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

‍

One way to offer air cover for ideas that may look wild at first is to build an innovation lab—a dedicated safe space where employees can focus on deeply understanding customer needs to design the next generation of products and services for the parent organization.

Unfortunately, many labs have gotten a bad rap for being nothing more than cost centers or design palaces with modular furniture, generating radical ideas that are not aligned with the core business.

But not all labs are fads. They take time to find their stride and show value—sometimes several years to see a new product or service through from ideation to market. That kind of timeline requires leaders with strong enough stomachs to ignore short-term failures, knowing it’s the only way to ensure long-term sustainability.

When setting up a lab, you might take a few cues from the organizational wisdom of ant colonies.

Every six months, a small group of explorer ants finds a new space, and excavates tunnels to enable the entire colony to relocate. The explorer ants start small, then scale, marking the route for the rest of the ants to follow.

Some would hypothesize that this process is a preventative strategy—keeping predators on the move. More importantly, savvy explorer ants avoid uprooting the entire colony until they’ve tested the new space and defined a clear path to get there.

Labs can do the same thing: keep the competition guessing and mitigate the risk of scaling a new product or service before it’s market ready.

In order to succeed, innovation labs require a clear purpose that will empower the parent organization; a portfolio of beacon projects that push the edge of the organization’s current strategy; creative teams with a breadth of expertise; and work spaces where the lab can develop and sustain its own unique culture.

Below we map the pathways to success in each of these areas, which any lab can use to mobilize, pioneer, and scale new ideas.

1. Define the lab's reason for being

Defining the organization’s purpose and reason for existing beyond making money is harder than it sounds. It requires some organizational soul-searching followed by deft communication. But once you’ve aligned on a purpose statement, it can shift things in radical ways, helping employees make decisions about what initiatives to pursue and what to put aside. IDEO’s creative business research studio has found that teams that foster a clear, consistent, and inspiring purpose have 12% more successful launches than teams that do not. Customers may also gain a new understanding of what you stand for and relate to you in a new way. And in a lab, a newly defined purpose can reignite the parent organization’s entrepreneurial spirit, creating a shared identity and reason to continually reinvent itself.

In 2016, the Chairman of Ford Smart Mobility, Jim Hackett, set out to define the purpose of the mobility ecosystem for Ford Smart Mobility. To do so, he established Greenfield Labs, a human-centered lab based in Palo Alto.

The sole purpose of Greenfield Labs, Hackett said, was to “bring humanity to mobility.” That clarity of focus helped to define a portfolio of work that oriented toward those who don’t drive cars, and the highly integrated ecosystem required to move goods and people freely through cities, countries, and the world.

Imagine that: America’s oldest car company setting out to improve things for those who don’t drive. With Jim’s appointment to CEO in 2017, Ford Motor Company articulated a new purpose: to be the most trusted mobility company, designing smart vehicles for a smart world.

For an organization whose sole objective for the past 115 years has been to mass produce vehicles, it’s a hard mental shift to make. But envisioning the impossible is a part of the company’s legacy.

To execute its new purpose, Ford will continue to build smarter vehicles. That’s core to its business. But setting out to understand the larger ecosystem is new to Ford’s portfolio. The role of Greenfield Labs as it establishes new locations in strategic geographies will be to partner with businesses and cities to bring customer needs to the forefront of the design of its products and services.

2. Test your strategy through beacon projects

Like the explorer ants, an innovation lab seeks out new opportunities that are complementary to—and sometimes in competition with—the parent organization’s core capabilities. Ideally, the innovation leaders and the parent organization work together to identify and solve high-priority problems through beacon projects. These are riskier endeavors that push the edge of a company’s strategic portfolio in several key ways: They compete with the core business; they must actually launch a new product, service, or venture into the market; and they build new capabilities along the way. These edge cases, which have a high degree of uncertainty and longer time horizons, may compose up to 20% of the company’s strategic portfolio. If they work, they can be game-changers.

In 2013, Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, Chairman of Intercorp, one of the fast-growing companies in South America, enlisted IDEO to help build an affordable public school system that would address the needs of emerging middle class Peruvians. After six months of research, design, and testing in a wide array of areas including brand, architectural design, curriculum design, business economics, teacher requirements, and school uniforms, Intercorp launched Innova Schools. What began as an initial prototype has now grown to 54 schools in Peru and one in Mexico. Innova is profitable and has graduated countless students who lacked an affordable schooling option. Innova is now planning to expand globally to bring affordable education to the world.

