As the curtain parted on moooi’s 2022 exhibit, the audience was treated to a multi-sensory performance unlike any other: four synchronized robot scent diffusers telling a story through dance. As the robots—called Piro—swayed and dipped to the beats of a custom-designed soundscape, it was easy to forget the performers were made by a team of industrial designers and engineers in San Francisco.

The work expressed a future vision for what it means to humanize technology. Rather than design technology to make our lives more efficient, what if instead we designed technology to make life more beautiful?

For twenty years, moooi has seduced the world with bold, imaginative design. The firm, named after the Dutch word for beautiful, made its name by designing furniture and home goods that appeal to an interest in pushing the edges of form as much as function. Moooi came to IDEO looking to create an exhibit for the largest furniture fair in the world that might provoke the audience to imagine a world where design’s primary function was to inspire joy.

“Defy Gravity”: one of several experiential “worlds” moooi created for the 2022 Salone del Mobile. Each room had its own scent, soundscape, color, and digital experience.

Our process started by going wide. We presented 20 potential conceptual designs to the team, one of which moooi founder Marcel Wanders lovingly referred to as the “farting pet,” a robot scent diffuser that could walk around the home.

A scented smoke ring lingers in the air after Piro’s final crescendo.

From there, a team of IDEO designers enlisted the support of Catie Cuan, a choreographer who specializes in human-robot interaction, and Dutch sound design firm KLOAQ, to refine the concept into a four-minute performance piece.

Piro learned to mimic balletic human gestures.

The final result was technically involved: four robots moved independently, controlled by custom electronics and software designed to mimic the movements and grace of ballerinas. But in the performance itself, the complex mechanics disappeared, allowing the audience to experience not just what technology can do, but how it can make us feel.

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What happens when a designer and a classically-trained choreographer collaborate? Attendees of Salone del Mobile.Milano, the largest furniture fair in the world, got to see for themselves.

To build a climate-resilient future, we need an all-hands-on-deck approach across industries and organizations, as well as the leadership and collaboration of frontline communities themselves. 

To that end, IDEO and CSAA Insurance Group worked together to unite nine partner organizations, including Aon and the Environmental Defense Fund, to launch an open call for solutions to help communities prevent, prepare for, and recover from climate-related disasters. The goal of the Challenge was to surface actionable and scalable ideas that experiment with new technologies, models, and partnerships, then provide innovators with the support and funding they need to get their ideas off the ground and into the hands of frontline communities.

IDEO set these entrepreneurs up for success throughout the submission process, holding one-on-one conversations with participants, sharing constructive feedback on potential solutions, and developing their ideas and skill sets. The team also hosted workshop and panel sessions to grow community bonds and provide expertise on critical topics, including assessing climate risk and storytelling for impact. Hundreds of ideas came in from around the world, ranging from harnessing the power of AI, to building resilient infrastructures, to democratizing access to climate data, and more.

Once all of the ideas were in, a cohort of judges with a wide diversity of work and lived experience screened for concepts that were relevant, impactful, novel, community-informed, and equitable. At the end of the Challenge, the team chose 13 winning concepts with high potential for impact and partnerships, including Reef Rocket, which seeks to fabricate natural biocement reefs that reduce coastal flooding and erosion, and BurnBot, which is working to prevent wildfires by conducting controlled burns at scale.  

For these winning entrepreneurs, the end of the Challenge is just the beginning. Now, they are equipped with critical early funding, as well as a cohort of climate entrepreneurs, along with mentorship from IDEO, CSAA, and the other organizations. It’s a big step forward as they introduce new forms of equitable and transparent data, promote the voices of BIPOC communities, and bring to market new technologies that will protect and support frontline communities through this ongoing crisis. 

Read the Challenge Impact Report to learn more.

In the US alone, climate-related disasters cause $120 billion in damages annually. That figure is five times greater than 50 years ago, and projections are $2 trillion by the end of the century.

Nearly 90% of counties in the US declared a natural disaster over the last decade.

