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

‍

To answer that question, we teamed up with Healthworx Studio to run an intensive five-week sprint and design a business that would address issues of access in rural health, leaning on AI to supercharge the process.

We kicked off with a lot of questions: Could we produce more rigorous, higher-quality results if we used gen AI tools to augment our team? Would it come up with innovative ideas for how to make healthcare more equitable? Could we get further faster? The answer was yes—with a lot of caveats. (For a deep dive into our approach, principles, and learnings, check out our Designing with AI Report.)

It quickly became clear that while Gen AI tools can’t replace human ingenuity, they certainly fuel it. When it came to generating solutions to a problem this complex, AI had very little to offer in comparison to human teammates. But it did help us innovate much faster and with more depth, bringing us up to speed on initial stakeholder context and synthesizing and incorporating datasets —crucial parts of the process that can take a lot of time. Here’s where we succeeded and failed, and what that taught us about using AI going forward.

Opening the aperture

Did a machine just listen to dozens of podcasts, summarize them, and give us themes in an hour? Yes it did. Thanks to tools like Preplexity.ai, which enables social listening on platforms like Reddit, we were able to quickly synthesize diverse perspectives from varied sources and distill themes that seamlessly integrated into our research process. 

Working with these tools feels like being bitten by a radioactive spider and gaining a suite of superpowers. We can rapidly develop contextual awareness of numerous stakeholders and their pain points in relation to the challenges we aim to address. With our lens widened, the questions we asked became more pointed and the concepts we designed more crisp. “The AI enables efficient pattern matching across massive datasets, unlocking value from information that was previously siloed or inaccessible,” explains Jaime Goff, Product Design Lead at Healthworx Studio. “By leveraging these capabilities, we can incorporate a breadth of knowledge beyond what our team could internalize before. It really expands what we can achieve by connecting us to data in new ways.”

The importance of coming together

But as our use of AI tools increased, there were unexpected sandtraps, too. For one, we noticed a steep decline in the quality of our team interactions. We thought that getting an AI boost would be “like having an extra designer in the room with us.” But the reality was we each retreated into our corners with our own AI assistant, forging ahead with new ideas. When it was time to reconvene, we were on wildly divergent tracks, and re-aligning to move forward as a team was an enormous undertaking. 

Another caveat: While generative AI tools helped us gather new forms of data, it was still critical to hear directly from the people who would be using these solutions. 

Nicole lives on a ranch the size of the City of San Francisco. After her husband broke his leg in a freak accident, she had to make a harrowing journey, traveling two hours to the nearest hospital. Stories like Nicole’s taught us a lot about what it’s actually like to access healthcare in rural areas, and the resilience it requires. It was the people we spoke with who brought nuance to the problem our team was trying to solve, inspiring our most critical insights and building confidence in our concepts. As much as we tried, we could not find an artificial substitute that could come close.

It was the people we spoke with who brought nuance to the problem our team was trying to solve, inspiring our most critical insights and building confidence in our concepts. As much as we tried, we could not find an artificial substitute that could come close.

Smelling the AI B.S.

When reviewing a few AI-generated venture concepts with the Healthworx team, the room fell silent. The concepts were all variations of the same idea, repeated and rehashed. “Generative AI can rapidly spin up concepts that seem good enough at first glance,” Goff says. “But when you scrutinize them, the limitations become obvious.” Even after extensive prompting with our AI co-pilots, we were still back to the same place, with a bunch of repetitive concepts. 

But when the team mined our own insights, we were able to find a truly compelling venture idea.

Late into the night, when the team was riffing, we shifted our approach from working alongside AI to guiding it. We had ChatGPT review and improve on its own ideas, asking it to strengthen the overall concept as it went. The tool acted like jet fuel, helping us add rigor and build out the venture, ultimately producing a successful pitch presentation that included high-fidelity mockups, early working AI prototypes, and an in-depth pitch deck.

Supercharging our process

We’re in the caveman era of generative AI, and there are plenty of unintended consequences to be concerned about. But we’re optimistic about how a human-AI partnership that leverages human creativity and nuanced subject matter expertise alongside AI tools allows us to quickly outsource parts of the process, add rigor, and iterate faster, supercharging design and innovation.

