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.  
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• 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

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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.
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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

‍

We've studied the effects of emotions in the workplace, and the research shows that managers can make or break an office. In one poll, 50% of people said they’ve quit a job to remove themselves from a bad manager. (In another survey, 65% of folks said they’d take a new boss over a pay raise. Ouch.)

Managers often set the tone of the workplace. But that doesn’t mean managing has to be stoic, emotionless work. In fact, we think it should be the opposite.

There’s no set formula for becoming a perfect boss, but we have a few tips for building a positive emotional culture in the office and supporting the needs of the people that work for you.

Manage individually

After surveying almost 80,000 people, researcher Marcus Buckingham came up with the insight that “average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess.” In checkers, every piece is the same: they’re interchangeable. But winning a game of chess requires you to understand each piece’s strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t effectively play unless you understand why each piece is unique.

One of Mollie’s favorite examples of this individualized approach is IDEO’s new employee survey, which includes hardball questions like, “What’s your favorite office snack?” and “What kind of flowers do you like?” The answers give teams an understanding of their new colleagues right off the bat, and help managers address a newbie’s individual interests—even if it’s just a preference for vanilla vs. chocolate.

Address your feelings without becoming “emotionally leaky”

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott recalls a morning when a report told her, “I know what kind of day I’m going to have by the kind of mood you’re in when you walk in the door.” Managing your feelings is as important as managing your team; what you consider a throwaway comment or a momentary bad mood can ruin someone’s day. Reactive, hot-tempered managers are hurtful and demoralizing.

But don’t pretend that you’re not allowed to have feelings (you’re human. Accept it!). “The idea that you’re never going to have a bad day as a boss is bullshit,” Kim says. “The best thing to do is to cop to it. Say to your team, ‘I’m having a bad day, and I’m trying my best not to take it out on you. But if it seems like I’m having a bad day, it’s because I am.’”

You don’t necessarily have to go into great detail (oversharing is another complicated topic), but acknowledging that there’s something going on can help those around you avoid unnecessary anxiety.

Figure yourself out first

Like we said: You’re human. That means you have your own emotional responses to unpack before you’re fully equipped to help others do the same. The best leaders are able to hit the pause button when they become emotional, sit with their feelings, and understand where they’re coming from. Instead of taking action immediately, they ask themselves, “What’s behind this emotion?”

A great manager will realize, for example, that anxiety about meeting a deadline can be mitigated by building structure to help a team get work done on time, or that a tough design review means that next time, more prototypes might be necessary. Tapping into your emotional toolkit will help you arm others for the emotional demands of the office.

Listen

It sounds basic, but it bears repeating. One of the questions Wharton Professor Adam Grant fields most often is, how do you have your suggestions heard when you’re not in charge? "These are not questions asked by leaders," Grant notes. Hearing people out is an extremely important part of letting them know you appreciate their work.

Listening is also the only way leaders can understand the source of problems or strong emotions. As a manager, ask questions instead of immediately trying to problem solve. You’ll never understand another person’s perspective unless you listen and show compassion.

Find time to prioritize yourself

Managing means cooking something on every burner without burning anything. You also have to time every step perfectly to make sure the meal comes together. If the simple thought of that balancing act exhausts you, try taking a "Shultz hour." When he was in office, former Secretary of State George Shultz protected one hour each week for solitary reflection with paper and pen. No one was allowed to interrupt him (except the president or his wife, which we understand).

If solo time feels a little too isolating, seek support. Try connecting with peers and folks who have a similar role with whom you feel safe talking openly about personal and professional issues. As Liz Koenig, who managed Teach for America teachers, told us, “You can’t pour out of an empty cup.”

Acknowledging emotions in the workplace is one thing; harnessing their power to become a better manager is another. It’s not impossible, but it does take work. We’d recommend not putting on a brave face, but instead getting a little vulnerable with the people that work for you. Here’s one last reminder: You’re human.

Like playing the flute or choosing the right sized Tupperware for your leftovers, being a good manager is a skill. You’re not born knowing how to play scales or eyeball specific volumes of pasta—it’s something learned and practiced. And when it comes to building your managerial muscles and shepherding others through a career journey, there are a lot of emotional skills that can really boost your toolkit.

Not necessarily, says Chris Nyffeler, IDEO Executive Design Director and a faculty member in the undergraduate and graduate programs in Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts. Those vocational skills are important, but they can come later. A foundation in design—whether built through education or early career experience—comes from understanding the process and building up the soft skills that all designers, but especially interaction designers, need to master.

Chris would often see his students hung up on mastering tools first. But according to him, great interaction designers have three things at their core—empathy for users, storytelling chops, and the instinct to prototype.

1. Empathy for users

The role of a designer is to be the voice of and advocate for the end user. This is especially true when you're working in-house alongside engineering and product teams that might feel disconnected from the customer.