418

submissions

13

winners

$1M

in prizes

Every year, the NSF provides around 30 teams with up to $750,000 and a year’s worth of coaching, training, and collaboration to develop solutions for research areas like sustainable ocean use or combating fake news. Over the course of nine months, the teams learn how to uncover insights about human needs and design durable solutions for end users. But many of the scientists and experts in the program felt stretched by the idea of putting the needs of end users in the mix with their scientific testing—something few of them have been trained to do in their previous work.

To make that process feel more achievable, the teams built out prototypes and received guidance on refining and pitching their ideas along the way. IDEO joined the project as an innovation partner, facilitating hands-on workshops and creating “Science TV” episodes that could help the program reach a broader audience, deepening its impact now and in the future.

To help grantees get vulnerable, and evolve their ways of working, IDEO sent grantees to improv training  so that they could learn to build off each other. The team also took them to magic shows and on ghost tours in downtown San Francisco to learn the value of compelling storytelling in their work. The fun was part of the plan—gelling as a team and building relationships meant participants could make mistakes in front of one another. Being wrong doesn’t come naturally to academics, but it’s a key part of the design process, and a crucial part of solving complex problems .

Each year, a select group of teams move onto the next phase of the “coop-etition,” receiving up to $5 million in additional funding. And all of the participants leave with valuable new skills they can use to break out of their own silos and create human-centered, ground-breaking solutions for the rest of their careers.

When the NSF launched the Convergence Accelerator and made the radical move of bringing together teams from different disciplines, these academics, scientists, and industry partners didn’t have a shared language to move their ideas forward, and needed a structured approach to coming up with new solutions.

164

trained research teams

$200M

in federal support granted to AI-driven innovation, quantum technology, food security, sustainable materials, opportunities for people with disabilities, and more

IDEO and The Earthshot Prize built a nine-month Fellowship program and a five-day, in-person retreat to give Finalists the best shot at reaching the Prize’s ultimate goal: to scale the solutions that will repair our planet this decade.

To build out the new Fellowship, IDEO took a deep dive with the previous year’s Finalists to uncover where they needed critical support. This research revealed that the Finalists needed more ways to leverage the Earthshot platform, connect with potential partners to help scale their ideas, and build community with each other. The IDEO team then used those insights to create a set of recommendations The Earthshot Prize team could implement to create a more supportive and structured experience. Ideas they took forward included assigning a designated “Leap Advisor” who could provide guidance and assistance for each Finalist, as well as an advisor from the Prize’s Global Alliance Network who could partner on specific growth initiatives, like scaling product design, or policy change. 

Next up: the design of the retreat itself. Together, IDEO and the Earthshot team had three goals for the cohort’s week together in Windsor: focus on new forms of leadership and movement building, spur action through storytelling, and foster community.

The team developed the curriculum with leaders from Google X and Speed & Scale, alongside startups like UPSIDE Foods. They designed moments to build community, like paired walks and a chocolate-making workshop where Finalists could get to know each other away from the noise of meetings. 

Photographers captured the event to create assets for Finalists to use when pitching their ideas, and Finalists honed their storytelling skills. But what most remember is the magical moments of coming together as a cohort of next generation climate leaders who will help each other make an impact on the problems facing our planet, long after The Earthshot Prize has concluded.

The problems facing our planet are enormous, spanning industries, borders, currencies, and regulatory environments. Meaningful solutions will require leaders who can work across those lines.

30

climate solutions accelerated in first two years

I first saw Sharon during a workshop she delivered for Black Minds Matter. Sharon discussed the creative process as essential to mental health and considered the white dominance of the mainstream art world, all while making an original, delicate art piece with a scalpel and fine magazine paper. (I know—“multi-talented” doesn’t even cover it, right?)

In a session she later ran for IDEO, she created such a warm space while inviting us into the intimacy of her signature collaging process. She inspired us to see what it is when someone dictates the rules of their own art, career journey, how they define and are defined.

The pieces evolving from her “Seeing Ourselves” collection explore identity, representation, portraiture—when the ‘we’ and the ‘our’ are represented in art, education, media. Who is omitted from that narrative and how can art reclaim it?

Sharon is currently exhibiting at the Black Art Matters exhibition. She took a few minutes out of her day to answer some questions I had for her.

In one sentence, who are you?

