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

‍

That was a key message we took from our time at the second annual TED AI conference, hosted in our own backyard of San Francisco. Two days full of panel sessions, robot demos, and classic TED Talks had us considering the nature of time, the power of language, and transcending human cognitive limitations. The biggest theme: The urgency for bringing human centered-design to AI is only getting stronger.

Here are five key takeaways from our time on the ground.

1. Beware the black box

The black box approach to AI’s foundational models are the root cause of issues around ownership, copyright, credit—and in the case of certain industries like healthcare—exclusion of entire userbases.

Not knowing what the training data was, where it came from, or who it originally belonged to, means that:

1. We’re not able to give credit or reimbursement to the original creators of that data.
2. There are unknowable but impending legal ramifications from a copyright perspective.
3. Healthcare professionals are unable to use models such as ChatGPT, because without being able to verify or validate the training data, they’re unable to confidently (or even legally) use the answers the models provide.

Already, though, some companies are pioneering more transparent and more widely-usable data sets and model developers. HOPPR, for example, is building the first multimodal AI foundation model for medical imaging and radiology, while the non-profit Fairly Trained is based on the belief that that many consumers and companies “would prefer to work with generative AI companies who train on data provided with the consent of its creators.”

The concept of designing for transparency is reflective of a lot of research we have done in the past with users and data. Our 2019 work with Mozilla exploring more ethical and user-centered solutions to the Surveillance Economy highlighted the pitfalls of data collection, and the opportunities for tech companies to build value by handling user data in more human-centered ways. Combine that with our blockchain work at IDEO CoLab, and there are lots of interesting spaces to explore and draw inspiration from—including individual and collective control, consent, and value generation.

2. Consider the human consequences

A lot of industry specialists are focused on the near-future of the technology, as opposed to the mid-term opportunities and AI’s long-term effects on humanity. Some speakers were concerned that we're spending too much time worrying about what the technology will do for us, while others think we're too concerned about what it will do to us. There was a lot of focus (for better or worse) on the productivity benefits, but relatively few people were thinking about the consequences for humans.

Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika, noted that we should “stop designing for productivity, and start designing for joy,” which is a lovely provocation. We don’t need to forsake one for the other, but designing for joyous experiences can make productivity far more desirable. Our work with Ethiqly around integrating AI and writing exercises in schools focused not on the power of the technology or how many more essays kids could write, but on making the process of getting your creativity on to paper more joyful and rewarding, and focusing on the relationship between teacher and student.

There were also several conversations around the idea that technology will free up time for us to spend with our families instead of working. As romantic as this sounds, it’s not realistic. Organizations will simply reduce headcount, and then increase the other workloads for employees. Articles like this one from the BBC hint at a workforce feeling more burnt out due to AI implementation, showing a glimpse of the human consequences we should be designing for at the application layer.

3. Embrace quality over quantity

Several people spoke about the exponential growth of investment in computing power for large language models (LLMs). Currently, 70 cents of every dollar invested in AI models goes into crunching the data.

As an alternative to this massive use of resources, several speakers brought up the concept of small language models. SLMs are literally smaller models, trained on just 1 billion tokens. (LLMs can require upwards of 1 trillion tokens.) These SLMs can be created with a fraction of the time and energy, and offer great specific utility. Consider the example of the telecom call center. Its model doesn’t need to be exposed to the nuances of Shakespearean sonnets; it just needs to know the words and phrases needed to operate a call center, so you can spend less time, money, and energy on creating your model.

With the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars we’re spending to train LLMs, how much are we willing—or is financially feasible—to spend on models? If we continue down this path, the financial / physical / electrical requirements are going to become unsustainable. One panelist mentioned that “we should be feeding the machine the right information vs. all the information.”

The potential futures for more intentional and nimble SLMs seems much more approachable and both financially and ethically feasible.

4. Spoken language is irreplaceable

One of our favorite speakers was Jessica Coon, the linguist who consulted on the movie Arrival. She argued that human language is rich, nuanced, and endowed with the histories of our cultures. An input text box attached to a keyboard populated with Roman characters is never going to be able to express a fraction of it.