Empathy starts with an awareness of others and an ability to detect their emotions and understand their perspective. What does it actually feel like to live with a problem, and how would a potential solution actually fix it? “The more that you can build that muscle of empathy,” Chris says, “the better you're going to be as a designer.”

And for more seasoned in-house designers, the more you can help your counterparts across the organization develop their empathy muscles, the more successful it will make you and your UX team in delivering great products to market.

2. The desire to tell a story

Chris describes storytelling as effectively envisioning ideas and putting them into a more strategic framework. That frame could be user insights (how the work is right for the user), a business context (how the work builds on business goals), or organizational context (how the team is well equipped to deliver on the work).

“Storytelling is an under-appreciated soft skill,” Chris says. Storytelling doesn’t just come in handy for presenting your ideas—it helps build consensus with cross-functional teams. Being able to share your ideas and bring others on board helps designers be strong advocates for their own work.

3. The instinct to prototype

At IDEO, we talk about prototyping as a central step in the design process, but it's also a mindset that should be fundamental to the way an interaction designer thinks.

“As they have an idea, great designers put pen to paper, or pixels on screen, or just start building something as a way of working out their process,” Chris says.

Designers should be skilled at prototyping at various levels of fidelity, but most importantly, their gut instinct should push them to test ideas early and often.

“I love seeing that, especially from designers who are just discovering prototyping as a tool in their tool belt,” Chris says. “Seeing them realize that there’s more than one way of doing things, and that their first assumption of how they should present an experience could be right or wrong.”

Putting unfinished, scrappy ideas out into the world can make a designer feel uncomfortable, but Chris says the best prototypes leave room for users to co-design parts of the experience. “If they show you something that’s not working,” Chris says, “quickly change it. Move a button, rewrite copy, replace an image. Users can also take you down unexpected, delightful paths that can lead you to a powerful new idea."

Connecting more deeply with that end user—the person you’re designing for—is key to developing all three of these skills.

Want to learn more about interaction design? Dive deeper with IDEO U’s on-demand class, Prototyping for Digital Experiences.

How do you identify the makings of a great interaction designer? Is it coding expertise? Mastery of digital tools? A beautiful portfolio of visual design work?

Turns out it's really hard to get people to think about why they'd use technology they don’t understand for a problem they don’t know exists. And that's exactly the challenge we've taken on at the CoLab, IDEO’s collaborative innovation lab—to determine what humans will need in the connected future.

How does that affect our quarterly design sprints? The goal isn't faster execution—as it would be with a typical work sprint—but rather surfacing and validating new opportunities.

Here's how it works: At the start of the sprint, each multidisciplinary team (a motley crew of designers, technologists, and businesspeople who range from students to entrepreneurs to corporate representatives) is given a design brief that specifies a technology to use, like blockchain or machine learning. Teams are charged with quickly getting their heads around the emerging technology, creating their first prototype, gathering feedback, iterating, synthesizing, and sharing their design.

Over the past four years, we’ve created well over 200 prototypes and learned a ton.

Here are our best tips for how to run a highly productive design sprint:

1. Big questions need small starting points

When you’re asking a huge, provocative question, you could spend months coming up with answers. So, before the sprint, we make sure we take time to craft specific briefs to work on—design challenges that are bite-sized enough that we can (in)validate them during the course of a week, but broad enough that we can sink our teeth into them.

We might start with a question like: “How might decentralized technologies change the ways communities reduce risk?” and include a suggested prototype like: “Build a peer to peer insurance product for travel using blockchain technology.” This level of specificity can feel stifling at first—but it helps teams get moving fast toward a prototype.

2. Timebox everything

An exploratory sprint can feel directionless at first—you’re trying to make something new with a brand new tool, which means you could do almost anything. The best way to not devolve into endless spiraling is by scheduling every phase of design down to the minute. When you know your team needs to make a decision between A and B in the next seven minutes, well, you put on your big kid pants and decide. By giving yourself a series of minideadlines, you can accomplish more iterations and ultimately, a better prototype at the end of your sprint.

3. Show up with a prototype

When you’re working with a revolutionary technology and trying to explain your idea to a potential user, their eyes glaze over. Showing up to user testing sessions with a prototype—even if it’s far from final—makes the future tangible and accessible. You’re not talking about faster horses anymore, you’ve got people imagining cars.

4. Strong ideas weakly held

Making something takes confidence, and nothing builds confidence like concrete evidence that you’re headed in the right direction. But evidence is hard to come by in the world of emerging tech. Try prototyping as if you’re right—and then listening as if you’re wrong. This means putting your prototype in front of people and learning from all the ways it didn’t work for them—giving you both evidence and direction on what to build.

