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.
‍
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

‍

Some of the best lessons I learned on the topic come from my time working at IDEO.org, our non-profit arm, which focuses on improving the lives of people living in poverty.

Here are some key lessons that can strengthen your approach, no matter where you’re designing.

1. Lead with empathy

While at IDEO.org, I worked on Health XO–a team focused on designing better access to birth control. Translation? We went into urban and rural communities throughout East Africa and talked to teens about their sex lives. These conversations are very personal for anyone, but for many of the teens we spoke to, having a sex life before marriage is stigmatized and risky. In this situation, having empathy meant considering all aspects of the topic: the individual experience, cultural taboos, and the larger community.

Because the stakes were high, I found myself paying particular attention to how I conducted research. Was the setting private enough for the young women to feel safe? Was a group interview among friends a better way to structure it? Would the girl feel more comfortable if we met a few times before launching into the more personal topics?

This experience made me realize how important it is to take a moment before every interview to make sure my attitude is collaborative, not extractive—even in for-profit design work. This makes all the difference in protecting and honoring the people you’re researching.

Ask yourself: What can I do to make this experience beneficial for my research subject? How might I approach their situation with empathy, and without the end-game in mind?

2. Find out what happens when no one is watching

Maybe you’re designing something you know a bit about. Or maybe you just have an idea about what would be cool to make, and prototyping seems like a waste of time. When we’re designing in our own backyards, it’s easy to ignore prototyping. But as I began designing in less and less familiar contexts, I found the value of prototyping increased significantly. The prototypes had to speak for themselves.

When our team worked with a local organization in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, we were tasked with finding more effective ways to engage men and boys in reporting instances of gender-based violence. In order to understand the contexts where people felt most comfortable making reports, we worked with local metalworkers to build boxes where anyone could anonymously drop a written report about incidents. We installed them throughout the neighborhood: in bars, public toilets, on the street, and in barbershops. Within a few days, we began to see patterns in where reports were—or weren’t—submitted. This informed our strategy going forward.

Prototyping is especially important if you want to observe behaviors that can be difficult to suss out through interviews alone.

Ask yourself: How might we build a stand-alone prototype that more effectively gauges how people might behave when nobody’s watching?

3. Help your clients build their own design skills

Deliverables matter. But without client ownership, even the most thoughtful design can gather dust. This is true no matter who your client is. But when you factor in a separation of 9,586 miles between you and your client, skill-building suddenly feels much more important.

One of the largest scale projects I worked on with IDEO.org was with Marie Stopes International. Our goal was to design avenues for teen access to birth control information and services, across all of Kenya. We worked side-by-side with the health workers who go from town to town as traveling medics. Not only were we learning from them, but we were also able to share how they could use design thinking methods to improve their current model.

Making sure that all team members have the tools they need starts with understanding the value that you—and your clients—bring. Our partners on the ground offered incredible expertise in the local landscape, regulations, and healthcare needs. We offered tools and a way of thinking that enabled these healthcare providers to try new ways of working, based on human-centered insights and a shared vision.

Ask yourself: What are the superpowers that my client has? How can I harness this knowledge in our designs, and include them in the creative process?

See what I mean about constraints? The next time you’re approaching a design project, take a moment to consider how you approach your work. Chances are, a step back from your day-to-day perspective will help improve your process, and your output.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. When you have a small budget or a tight timeframe, constraints help you focus, force tough decisions, and require you to take a very exact approach. The more I design, the more I have come to value constraints. When you’re working on low budgets in emerging economies, with a language barrier, or in rural conditions, embracing the design process is key.

So last summer, in search of some sort of spark, I decided to take on a personal project: I would make one animated GIF per day, every day, until I felt like stopping.

It may sound silly. GIFs often are. But it turns out, making GIFs is a great design exercise.

For one thing, they’re extraordinarily simple by design. Steve Wilhite, a computer scientist working at Compuserve, the first big online service company in the U.S., created the GIF in 1987. He had been asked to make a simple graphics format that works on all kinds of computers and could display sharp images even over slow internet connections. (Yes, in the late 80s the image quality of a GIF was considered “sharp.”) One of the first animated GIFs is this famous airplane.

What he wasn't asked to do was create a platform for animation. In fact, the spec sheet for the then-new file format clearly states that though GIFs could be used for very limited animation, that isn’t what they were made for.

But that’s largely what we use them for these days, which means we end up working under a lot of constraints. And creativity thrives under constraints! You have to experiment to leverage limitations and quirks and make them work to your advantage. When you make a GIF, you’re working with a limited color palette (less than 256 colors). Your animation has to be very short and simple or else your file size will be so big that the GIF is no longer easy to share / quick to load. The small file size might frustrate you, but it also might force you to think more abstractly about the most concise way to communicate something complicated.

