential body modifications—visualizing how a fictional company might improve sociability in the elderly. The IDEO team, including Ed White, Daniel Tauber, and Javier Soto Morras, had researched alterations that could be made to the body to send biological notifications. The work made me aware of the pressures and expectations on the elderly.

Tell us about three of your favorite projects

In 2013, I produced “Transfigurations”, which depicted babies with structural modifications. The work encouraged people to consider whether surgical procedures might offer solutions to future social and environmental problems. I think the cuteness of these sculptures made the work both disturbing and delightful. Another project, involved dissecting sculptures of anatomical parts, suggesting potential future procedures such as the removal of a cyst from a bionic eye implant. The tactile element helped this work to become a lightning rod for discussion regarding scientific research. Currently, I am developing “if you prick us do we not bleed?” about how we interact with humanoid robots by including bodily fluids. I was, of course, inspired by the famous Shylock monologue in the Merchant of Venice. “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” .It's still a very powerful message about the mistreatment of those perceived as different.

What does it mean to use the body as a design medium?

All of my work is, of course, speculative. I don’t spend much time actually moving human material around, although I did once spend a very interesting day at a cadaver research laboratory! Instead I research the tools and materials that may have an impact on the body, or how we perceive the body. There are already disciplines that have to view the body as editable, and moving this way of thinking from a surgical or dental domain to a design or engineering one is where there is space for interesting interventions. There seems to be lots of interest in nanotechnology, and like many biotechnologies, this means there will be interactions with designs we can not see, but can perhaps feel, and maybe also artificial intelligence that may make design decisions for us.

Want to see more of Haines’ work? Find her current exhibits and talks here.

Agi Haines’ artwork isn’t easy on the eyes. But to her, it looks just like home. As the daughter of two South East London artists who met while working at Madame Tussauds wax museum, her childhood home was populated with wax heads, antique surgical tools, and sculpture scaffolds. Viewing the human body as raw material for design interventions wasn’t the stuff of some sci-fi future—it started as a family affair (her sister, Beatrice Haines caught the bug, too) and Haines has been working and speaking about it ever since.

A few days ago, in the middle of an impromptu content brainstorm, I noticed that my colleague had her hair tie cleverly wrapped around her belt to keep the excess tail neatly in place.

Hair ties are something many of us wear on our wrists all the time. They’re inexpensive and, while essential for those of us with long hair, they're often under valued and under utilized. My colleague's back-up belt loop is by far the smartest and most delightful use of a hair tie I’ve ever seen.

I’m particularly inspired by this because I like to repurpose unloved objects in ways that exercise creativity and expand appreciation for junk. Recently, I took an old wine-stained summer dress and coiled it around my neck as a scarf. It now lives in the scarf section of my wardrobe.

Now, I'm thinking about ways I can repurpose all the brightly colored hair ties that I don’t like to wear against my black hair. Besides belt loop reinforcement, they might just be a new way to introduce a pop of color into an outfit.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions thoughtless acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

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.