And while the AI hype is founded, its limitations, which became patently clear in the ways it addressed a complex challenge like rural healthcare, made us appreciate how important humans are to this equation. Goff says it best: “This project showed the value of individuals bringing their unique brains and nuance to the table to work alongside AI. Our minds provide the spark that drives real progress.”

For those who crave the details, learn more about our approach, principles, and experiments with our transformative collaboration with Healthworx Studio here or reach out to ai@ideo.com

Visuals created with Midjourney.

Healthcare has a lot of big problems to solve. Could AI help?

At a recent business roundtable, the topic was how to set product innovation up for success. I spend the bulk of my days helping organizations stretch to tackle business challenges by coming up with breakthrough ideas, so it might seem sacrilegious to allow those ideas to fail.  But since that breakfast, I found myself scrutinizing not only what failure looks like, but also how it feels.

There’s a saying that’s usually applied to writing: “Kill your darlings.” It’s a nudge to let go of a much-chewed-over clever phrase that doesn’t help the overall story.

We use the saying at IDEO, too. But our “darlings” are hypotheses or “sacrificial concepts” that we quickly put to the test and are willing to abandon. Iteration is the lifeblood of the design process—and the magic of it is that it allows for what Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson calls “productive failure.”

When companies face business challenges that require innovation, the instinct is to look for and land on a solution and sell it internally, so you secure permission to move forward. And what if the path you’ve chosen doesn’t pan out? We have a natural instinct to persist: The company has allocated money and resources, and it’s easier to hang onto the hope that a turnaround is just ahead than to pivot. 

But hope isn’t enough in an era of new baselines like disruptive AI and climate change. Companies must stretch further, build resilience, and find ways to meet an ever-evolving new customer. 

To keep pace, we have to reframe  business challenges as human challenges: What is desirable from a human point of view? What do people really need? How can we help a brand like H&M meet its customers’ desire to use less plastic? And also help the retailer meet its climate goals by reducing waste from its supply chain? Insights drawn from in-depth interviews with and observation of customers and other stakeholders combined with data already collected by the organization help us generate hypotheses that we can quickly test. 

In the case of H&M, we suggested replacing the plastic packaging they used to ship online orders with paper. But there were many hurdles to clear to make sure that would work across a global supply chain with multiple brands. It ended up taking several months and multiple pilots to ensure the more sustainable packaging would work.

Finding out that something doesn’t work—and, crucially, why—sets you up to more deeply understand the constraints you're operating within. And reframing an abandoned concept as a learning rather than a failure allows you to prioritize continuous improvement, keep teams motivated, and build stakeholder confidence . 

Organizations may feel like they don’t have the luxury of time to test innovative ideas. But proof of concept needn’t take more than one to two weeks and can be done at low-cost. One timesaver is to test hypotheses in parallel. That approach also allows teams to let go of darling concepts and view the goal as learning rather than validation. 

By one estimate, 95 percent of new products fail, and baking failure into the exploratory phase helps ensure the product or service that emerges has been battle-tested. A hypothesis that doesn’t work out isn’t a Failure, it’s a failure, and that feels different. In the case of H&M, prototyping packaging options not only led us to a paper solution that cut plastic, it led to us digging deeper on climate goals and ultimately redesigning their supply chain to cut millions of tons of waste.  

At the roundtable, we talked about the challenge of working within a company culture that doesn’t tolerate failure. I’ve worked in a number of those environments and cultures; they’re tough. Failure carries emotional baggage. If you got a taste of it as a child and were a diligent but mostly average student like me, you did everything you could to avoid seeing that red letter atop a test ever again.  

I’m currently working within a culture that makes room for failure. Some of that is inherent in the design process, which is optimistic and pragmatic. But my colleagues also share an important mindset. They focus more on impact than the idea or activity that produces it. There is a deep respect for diversity of perspective and a shared belief that if there’s a better way to do it, we’re going to do it that way. 

