Globally, the European Commission reports, a truckload of textiles heads to landfills or is incinerated every single second.

The fashion industry accounts for some 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Less than 1 percent of the materials used to make clothing is recycled, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The best way to keep clothes out of a landfill? Don’t make them.

Picture this: Not long ago, it wasn’t unusual for a customer to walk into an H&M store and not be able to find a basic white t-shirt in their size. Why? Like most long-established retail operations, H&M was operating with a push model—placing seasonal bets on what the demand for a given item of clothing might be, locking orders far in advance, and hoping that they were able to sell out. Make a mistake in that kind of model, though, and you can end up with customers unable to find the basics they rely on, or excess inventory you can’t sell. That’s a problem for the business, but for the environment as well—and one that doesn’t fit H&M’s aggressive sustainability goals.

Though H&M had tried to tackle the problem before, the launch of the H&M Group Design Studio, co-created with IDEO, gave the retailer the confidence to go after it again. The team started out by mapping out the complex network of people that make up its supply chain across the globe, meeting with everyone from designers to garment suppliers, logistics managers, and even folks selling the final product in H&M stores. 

They then created an algorithm for more precise ordering, as well as a tool that provides a shared view of information. Instead of placing orders, the new automated flow—dubbed “Cruise Control"—allows staff to work with a demand forecast that gives them more time to focus on customer-centric operations, like providing guidance and inspiration. It also makes it easier for H&M to follow the demands of the market, and place much more accurate bets on what consumers will want, when. Already, H&M has significantly increased sales while cutting excess inventory—a result that improves its bottom line, as well as its environmental impact.

Estimates project that by 2030, global apparel consumption will hit 102 million tons.

‍

22%

reduction in stock during a pilot program

34%

increase in sales during a pilot program

To foster creative projects that spoke to the needs of local communities and environments, the BSA began to engage its members in collaborative, user-led design. The organization launched its first-ever innovation challenge, putting out a call for all members to pitch their ideas for projects in the built environment.

The BSA expected those pitches to have dollar signs attached. To the organizer’s surprise, only one asked for funding. The rest requested less tangible, but equally meaningful support: advice, connections, specific expertise. Those are resources that the BSA has aplenty, but hadn’t learned how to leverage well.

From that first go at an innovation challenge, the BSA learned how to better support its members. It also learned that to lead with purpose and make strategic choices, one must develop the confidence to say no. Instead of spreading itself thin across many projects, the organization decided to take small steps, focusing on one initiative at a time, so that it can deliver focused impact and stay true to its evolving mission.

With 36% of global energy going to buildings and 8% of global emissions caused by cement alone, the architectural community is inextricably intertwined with both the causes and solutions related to climate change.

‍

According to a survey conducted by the AIA, the architecture profession in the US is less diverse than the population as a whole. This lack of diversity can contribute to a disconnect between architects and the communities they serve.

31

submissions received from innovators in the Boston region working on equity and sustainability challenges

5

innovation teams invited to pitch ideas

The resources that NYU students needed were organized by administrative department, and buried on disparate websites and calendars. But students don’t think in terms of departments—they just need to know where their classes are.

All of this became patently clear as IDEO shadowed students. Team members visited classrooms, walked with them through their days, and hosted pop-ups in highly trafficked areas to get ideas from passersby. That helped the team develop a common understanding of the overall student journey and grounded employees in the key moments that can either make or break a student’s experience. Visualizing their journey helped departments gain a shared understanding of the fractured communications challenge and develop possible solutions.

To synthesize those insights, we formed cross-functional action learning groups, challenging existing practices at the university and coming up with new ways of working. Participants came from a diverse set of departments, including enrollment management, student affairs, marketing and communications, IT, global inclusion, student services, the provost’s office, digital communications, and more. The cohorts sketched early hypotheses and got feedback from faculty, administrators, and students from all of NYU's undergraduate schools to refine initial concepts.