I am an artist, currently creating work using handmade collage, and an educator who is passionate about changing predominant narratives of underrepresented, marginalized people.

What does a typical work session look like?

I work from a new home studio which I set up a couple of days before lockdown in March 2020. I recently resigned from my part-time job of 4.5 years in a London museum to work as a full-time artist. I am working on several different projects and I find joy in the varied nature of my work.

My work varies greatly from one day to the next: I am currently working on a project with a national museum; I have been commissioned to create a few bespoke collages; I curate creative programs for organizations; and I deliver workshops and create hand-assembled collages. Creating the collages helps me to relax, and in parallel, explore identity and representation of Black womxn.

Does sharing your process while creating such personal work ever feel too intrusive or voyeuristic?

I absolutely love sharing the process of creating my very personal art. My background includes the delivery of teaching sessions in political literacy, also known as citizenship education. I have also taught art workshops and have delivered self-esteem, getting back into work and personal development workshops to women who have lost confidence after a period of unemployment. I have worked with people of all ages from children to the elderly. Sharing my process is a further extension of this highly invigorating work.

How has your work and career evolved?

My career has evolved organically; there hasn’t been a linear route towards my current working life.

My work has been varied, but today, I can now see how so many of these seemingly disparate strands connect to inform my present practice. Early on after my first degree, I worked in recruitment sales and was a headhunter. The skills I gained there have made me feel less awkward when selling my work; I am not afraid to speak to new people.

Training teachers and people of all ages has given me the confidence and skills to deliver creative workshops both online and in person; it is something I absolutely love doing! I am passionate about connecting and communicating with others.

For much of my life I worked with marginalized groups in a variety of settings, ranging from boys in young offender institutions and the elderly living in sheltered housing to underrepresented museum audiences. This work all feeds into my current series entitled “Seeing Ourselves” which focuses on the underrepresentation of Black women. My projects all encourage others to “take up space” in environments where they may be unseen and to use our voices to create positive change and impact.

What does it mean to you to do what you love at this stage?

It feels so wonderful to be doing what I love at this stage! I have wanted to be an artist since I was a child. For many years it felt like I would not make it, but deep down, I did not give up hope.

Money wasn’t available for me to pursue my dreams in my teens, but as a mature student, I got a second degree in Fine Art. I took “the scenic route” and with hindsight I am glad I did. Things are happening exactly when they are supposed to.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

To contact a collector who has commissioned a bespoke, hand-cut collage.

How do you see the world in 2078?

Wow! This is a huge question, which immediately saddens me; in reality it’s unlikely I’ll still be around. It immediately makes me think about the world I would like my children to be living in. I would hope there would be less disparity of wealth and greater visibility and distribution of power across diverse groups.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

To return to Barbados for a holiday someday soon; it is my mother’s country of birth and I have not visited it for 11 years. Despite being born in London, Barbados also feels like "home."

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

I am creative crushin’ on Sheena Rose who is a phenomenal, multidisciplinary, Barbadian artist. Her work spans drawings, hand-drawn animations, performance art, paintings, and new media. I am particularly inspired by Sheena’s vast creative works with powerful overarching themes.

When I first came across Sheena’s work on Instagram, she was creating amazing pieces from her bedroom which inspired me to return to creating after a long time. Through seeing Sheena working in this way, I began to believe it was possible for me to do the same without the luxury of a studio at the time.

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Experiencing Sharon Walters’s work is like being given a comforting, personal gift.

How’d we end up on this culinary carousel, from learning about kelp’s role in addressing climate change to understanding the significance of seeing kernza, an unusual perennial grain, in the cereal aisle by 2040? We spend our days working in the food world, hearing about its challenges: Hunger is rampant, but so is food waste, and the food system is responsible for 25 percent of global carbon emissions. This leads many to believe that the system is broken. But it’s not broken—it was designed this way. And if it was designed this way, then it’s time for a redesign. That’s what IDEO’s new narrative podcast, Food by Design, is all about.

The experts featured are living proof that we can create a system that’s nourishing for people and the planet. Below are some of the new ideas, staggering statistics, and inspiring stories they generously shared with us. Let’s dig in.

