Looking to understand the role of instant noodles in middle-class Chinese life, the IDEO team conducted in-home research with consumers across a range of life stages and levels of attachment to noodle culture and convenience foods. The first finding was reassuring: Everyone kept instant noodles at home. The category still had a place in middle-class kitchens. But beneath that was a more complicated, emotional story—and an unmet need for convenience and quality to coexist in a single product.

The team discovered that instant noodles are more than just a quick, on-the-go meal; they are a nostalgic comfort food that evokes fond memories. But since their heyday, their role in daily life has evolved. Once a complete meal in itself, instant noodles now often function as a versatile flavor base or culinary accent in other dishes. Because they don’t align with the healthier, higher-quality, and more novel food choices that middle-class consumers aspire to, noodle shops, delivery noodles, or fresh-cooked instant options often win out. Yet, even these alternatives come with trade-offs. Delivered noodles lose texture during transport. Sit-down noodle shops preserve quality but offer limited flavors.  Cooking from scratch meets the bar for both texture and flavor, but requires a significant time investment. As one young mother said, “If I could get the texture of fresh-cooked noodles without turning on the stove, I’d buy that instant noodle for sure.”

The research inspired the creation of a new category, which the team termed “fresh-brewed noodles.” More than just a noodle or broth upgrade, Master Kong’s fresh-brewed noodles would offer the speed of instant noodles with the quality of freshly cooked options, plus flavors not found in traditional noodle shops. The strategic positioning was clear. Executing it by making fresh-brewed noodles mass-producible, affordable, and eventually profitable presented a category-innovation challenge. To get there, IDEO designed a series of dual-track co-creation workshops with the Master Kong team and consumers.

One track focused on prototyping the core product experience: noodles, broth, and toppings. IDEO and Master Kong’s R&D team began by studying the traditional craft of Chinese noodle-making, starting in Shanxi, a region renowned for its noodles. Through successive rounds of prototyping and consumer tasting, the team identified a critical insight: for “fresh-brewed noodles” to be convincing, the innovation had to be centered on the noodles themselves.

Texture alone was not enough. Consumers needed to see a meaningful difference before they tasted the product. IDEO translated this insight into a distinctive noodle profile: irregular, dimensional shapes designed to remain springy, hold sauce and broth, and mimic the resilience of freshly cooked noodles using only hot water. Because this visible shape represented the product’s core value proposition, it became a hero feature on the packaging. The graphic design made a bold visual statement about the noodle form, turning a technical R&D breakthrough into an immediately legible consumer promise: these are not ordinary instant noodles.

A parallel track explored the broader commercial experience: trend-forward and reimagined classic flavor profiles, light yet deeply satisfying broths, carefully selected toppings, and packaging that signals a new level of quality on store shelves. One key insight was that utensils carry meaning. Conventional instant noodles are often associated with disposable plastic forks, while higher-quality noodles are eaten with chopsticks. IDEO translated this cultural cue into the design of the bowl’s lid.

Instead of treating utensils as an afterthought, the team designed a solid, rounded, heat-retaining lid that embeds a pair of small wooden chopsticks. The gesture creates a small ritual of anticipation and reframes the product—not just a convenient instant meal, but a more considered noodle experience. Once opened, the product fulfills that promise with satisfyingly bouncy noodles, a rich liquid broth pouch that replaces the traditional oil-and-powder packet, and a vegetable packet reformulated with more premium whole ingredients.

The first batch of “Te Bie Te” Fresh-Brewed Noodles—Chinese wordplay that emphasizes “special”—launched in August 2025 with three trendy and tried-and-true flavors. Within just three days, sales exceeded 100,000 bowls. Within a week, “Te Bie Te” topped the instant noodle category sales ranking on Douyin, China’s domestic counterpart to TikTok. The outcome was bigger than a product launch—it served as proof that a mature, declining category could be fundamentally reinvented to meet consumers’ real needs. For Master Kong, the project became a North Star and a model for internal category innovation in beverages, ready-to-eat foods, and beyond.