Intercorp’s second project focused on redesigning Interbank’s lobbies and in-person service experience to reduce customer queues and wait times. These observations revealed that customers would often have to wait in three different lines to request, pay, and pick up their items. The project illustrated the importance not only of improving the customer experience, but of redesigning the employee experience so they were empowered to deliver a more personalized customer experience.

Twelve months after the rollout, Interbank showed a 10% increase in new customers and an 80% increase in sales, with gains in all categories. Their NPS score showed customer loyalty skyrocketing, from 53 to 87. Those outcomes have translated across other businesses. The success of Innova Schools and Interbank inspired Rodríguez-Pastor to integrate human-centered design mindsets and methods in an in-house innovation hub, which he called La Victoria Lab. Its mandate: To transform Intercorp.

Established in 2014, the lab started small with a ragtag team of design mercenaries and a new Chief Innovation Officer, Hernan Carranza. With unique specialities in business design, anthropology, and graphic design, they called themselves an “expeditionary force for the future.” They provoked Intercorp businesses to define products and services their customers would love, utilizing human-centered ways of working.

One of the first projects sponsored by the lab set out to define the needs of Peruvian families. These family archetypes created a common ground from which all 35 different companies from Intercorp could build, with the lab as the center of gravity uniting future businesses.

Today, La Victoria Lab has grown to over 30 people, accelerating 50 beacon projects and hundreds of new ideas across Intercorp’s companies.

And while many of the 35 companies are now capable of running their own beacon projects, La Victoria Lab continues to sponsor cross-business initiatives, such as digital transformation.

With hundreds of new ideas infiltrating the organization, La Victoria Lab has already inspired new ways of thinking about Intercorp’s 35 companies—as strategic platforms in education, healthcare, financial services, retail and emerging businesses. The lab will also continue to define new mindsets and capabilities to attract, retain and develop best-in-class talent for all of its future businesses.

3. Build creative teams

Just as an ant colony needs both explorer and worker ants to survive and thrive; a lab needs and a mix of strategists, designers, and makers. Finding people who balance breadth of interests and capabilities with depth of expertise enables the lab to quickly pivot in both project and purpose if needed. Those workers are often called T-shaped, because they can go both wide across subject areas and deep on craft. It’s been shown that cross-functional, collaborative team make more rigorous, data-informed decisions, following the evidence from prototyping, solution modeling, and customer insights over hunches and gut feelings.

Here are a few of the qualities to look for in your lab’s explorer ants:

Expertise: Look for capabilities like interaction design, user/design research, software design, industrial design, communication design (visual and verbal), business design, product design and organizational design.

Mindset: Hire those who are curious, empathetic, optimistic, open to experimentation, collaborative, and comfortable with ambiguity. The no asshole rule is also critical to building collaborative teams. We’ve seen many labs fail because they held on too long to talent that was toxic to the experimental culture.

Method: Mastery of design thinking methods, including user observation and interviewing, synthesis, brainstorming, prototyping, and storytelling (to name a few) are a must. These are core capabilities to building to learn, not necessarily scaling to implement.

4. Create space and rituals for creativity

Culture is probably the biggest differentiator between the lab and the parent organization. Labs must produce radically new ideas, and a creative culture that can produce such ideas looks very different from a culture built to optimize. It’s okay to have subcultures, as they serve a different purpose and have different outcomes, but they have to work together.

At Ford’s original Greenfield Labs, many elements merge to set the stage for innovation, and developing even a few of these can lead you in the right direction.

Location: Labs thrive when they are physically far enough from the parent organization to explore a new idea without too much scrutiny, but close enough to test and co-create with the teams deeply embedded in execution. And importantly, they work best in locations with a diverse range of creative talent. Follow the designers.

Team time: Start with fewer meetings. Makers or designers need long, uninterrupted time to think and create. Maker teams protect this time by negotiating their own hours. Most teams collaborate from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., with early and late hours reserved for administrative tasks. Status update meetings in the middle of the day are going to wear on your productivity time.