A human-centered approach that prioritizes equity is required

The food system is inherently about food, but without humans, the system doesn’t work. Improving a system that’s been ravaged by multilayered crises—health, racial injustice, climate, and economic—depends on how we value those doing the actual labor in it. The role and importance of human-centeredness and equity (and the current lack of both) can’t be ignored.

We spoke with Saru Jayaraman, a professor at the University of California Berkeley who leads the Food Labor Research Center and founder of the non-profit One Fair Wage. In episode seven, she explains how the legacy of slavery still impacts how much money restaurant and food service workers make today—sometimes as low as two dollars and thirteen cents an hour—despite the cruel irony that the industry is the largest and fastest growing in the U.S.

Dr. Ricardo Salvador, Director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, adds to Saru’s perspective in a later episode: “We've been creating people that are affluent and at the same time we've been creating people that are poor,” he says. “All of that is a direct consequence of the way that the agricultural system in the United States was born. The system of slavery did not completely disappear. It has been transformed.”

We need both individual and structural change—it’s not an either/or situation

We’ve been told that individual action is enough, but we’ve also been told that it isn’t—we need bigger changes. Eating red meat is often the subject of this debate, as animal agriculture is the second-worst contributor to greenhouse gases after fossil fuels. But here’s the thing: we need both individual and structural change to design a better food system.

While doing research for our second episode, we met Lisa and Loren Poncia of Stemple Creek Ranch, cattle ranchers who now consider themselves carbon farmers. Through practices like rotational grazing (which allows pastures to rest and regenerate), they actually sequester carbon into the soil, keeping it from being released into the atmosphere where it contributes to greenhouse gases that cause climate change. When we recorded the episode, Stemple Creek Ranch was sequestering enough carbon to offset 285 passenger vehicles per year, and that number is growing.

With additional incentives, like those baked into the Federal Farm Bill, even more ranchers like Lisa and Loren might adopt these practices. “I wish that the federal government would jump on board and subsidize carbon and carbon sequestration instead of corn and soy,” says Loren. “In a very short amount of time, we'd have a lot of carbon stored in our soil.” (That’s a good thing.) In our sixth episode, we talk about how producing red meat conventionally can create nearly 10x the emissions of vegetables. But if individuals buy regenerative red meat from carbon ranches like Stemple Creek Ranch, it could help shift the rest of the industry this way and lead to more structural policy changes, having a huge impact on the health of the entire system.

Another example of the need for both individual and structural efforts comes from Karen Leibowitz and her partner, who established a climate-minded restaurant in San Francisco. Every detail of the Perennial aimed to minimize carbon emissions, from using recycled appliances and napkins meant to be fed as compost to worms to hydroponically-grown vegetables.

But just one business can't change the system. Armed with this insight, Karen and her partner closed the Perennial to scale their ambition across many restaurants—creating a more effective way to fight climate change. Their nonprofit Zero Foodprint asks restaurants to add a one percent charge to their bills and use those funds to fight climate change.

Embrace mental “flips” and blank slates...or cardboard boxes

Again and again, the individuals we interviewed shared that in order to create a better food system for all people and the planet, we must build something entirely new—whether reimagining the restaurant business model, altering what we believe is edible, or redefining the meaning of sustainability.

We talked to chef and restaurateur Camilla Marcus in our seventh episode, who is rethinking the power dynamic that gave rise to the harassment and racial and gender inequities in the restaurant industry. Her restaurant west~bourne turned the “front-of-house, back-of-house” hierarchy—which Camilla describes as a caste system in disguise—on its head. During an intensive training program, every team member becomes fluent in all areas of the business, from dishwashing to wine tasting. “If you envision a world a different way, you have to start from the beginning and be willing to redesign how everything is done,” says Camilla. “You can't just hope for a different outcome and keep using the same process and system.”