Once a popular, affordable staple, the instant noodle category in China has been declining rapidly due to shifting demographics, rising food delivery options, and increasing customer demand for healthier, more nutritious meals.

‍

According to the World Instant Noodles Association, between 2020 and 2023, China’s instant noodle consumption fell by 4 billion packs.

100,000+

“Te Bie Te” bowls sold in the first 3 days on the market

#1

on Douyin’s instant noodle category ranking within one week of launch

Taylor’s legacy began in 1969 with the founding of Taylor’s College and soon expanded to include Taylor’s University, one of Southeast Asia’s top private universities, as well as many other institutions that serve 35,000 students per year. The family-owned group also operates Taylor’s International Schools, Garden International School, and Nexus International School for students ages 4 to 18. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city, annual tuition at premium private schools like these ranges from about $10,000 to $25,000 USD. Taylor’s wanted to do something different: provide the same level of academic rigor and immersive learning experiences at one-third the cost.

IDEO began by speaking with over three dozen students, parents, teachers, and experts across the capital to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and what was missing from such moderately priced international schools.

A few themes quickly emerged. Families, students, and teachers were worried about the stability of these new private schools, which tended to have higher-than-normal teacher turnover rates and were plagued by financial instability, negatively impacting talent attraction and retention, as well as student learning. Parents appreciated that the schools offered holistic learning experiences, such as field trips to rural areas, including jungles, but wished they were more consistently part of the curriculum. And now, the looming challenge of AI—how to use it, how to teach it, and how to teach with it—was in the background, a persistent cause for concern. The big unmet need? Reassurance that Taylor’s was thinking long-term and systematically about developing the skills, knowledge, and mindsets that would prepare students for an ever-changing world. Parents wanted a school that measured growth in academic, social, and character terms over generations, not just school semesters.

With these insights in hand, IDEO began developing a design Playbook for Taylor’s new brand—Lexel International Schools. A combination of “lexicon” and “excellence,” Lexel’s mission is “building what lasts, learning for life.”

The schools are centered around three key differentiators: 

• Always Ahead: Lexel schools commit to staying current with the topics and subject matter they teach, as well as the tools they provide to students, parents, and teachers.s.  
  ‍
• Learning That Builds for Life: The schools ensure programmatic, systemic, and consistent learning experiences from Pre-K to Year 11. Interested students can even continue their post-secondary journey in partnership with Taylor’s University and other higher education institutions within the Taylor’s ecosystem.
  
  
• Educators for the Long Run: These schools commit to ongoing investments in professional growth opportunities for teachers and stable learning environments for students.

Four Lexel Literacies—AI, Digital, Financial, and Nutrition—integrated into the Cambridge Curriculum bring the school’s vision and mission to life.

By systematically integrating AI literacy into its spiral education framework, in particular, an approach where major topics are revisited multiple times through a curriculum to build fluency over time, Lexel ensures parents that the school is thinking a decade ahead from Day One, setting the school apart. In addition to enhancing AI fluency, Lexel offers unique end-of-term experiences called Jungles & Junctions.

Combining three important strands of learning—community engagement, nature-based personal and interpersonal development, and career and university exploration—Jungles & Junctions leverages Taylor’s extended educational network and Lexel’s strategic founding campus within the Gamuda Gardens development in Selangor. Surrounded by tropical rainforests, the township’s residential neighborhoods, theme park, and various sports facilities, including an Olympic-length swimming pool, are transformed into an extended Lexel campus, with a GenAI-driven planner to help teachers streamline the organization of class outings. “The Township is Your Campus” became the tagline for this approach.

In September 2025, just months after IDEO’s collaboration ended, Taylor’s began classes at its first Lexel International School. By mid-year, the new school had achieved 115% of its year-one student enrollment target, with significant inbound demand for Year 2 already demonstrating the school’s market resonance.