Collaborating with students gave staff a first-hand look at what students were struggling with and a way to engage students directly in addressing those challenges. Just as importantly, there was an overall culture shift at NYU: Administrators started with questions instead of agendas, came together around a table, and reached beyond their job descriptions to meet the needs of students.

First-year students reported receiving hundreds of paper forms, and email from more than 70 unique senders.

‍

NYU needed to offer students the right resources at the right time—and collaborate to serve them as a unified administration.

New services

in-production include centralized calendars, dynamic campus mapping, and customized notifications

Design-thinking cohorts

now support the student experience

Diversity alone isn’t enough—in marketing or any other facet of business. Today’s brands must authentically engage with and create the conditions for co-design with existing communities.

That sort of deep, meaningful engagement with customers doesn’t happen over Instagram. It requires a playbook, a prototype, and a healthy amount of trust. So, IDEO worked with Athleta and Gap to tap into the wisdom of a council of women who represent intersectional identities and lived experiences. The council surfaced powerful insights for the brand, like the fact that active women don’t need a brand to empower them—they already feel powerful.

After only a few weeks, Athleta experienced the difference between research and a truly reciprocal relationship. The way their brand engages with communities is adding depth, understanding, and authenticity to Athleta’s content, products, and experiences. And women can feel the difference.

76% of US adults say that the media promotes an unattainable body image for women.

‍

Fewer than 1 in 10 businesses review for inclusion as part of product design and marketing campaigns.

>2X

user growth in 2022

13,000+

Athleta WellPro well-being providers active on the platform

‍

What should a passenger’s experience feel like? How much space should be allocated to each passenger? What were the tradeoffs? The folks in marketing had one idea, while the folks in engineering had another. Spreadsheets were involved, but we weren’t making much progress.

Our project team didn’t have all of the answers either, but we thought of one way that we could help. We took over a section of our San Francisco studio and spent a week building a full-scale shell of a plane out of wood, foam core, and cardboard. Our intention was to create a dynamic space for physical and digital experimentation. We then invited our clients to host their next meeting inside the “plane.”

Once inside, the trade-offs were clearer. The team could picture what different seat configurations might feel like; they could move things around as they visualized various options. Prototyping revealed a level of granularity and specificity the team simply couldn’t access over Zoom or through conversation. What started out as a series of abstract questions suddenly became tangible.

When you work in the mobility space, the projects you work on are big—literally. It’s not just the size of a car, but the size of a train, an airport, even a city. While creating low-fidelity prototypes of products and systems of this magnitude might seem impossible, prototypes are a tried-and-true tool for learning about your customers and refining your product design. They are also equally valuable for learning, aligning, and collaborating as an organization. When it comes to larger-than-life challenges in the mobility space, here are three ways prototyping can help.

Prototyping breaks down barriers

Many established mobility companies have spent decades developing processes that have allowed them to build safe, high-quality products at scale. But those methods don’t always work when adapting to a rapidly shifting market. When it came time for our team to work with a leading automaker to rethink the future of the commercial van, we all knew it would demand new ways of working. Together with their team, we built a new collaboration space in the heart of their engineering building to shake people out of their usual workflow. The walls were covered with pictures of vans in action, quotes from potential users, and in-progress work. In the middle of the space sat “the rig,” a purposefully unfinished prototype van made from modular aluminum and hand-cut cardboard parts. This was far from the polished models of car shows.

Instead of putting this space under lock and key, the team put up posters throughout the engineering building inviting folks to join them. When that effort didn’t get much traction, a member of the team proposed an idea. He simply wedged the door open and posted a sign that declared: “open door policy.” The message was simple. We wanted people to build with us. And the people, and the ideas, followed.

Unfamiliar faces started to pop into the space and populate the prototype van with new mirrors, door handles, and smart sensors while other groups debated strategy across the room. What started with a single project space grew, eventually morphing into a dedicated innovation lab that is collaborating across the organization to tackle the future of mobility.