Another defining constraint: GIFs generally loop. And since those loops are short, you’ll usually see this a GIF in its entirety a couple of times. The best GIFs take advantage of this constraint and make it a central component of their design.

One last incredible thing about animated GIFs: They’re not precious. People aren’t afraid to mess with them. So many animated GIFs are the result of people adding to or altering or juxtaposing existing media, which is sort of like a weird form of collaboration if you look at it from the right angle.

With all those things in mind, I started the challenge.

Since each of these were so small and self-contained (I worked on them once for a limited amount of time and then never returned to them), I felt free to make some that were purely formal or technological explorations, which is not typically my jam. I played around with the tools and applications to see the unexpected things I could do with them. Stakes were low, possibilities endless.

This project revived my passion for making things. Because of the medium’s limitations and my self-imposed one-GIF-per-day requirement, I couldn’t let what I made get too complex. The GIFs were quick, self-contained, and ultimately really joyful to create. I had to to embrace experimentation and overcome the fear of sharing "bad" design that plagues so many designers. If you force yourself to make and share something new every single day, guess what? Some of that stuff probably isn't going to be your best work, and that's all right. This is an attitude and approach that I've carried with me since starting my GIF project, and I think it's made me a much bolder and better designer.

Eventually, a cross-country move and a new job meant I was both more regularly inspired through my work and a whole lot busier, so I stopped making daily GIFs. But I have decided to keep up with weekly GIFs—and a lot of my colleagues in Chicago are now doing it with me. It sounds like a small project, but for us, it has made it easier to share half-baked ideas, inspire each other, and keep on making.

Need a little help getting started? I learned by converting from video to GIF with Photoshop, and this guide can explain how. And for those who are less technologically inclined or don’t have access to Photoshop, Giphy’s GIF Maker is a great tool.

In a previous job, I was really struggling to feel inspired or challenged. That’s not ideal when your job is to be creative and make things, so I was a bit desperate to find something that could help me rediscover the joy in making—after all, that was what had drawn me to becoming a designer in the first place.

I kept going over books, blogs, and videos, hoping for a moment where it all clicked and suddenly I became a chip whisperer. But it just wasn’t happening.

Then things changed. I bashed my fingers into my keyboard for days, failing over and over again until finally—it worked. I had a project idea that tickled my brain in just the right way. It was weird, and it was mine. I made something work, something I liked and that was just for me. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

Looking back, I can see now that what really changed my relationship to code was letting my creative process lead. I was trying to make “useful” stuff, and that's not always necessary when you’re learning. Let the weird in! We worry about how the computer thinks when we’re learning to code, assuming that it’s smarter. It’s not. It’s a dumb box with lots of opinions. When I started worrying less about how it thought and more about what I was trying to achieve, I was able to find little toeholds in the translation process. I was able to work backwards from an idea, and break it down into tiny little steps. These steps are what every code project is made of.

I wanted to help my colleagues glimpse this feeling of creativity and control over programming—without having them touch a computer. I’m a lover of generative art and have long been inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt. His works are sets of instructions that can be interpreted and performed by anyone. This is also how a computer works. You give it instructions and it interprets them to perform some kind of function. (Literally, the part of the computer that reads code is called an “interpreter.”)

Our studio has a bi-weekly tradition called Make(Believe)Time. At each session, a member of the studio comes up with a creative activity to get us out of our heads and thinking more playfully. It might be to invent a new game, design advertisements for a future Earth invaded by aliens, or exploring our senses through making something strange. Ben Swire runs Make(Believe)Time and helped me craft a session that made this translation of code come to life with needle and thread. Each person received sewing supplies and a blank manila card (made to look like an old Fortran punch card). Everyone was asked to write simple instructions for a stitch on the card. Here are a few:

Ben and I shuffled and distributed the cards into groups. We explained that each card is a statement, a simple bit of instructions to be interpreted by the individual sewer. When each person was done with their statement card, they were to pass it to their neighbor until the group had shuffled through all of the statements. Each group of sewers would be acting like a programming function, performing a collection of simple directives.

When a group was done performing their “function,” their data (aka, the cards) was passed to another group. Much like in a computer, data was passed from one function (output) to another where it was added to (input). We were a human computer!

We were delighted to see the wild differences between each group's interpretation. That balance between constrained instruction and broad interpretation touched an interesting space between active and passive creativity. It was fun and inspiring to see the wide range of outputs that came from such simple instructions.

We’d love to hear how you explain complex processes through tangible experience. Send us your story!