The modern campus features spacious classrooms, science and technology labs, a library, a multipurpose hall, and a canteen. Annual tuition ranges from about $2,800 USD for pre-K students to about $6,100 USD for secondary students.

Most importantly, by combining Taylor’s deep academic expertise, Gamuda Land’s development prowess, and IDEO’s innovative design Playbook, Lexel brings quality, affordable international education closer to home for Malaysian families. According to one parent, “My daughter looks forward to going to school every day … and has a lot of opportunities to express herself. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give [Lexel] an 11.” Based on the IDEO Playbook, a second flagship campus in the Southern Klang Valley, which is scheduled to open in September 2026, has already exceeded its year-one target enrollment expectations, with plans to continue extending the Lexel network to other parts of Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asian region in the near future.

Malaysia’s private international school sector has grown significantly as parents seek quality English-language education. However, high tuition fees and limited access to reputable schools are continual challenges for those in the emerging middle class.

115%

of Lexel’s student enrollment target reached during the launch year of its first campus
‍

Year 1 enrollment target exceeded

at Lexel's second campus several months ahead of classes commencing

‍

The American news industry has long been a competitive and saturated market. This has only intensified with the emergence of social media outlets and AI-generated news. Even so, SAN’s rigorously unbiased, fact-based reporting style and rich video storytelling had enabled the ambitious startup to rise above the media fray in just three short years.

With a strong foundation to build on, IDEO sought to further differentiate SAN’s cutting-edge news product and build deeper engagement with a wider audience through a new user experience.

‍Collaborating closely, IDEO and SAN began by delving deeply into media consumption habits. They met with early SAN superfans, news consumers who spent hours a day absorbing content from traditional outlets like Fox and USA Today, and those who looked to their Ring doorbell app or Reddit for news. The takeaways? People were tired of clickbait and clunky interfaces. They sought clear, factual news that was easily accessible, with additional context to help them interpret events and understand their significance. They craved more than one perspective on important topics, so stories felt balanced rather than polarized. They also valued having control over how they consumed news, so making it easy to switch between text, video, and audio formats was crucial.

Together, IDEO and SAN created features across SAN’s website and app that put facts, trust, and transparency at the core of the product experience. Fact Cards distill key data points into clear, shareable units, while the Sources feature allows readers to trace information directly back to its original source. To make complex stories easier to grasp, Big Picture insights drill down into why events matter, surfacing underlying themes, historical parallels, differences in reporting, and common ground. The Why This Story Matters section provides readers with clear framing and sets the story within a broader context, while the Timeline illustrates how events unfold over days, months, or even years. An antidote to news polarization, See All Sides presents left, right, and center narratives for key topics side-by-side, and Media Landscape visualizations reveal how coverage varies across outlets. Finally, to ensure SAN fits seamlessly into readers’ daily lives, the redesigned Today Page is organized into three highly scannable sections: Latest News, Top Stories, and SAN Originals. The combined features create a balanced, clear, and non-polarizing news experience, making it easy for readers to delve deeper into the sources of their news.

SAN now delivers a news experience as modern, dynamic, and trustworthy as its journalism. A month after its debut, the SAN app’s page views increased 1,170 percent year over year compared to June 2024, while active users rose 700 percent. Readers also give the updated mobile experience a 4.8 rating on the Apple App Store. “Our team is delivering reporting that’s both deeply factual and accessible,” said Derek Mead, SAN’s Chief Content Officer. “This redesign is pivotal to the direction journalism needs to take and the leadership role Straight Arrow News is taking on as we help guide the news industry into a brighter future.”

SAN built a loyal readership and gained recognition for its unbiased reporting. To expand and stand out from legacy media, SAN  wanted a redesigned user experience that reflected its commitment to fact-based journalism.

1,170%

increase in app page views YoY 

700%

increase in active users

4.8 rating

on the Apple App Store

Sanofi was the first company to supply the polio vaccine worldwide. Because of the global fight against the disease, endemic wild poliovirus transmission is now limited to just two countries. However, attitudes toward vaccines and immunizations have shifted significantly. To ensure a smooth launch of Beyfortus in a time of increased vaccine hesitancy, Sanofi asked IDEO to conduct research across four important and very different healthcare markets: Germany, Spain, China, and the US.

IDEO worked with parents, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and healthcare administrators to identify potential barriers to vaccine adoption and understand the emotional needs of all stakeholders involved in the immunization process. Navigating cultural differences and diverse healthcare environments, the team uncovered a set of insights.

For healthcare professionals, the team discovered there was no one-size-fits-all approach to immunization training across Sanofi’s 20-plus global markets. While consistency of key information was important, trainings needed to be flexible and customizable. This way, regardless of whether the vaccine was administered by midwives, OB-GYNs, nurses, or doctors, they could  confidently discuss the pros and cons across cultural contexts and administer the drug correctly.
‍
For new parents, receiving information about a new immunization immediately after giving birth could be too stressful. But simply leaving pamphlets about Beyfortus in waiting rooms didn't address their real concerns, either. Caregivers needed to engage in conversations earlier in their pregnancies and continue them after leaving the hospital, when they might have additional questions.

IDEO translated these research insights into a highly accessible global communication toolkit that uses simple, straightforward language, metaphors, and illustrations to support informed conversations between healthcare providers and parents before, during, and after a child is born. IDEO then conducted a series of market-fit co-design workshops with representatives of Sanofi’s global immunization business to iterate on the print and digital tools, make them more resonant with regional customers, and ensure compliance with local regulations. IDEO handed the toolkits over for development to support the launch of Beyfortus in January 2024, just in time for RSV season.

Beyfortus saw enormous demand in its first year, demonstrating strong efficacy in real-world applications and achieving blockbuster status as a $1.8 billion therapy. Sanofi’s global launch team credits the patient-centric toolkit with increased requests for communication materials from its regional markets as well as from healthcare and government organizations that have typically been hard to reach, key goals of its global-local launch strategy.

Since its development, Beyfortus has received swift regulatory approval from the US, EU, China, and Japan, with patient demand causing Sanofi to triple its worldwide manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of the 2024-25 RSV season. Ahead of the larger global distribution of Beyfortus, IDEO and Sanofi partnered with equity expert consultants, Fearless Futures, to conduct a DEI review and worked with doctors and nurses who participated in the initial drug launch to make the materials even more accessible, relevant, and successful for 2025 and beyond. To date, six million babies—and counting—have been immunized with Beyfortus.

Worldwide, childhood vaccination hesitancy among parents fluctuates between 25-45%, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), a trend it considers one of the biggest global threats to public health.

85.9%

‍reduction in hospitalizations for infants who received Beyfortus compared to those who did not (2023–24 RSV season)

$1.8B

in first-year sales of Beyfortus

‍

Fifteen years have now passed, and in that time, I’ve developed a sincere passion for the medium. I’ve worked with many photographers both in the studio and on location, and also have shot my own work, both at IDEO and personally. Though I consider myself a designer first and a photographer second, I realize now just how much this art form has influenced the way I work. The overlapping values in each discipline have sharpened my focus and demanded a constant reassessment of line, color, and composition.

Here’s how photography can help you become a better...

1. ART DIRECTOR

Being able to identify not only the subject but also the photographic styles that will work with your concept adds richness to the message. For example, is the experience that you are creating intended for families or teenage fashionistas? Should the audience feel like they’re part of the story, or like they’re being challenged by the subject? Does the graphic design feature geometric lines or organic shapes? Try answering questions like these and choose appropriate imagery with consideration for lighting, color, tone and camera perspective to help define the experience.

2. UI & UX DESIGNER

Photographic composition translates well to design composition. In photography there are many ways to draw the viewer’s eye to the intended subject or to communicate a message. In UI/UX, it is often beneficial to limit your color palette and reduce visual noise. In photography, creating an image with areas of equal tonal values or color helps to simplify and focus. You are making conscious decisions to help the viewer (or user) make choices. Interestingly, when photography is used in conjunction with UI elements, designers often have to figure out how to maintain the legibility of text, important links, and buttons. You can sometimes get away with using a dark tint (usually an opacity of black) over the image, although this can appear dark and muddy. Use a gradient overlay rather than a full tint. It will look less heavy. Video tends to be more forgiving as your eye can distinguish the type more easily against the moving content.

3. DESIGN RESEARCHER

Most people aren’t comfortable in front of the camera, and I don’t blame them — it can feel awkward and vulnerable. Creating a good rapport with a subject can ease their stress, and is essential to capturing their true character. This is my favorite aspect of portrait photography — connecting with people — and it can be hard to do in a limited period of time.

Getting to know a person before you just start shooting away is a lot like breaking the ice before diving into an interview . As Ann Kim, a design researcher at IDEO, says, “Building trust is essential to successful design research.”

As an exercise, try photographing a colleague or acquaintance. Spend time getting to know your subject before shooting their portrait. Share your final image with a few people. Ask them who they think your subject is, and what they are like. It will be interesting to compare their feedback to the experience you had with your subject.

4. STORYTELLER

Use photographs to document each stage of a design project to visually enhance your story. Capture images of your experiences during research and inspiration trips. Record user interactions through video and photography. These tools build trust by placing the user front and center, bringing focus back to the intended audience. Build your narrative by introducing the components of your design first. For the big finale, show the human response to the product or prototype as a holistic system or journey.

Photographing your process also ensures that you have assets for sharing work with colleagues or collaborators which helps to inform and inspire.

I would love to hear how other designers and creators connect with photography — both the process and the perspective it gives. How has it influenced your work? What has it helped you to see more clearly? What hurdles has it helped you to clear? Direct message me your responses on Twitter.

Have fun shooting!

‍

Many moons ago, when I was a couple of years out of college working at a digital agency in London, they handed me the responsibility of directing my first photo shoot. Cue anxiety. As a junior designer, I had limited experience with professional photography. I didn’t understand enough about the medium to give adequate direction to a photographer. On the day of our shoot, it seemed like magic watching the photographer and his assistants make it happen — the combination of their technical knowledge and efficient process was fascinating.

Kelly masterfully weaves together what he calls the 12 forces, tech trends driving us into the future. In Kelly’s view, the forces—Becoming, Flowing, Filtering, Remixing, etc—lean on and reinforce each other. Each is a combination of technologies and societal factors that give us a preview of what the future will look like. In the Cognifying chapter, Kelly details the ways artificial intelligence is already catalyzing technological disruption, and imagines the infinite ways it will continue to change our experience. What happens when physical objects aren’t just smart, but also constantly learning? Like many of the chapters in the book, Cognifying is both entirely relatable and totally mind bending; you unpeel layer after layer, occasionally pausing to savor the individual seeds.

As Rodriguez notes in the episode, each chapter almost seems like a book unto itself. “It feels like what we get here at IDEO with a group of people in a project space for six months.” It turns out, some of these chapters started 10 years ago as blog posts, then went through ruthless revisions by magazine editors, and were rewritten again over the years, eventually ripening into this multifaceted fruit.

Some business books are like bananas: easy to consume, bland, too mushy. But when IDEO Futures host Diego Rodriguez dug into podcast guest Kevin Kelly’s latest book, The Inevitable, it felt like something entirely different. Kelly’s book outlines the technological trends that will drive every aspect of business going forward. It’s no banana. It’s more like a pomegranate—layered and fractal. Peeling back the layers requires work, but the rewards are juicy.

That’s the radical promise of the Circular Economy: moving from our traditional take-make-dispose economy, to one that has a closed loop, where materials, nutrients, and data are continuously repurposed.