5. Find the right questions, not perfect solutions

Exploration is about charting unfamiliar territory. Sometimes that means you get it all wrong and end up at a dead-end. But that doesn’t mean the sprint was a failure! As we said, the goal of an exploratory sprint is not to execute a million dollar idea in record time, but to surface new opportunities.

At the end of the sprint, when it’s time to present your prototype, focus the conversation on what you learned: What would you build next time to make an even better, more human-centered solution? What advice would you give to others designing with these technologies?

6. Science fair, not pitch deck

Rather than jazz hands, Powerpoints, and promises of what your prototype could do, we always end our sprints in a science fair format: multiple hands-on demos happening alongside one another, with lots of room for discussion.

This lets people experience prototypes individually and then come back together to reflect on how the ideas worked for them (or didn’t). It’s another round of user feedback that furthers our learning and participants walk away with real insights that might apply to their work beyond the sprint.

It’s not always easy to run a sprint. It means breaking out of your regular work routine and collaborating with a team to do something intense and exhausting that you aren’t always sure is going to work. It means building with tools you don’t know how to use (yet).

But when we follow these rules, our sprints offer up reams of new ideas, insights, opportunities, and next steps that send us galloping toward a more human-centered future.

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Know that timeworn Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”? Turns out Ford probably never said that. But as designers who are trying to imagine and build the future, we’ve found it to be a very useful notion.

1. THE DIXON MULTIPLEX

Multiplex is a pop-up "department store of tomorrow" trading for a month as part of the London Design Festival. It features contributions from a wide range of brands curated by legendary product designer Tom Dixon and Wallpaper magazine.

Billed as immersive and multi-sensory, I was super curious to see the designer's vision of an multi-brand store that is fighting for the attention of tomorrow's customers by offering experiences, not just products. That included British botanicals brand Haeckels’ mist spa (like walking into an aromatic greenhouse), to booking in for a fashion shoot or even a vitamin injection.

2. MINDBLOWER

Mindblower is a new 'idea to product' platform showcased at Multiplex, which invites you to pitch ideas for physical products you would like to create, to help bridge the gap between the amazing ideas we dream up and our ability to tangibly own them.

A blend of TV show Dragon’s Den and Kickstarter, its inclusion within a prototype store of tomorrow was interesting, blurred the boundaries between consumer, inventor, and entrepreneur. It's still super early days, but interesting to see someone responding to the citizen maker-economy without assuming that everyone is well-versed in design, 3D printing or engineering.

3. THE GOOD JUDGMENT PROJECT, AND SUPERFORECASTING

The Good Judgement Project is an experiment to explore how well the 'wisdom of the crowd' is able to predict future world events (e.g. will a nation's government collapse in the next six months). It's headline-grabbing finding is that within the thousands of people taking part, there is a small group of ordinary citizens dubbed 'superforecasters' whose predictions are 30% better than intelligence professionals armed with confidential data and subject expertise.

Philip Tetlock's new book - Superforecasting - looks at what sets these superforecasters apart. It's not just about raw intelligence (Superforecasters are clever but not off the charts) they demonstrate a 'growth mindset'; an openness to consider information from many different origins, to change their predictions, and to look back at their predictions and learn from their mistakes. Forecasting is something we could all potentially become better at, and Tetlock has now described how.

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Every Monday morning, the London studio shares a coffee and some inspiration. This week, design researcher Kate Wakely talks through an immersive, pop-up retail experience from famed product designer Tom Dixon, a Dragon’s Den meets Quirky-style product development platform, and a book on the emerging art of super forecasting.

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.

Michelle Lee, a managing director leading IDEO’s Design for Play team, tells us how to create a magic circle and why removing constraints is so powerful in helping your team come up with wild new ideas. This episode revisits one of our favorite moments on the Creative Confidence Podcast around the theme of enabling leaders to bring out the best in their team. Listen to the full episode with Michelle and read a recap of the conversation on the IDEO U blog:

Serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brit Morin shares advice for inspiring a team by nurturing individual needs, creating psychological safety, and giving people meaningful work. This episode revisits one of our favorite moments on the Creative Confidence Podcast around the theme of enabling leaders to bring out the best in their team. Listen to the full episode with Brit and read a recap of the conversation on the IDEO U blog:

IDEO Senior Portfolio Director Dwayne Edwards shares an activity leaders can try to encourage their team to tap into the power of intuition. This episode revisits one of our favorite moments on the Creative Confidence Podcast around the theme of enabling leaders to bring out the best in their team. Listen to the full episode with Dwayne and read a recap of the conversation on the IDEO U blog:

Harvard Business School Professor Frances Frei and IDEO Senior Design Director Lauren Collins share advice for inclusive leadership, encouraging participation, and giving attribution. This episode revisits one of our favorite moments on the Creative Confidence Podcast around the theme of enabling leaders to bring out the best in their team. Listen to the full episode with Frances and Lauren and read a recap of the conversation on the IDEO U blog: