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

Then, about a year ago, I heard of Wim Hof. Hof holds world records for running barefoot marathons above the Arctic circle, for swimming under solid ice, and for climbing Mt Kilimanjaro in shorts. My small question became an obsession.

At IDEO, we look to extreme users to inspire the things we design, and Wim Hof seemed like the ultimate extreme user. I joined one of his workshops in the Pyrenees, Spain, and met folks from all over the world, who had come to find answers for their mental health, physical health, or athletic performance.

Hof is the cold fairy. He gives you permission to go into the cold, to enjoy it, to seek it. Cold has been his teacher, and breath-work his toolkit. He is happy to share his methods, and create the conditions for others to push their boundaries. Under his guidance, I took a 10 minute ice bath and did not shiver, during or after. I saw many new friends make breakthroughs that week. The cold was teaching us that we were in control and the decider of our own experiences: we could overcome pure pain.

Stanford Neuroscience Professor Andrew Huberman was invited by Hof to join our workshop, and we spoke about how to apply his Method, and about bringing Hof to California.

I began teaching my distillation of the Wim Hof Method to fellow IDEOers in Palo Alto, and to my surprise, over a third of our studio expressed interest in a mini-course. We got ready. We talked about how we stay warm—from shivering, to insulation, to mitochondrial chemical energy. We breathed, and observed the adrenaline-high cortisol-low effects of deep breath cycles with retentions.

Then Wim Hof and Prof. Huberman joined us in person for an afternoon of ice baths and to present their talk, “The Mind Made Visible”. This led to a great discussion on the inner workings of the Hof Method, and about the science behind his approach. Scientists are intrigued by this case of the “extreme user” who can teach his methods to other people and show results immediately—in contrast with a pranayama guru who requires 20 years of study. A groundbreaking study has shown that participants trained in the Method can control their autonomic nervous systems and suppress immune response to an endotoxin injection (the introduction of bacteria, which can trigger many adverse physiological reactions in humans).

The Method involves several minutes of deep inhalation-driven breathing, followed by holding the breath on a full exhalation for as long as is comfortable. Beginners can hold their breath for a remarkable 1- 2 minutes. After extended practice people can reach 4+ minutes. During this process, the blood pH becomes alkaline and prevents you from passing out, while also serving to restore balance in the endocrine and immune systems. At around the 90 second mark, an adrenaline release is triggered. Unlike when adrenaline is pumped out if your life is in peril, low cortisol levels ensure that you remain calm, focused, and able to direct the superhuman power boost.

The cold and breath work go hand-in-hand—the breathing fortifies you for the cold, and the release of cold-shock proteins from sustained ice-water immersion amplifies the effects of the breathing. The practice, Hof says, resets insomnia/jet lag, reduces chronic pain, heads off depression, improves memory, and increases longevity. (Note: the breathing Method should be performed in advance of, not during, cold water immersion).

For me, the Method has been most helpful while mountaineering. By controlling my body's reactions to cold and over-indexing on oxygen, I stay comfortable in extreme conditions and acclimatize more effectively. After meeting Hof, I'm no longer asking, why are we afraid of the cold? But instead, how might we harness the cold to unlock our own potential?

In the New Hampshire winter of 2005, I gave up use of all jackets, sweaters, and warm layers for the season. Crossing between high school campus buildings in a t-shirt during snow and freezing rain, I received appalled looks from my peers and teachers, but felt invigorated and unconstrained. I began asking, why are we afraid of the cold? I later reverted to social norms, and by college, I was a lover of warmth. But the question stayed with me.

I don't snap pics of my lunch @plantbowls to brag about what I’ve made or ordered. I do it to take stock of what I’m about to eat, to appreciate it, and to build community around it—something I’m in the habit of doing as a coordinator for IDEO U.

Four years ago, I shifted to a plant-based diet. Going vegan turned out to be an easy move with the help of Instagram. Because I made it a habit to capture food in the best light, it started to look gorgeous. Focusing on plants might seem bland, or limited, but documenting them made me realize the glory of spices, vegetables, fruits, beans—the sheer variety of it all! I began to revere colorful jewels of fruit, to inhale the aroma of a tahini sauce before I dug in. I really noticed what was on my plate. I would take an extra beat to slice an avocado onto a bowl of veggies or drizzle nut butter on top of steaming oatmeal, both to make them look more appealing and add to their deliciousness.

Not long after I started foodstagramming, I read an article that explained why. It turns out that by taking pictures and waiting a little longer before we pick up our forks, we delay gratification, which makes the food seem more delectable. By holding off on eating for a beat or two, I was actually making it taste better.

And when I posted these dishes on Instagram later, I got to experience them again while trying to think up a clever caption or hashtag. Initially, it was just about sharing a beautiful image. But seeing others be surprised by the diversity of plant-based foods, and having them ask about recipes meant a lot to me. Maybe they'd get inspired to shift to a healthier diet, too.

We eat at least three times a day. Why not bring more joy to a basic necessity? It feels good, it smells good, it looks good… and it gets a lot of likes.

Here are some accounts I follow to get inspired:

1. instagram.com/healthiecook
2. instagram.com/panaceas_pantry
3. instagram.com/feastingonfruit
4. instagram.com/nathaliesader
5. instagram.com/thefeedfeed.vegan

And here’s mine: instagram.com/plantbowls

It's easy to roll your eyes at the guy at the table next to you lurking over his food, phone in hand. I once considered foodstagramming to be a cliché, and certainly think spending much of our time with our faces planted in our phones is not a great evolutionary turn. Then I started my own foodstagram.

After Effects is one of my favorite prototyping tools. I use it to animate web and mobile interactions, or to demonstrate physical interactions by augmenting UI and sound over video footage.

AE is super powerful, but has a deep and twisty interface with lots of corners to navigate. The timeline is one of its most daunting aspects. Things can escalate quickly, and before you know it, your project is a labyrinth of layers, expressions, effects, and comps. Here are a few tips to help you find your way.

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Sometimes you need to cut to the chase. A deadline is looming and there's no time to luxuriate in lessons from your go-to experts. You need bite-sized tutorials to beef up your skills, one morsel at a time. If you're looking for help with After Effects, today's your lucky day.

When we were invited to create a booth for the American Academy of Pediatrics conference, we had two weeks and limited resources. We sat down, sketched out a floor plan, and had lively discussions about how to bring families’ everyday struggles with healthy food to life.

It’s our nature to be makers, so we jumped into the prototyping shop with scrap wood, some cardboard, hot glue, and some farmer’s market produce. As we would soon learn, this was not the typical way one builds a booth for a conference like this.

But the important thing wasn’t the level of production, it was the message: healthcare has a huge opportunity to lead the conversation about food and health in a way that is compelling and accessible for everyone. What if doctors could prescribe food as part of a therapeutic care plan and make it possible for families to access food that will keep their loved ones well? What if we reimagined nutrition education with hands-on learning that emphasizes the joy of food rather than the restrictive messaging often associated with food and health? How could we transform healthcare and communities by promoting food as medicine?

Together with our collaborators—led by Supervisor Wilma Chan and her “ALL IN” Alameda County initiative to end poverty and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland along with Alameda County Public Health Department, Alameda County Community Food Bank and Dig Deep Farms—we synthesized input from doctors, nutritionists, policy makers, hospital administrators, and public health workers to create a vision of how people might use a Food Pharmacy. Through illustrations and personal stories we brought our collective vision to life, gave it a name, and designed recipes and cooking tools for our booth.

Our handmade booth with its bright colors and fresh produce stood out in the towering sea of sleek glowing structures. The focal point was a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables, like kale, eggplant, imperfect apples, pumpkins, bananas, and hefty carrots still a bit dirty from the farm, all spilling out in an exuberant mess. It didn’t matter that we hacked together IKEA furniture and used leftover wood for the booth frame. It was rough. It was real. It matched our message that health care needs to meet people where they are. And because of this, it was a hit.

Some of the most pressing human-centered innovations—especially as they relate to health and food—can be prototyped in a much more humble way. Sometimes all it takes is an enthusiastic and collaborative team, a couple of glue guns, a pile of vegetables, and some imagination.

If you’re interested in joining the conversation, get in touch with us at vbarad@ideo.com.

Imagine walking into a pharmacy that looks more like a farmer's market, the open shelves stocked with vegetables, roots, and herbs. And instead of a dull waiting room there are interactive cooking classes and food sampling stations. Imagine a future in which food is seen as medicine.

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.