Working with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which aims to inspire a shift to that new model, we’ve designed this guide to meet an emerging need among industry leaders: an alternative, restorative, and regenerative approach to business, one that creates new value and delivers long-term economic, social and ecological prosperity.

Transitioning the Circular Economy into the mainstream will be one of the biggest creative challenges of our time. But we believe design thinking is an ideal approach for tackling this complex, systemic, ambitious challenge.

Created for innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, the guide aims to raise awareness of the Circular Economy, nurture a systems perspective, and share practical innovation methods.

We hope these ideas will galvanize readers to start designing tomorrow’s breakthrough businesses.

Get started at circulardesignguide.com.

What if we had a new way to design products, services, and businesses that were good for people, the planet, and business?

‍

I’ve always loved drawing. I had cool, encouraging parents who’d do things like let me draw an invitation to my 6th birthday party, then go make copies of it so that I had personalized cards to send out.

I remember discovering my mom’s college sketchbook in the basement when I was a teenager, and feeling like it gave me a window into who she was at that time of her life. I started keeping sketchbooks in 10th grade, and have managed to hold on to almost all of them since then.

In my career as a programmer, I live and work inside my computer screen. My professional body of work can sometimes feel so ephemeral—everything I’ve ever made could be wiped out by a really strong magnet. So it feels really nice to have some solid, double-layered bookshelves and bins full of sketchbooks to step back and look at sometimes.

Lately, I’ve been drawing complicated women in the evenings. A woman’s physicality is so much more political than a man’s—and to me, this makes it so much more powerful. A woman has more expectations placed on her physical looks—her clothes, her hair, even her expression—and that only makes it that much more of a provocation when those expectations are thwarted.

When I was a kid, I’d spend hours drawing Ariel from Disney’s A Little Mermaid. I'd sometimes catch myself unconsciously copying her expression with my own face. Even at 9 years old, I’d feel a little embarrassed when I felt a big, fake grin on my face. I liked Ariel and her gadgets and gizmos aplenty, but I wasn’t like Ariel. I was faking it.

Then in high school, when it was time for my exciting locking-myself-in-my-room-and-drawing-self-portraits period, I had to shift into thinking intentionally about what my face was doing while I drew from the mirror. I found that whether I was trying to make a specific kind of face, whatever came out ended up feeling like a character. And that somehow felt instantly more powerful than just the image in the mirror.

The women I like to draw now capture some element of that feeling. They may not be the definition of self-possessed, they may or may not be confident and composed, but they are self-aware, and in control of what they are putting out into the world. They may be performing a little, but they're doing it on their own terms, for their own benefit.

They’re from noir movies and punk bands. They’re artists, journalists, wastoids, and dweebies. I like to think they lived for themselves and as themselves—the most provocative act there is for any human. I admire them and want to see myself in them

“I have been drawing complicated women in the evenings lately.” Cambridge software designer Ashley Holtgraver reveals the secrets of her notebooks.

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.

‍

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.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Sam Conniff, founder of Uncertainty Experts and author of The Uncertainty Toolkit, about why leaders often value appearing decisive over being right, and three learnable questions that help teams make better decisions without pretending to have certainty.

Mina Seetharaman talks with journalist, author, and former IDEO Design Lead Simone Stolzoff about why certainty is seductive, how the pursuit of it can undermine decision-making, and how leaders can build uncertainty tolerance as a practical skill.

IDEO Design Researcher and Data Scientist Angela Kochoska answers questions about using AI responsibly in research, including how to preserve nuance, distinguish patterns from insights, avoid outsourcing judgment, and recognize when AI-assisted synthesis is genuinely useful.

IDEO Executive Design Researcher Hannah Rosenfeld shares a framework for using AI intentionally across the research process—not only to work faster, but to widen the aperture, notice nuance, challenge assumptions, and create new ways to engage with research data.