Field trips: Work hard, play hard. Making time and supplying budget to visit people in the field is paramount to lab work. If teams aren’t inspired, the work suffers. Not all inspiration visits are literal. They can be as simple as visiting a museum or competitor’s space together. Shared learning is the key.

Language: Instead of words like “policy” and “process,” Ford’s Greenfield Labs uses words like “guidelines” or “drumbeats.” They don’t get attached to job titles or hierarchies. No one “reports to” anyone. Instead of “leaders,” they use the term “stewards.” This is not a small point—words matter in defining expectations on a daily basis. It sets the tone for how we expect people to behave.

Values: After the first year, Greenfield Labs rewrote their values, one of which is “quirky.” That’s not something you’d identify with Ford, and it helped to formalize the goal of having a dynamic, diverse culture.

Rituals: Recognition goes a long way. Often teams are working on complex, long-term programs with multiple start-stops, owners, and changes in direction. One way to avoid a feeling of slow progress is to celebrate the small wins that occur more frequently. Greenfield Labs has a weekly ritual they call “putting socks on a chicken.” Inspired by a team member’s remark that some problems are harder than putting socks on a chicken, each week, the lab assembles to present one notable problem solver with a pair of wild or weird socks as a kind of high five. The tradition has become so beloved that new hires and visitors to the lab are also indoctrinated with their own customized socks (some actually have chickens on them). And notably, there is now a budget line-item for socks.

Learning from failure: Another way Greenfield Labs codifies lessons learned is to create digitally documented retrospectives and give out an annual "Phoenix Award" to honor failed projects and ceremoniously bid them farewell. If you are allowed to fail and celebrate what you have learned, people will be more likely to take the necessary risks to drive innovation.

Storytelling: It’s important to reinforce the lab’s reason for existing and to build a shared narrative with the parent organization, which can in turn be shared externally. Video is a great medium for storytelling, whether creating short and scrappy vignettes or more polished productions with B-roll and music. It gets the point across without a deck. In fact, skip decks altogether if you can.

Space: Expressing the spirit and aspirations of the lab through physical design is about more than post-its and foam core boards. The value of considering space lies in differentiating the lab from its corporate parent and infusing it with human dimension and creativity. This can be reflected through open floor plans, high ceilings, and plenty of daylight. Collaborative and heads-down working areas are also necessary for digging into hard problems.Instead of company logos, display photos of real people who use the new services or products. These are the ingredients for a hub of activity and creative expression, and they’re important visual signals that enable the work to be scrappy as it moves through different levels of fidelity.

Is a lab for you?

Labs are not for the faint of heart. If organizational change were easy, no company would falter. But with a clear purpose and portfolio of beacon projects, a lab can focus on new explorations while the parent company delivers its core offers. It’s a partnership.

In an era of fast-paced change and technological disruption, we’d do well to learn from the long-proven survival tactics found in nature. Ants know how to establish a link between the original colony and an exploratory space. Then slowly, ant by ant, they complete the monumental task of upending the entire colony to ensure their perseverance.

Unless otherwise specified, all statistics come from IDEO’s Creative Difference, a digital tool to assess, guide, and track the development of creative and innovative teams.

Visuals by Jeannie Phan.

Today’s leaders face immense pressure to optimize their core offers and cultivate new ideas. But in large organizations, new ideas are too often smothered by middle management. We don’t have to look too far back to Kodak, Blockbuster, and Yahoo for reminders of behemoths that became so attached to a core product and revenue stream that they overlooked riskier—but highly promising—opportunities.

As my team and I prepared for Typeforce, an annual Chicago typography gallery show, we started to think about how we could leverage AI and our own creative skills to build an intelligent system that could work with us—a communication designer, a production designer, and a data scientist—to create a visually distinct submission.

While you might think of typography as designing or selecting just the right font and arranging it immaculately, submissions to Typeforce range far outside that, including everything from carved sculptural elements and needlepoint to hand-drawn tableaus and digital installations. It was our first time submitting to the show, and our goal was to take advantage of this wide-open opportunity and use our individual crafts to make something out of the ordinary.