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Despite what I was led to believe, learning to code was excruciating. Throughout the process, I was convinced that I was dumb and should just get really, really good at Excel because that’s as close as I’d ever get to making a computer do anything by typing at it.

In the beginning, we hadn’t been assigned to client projects yet, so we found ourselves on what IDEO designers call “whitespace,” meaning we had some time on our hands while we waited for placements.

With so many newbies wandering the studio, and more joining the ranks every week, it was becoming hard to keep all the new faces straight. Our colleague Annette, one of our co-experience directors, saw an opportunity for us to revive a studio-wide program that set up any two IDEOers to go out to lunch on the studio’s dime once a month. The idea was to help establish new connections, but busy colleagues would often cancel lunch plans and the task of scheduling (and rescheduling) soon fell to one of our beloved leadership coordinators, Biz. As a result, this benefit had become severely underutilized.

Our mission: to use data science to (mostly) automate the scheduling process so that newbies and veterans alike could easily participate in the program. The tool would need to assign “optimal” groups of Chicago IDEOers, search their calendars for a mutually agreeable time, and send them an invitation to go to lunch together. Here’s how we did it:

1. Designing the perfect group

We started by asking a seemingly simple question: What makes a good group? To find out, we practiced our design research skills in some working sessions with Annette and Biz.

Annette suggested that we create groups of three, rather than two, based on social science research that finds triads are more conducive to sparking creative collaborations and community than dyads. That fact inspired us to call the program “Meet ‘n Three,” a play on the traditional Southern combo meal offering of a protein and three sides.

Together, we decided that groups should comprise three people whose paths don’t cross day-to-day, while also striking a balance of design disciplines—not all interaction designers or all data scientists. And an ideal triad would mix people who were new to the studio with those who had been around longer. With these principles ironed out, we got to building the algorithm.

2. Creating custom datasets

To build the groups, we needed some data on our coworkers. We turned to IDEO’s intranet to get a list of everyone who worked at a given IDEO location, their disciplines, and projects they’d worked on. We combined that with manually-created datasets that contained each person’s level of seniority and discipline. Using this data and the earlier criteria, we created an algorithm that randomly samples employees, generating one group at a time. Once a person is in one group, their likelihood of being chosen for another decreases; to spare their calendars, no employee can be in more than two groups.

The group is then assigned a score for its “novelty,” which includes the number of disciplines represented, the variety of seniority, and the number of projects shared between group members. The algorithm optimizes the score for an entire month’s worth of groups using a Monte Carlo approach. (In other words, we create many more groups than we actually need, and throw away all but those with the highest scores.)

3. Addressing the scheduling conflict

Once we have a group, all that’s left is to find a time for them to meet. Through the Google Calendar API, we were able to get a list of available times on people’s calendars. Since these times aren’t uniform, this data structure isn’t easy to work with. After many frustrating attempts to create a functional system, we realized that fellow data scientist (and Datascope co-founder) Mike Stringer had already solved this problem (albeit for a different reason). We used the Python library he created to perform unevenly spaced time series analysis, saved ourselves heaps of wasted time and energy, and learned a lesson: When surrounded by world-class nerds, phone a friend before trying to reinvent the wheel.

4. Putting the Meetbot to work

As designers, we knew that creating the algorithm was only half the battle—we also had to share our work to make it successful. To give the bot some personality, we created a mascot we dubbed Meaty the Meetbot, a friendly humanoid meatball on a mission to bring people together. We introduced Meaty (and his functionality) during an office-wide lunch meeting. The newly-minted Meetbot was better suited to the IDEO Chicago of 2018 than the old program: it scaled to accommodate the 45% increase in employees, and infused a little data science flavor. For the big finale, we sent out the first batch of invites all at once, so everyone received them at the same time.

Since Meaty’s initial rollout in late March, there have been 112 group lunches in Chicago (according to Google calendar), bringing together everyone from support staff to directors to designers. Word spread to other studios, and the Palo Alto and San Francisco offices are on deck to start their own group lunches. Meaty has also virtually connected IDEOers around the world, scheduling calls between design researchers in Cambridge and New York, and handling the time-zone-juggling challenge of scheduling global calls between Munich, Shanghai, and Tokyo.

Although Meaty the Meetbot was born as a silly thing to tinker with until we had “real work” to do, it’s had real impact. For us, it’s been a reminder that even in seemingly inane projects, data and algorithms can be used in service of human interactions. By letting a computer take over the grunt work, we freed up some (way more valuable) human time, making room for people to connect and create. Maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch.

Late last year, IDEO acquired data science firm Datascope, adding 18 data scientists to the Chicago studio’s roster overnight. We’re two of those data scientists.

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.

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

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

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

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