In IDEO’s London studio, we have a framed, handwritten quote: “I don’t hate you, I just hate your idea.” It was never intended to be framed, but it’s a fabulous reminder about not taking failure personally. If we truly share a collective goal of doing well and doing good, we need to generate and test as many ideas as we can—and be okay with killing our darlings to get there. It’s the only way to make real change.

Is your intolerance for failure holding you back? I’d love to hear more.

Should we allow new ideas to fail?

Two of those shifts? Generative AI, and our rapidly changing climate.

‍

Together, these two forces are moving both the people side of the equation—what we need and how we behave—and the how side of design: what’s possible.

‍

Welcome to the Climate Era

A new age is upon us. Steam propelled the original Industrial Revolution; electricity powered the second; preliminary automation and machinery engineered the third; and cyberphysical systems—or AI-powered computers—are shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

But the universal context is our climate. The Climate Era is our time-windowed opportunity to reverse the costs of the industrial and digital eras—creating a more abundant future for all. The way through it is to find ways to reinvent our economies, in part by turning necessary choices (like conservation and circularity) into desirable ones.

To the degree that the climate crisis can be solved, we already have solutions and technologies. The central question of the Climate Era is not can we do it? It’s will we do it?

‍

Hello, generative AI

If the challenges of the Climate Era have been building up over centuries, the transformative power of generative AI seems to have hit the world in a flash.

And this is a critical moment to interrogate our relationship with technology. At IDEO we do that through the tools and habits of design: building to think, taking time to understand people deeply, investigating the farthest consequences we can imagine, and embracing new skills, disciplines, and ways of being in the world through experiments.

‍

Combined forces

These two forces—AI and the Climate Era—have the potential to change everything for everyone. And in some ways, they already have. More often than not, AI and Climate thought live in different conversations. But what might happen when they’re brought together?

The pull of personality

Here’s an example of how AI might help us be climate-friendly manufacturers and consumers: It can help you get to know your clothes before you buy them.

We want and we need to build a circular economy. But its biggest challenge is scale: getting to the necessary infrastructure and processes, and—maybe the most challenging—getting enough people to participate.

There are signs of shifts at the policy level: You see it in Europe, for example, where the EU has a regulatory framework to promote (and require) circular behaviors from both businesses and consumers alike. And more and more people are participating in circular-like ways, such as thrifting. We see younger consumers pushing brands to become more active in developing and promoting sustainable versions of their products (so long as they’re not more expensive).

All that made us think about a pair of jeans.

Jeans lack the physical traits necessary for conversation. But, for an exhibit of speculative design at IDEO, we imagined them capable of communication. 

For starters: We might ask the jeans about their (un)life story, what went into their creation, or how they like to be treated. We might learn about where they were manufactured, their previous owners, and how to fix them if they ripped. Knowing all this about your jeans would give you a much better sense of whether they were a good fit.

Through AI, all of us will soon be conversing regularly with non-humans. And what else might “speak” through AI? Vehicles that remind us that they’re happier when filled with passengers and bound for the carpool lane?

‍

Speaking for the trees

Most of the sustainability problems we seek to fix were created in the design and strategy choices that were made early on in a product’s journey. The lifecycle analysis is a robust process. But it’s costly and generally retrospective, analyzing only those products and practices that already exist.

What about when we’re exploring different potential options and what could be, not what is? 

AI can help us incorporate a real sense of the “true cost” of a product and give nature a seat at the table early on. AI that draws on scope 1,2, and 3 datasets could help protect nature’s best interests in the decision-making phase. To be credible and useful, such an AI would need to synthesize scientific data, cultural data, and archives of experiments. And it would need to have some ability to understand the ground truth of things: learning from both human and technical inputs how things really are, right now, in the soil, in the ocean, in the community, and on and on.

With such a nature-centered AI in play, deployed ethically, we can imagine it occupying different roles and settings. As an advocate in the boardroom (where it might pose strategic questions or even cast a vote), or as an inventor in the materials lab (where it might suggest radically more sustainable ways to use resources and optimize production). ‍

‍

Everything in play

When we talk about making great choices in the Climate Era, especially at the policy or regulatory level, we’re talking about something unbelievably complicated. There are so many factors to consider, in so many dimensions.

And AI can help us think systemically. Take something like fishing. To regulate it, we need to understand  the immediate economic impact (such as business profit); the effect on communities and livelihoods; taxation and employment; the effect of granting more or fewer fishing licenses; how to balance production and protection of spawning areas); and biodiversity. AI can synthesize all of that information and data and make suggestions that expand our imagination about what’s possible. 

Another thing artificial intelligence has a knack for is running simulations. What if AI could help you simulate the tradeoffs among biodiversity, job creation/local livelihoods, and business success?

We imagined this kind of thing in a piece of work with our friends at Conservation International.

A simulation is often quite technical, and AI is already great at that. But we can also imagine an AI pushing people to consider their choices in other ways. What if it could point you to the right humans, on island nations for example, to enrich your understanding of potential impacts, far beyond your own frames of reference?

‍

The age of transformers

There are so many ways the Climate Era and AI, two transformative forces, might collide in service of building better futures. We picked out just three:
• Driving consumer adoption and adaptation by making things that are better
• Optimizing and reimagining production by giving nature a voice and a seat at the table
• Radically reworking how we make climate choices, especially at the largest scale

But, of course, they’re not the only transformers at work. We are, too. Especially those of us in positions of power and influence.

The Climate Era is here.
The Age of AI has arrived.
And it’s still our world to make and remake—for the better, if we choose.

‍

‍This article is adapted from a session delivered by IDEO in NYC at the 2023 FastCo Innovation Festival. With editing support from Christina Drill.

The problems we’re being asked to solve are changing. It’s less about helping partners innovate in incremental ways, and more about big transformational shifts in how we live and work.

In some cases, we knew nothing about the people we were trying to reach, so addressed them with the default direct marketing salutation, “Dear Valued Customer.” Finding the target audience was like being spun around blindfolded, then praying you were walking in the right direction.

Thirty-seven years later, we know virtually everything about everyone. Thanks to data mining and feeble privacy laws, we can pinpoint your exact location, health status, consumption habits, and, troublingly, what makes you laugh, cry—even think. All of that data is now being poured into the greased pan of generative AI where—we are promised—it will bake the most delicious cake, made just for us.

From direct marketing to AI-driven personalization, I’ve witnessed a transformation in how businesses reach their customers. We've never known so much about people, and yet we've rarely understood them less. In my view, using data alone to understand people has the same flattening effect as “Dear Valued Customer.”

But there is an antidote: Human-centered design.

Goodbye “Dear Valued Customer”‍

Once, at an international conference, I heard a speech by someone who worked for a large social media company. The premise of the talk was that a person’s “likes” could mirror their answers on a personality test. The more likes the social media company could analyze, the better they could predict a person’s personality—and to a level of accuracy that could beat what your friends knew of you; beat your family; and maybe know you better than you knew yourself.  

With that kind of knowledge, companies are able to design user experiences that feel like intimate conversations. But are they, really? Or is it only the illusion of intimacy—the hackneyed output of a data-driven predictive power?

It made me wonder: Is how we appear online—even to ourselves—who we really are?

Of course not. People are not reducible to their preferences. People contain multitudes. People change their minds, regularly and often. They respond to things that feel authentic and responsive to their experiences and identity—especially if they have historically been written off, underrepresented, or marginalized. 

The new customer, if we can imagine them in their infinite richness, has in recent times slogged through a global pandemic; discovered the unwelcome uplands of hiked interest rates and housing shortages; and likely contended with some form of professional burnout. Human lives are necessarily messy: You can’t rely on troves of data and canned messages to reach them, let alone persuade them. People can smell a door-to-door algorithm from a mile away. 

‍The best organizations are able to stretch how they think about their customers. The most successful businesses are able to understand and reflect back to people things that they don’t even know about themselves. ‍

‍The power of starting small ‍

In China, a client once questioned IDEO’s decision to root an entire concept in the preferences and needs of a small group of people. But when the product was delivered, the client recognized a level of human understanding that data alone could not achieve.

My time at IDEO has shown me that understanding people requires research at depth. For us, that often means ethnography, and you don’t have to have thousands or hundreds or even 50 people in the room to do it. What you need is a small sample of people with a diversity of lived experiences whom you get to know very well. 

Starting small requires designing with people and communities rather than for them, too. Innovation doesn’t spring from our heads as Athena from the forehead of Zeus; it's uncovered through the careful and considered use of tools, mindsets, and methods which we share with teams and communities.

‍Great organizations recognize that the work of understanding their customers is never complete. They continuously challenge themselves to listen and respond to what their customers are telling them, not only through data, but also by including them as co-designers.

The brutality of perfection‍

I once had a custom suit made for me for my wedding. To appear cool and unconventional, I asked for a red lining. The tailor wondered if I would still be fond of that red lining in 10 years. A simple question based on lots of experience. Upon a moment of honest self-reflection, my answer was, no, I would not. So, I followed his advice. I still wear that suit today; not once have I wished for a red lining. Of course, a company selling that same suit to me based on tracked preferences would’ve gladly hawked me any lining I wanted. But I am not sure I would trust that company again. I’d move on.

‍The organizations that will endure will be the ones that stretch their ability to deliver long-term, unexpected value to their customers.‍

I am thrilled by the possibilities of generative AI. IDEO’s experiments with emerging technology are as fervent today as they’ve ever been. And one of the qualities of which I’m most proud is our collective hunch that the most interesting opportunities lie in the messiest places.

That runs counter to the brutal attraction of data and AI in the current moment: an implied promise that an objectively “right” answer is within reach. Much of what we love in the world is so wrong it’s right. Perfect is not interesting, it’s not personal. In our pursuit of the spotless and ideal, we lose the essence that makes us human. The truth is, we value imperfection over perfection. 

New customer, new organization, new baselines ‍

I believe we’ve now reached an inflection point where many of us are experiencing a similar moment, only all at the same time. The last few years have changed how we work, how we socialize, how we spend our money, and how we think about our time. And we are being pushed to rethink how we do business, too. 

One of the baselines affecting us all is the arrival of the Climate Era. The planet reminds us daily that we have entered into a new normal. July was the hottest month on human record, impacting anyone who works outside or without AC—such as the drivers and  workers delivering boxes upon boxes to our doorsteps.

We can expect increased absenteeism and reduced efficiency, much more disruption to supply chains, and customers moving away from known polluters and toward brands that reward their conscience and their wallet. Climate regulation is coming too: The EU is working to impose tougher rules on  production and consumption in fast fashion.

Yet, while two-thirds of businesses are affected by climate change, few are doing enough to prepare for it. If we’re to avoid catastrophe, we’re going to have to redesign everything. And, if we want people to adopt Climate Era behaviors, we’re going to have to make things that are irresistible to them.‍

That means creating sustainable products and services that are simply better than the competition. By stretching to meet new and emerging customer needs, organizations can create products that people love and that are fit for the Climate Era.

When the instinct is to contract, great leaders stretch ‍

The SF adman Howard Gossage had this saying: “Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them. And sometimes it’s an ad.” After 36 years as an advertising executive, I know better than anyone that we can’t always predict what will interest people.

But now, as the leader of an extraordinary community of designers, I know we have ways to help organizations figure it out. Creative, mind-bending ways that leaders and their teams can stretch to meet their markets and the new customer.

How? By continuously reassessing and expanding our understanding of what people want and need, with care, imagination, and sensitivity. We owe that to people, and we owe it to the planet all of us call home. 

Because in the end, the things that make our time here on Earth worthwhile are the things no algorithm can come up with on its own, no matter how much of the internet it’s ingested. They’re the irreducible things that make us who we are.

Early in my career, I worked on direct marketing mailers for British Telecom’s high-value customers.

As an experienced business and design leader, I have a proven track record of seeing and building the next big thing for IDEO and our clients.

When I work with executive teams, I use the tools of design, strategy, and change to help answer two questions: What’s our desired future? And how must we evolve to realize it?

I am driven by my belief in the potential for business to do well by doing good.

In addition to my work at IDEO, I am the Design Fellow of Conservation International and a core design team member for the Aspen Institute First Movers Fellowship Program. My work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and The New York Times.

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.