We imagined a creative process where Kristen, our communication designer, would give an algorithm examples of posters with interesting type compositions, and it would try to learn from them and spit back lots and lots of attempts to create something similar. Kristen could use the algorithm’s generated posters as starting points for creating new posters to feed back into it, as well as clues for what it still needed to learn. Trying to train the algorithm could itself become a great set of constraints for creativity, and when it was over, we could show off the visual artifacts of that back-and-forth process at the show.

We landed on Dadaist and Futurist compositions as an interesting place to begin. The Dadaists made things that didn’t make sense, reacting to a world (at the time, in the midst of World War I) that also didn’t make sense. That felt relevant to today as well, and had the added bonus of being something a computer might be better at producing than more immaculate, grid-based layouts.

So we got to work collecting historical examples we liked, and Kristen traced them so I could feed them into our algorithm as digital files. I got to work on the algorithm itself, which we named Kurt, after the Dadaist artist and designer Kurt Schwitters.

For Kristen, teaching Kurt initially felt weirdly similar to teaching a human design student. He made compositions and she looked at them, identified his strongest concepts, and "suggested" ways that they could be improved through the next round of examples. Then he responded to her feedback.

After this first exchange, though, the differences between an algorithm and a human design student became more apparent. Kurt's learning was reactive, limited to the examples he's seen and the only way he knows to think—in numerical variables like font sizes, rotations, and X-Y coordinates. Human designers often start out this way too—just absorbing examples of design and then mimicking them—but they usually grow past it. Instead of just copying a poster they see, the poster might inspire them to push aspects of it further, or combine them with other styles that work well together. AIs like Kurt can’t do this the way a person can—certainly not yet, and probably not anytime soon.

Kurt also doesn’t understand English, much less design terminology or ideas about why he’s doing anything. He can’t understand feedback about tone or context that Kristen might give her real students, like "your typography feels a little uninviting and impersonal. Is that tone appropriate to your audience/content/message?" And being able to respond to those sorts of questions in a sensitive, nuanced way is pretty central to being a good communication designer.

Ultimately we filled the wall with 90 prints, which made for a nice display of Kurt’s strengths—his ability to learn, and how prolific he can be—as well as Kristen’s—her skill as a designer and how she used those skills to teach.

Designers like Kristen can lean on Kurt to do things humans can't, like create dozens of compositions in a minute, or provide modifications or jumping off points that are really off the wall and decidedly not what an experienced designer would do. Some creative thinkers are already experimenting with these kinds of techniques; Robin Sloan, for example, a writer who hacked a text editor to complete his sentences using a deep learning model trained on a bunch of old sci-fi stories.

We imagine a future with more tools that creators can “teach"—unique products of an individual’s sensibilities that serve to amplify their intent and challenge them creatively, like a synthesizer that learns to play along and accompany in a style complementary to a musician’s vision. We hope Kurt inspires other designers, engineers, and data scientists to explore this future by building “collaborators” together.

‍

As a data scientist, I know computers are great at trying lots of things quickly. But when it comes to learning artful nuance, they can fall flat. At the same time, human graphic designers are great at tweaking and critiquing, but they can only move their hands so fast in Illustrator. It's a juxtaposition that begs the question, can AI and humans collaborate to leverage their unique strengths?

Battle terminology sneaks in (kill, crush, destroy, capture, acquire); and as in war, it becomes necessary to take the humanity out of those “targets” in order to execute on the plan.

But it’s not impossible to imagine a world where business success goes hand-in-hand with seeing and respecting the humanity of our competitors, or customers, or colleagues. Even at IDEO, where we champion a human-centered approach, the words we use in meetings and briefs can fall into the tried and true trope of conquest.

As a thought exercise, we made a list of the common terms that can dehumanize customers and competitors, and a list of alternatives that might infuse our conversations about individual and organizational performance with more humanity, agency, and reciprocity.

No one needs more business jargon, but we have a hunch that changing the way we speak can change the way we think, and in turn can change the way business feels and what it delivers. We’re trying it out and invite you to do the same.

Business is competitive by design. To succeed, as an individual or an organization, requires assertiveness, power, and strength. As a result, much of the language we use while doing business implies a desire to overpower—or even disempower—our competitors.

While we designed a new family of acoustic amps for Fender, we squeezed into an Airstream for two months to better understand the touring musician lifestyle. And when we wanted to better understand the environmental impact of the things we design, we visited a sewage treatment plant to see what happens when a product can't be recycled.