Like Camilla, Mr. Lyan—a professional moniker for Ryan Chetiyawardana—is another food visionary. Mr. Lyan was crowned world’s best bartender in 2015, and his bar Dandelyan, now reopened as Lyaness, was named the world’s best bar in 2018. He’s known for experimenting with “closed loop cocktails”—any waste from the production of these drinks is used as ingredients for future drinks. For instance, he pressure-cooks leftover citrus and uses the resulting flavorful stock to create fruit jelly desserts. He doesn’t stop at fruit: Mr. Lyan even boils down cardboard delivery boxes with lemongrass, chamomile, sugar, and water, then strains it and turns it into a syrup. “People saw it as an affront,” he tells us. “So much of what we faced was this idea that the world that we were inhabiting—you know, luxury food and drink—was at odds with the idea of sustainability.” (Until, of course, a restaurant critic said that the drinks were the best he’d ever had in the city.)

Nearly a year before we found ourselves professing our love to baby kelps, we were carpooling home from IDEO’s San Francisco studio to our homes in Oakland. As our conversation quite naturally ping-ponged from an upcoming CSA delivery to methane-producing cow burps to Indigenous agriculture to aquafaba (a chickpea byproduct) to workers’ rights, a creative lightbulb went off. And the idea for Food by Design was born.

We wanted to connect the dots across all these topics and better understand the potential opportunities for design. So we set out to explore the question: How might we build a climate-positive food system that favors the many instead of the few? We hope the array of voices and stories shared on Food by Design not only demonstrate the breadth, interconnectedness, and gaps of the food system, but just how many people depend on it being sustainably and equitably redesigned, and can help us do this, together. Listen to some of their stories today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune into your podcasts.

On a chilly December morning, Bri Warner gave us a tour of her kelp facility in Saco, Maine. The room was filled with giant tanks of seawater containing thousands of baby kelps. “We change their tanks constantly,” said Bri. “We play them music. When nobody's looking, I'll lean over and be like, ‘Hi, babies.’” On another occasion, we spent an entire afternoon chatting up Larisa Jacobson of Soul Fire Farm, a BIPOC-centered community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system.

While the text is close to coherent if you can read Latin, it appears as legible nonsense to the rest of us. Lorem ipsum looks realistic but doesn’t convey any information to the reader that could otherwise color their interpretation of the mockup. This is great for text-based layouts, but when it comes to placeholder data, we don’t really have an equivalent. What if we had something like Lorem ipsum... but for numbers?

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The numbers problem

This idea came from a real project: IDEO data scientist Chris Kucharczyk ran into a problem while prototyping a dashboard for a client. The dashboard was supposed to show sales data for business owners. He was using placeholder data in the mockup, but it just didn’t look right. At IDEO, we often use placeholder data in these mockups before we know what kind of real data we need. It allows us to prototype, then pivot quickly if and when we learn a different kind of data is needed.

By sharing a prototype, Chris was hoping it could help his team talk to the client and better understand what questions business owners would have when coming to the dashboard. More specifically, he and the team were wondering this: How do these business owners use data to help them run their business, and what would they change if they saw certain patterns in the data

The foreign language effect

We’ve learned that people often interrogate numbers more scrupulously than they do other parts of a design and are very sensitive to numbers looking “wrong.” Whether it's restaurant data or health data, a wrong number—even if it's a placeholder—causes the viewer to want to correct that "wrong-ness" rather than respond to the placement, color, or size of the numbers.

In fact, numbers that appear uninformed can derail a conversation even if the point of the conversation is to find out what kinds of numbers are needed. While mockups plainly look unfinished, numbers always look high-fidelity due to the “foreign language” effect.

For example, if you were to pick up a newspaper written in a language you didn't understand, your eyes physically look at that differently. But if that newspaper has charts or graphs, you'll be able to wonder what those are and what they mean because you can read and understand the numbers visually.

Back to the project. Chris had a few options. If he left the numbers at zero, the dashboard wouldn’t have anything to visualize. On the other hand, if he populated them randomly, it would look nonsensical. Any pattern chosen would need to be relevant to the larger context of the project. What he needed to do was come up with an alternative written language for numbers that mimicked the effect that using Latin has in copywriting and layout design.

Designing Norum Ipnum

To respond to this problem, we went down a creative rabbit hole with software designer Ben Syverson to design a collection of font families called Norum Ipnum ("No" as a play off the typographic shorthand of the numero № and "num" substitution as in "number") that are alternatives to numeral letterforms. They act as visual placeholders without conveying data. (The font families can be downloaded for free here!)

This is an example of how it might be used in a mockup:

Here’s how it all came together. In the IDEO Chicago studio, Chris and another data scientist, Joe Gambino, set up a foamcore board to capture ideas from the studio on Post-its.

They asked for people to add a fake digit idea to the board as they passed by. We got a lot of ideas to work from, but one idea stood out as an interesting exploration.

What if we used the tried and true seven-segment display as inspiration for what these numbers could look like? You might be familiar with this type of display from a digital watch or a microwave. The reason these displays are used in electronics is because they can communicate all ten numerals by “lighting up” patterns of the seven simple lines they contain.

Using the seven-segment display as inspiration, Joe then wrote a Python script to draw out all of the different non-numeral permutations of what a seven-segment display could show. We then took that print-out and starred the different characters that looked different enough from letters and numbers to have a working set of ten numerals.

This was a great start to narrowing down a set of digits. Using this set of digits, we continued the process using the brief: If these digits were the abstracted form of an original numeral, what did those numerals look like?

After this initial exploration, it seemed like there was something here we could work with. At this point, Ben suggested we do a range of weights and typefaces of these numerals to help aid in layouts, and offered to work on a serif version. Ben recommended the fantastic tool, Glyphs, that we used to build these font families, and after a few revisions, we ended up with the collection presented here.

There are two font families in the set: sans and segment (with serif to hopefully come in the future). For sans, these have six different weights and italics. They are also selectable between tabular and proportional lining.

We hope these fonts are fun to play with and useful for your mockups. Please let us know if you find an interesting use for them! The families are Open Font licensed under the SIL-OFL, and we have provided the Glyph App source files, so feel free to make your own variants and add to the collection. The Github repository can be found here.

We hope you find some fun uses for it!

If you’re a designer, chances are you’ve heard of Lorem Ipsum—a block of text loosely based on Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum that's commonly used as placeholder copy in graphic layouts.

Some speculate that this rising tide might lift all boats, nudging every business to become a subscription business. But as the last six months have shown, the impact of COVID-19 has been unevenly distributed; winners and losers are determined by how favorable their offering is to the everything-from-home context. While all companies are working to make their products and services remote-friendly, this can obscure the fundamental question of how to design a compelling and intentional membership proposition, one that can endure and flex to exogenous shocks. In this article, we’ll explore six levers for designing membership and fostering loyalty right now and in the future.

A membership offering must accomplish either of these two things

There is no one formula for designing a compelling membership offering. But membership should be more than a basic loyalty program. It must offer either exceptional rational value or deep emotional value.

Rational value implies tangible benefits: customers know exactly what they’re getting from the offering, and it’s easy and straightforward to justify and explain their continued loyalty. Emotional value is intangible but at least equally powerful. While it may not be quantifiable, it creates genuine connection that generates sustained engagement and loyalty.

There are various levers—value drivers to design a membership offering around—that ladder up to and provide rational or emotional value. Cost, convenience, and incentives and rewards provide rational value; identity, community, and experience provide emotional value.

Designing for rational value: Cost, convenience, and incentives and rewards

LEVER 1: COST

One fundamental value proposition of a membership model is its ability to offer customers savings. By committing to a monthly or annual fee, subscription-based organizations can often afford to provide members with preferential pricing. This is the most basic element and value driver of a membership rooted in rational value.

One of the originators of the warehouse model, Costco offers members bulk quantities of goods at attractive prices. Costco prioritizes savings beyond other benefits, like high-touch customer service or an elevated store experience. And yet, Costco consistently receives top marks for customer satisfaction. They achieve this through an unwavering understanding and dedication to their key value proposition.

Costco has been able to sustain a successful business rooted in cost savings because of significant economies of scale, which help create barriers of entry for potential competitors. In many other industries, attempts to define and differentiate a value proposition on price and discounts will almost inevitably lead to brutal competition and eventual commoditization. Accordingly, companies considering cost as a membership lever must carefully think through the strategic and viability implications within their particular market.

Prompts for teams:

• Do your brand and mission align primarily with the idea of providing savings?
• Can you provide savings to customers while maintaining a sustainable business?
• What benefits will you not provide in order to deliver on cost savings?

LEVER 2: CONVENIENCE

As they say, time is money. As a source of rational value, convenience is as compelling as cost savings. In today’s convenience economy, technology is being leveraged to save time and effort in every market and pocket of daily life.

Amazon’s largest lever for rational value is the convenience it provides members. For an annual fee of $119, Amazon Prime members can get almost anything they could possibly need shipped to them in two days or (increasingly) less. This one benefit has allowed Amazon to forge a relationship with members that transcends loyalty to resemble something closer to dependence. This convenience proposition has become so powerful that it arguably provides members emotional value, too. Ask almost any new parent and they’ll probably rank Amazon somewhere between a utility and a member of the family. Providing rational value to such a degree that it also drives emotional value is a rare achievement, but demonstrates how impactful convenience can be.

Prompts for teams:

• How critical is convenience to the value proposition that you provide customers?
• What are the biggest challenges and bottlenecks your customers face in fulfilling their needs on a daily basis that your industry, market, or product area can help address?
• Can your company provide something to customers that they truly can’t live without?

LEVER 3: INCENTIVES & REWARDS

Incentives and rewards are often employed as part of membership programs to drive engagement and encourage specific behaviors such as sign-ups, spending, and referrals. They tend to be utilized in industries with limited differentiation, such as airlines and credit cards.

The credit card industry in particular has developed an incentives model that uses referrals, sign-up bonuses and points multipliers to drive customer acquisition and encourage early spending. This model has quickly become both the industry norm and customer expectation. In 2016, Chase made headlines by offering 100,000 points for its Sapphire Reserve card, the most extreme sign-up incentive the space had seen. Chase also won customer favor by simplifying the points to dollar value to 100:1, a calculation which many other credit cards obscure to make comparison more difficult.

There’s no denying the ability of financial incentives to drive behavior. But keep in mind, space for innovation is slim and an over-reliance on this lever runs the risk of creating a transactional relationship with the customer. Depending solely on financial incentives can also attract customers who are focused on “gaming” the system. Moreover, it creates an inevitable race to the bottom where eventually no player can viably compete. Balancing incentives and rewards with other rational or emotional value drivers can help mitigate these effects.

Prompts for teams:

• What is truly differentiating about the incentives and rewards that you can offer?
• How can you design your incentives and rewards to be less transactional and instead reinforce your core value proposition?
• How might you leverage incentives and rewards with other sources of value in your loyalty program?

Designing for emotional value: Identity, community, and experience

LEVER 4: IDENTITY

Some companies and brands are able to command loyalty through the strength of their identity, which is reflected in their brand, mission, or values. A membership rooted in identity is enabled when a company can rally customers around shared values and reinforce them through its offering, allowing members to see and express themselves through their participation.

One example is Ellevest, an investing platform for women that aims to educate, empower, and advance its customers in pursuit of their financial goals and to close the gender wealth gap. Ellevest differentiates itself from the many other investing options in the market through this dedicated focus, which is reflected in both its purpose and product—its algorithm recommends an investment plan that is designed to help address the gender investing gap.

In June 2020, Ellevest added a membership program to its core product that includes new features and services that strongly tie to their core mission. In addition to banking and debit products, the membership provides career workshops, coaches, and financial planners. While all of these benefits are designed to further members’ financial success, Ellevest is selling more than these services: they’re asking members to buy into their mission. An Ellevest member could receive similar products from any number of institutions. Being a part of the membership signals the salience of identity—both that it is key to the experience of managing money and an alignment of values.

Prompts for teams:

• What does your organization stand for and what are its most powerful, emotionally rich territories for design and differentiation?
• How can you tap into your organization’s mission or purpose as a way to create more emotionally resonant services and experiences?
• What would it look like to evolve the membership offering to reflect these values or enable members to express themselves?

LEVER 5: COMMUNITY

When community is a key value proposition of a membership, members not only feel connection with the brand, but also a sense of belonging and kinship with other members. From religious communities to career networks to social media, being part of a group creates powerful emotional currency.