Prototyping challenges assumptions

Several years ago, IDEO worked with Toronto Pearson International Airport to revitalize the airport’s operations from the passenger experience to the baggage handling process. Baggage handling operations are particularly important, as they’re a key metric for measuring airport efficiency, service quality, and performance. They’re also very complicated. Baggage handling involves multiple organizations, thousands of contract workers, and even more suitcases, moving between planes and carousels all around the world.

As contractors, baggage handlers aren’t often brought into the process to help redesign operations. But their perspective is invaluable. So together, IDEO and Toronto Pearson decided to hold a “baggage olympics” for operations employees, passengers, and baggage handlers to test, build, and improve prototypes of early baggage handling ideas. They landed on a simple but effective solution: color-coded signs, clear iconography, and guidance on where baggage should be placed. Not only did the exercise streamline airport operations, but it also changed everyone’s idea of how different groups of people could work together and how operations should work in the future.

As Darin Juby, Director of Baggage Services, told IDEO: “The work to reimagine baggage handling taught us how to prototype and collaborate—it reprogrammed us with a new mindset and way of working. When the pandemic hit two years later, because we had laid the groundwork, we were able to pivot quickly and cost-effectively in the midst of an unforeseen crisis."

Prototyping reveals unexpected needs

Bringing in potential customers to test out prototypes is a pretty common practice among design teams. But often in the automotive space, users do not have a chance to interact with prototypes until much later in the design process. Even then, they are often restricted to testing out highly refined models in tightly controlled sessions.

It’s far more rare to bring parents and children into your design space and invite a range of stakeholders with different perspectives, hypotheses, and critical questions to watch them play in an early prototype firsthand. But that’s exactly what we did with our partners at one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers.

While we had been talking about bringing people into the lab, it wasn’t until families were engaging with our designs that we realized just how eye-opening it was. In one session, we watched alongside marketing, design, strategy, and product development leaders as a family played a game in the front of the car. Halfway through the game, a child pulled her mom to the back for some one-on-one time, pretending they were looking out at stars.That seemingly simple interaction inspired our team.

The team renamed the prototype Stargazer, and it helped changed the conversation about these vehicles. Decision-makers for this vehicle portfolio were bringing an empathy for the lives of these users into meetings, and talking more about how to foster quality family time than vehicle features and functions. Seeing our prototype in action extended customer empathy and understanding beyond marketing execs, ensuring that teams across the multinational organization were considering user needs from the outset.

Prototyping unlocks possibilities

Throughout my work on mobility projects at IDEO, prototyping has been the best tool for shaking up entrenched thoughts about how teams should work together. It not only provides teams with an opportunity to test assumptions and generate radically new ideas, but it also helps spark alignment and build confidence across disparate stakeholders. In some projects, embracing prototyping has even led to the development of new ways of working and labs that live on far beyond the launch of a product.

For those tackling challenges within the mobility space, and are eager to experiment with prototyping, start small. Take over a conference room, invite different voices in, construct a cardboard model, and watch your organization transform.

‍

Late last year, we sat on a Zoom call with executives at an organization redefining commercial aviation. They had some critical decisions to make about their first commercial aircraft.

“You had to build serious cred with them for them to give a sh*t at all, because there’s no consequence,” she says.

Her solution: Making lessons less about the curriculum, and more about engaging kids in the scary, quickly-evolving events shaping our lives. “I’d show some slides and ask if anyone had heard about [the event] and what their questions were. We’d talk about the facts of the situation,” she shared. “I tried to get them excited about their knowledge of [current events].”

In 2020, America’s students and teachers experienced a full-blown disaster, and teachers were the front-line responders. As they and their students were reduced to rectangles on a screen, they had no choice but to lean into innovation, coming up with solutions like having students create hype videos about their favorite books to encourage classmates to read them, leveraging home kitchens to create lab lessons, and using data to evaluate how their students are doing with learning from afar. Under the worst possible circumstances, they came up with solutions that will improve education for the better, in this moment, and for the future.

IDEO and PowerSchool were so inspired by their work that we partnered to research the way teachers hacked, persisted, and made do to uncover clues to innovation. Last year, we interviewed teachers, administrators, teacher coaches, and education experts to get a close up look at how teachers innovated in 2020 and 2021, and how we as designers and makers might learn from their work.

Breaking down silos in the name of collaboration

When this crisis thrust even first graders out of their classrooms and stuck them in front of computers with varying degrees of Wifi—and supervision—teachers had to throw out the rule book. Both expert and mentor teachers alike were caught on their heels, and their only option was to innovate.

To meet this extraordinary demand for real-time innovation, they turned to one another—peers in their buildings as well as online learning communities. Teachers were no longer experts, they were almost “lead learners”—humbly fostering collaboration with one another and pushing forward to develop an entirely new way of working in real time. "The pandemic has enabled so much more collaboration than before,” explained Christine, an elementary school art teacher in Massachusetts. “I've seen techniques done in new ways, skills taught in ways I never would have thought to teach them. This is an opportunity to see how each other teaches!" What’s more, when even seasoned teachers were getting used to an entirely new context, mentor/mentee relationships began to shift, as everyone had ideas to share with each other. A new teacher manager in a district in California told us that “there were a number of examples where the mentor was certainly a more experienced educator, but not nearly as experienced or fast at learning technology, so there was an exchange of skills.”

Teachers were forced into this situation, but their reaction is one that makers and designers should learn from. You might ask yourself—who is it absolutely nuts that I don’t already work with? Who would you call for help if everything fell apart? It might be a person you think of as a friendly competitor. Or it could be someone whose work context just seemed too different—maybe they are more junior, or work in a non-profit setting. At this point, what humanity really needs is connection with one another. To create it, we must break down the silos we’re keeping up. It’s time to rethink the divisions we have between departments, companies, and even sectors to speed up our collective innovation.

Building tighter learning loops

One of the biggest challenges that teachers faced in experimenting with so many new tools was determining what was actually working. After all, rapid prototyping is only as useful as the learning you can apply to the next prototype. Teachers couldn’t afford to wait until grading periods to analyze how it was all working out.

The remote setting opened up the opportunity to work more closely with individual students one-on-one and to personalize learning experiences and methods to meet their needs. Technology also helped them better understand each student’s progress, enabling them to tailor their instruction the next day. More teachers began leveraging instant feedback tools, even as they faced more variability in student knowledge and skills.

Hannah, a secondary math teacher, dove into new apps and services she started using to track student progress to make instruction more personalized, explaining that rather than going on gut feel, “I can genuinely say I know which kids aren’t making the right progress.” When students and families could see educators iterate on lesson plans each week, and make feedback immediately actionable, everyone was able to take a collective breath and feel the progress. Even if the changes were relatively small, they knew that they were being listened to. Teachers built new processes and improved trust.

Maybe you already do rapid prototyping in your work and have formed tight learning loops. Consider how you might use them as a means of not just learning, but showing your users that you’re learning. Internally, we all could be using technology to do daily micro-check moments with our teams and collaborators, and get even more serious and actionable after receiving real time feedback. Imagine a working world where the last five minutes of every meeting or collaboration were dedicated to asking ourselves how did that go? What could we do better next time?

Maintaining a laser focus on what’s most relevant

In some ways, students had their own form of a “Great Resignation” in 2020. They had previously been held captive in school rooms that weren’t catering to them, and their new at-home context meant teachers had to rethink how they were reaching students. “We’re messing around with our schedule,” explained Evan, a middle school principal. “We’re trying to create more space for more things that we say we value.”

Teachers had been operating under a 180-day school year for decades and have optimized their content to fit standard school hours—maybe you’ve been doing the same with your five day work week. During distance learning, teachers had no idea how much time they would actually get with students on any given day, leading them to simplify their content and get strategic about making every minute count.