Rikin Gandhi, the co-founder of Digital Green, a company using AI to provide agricultural information and guidance, spoke about the company’s work with farmers in rural India, where illiteracy and nuanced local dialects and translations make-text based offers unviable. But AI models’ abilities to understand spoken language, locational context, and nuances of a given agroecology and a given time of the year means those farmers can interact through images, video, and spoken word.

This perspective shines a spotlight on the potential for more diverse and inclusive design principles, and our spoken language is a key part of that future.

5. Discover a new impetus for responsible design

We also heard from Pratyusha Sharma, a leading researcher and member of Project Ceti, who shed light on how we might be able to leverage generative AI to understand the unsolved mysteries of the ecological world.
‍
Sperm whales communicate through clicks, or codas. While researchers for decades have understood that this is the primary communication pattern by which this social species coordinated, it had been impossible to untangle the spoken language and what it meant. Sharma spoke about a novel use of generative AI—using a generative adversarial network, or GAN, to surface both the alphabetic principle and deeper understanding of coda meanings. With this technology, not only could we hear the sperm whales’ communication—we can understand what it means and predict from their communications what they might do next, whether that’s diving for food or coordinating childcare.

As AI tools become more and more powerful in helping us understand the language of the world around us, the impetus for responsible design will become clearer and clearer. If we can start to interpret the language plants, animals and earth use to communicate, how can they not be a stakeholder in everything we design?

Curious how human-centered design could help you make more desirable AI products? We’d love to chat.

We need to start pulling the human signals from the technological noise, and weaving them together.

A good purpose statement articulates a passion to boldly make an impact. It can differentiate you from competitors, grounding your work in deeper meaning. It can serve as a beacon to draw like-minded individuals to your company—as consumers or employees. And it can align and motivate leaders, guiding strategic choices.

To do all that, a good purpose has to make you FEEL something.

But too often in crafting a purpose statement, marketing and business jargon sneaks in, adding extra bloat. Or conversely, the language gets watered down to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. The emotional gets sacrificed for the intellectual.

If you feel yourself or your team starting to slip into the weeds—or floating too high above the clouds—here are three ways to re-inspire and re-calibrate your thinking around purpose.

1. Get out of your own head: Collect love letters.

‍If you’re feeling lost at where to even begin, start with some on-the-ground research. Approach employees, end users, stakeholders—whoever interacts with your brand or company—and ask them to write a love letter to your organization, talking about what they’re most proud of, or what they appreciate most.

How we’ve used it: Last year, we were working with the team at Dartmouth Library to develop its strategy, starting with a clear articulation of its purpose. As part of a series of co-design workshops with faculty, staff, and students, we asked participants to write a letter to their library: What did they treasure most? How did it make them feel? While the stories we gathered covered a broad range—encompassing everything from intellectual exploration to belonging—they revealed the deep connections people had with their library, an attachment that was central to both its purpose and strategy.

2. Push past “what” and “how” to uncover your “why.”

‍If you’re feeling like your purpose is stuck in details and logistics, try the classic Golden Circle from Simon Sinek. Draw three concentric circles: the biggest should be WHAT you do; the next, HOW you do it; and the center WHY you do it. Brainstorm your answers to each and put them in the appropriate sphere. Focus on what landed in your center circle—your whys start to articulate your purpose.

How we’ve used it: The Boston Society for Architecture reached out to us to help the organization shift from being program-driven to being impact-driven. In a series of collaborative workshops, we had stakeholders list all the practical and emotional benefits for member architects, partners, community leaders, and students. Together, the team mapped these examples on the Golden Circle, setting aside functional positioning statements to focus on elevating the why—the emotional purpose that the organization could rally around.

3. Fast forward to the future to ground purpose in greater context.

‍If you’re struggling to make your purpose feel more aspirational and evergreen, consider taking an imaginative journey five, 10, or 15 years into the future. Spend a few minutes generating as many future signals as possible: What are things you observe in your industry, your customers, or your organization today that might indicate bigger trends over time? How might you evolve your purpose to stay relevant amid these changes?

How we’ve used it: In the earliest days of the pandemic, we were working with a large consumer electronics company to design a bold new strategy for the organization. To kick off the work, we spent a couple of hours with the core team generating signals. Even though we had no idea what the impacts of the pandemic would ultimately be, we were looking to uncover and better understand trends that were already starting to emerge in the world around us. These explorations into themes like hybrid work, climate resilience, equity (and more!) helped us paint a picture of the future that gave us a context for defining a purpose that could fit the company for years to come.

Articulating a bold and inspirational purpose is hard. It requires creativity, empathy, and constant iteration. And in the swirl of “are we there yet?” it can be easy to sacrifice the emotion, chopping the “feeling” in favor of generic language that—if said with enough oomph—sounds smart enough. But it’s not worth it.

Finding the right “why” can help give your purpose the power it needs to inspire leaders and employees to work in service of something greater. And when you bring it to life, a great purpose can signal your company’s core ethos to consumers, acting like a beacon to those who seek what you have to offer.

For organizations and brands, discovering purpose always starts with a question: “Why do you exist, beyond profit?”

But where is “here” exactly? Here is a tense political environment amidst a divisive battle over “woke” values. It’s a challenging business climate with companies deprioritizing DEIB budgets and sometimes removing entire teams. It’s a design community questioning when and where to push on inclusive practices, in service of moving all of us forward.

Even amidst these hurdles, many of us are still seeking a world where our commercial systems reinforce the world we want to live in. That’s our “there.” To those who believe, the path to more inclusive design practices is not some cherry-on-top afterthought; it’s an imperative facet of our evolving global culture. And for some designers, it’s why we wake up and go to work every day.

Responsible design (or inclusive design, ethical design, or even respectful design, as design leader Dr. Dori Tunstall has dubbed it) has been an emerging focus of design for decades, most often helmed by BIPOC and marginalized folks at design-led organizations. At IDEO, it’s been a movement most recently organized by the Inclusive Design Collective (IDC), a fast-growing crew that meets regularly to discuss design, interrogate our processes, and consider the potential consequences of our work, socially and environmentally.

The IDC has been experimenting with design tools and resources to use throughout the design thinking process (many of these interventions build on tools and best practices from across the worlds of design, engineering, and business). Most of the tools we’ve developed and adopted make space in the project journey to question privilege, power dynamics, biases, and access—all to unlock better outcomes for people and the planet.

Meanwhile, we can feel business shifting. Not all decisions are being driven by profit and shareholder value anymore. We see in our research and in our client work that commerce is becoming more values- and responsibility-driven choice-making. (And in many cases, it’s already there.) Here are five reasons we believe centering inclusive practices in design is the way things are going:

1. Inclusive design is at the heart of global scaling

Capitalism is built on a premise of continual growth. Increasingly, businesses are looking globally to find that growth—but doing so requires that we design thoughtfully and inclusively for consumers and producers in those new markets. For decades now, emerging markets have produced goods for the world, leading to a wave of consumerism. The internet accelerated this change in consumption and exacerbated a trade imbalance that does not serve the needs of people in emerging markets.

But now, we're seeing a shift, especially as historically marginalized countries are experiencing population and economic gains that far outpace the rate of change in other markets. Companies have begun trying to sell products and services to people in emerging markets, delivering to an entirely new set of customers with different values, systems, cultures, needs, and motivations. The businesses that will win—as always—are the ones that deeply understand their customers and how the products they deliver meet those customers’ needs. That means the businesses that will win will be the ones who design alongside them.

We’ve seen this firsthand. Our Last Mile Money program, funded by the Gates Foundation, was a great use case for responsible design. Our work focused on helping companies launch more inclusive products and greater financial access in emerging markets at what is called “the last mile”—underserved women, people in rural areas, and others facing barriers like literacy and internet access. Even companies that were committed to designing for underrepresented users were facing a challenge: Products were often designed with urban, tech-savvy, mostly-male users in mind. Despite pouring money into marketing, promotions, and rebrands, new users weren't adopting their wares. To unlock real growth, these companies needed to expand far beyond their existing users.

In response to these challenges, IDEO developed tools like Designing for Digital Confidence, the Gender Evaluation Framework, and the Financial Confidence Playbook. We centered underserved users throughout the design process, constantly going back to them for feedback to help product teams understand a range of barriers that have kept many people from using and benefiting from digital products. We listened and then took action, redesigning and improving products for needs that have often been ignored.

In India, major e-commerce platform FlipKart (owned by Walmart) redesigned its app to be more intuitive for first-time internet users, helping them serve hundreds of millions of customers. In Kenya, a startup called Leja streamlined its product’s onboarding experience for female small-business owners, leading to 30 percent more sign-ups, and more than quintupling transaction growth. We're seeing many more companies integrate responsible design into how they operate, not just because it’s the right thing to do—but because their own future growth depends on it.

2.  Gen Z won’t mess with anything that’s not inclusive—no cap

‍The number of Gen Z workers—those born between 1997 and 2012—is projected to grow to 51 million by 2030 (overtaking Boomers, who had long reigned as the largest generation of full-time workers, from the late 1970s-2011). Gen Zers are digital natives who grew up in the era of rapid technology development, possess a unique set of skills and perspectives, and are the most diverse generation of our time. Gen Z's strong sense of social awareness and values-driven choice-making guides everything they do. It now has begun to guide business. Companies are shifting their calculus—lack of inclusivity means fewer customers. And businesses who don’t heed this may go the way of Crystal Pepsi.

Meanwhile, external signals reflect a similar sentiment, like the rise in demand for environmental, social, and corporate governance-related investment (82 percent of Gen Z have exposure to ESG investments, and 40 percent say their investment decisions are driven by companies with purpose), or the way Gen Z has redefined consumption from ownership to access, show that they're demanding more from the companies, products, and technologies they adopt. Gen Zers hate labels, love “slow fashion,” and more than half of them identify as “not straight.” For them, DEIB needs to be built in, and authentic, and their loyalty will follow.

As many companies are scrambling to build AI products as quickly as possible, we took a different approach: working directly with Gen Zers to learn more about what they really want from AI. As we tested and prototyped product concepts, they sent us a clear message: They only want products that align with their values. Too many of us assumed that as digital natives, they would take to all-new tech like ducks to water; instead their preferences have many folks really considering the ethical and climate consequences of emerging technology.

3. In many sectors, responsible design won’t be a choice—it will be an obligation

‍‍We all know that businesses today are not nearly as motivated as they need to be to make the changes our planet will need. When we worked with H&M’s CEO at the time, the company had made aggressive sustainability goals, driven by their own aspirations for the business. However, they were also aligned with global regulations, calling for less plastic and less waste in manufacturing processes, and placed them ahead of the market in this transition by streamlining their supply chain, and cutting excess inventory, and producing less waste.

It’s too early for this latest AI growth spurt to have spurred much regulation—but it is coming. IDEO’s Emerging Tech Lab is putting ethics first and sees AI and climate at an intersection, ripe with opportunity for designing more responsibly—for the good of the world, but also because one day, companies simply won’t have a choice.

4. Consumer preferences are changing, and businesses that only care about shareholder growth may be penalized

‍Values-based consumption is not just having a moment—it has redefined consumption. More people are choosing to support companies that align with their values. In fact, in a McKinsey survey, 70 percent of Gen Z respondents said they try to purchase products from companies they consider ethical. Nielsen tells us that 75 percent of Millennials are so eco-conscious, they’ll change their buying habits to favor environmentally-friendly products.

Consider Patagonia. With an estimated value of about $3 billion dollars, and $1 billion in annual revenue, the outdoor company announced in 2022 that Mother Earth would be its only shareholder, and “every dollar that is not reinvested … will be distributed as dividends to protect the planet.” Patagonia has made a name for itself with aggressive environmental goals, like completely eliminating virgin petroleum material in its products by 2025, and becoming net zero by 2040. Patagonia products aren’t cheap, yet sales have quadrupled over the past decade, and it has also expanded offerings into food. The company is a great example of how a brand can be very clear about what it stands for, and still find that people will pay for quality—even at a time when consumers are feeling the pain of inflation. Meanwhile, fast fashion, which offers customers lower quality goods at a much cheaper price point, has seen a steady decline in sales. If businesses continue to only value cost savings, they may learn: Cheap isn’t cheap when it loses you a customer.

‍5. Responsible design creates better products

‍We're big admirers of the healthtech startup Kasha, which has leaned into responsible design to unlock pent-up demand with healthtech. Founder Joanna Bichsel saw that millions of women lacked access to health products in Rwanda. So, Kasha listened to customers’ needs and pain points, and it designed a service that delivered tampons, contraceptives, and other women’s products in accessible and responsible ways. Kasha tapped into massive demand by offering unprecedented product choice, high quality, and perhaps most importantly, confidentiality to its customers, who are 65 percent low-income women. Kasha has seen 10 times revenue growth, and has now expanded to multiple markets across Africa. The woman-led startup isn’t stopping there: It’s adding pharmaceuticals, telehealth, and credit services—all to help women better access quality health care. Kasha learned that centering the unmet needs of the voices that are so often unheard was not just the path to more inclusivity, but also to create products specifically tailored for their customers, and succeed as a company.

The opportunities ahead

Whether it’s the values-based consumption habits of the next generation, new opportunities in growth markets, a coming wave of regulations in climate and Gen AI—Bob Dylan said it best—“the times, they are a-changin.”

Companies that plan for this future, this “there,” with value-loving consumers, more diverse needs, more access, more expansive geographies—will not only get “there,” they will reap the benefits, too. If you’re trying to make it through this tough, ever-changing market—inclusive design might be the best way to survive, and we’d love to help.

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(The figure for Patagonia's annual revenue has been updated for accuracy.)

We won’t get “there” by doing what got us “here.”

The question was a daily prompt, an experiment to help teams to have more candid conversations and increase their ability to collaborate with each other. Instead, an awkward silence followed.

The exercise was part of a partnership exploring the power of making with a global healthcare company. Together, we were designing for the organizational culture the company wants to have to achieve their strategic ambitions. This team’s role was to instill new ways of working for the whole company. They wrote the culture code. But they couldn’t quite articulate how they themselves were living it. Yet.

Their trouble answering the question wasn’t a failure—this work is hard. And it requires changing ingrained behaviors every day. So together, we worked with the team to make culture change tangible through real-world experiments (not just decks and frameworks) that helped ignite new behaviors through actions, not words.

What does that mean, exactly? As Roger L. Martin, strategy advisor to some of the world’s most successful organizations, explains, “The truth about culture is that the only way you can change it is by changing the way individuals work with one another. If you can change that, then you will find the culture has changed.” Changing how individuals work takes more than words, or artifacts, or processes (although those things definitely have a role to play). It requires action. That’s where design comes in. And that’s where our team started, by making a series of cultural experiments.

The goal was to learn about how we can change people’s behaviors and enable them to work differently. We collaborated with key teams and people who identified themselves as culture ambassadors. Together, we created tools and activities that would inspire action, and teach us how to change culture in this specific environment, because every org is different.

Here are some of the experiments we used to ignite action.

Unblocking decisions and flex support styles with a card deck

The organization wanted to become “networked”— meaning people would work more autonomously, with high accountability and clear communication between teams and their leaders (rather than linear, siloed teams). But if communication is lacking, and accountability isn’t clear, decisions in a network are made by consensus, and people don’t feel empowered to take ownership and use their ingenuity to solve problems. So we created two sets of cards to prompt better conversations between people and their managers.

One set of cards focused on unblocking decisions, by sharing questions (Is there psychological safety within the team making decisions?) and assigning clear roles that defined the level of involvement people have in making different decisions. Is someone supposed to drive a decision, or simply consult on it?

The other set of cards helped people articulate the type of support they need from their managers in a given moment, like coaching vs. problem solving—facilitating more open conversation about the type of leadership they need to thrive. These cards empowered managers to better support their teams, while empowering teams to be clear about what they need to drive good outcomes. They also proved that specific structure and language could prompt desired behaviors at scale.

One participant shared that after an initial conversation where she told her boss she was looking for a coach, he helped her strategize to draw on her strengths to achieve her goals. And when she wanted to share her “value with a broader group outside of customer-facing work and my immediate team,” she felt empowered to put that into action, which “would've never happened if it weren't for the initial coaching.”

Implementing a daily ritual to prompt collective reflection and candor

One of the most critical behaviors for creating a collaborative culture is regular, honest feedback between people. Done well, it builds trust and psychological safety among teams, leading to better performance. In this organization, teams rarely found time and space to give or gather informal feedback on the way they work. When it was positioned as a mandatory, formal task, it could feel exhausting.

Intead, we wanted to prompt small, regular conversations about collaboration. So we created a fun reflective tool based on a spin-the-wheel format:, an online generator that surfaces topical questions (like the one at the beginning of this article) to prompt candid chats. The questions run the gamut from silly to serious, and taught us the importance of making something fun if you want teams to build it into their existing routines. Questions like, “When has a new perspective helped you make a decision recently?” encouraged people to feel safe in opening up and reflecting on their behavior as a group.

Over time, reflection moments became something teams looked forward to. The questions changed the narrative so that employees could surface issues without fear of consequence, and resolve issues before they became problems. As one participant told us, “The energy was palpable in our group. It got to five minutes before the end of the session, and they still wanted to talk. Everyone wanted to do it again. It’s turning into something wonderful that we needed.”

Introducing an action journal to increase leaders’ self awareness

Many leaders recognize the importance of regular reflection and feedback sessions, but competing priorities get in the way.

To address that need, we designed a personalized action journal that fit into leaders’ daily work flow. The goal was to learn whether a tool that prompts regular self-reflection will result in an increase in leaders' self-awareness, helping them identify how they want to grow, and prompting them to seek more support.

Through this simple experiment, we were able to learn that creating dedicated space and time for reflective practices not only boosts leaders’ confidence, it models the value of continual learning and growth for others. One participant told us, “I've found it a nice and simple way to reflect on the things I've been doing, and connect that back to conversations with my own manager.”

Each of these experiments made new behaviors tangible by giving form, fun, and structure to otherwise abstract concepts. They helped people experience the potential value of new ways of working for themselves, demonstrating their function, and connecting theoretical culture change concepts with day-to-day work.

Culture change at any scale requires more than words; it requires action and application in people’s everyday experiences. Making change tangible through experiments is the quickest way to surface stories, build belief, and gather the evidence to support change at scale. Not every organization is trying to solve the same problem, and the same experiments won’t work everywhere. But for every culture problem at every company, there are tangible ways to drive change.

In a recent meeting with a new client, we asked the team, “What smart risks have you or your team taken recently?”

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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.

Cas Holman and IDEO Partner Michelle Lee answer questions about applying playful thinking when time is short and stakes are high, including how leaders can create psychological safety, use constraints to fuel creativity, and model vulnerability.

Play isn’t the opposite of serious work. It’s a leadership mindset that helps teams stay curious, creative, and effective under pressure. In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, host Mina Seetharaman is joined by Cas Holman, play designer and author of Playful, and Michelle Lee, IDEO Partner and Executive Co-Managing Director, to explore how play supports better questions, psychological safety, and innovation at work.Why playfulness can improve collaboration, experimentation, and creative quality.

IDEO CEO Mike Peng returns to the Creative Confidence Podcast to answer questions from listeners about modern creative leadership. Building on his previous episode, Mike goes deeper on how to lead creative teams when organizations resist change, how to reduce fear and build trust, what failure has taught him about leadership, and how to stay inspired in a fast-moving world.

The creative leadership advice continues. In Part 2, creative leaders including IDEO partners, alumni, and IDEO U instructors share hard-won lessons on relationships, reflection, and staying human as we move into 2026. Host Mina Seetharaman and IDEO Partner Ilya Prokopoff share reactions and build on each leader’s advice. Many of the leaders featured on this episode have been guests on the podcast.