WW, formerly known as Weight Watchers, is a company that has differentiated its membership offering through community. The organization’s promise is rooted in its origin story: a Queens mom who began inviting people into her home to discuss weight loss strategies. The concept quickly grew into a global organization that outlives various fad diets and health trends because of its core value: guiding people in their weight loss journeys through social and emotional support. Whereas before, every diet and nutritional program was designed to be undertaken alone, WW was designed to be interactive and communal through weekly group meetings. This structure provides people with support, inspiration, and accountability. The group convenes to share challenges and victories and provide each other with encouragement. The impact and effectiveness of this value proposition is reflected in WW's strong retention: many members continue attending meetings for years even after achieving their goal.

Prompts for teams:

• How authentic is the promise of community for your organization? Do members truly interact and benefit from other members?
• What is the role of exclusivity in your membership? Exclusivity is a powerful driver for people, but what does it say about your brand and what it stands for?
• How can you empower your community with roles, tools, rituals, and shared experiences?

LEVER 6: EXPERIENCE

Finally, there’s the element of experience, which can be a vague, squishy term that many companies claim to offer. People are drawn to memberships that provide unique, enriching, and inspiring experiences. An experience can be physical or digital, a product or service, communal or individual. While it can be delivered with pomp and circumstance, meaningful experiences can also be remarkably simple.

An example of an exceptional experience born out of a simple idea is SoulCycle. Interestingly, SoulCycle doesn’t technically offer membership; they sell individual drop-in classes or class packs. But with its cult-like following of diehard riders, SoulCycle certainly feels like a membership. The fitness start-up achieved this status through their distinct vision for what a spin class should be. The founders recognized that when exercising, people are looking not only for a physical release, but a mental one, as well. While most cycling classes focused on providing a great workout, SoulCycle designed an entirely different kind of ride: a collective, uplifting, and emotional experience that is as much a part of its value proposition as the sweat.

During COVID-19, SoulCycle has suffered, given its reliance on in-studio group sessions. By contrast, Peloton is soaring because it was designed to be experienced at home. As SoulCycle pivots to offer their own at-home bike, the way it evolves the experience to elevate its collective and emotional DNA will be crucial for success.

Prompts for teams:

• What are the needs that your experience is designed to serve?
• How can experience be a differentiating factor of your membership offering?
• What qualities define your experience, and how might you elevate or amplify the value they provide your customers?

The power of offering rational and emotional value

Cost, convenience, and incentives and rewards can be powerful sources of value in membership because they offer rational, straightforward value. However, because they provide limited dimensions for differentiation, they can lead to competition and be challenging to sustain. Designing around emotional tenets—identity, community, and experience—presents different starting points and opportunities for membership offerings.

But memberships that draw on more than one of these levers—particularly those that generate both rational and emotional value—will be especially effective. While Costco’s core value proposition is rooted in cost savings, its business provides emotional value, too, through its famous food court and food and beverage sampling experiences and additional services. This combination of rational and emotional value has proven incredibly compelling in both customer experience and membership proposition: Costco has some of the highest customer satisfaction scores and retention rates in the business.

Keep your purpose, mission, and value proposition top of mind

The six levers we discussed can individually, or more powerfully in combination, form the foundation of a differentiated, value-driving membership offering. But in any of these territories, companies must have (or earn) their customers’ permission to play.

At its core, membership demands an ongoing relationship and commitment from its customers. Designing membership for this level of loyalty boils down to both an organization’s value proposition and who they fundamentally are: What is the essence of what’s being provided through membership, and what does the company stand for? And critically, do these two things match—does the membership feel authentic to a company’s purpose?

By aligning purpose with a compelling rational or emotional value proposition, companies can cultivate reciprocally authentic and lasting customer loyalty.

Illustrations by Simon Heather

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In the last decade, we’ve witnessed the explosion of subscription-based “membership,” from movies, music, and audiobooks to elite global communities, razor blades, and dog food. While this phenomenon has been fueled in part by the growth of digital channels, targeted marketing, and the rise of the sharing economy, what’s ultimately driving companies across industries to adopt a version of this business model is the irresistible promise of recurring revenue and sustained customer loyalty.

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.