In an essay from 2003, Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, stresses the importance of “subtracting.” “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit.” It isn’t just about prioritizing what’s most important; it’s about not holding on to the parts that don’t serve us anymore, even if they have already cost us years of effort. We need to consider how to do more with less, and how to subtract what’s not serving us and those around us.

Be human first

Teachers have always been concerned about their students, but the pandemic brought that concern to a new level. (You, too, might have experienced more personal stories, tears, and vulnerability at work!) We saw teachers get creative about meeting students’ emotional needs—trying things like swapping out detention for meditation, or having a weekly “campfire” in class to circle up and share how everyone was doing. They extended deadlines, accepted late work, and allowed students to retake exams. Teachers brought more of themselves to school, showing up as humans first and foremost and prioritizing care before content.

As Jennie, a high school teacher in Ohio explained, “I just have more grace for everyone. Are you lying to me about homework? Maybe. Do you have a reason to be lying? Maybe. I think it’s made me a better teacher. I’m more compassionate. Life’s hard."

As innovators, we too need to build in flexibility for the fallibility that comes with being human, and find ways to bring more humanness to our leadership. We must find ways to prioritize the health and wellness of the people we work with above everything else.

—

At both of our organizations, and hopefully at yours, teachers are inspiring us to break down arbitrary siloes, cut the fluff, show we’re listening, and be more human. But they’re not the only innovators we should be watching right now. The heroic, hard-working, dynamic first responders of the pandemic—nurses, social workers, librarians, counselors—are also on the front lines of innovation. They are adapting, growing, testing, and changing at a rapid pace in a way that all business leaders could be taking lessons from.

Read the full Teaching in Flux report, authored by Jen Halls, Ridima Ramesh, and Brian Standeford.

When COVID-19 lockdowns were in full effect, Amanda, then a reading coach in a California school system, was faced with an impossible challenge: figuring out how to get kids, home alone, to log into Zoom for lessons, when no one would be there to make them do it.

In the first phase of our work, we tackled what some might consider “low hanging fruit” in the work toward Net Zero: we estimated our carbon footprint, offset our greenhouse gas emissions, switched to renewable energy, experimented with a modest carbon tax, and improved our responsible retirement investment options.

While these strides are significant, there is still so much more to do—and time is of the essence. There are countless ways forward, but we’re eager to share four next steps we have in mind.

1. Track and manage emissions (Part 2)

Building on our previous exploration, we’re ready to tackle phase two of emissions accounting. At the top of our priority list is identifying a comprehensive emissions accounting solution to track and manage down our Scope 3 emissions. It’s difficult to imagine how we will empower IDEOers to make sustainable decisions without giving them access to data about the environmental impact of those choices. Afterall, what’s the point of managing down your emissions if you don’t get credit for working with Clean Co. over Dirty Co.? Investing in an emissions accounting platform will help get us one step closer to estimating IDEO’s carbon footprint and identifying viable climate-friendly alternatives at scale. From there, we hope to experiment with things like internal carbon taxes or incentives for individuals and teams to manage their carbon footprint.

2. Embed sustainability throughout the project cycle

Despite the increase in climate-forward projects IDEO has taken on, we are still not fully set up to account for the downstream implications of our work. With that in mind, we’re exploring what it would look like to introduce sustainability at every touchpoint of the project lifecycle—from initial client conversations to final deliverables. In practice, this might look like sustainability design reviews with external experts or developing design principles and toolkits like The Circular Design Guide to support climate-conscious work. Ultimately, we hope to foster a culture where teams feel equipped to explore and develop best practices around sustainable work. Regardless of what form this takes, we need to develop a way to track the downstream impact of our projects and deliverables. Ideally, that system would plug into our emissions accounting platform—neither of which we have today.

3. Balance what’s impactful with what’s visible

In order to meaningfully reduce IDEO’s global emissions, we prioritized action that tends to be impactful for our carbon footprint, but invisible to everyday IDEOers and our clients. For example, while switching to renewable energy did not trigger obvious changes to the everyday experience at IDEO, it reduced our global carbon footprint by 4%. These changes can seem at odds with changes that are highly visible yet are often less impactful (e.g., eliminating single use plastics across IDEO). In order to ensure our everyday experience at IDEO does not undermine the climate commitments we have made, we need to balance what is impactful and what is highly visible. This might look like developing frameworks to help project teams weigh the tradeoffs between client travel and environmental impact, holding inter-studio competitions to switch to sustainable food vendors, or identifying a broad set of replacement suppliers for more sustainable goods throughout our studios.

4. Reset industry norms

Let’s face it. If a competitor is willing to get on a plane, we almost certainly will do the same and vice versa. To create the conditions for IDEO to thrive while meeting its climate commitments, we need to reset industry norms and work alongside other creative consulting firms to reimagine the ways of doing business in the 2020s and beyond. This may look like joining or starting a creative climate pledge for companies operating in a climate-forward way, or inviting direct competitors to join our kyu climate action learning group.

As we make progress toward IDEO’s climate commitments, we will continue to experiment, iterate, and learn. Most importantly, we’re eager to learn alongside you. Time is precious and we all need to collectively accelerate toward our respective commitments. In the spirit of co-creating a more sustainable future, we invite you to continue the conversation with us by contacting our team. We’re eager to learn about the steps you are taking, the lessons you’ve learned, and what’s next.

Over the past year, IDEO has been working toward meeting a series of wide-ranging climate commitments.

The report outlined that over the next decade, we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% annually, a daunting reality that has been reiterated in recent IPCC updates. That means reducing our emissions by over half in less than 8 years. This is one of the most critical challenges of our decade, if not century.

As part of IDEO’s Net Zero strategy, we knew we couldn’t just invest in carbon offsets, we also had to do our part in removing emissions from the atmosphere. In many ways, the pandemic accelerated us toward that path. From 2019 to 2020, our emissions were slashed from ~14,500 t CO2e to ~6,400 t CO2e respectively. But we knew we needed to do more, especially with IDEO’s shift to embracing hybrid working models and their unknown travel-based emissions implications.

In 2021, we implemented three interventions to further reduce our carbon footprint. We switched to renewable energy, incentivized reductions in project-based emissions, and made improvements to our responsible retirement portfolio. Some of these efforts were successful, others less so. We’re eager to share what worked and what didn’t.

Intervention 1: Switching to renewable energy

There are several options for switching to renewable energy, including purchasing rooftop solar grids, participating in community solar programs, purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs), and more.

In evaluating these approaches, we ran into a few setbacks. Since IDEO doesn’t own any of its buildings and each of our studios consume about as much electricity as a couple of big houses, we optimistically hoped that we might be able to sign up for community solar programs across the board. But we quickly learned that community solar wasn’t available for all of our locations. To make matters more complicated, many of our locations didn’t even have the ability to choose their electricity suppliers.

Our next best bet was to either purchase RECs for our global energy consumption, or opt for location-specific solutions. In pursuit of progress over perfection, we purchased 750 MWhr’s of RECs from Bonneville Environmental Foundation to cover energy consumption across all of IDEO’s locations. This not only reduced our carbon footprint by 360 t CO2e, but also meant that effective January 1, 2021, IDEO switched to renewable energy globally.

Looking ahead to 2022 and beyond, we will continue to evaluate and implement the best renewable energy solutions on a local level. To date, we have switched to renewable energy in two locations:

• Chicago: We switched our energy supplier from ComEd and enrolled in community solar through Solstice. Solstice also offers a renewable energy program for employees to mitigate energy impacts from working from home. For every employee that signs up for Solstice’s community solar program, Solstice donates $100 toward their nonprofit arm, Solstice Initiative, to make renewable energy accessible for underserved communities.
• Munich: We switched our energy supply from Stadtwerke München (SWM), Munich's municipal utilities company, to renewable hydropower from Polarstern, a Munich-based renewable energy pioneer and social business promoting the energy transformation in Germany and worldwide.

While it took more time and resources to explore local renewable energy solutions than to purchase RECs, we felt it was important to switch to local alternatives wherever possible.

Intervention 2: Incentivizing reductions in project-based emissions

“But what about the emissions from our project operations?”

In our journey to Net Zero, this question came up time after time. It turns out, over a third of IDEO’s non-wage-based expenses come from project-based expenses like flights, food, prototyping materials, and research incentives. When we estimated IDEO’s carbon footprint, we saw that a significant fraction of our emissions came from everyday decisions made by project teams.

After some digging, we saw that consulting firms similar to IDEO approach emission-reduction incentives differently. Some impose strict travel guidelines, while others set a steep internal price on carbon. The concept of a carbon tax as an incentive was appealing, but would clients go for it? We decided to find out.

Inspired by 1% for the Planet, we started a pilot that added new language about emissions reductions in all of our statements of work. In addition to our standard language about project-based expenses, we added:

Expense invoices will include an additional 1% of all billable expenses to offset greenhouse gas emissions arising from this work.

For a project with $100,000 in expenses, we would add a $1,000 fee to fund carbon offsets. From our preliminary estimates, this would sufficiently cover the emissions from our projects and allow us to purchase ever higher quality emissions over time.

While promising in theory, the execution has been difficult. Of the 33 statements of work signed over the past 6 months, only 4 of them included the 1% fee. In some cases, clients objected to paying for IDEO’s carbon offsets and the language was negotiated out of the contract. In other cases, the language was never included to begin with. Many IDEOers were apprehensive about broaching the topic with clients.

Despite the slow start, we are continuing this pilot so that we can gather more data and design an informed approach to reducing project-based emissions.

Intervention 3: Improving our responsible retirement portfolio

While IDEO will continue to vote with its dollars to reduce our emissions, many of those dollars have their own environmental and social implications. With ESG frameworks and ratings agencies scrambling to answer calls to action from BlackRock and beyond, there are a dizzying number of ways to evaluate responsible investments.

Our third intervention involved scrutinizing our existing 401(k) portfolio. Alongside Fossil Free Funds, a non-profit that grades investments using a variety of social and environmental considerations, we evaluated IDEO’s existing 401(k) and came up with a system—or score—for each of the available funds in our portfolio. We then supplemented this analysis with data from Morningstar Sustainability Rating to provide another perspective on how our investments were, or were not, meeting environmental, social, and governance challenges.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many funds in IDEO’s 401(k) were poorly rated. Our portfolio, like most, is dominated by index and mutual funds that track the market. Since the Fortune 500 account for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and only 11% of these organizations are hitting their emissions goals, our portfolio wasn’t tracking in accordance with the climate commitments we’d set.

Our Talent team sprung into action. Together with our Empower Retirement administrators, they identified new funds that we could add to our investment mix. In addition to the Vanguard Social Index Fund that was already in our portfolio, we added two new funds: Calvert Balanced Fund (R6) and Calvert Short Duration Income Fund (R6).

A year later, about 1% of IDEO’s $140m 401(k) assets are in these ESG funds. While this is certainly a move in the right direction, we are continuing to explore how we can improve our responsible retirement portfolio even further.

---

More than anything, these three interventions have highlighted an intrinsic dilemma of reducing emissions at scale: distributed behavior change is challenging and incremental. We’re still grappling with questions like: Are we focused on the right things? How might we design better incentives that accelerate emission reduction? How might we incentivize our partners to change alongside us?

But this is a design challenge that cannot wait to be solved. We’d love to learn alongside others and hear how others are tackling behavior change within their firms. Please share your reflections, questions, and insights by getting in touch here!

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

In 2019, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released an updated climate report reiterating how critical the 2020s will be in curbing wide-ranging and destructive climate impacts.

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.

‍

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.