We go after big problems that have never been solved. And by going all in on the unfamiliar and uncomfortable, we’ve come up with creative solutions that we might not have imagined before.

As an industrial designer, I’m a builder. I experience the world with all my senses and apply my tangible building skills to make experiences and systems. Technology inspires me because it's always been an important vehicle to advance our current state. With technology racing forward at an ever increasing pace, some advancements can impact us on an unprecedented scale. As shapers of the future, we must strive to understand the consequences and implications of emerging technology. We do this by asking ourselves uncomfortable questions about possible outcomes during the design process in areas like healthcare, the future of work, and the circular economy.

In order to better understand how emerging technologies could affect our day-to-day life, my colleagues from multiple design disciplines—industrial design, data science, communications, interaction design—and I embarked on an internal IDEO project that could give us some clues. We got curious and asked ourselves, How might the way we’re communicating with each other change with new technology? How might we collaborate together in the future when we can show up in different realities? What could be possible if the digital and physical world blend seamlessly into each other? How will we protect our privacy if we can teach devices our most personal preferences, and what will happen to our data?

We named our project The Discomfort Zone.

In order to explore these uncomfortable, out-there questions, we had to experience them ourselves, and to experience the future we had to build it. Here are the tools that we built:

Personalized Intelligence: by building a camera that can be taught to take the best self portraits based on individualized feedback, we experienced the idea of actively teaching machines our preferences. The user trains it on their ideal lighting, placement, composition, head tilt, and facial expressions. While it may seem like a trivial thing to create, teaching machines to see us how we see ourselves can show us the path to building other devices—like health devices—that the user can teach to adapt to user preferences and feedback.

Complementary Media: a device that can be taught to recognize facial expressions and emotions, then generates an appropriate, customized emotional expression for each user—like a personalized emoji—helped us imagine more depth and expressiveness online using artificial intelligence. This tool can communicate real human emotion, which could lead to improved communication among children, for example.

Shared Realities: a tool, bridging the physical and virtual, that allows workers operating in VR to sense the presence and movements of colleagues around them as if they are on the same plane. An exploration of how virtual and augmented technology might improve collaboration, it allows people to respond to virtual coworkers’ cues without fully disrupting work in the virtual environment.

Network Empathy: code that enables a user to anticipate how large social or interconnected user networks will react to messages before they are posted, bringing deeper understanding and empathy to online communication. With cues from large online networks, smart technology becomes even smarter and empathetic interaction online becomes easier—especially when it is applied to high-profile communications, or at mass scale among networks that might be discussing politics, health, or education.

Meta Identity: code that is invisible to naked eye can be embedded in an object to make it readable by a machine—not unlike a barcode—and give it meaning online. Branding and production methods might evolve toward this physical tagging method, so that users easily learn about physical objects they see, and find them online. Making the physical as searchable as the Internet could further empower consumers to align their purchase decisions with their beliefs and values.

As designers, it is our responsibility to explore the discomfort zone, design holistically, and consider the full range of possibilities of what we create. For example, as much as Network Empathy was intended to be an inclusive tool, it could also be used to manipulate public opinion by predicting the reaction of large audiences. If we use Personalized Intelligence to teach our devices our most personal preferences, what becomes of this new personal data? And who is the owner of this information: the device, the platform, or the individual?

Because technology will serve us on an even more personal level, the stakes are high. Designers are uniquely stationed to be the connectors in an ever more complex ecosystem of stakeholders, and we must ensure the tool leaves the lab and enters an ecosystem with safeguards in place to have a positive impact.

We’re at the dawn of something big and unknown. New technologies are shaping the future in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. Some of them will have extraordinary benefits, while others, through unforeseen capabilities or even sinister intentions, may have unwanted consequences. But as designers, it’s up to us to explore them early, dive into the unfamiliar, and do what we can to shape the future for the better. We’d love for you to join us here in The Discomfort Zone.

The Discomfort Zone was a collaboration among many designers at IDEO. Special thanks to all involved, including the core design team: Leo Marzolf, Jochen Weber, Brooke Thyng, Christian Ramsey, and Nan Tsai.

So much of being a designer is being willing to embrace the uncomfortable. We create new products, experiences and systems for people whose needs are different than ours—sometimes really different.

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.

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