Giving food assistance is about more than handing over a box of groceries. It’s about allowing people to make their own choices.

But the pandemic only narrowed people’s choices. Undeterred, Northern Illinois Food Bank (NIFB) put people’s needs above everything else, leading to innovations that could improve food banks everywhere. IDEO recruited neighbors to co-design a new digital tool intended to improve people’s access to food. Local residents provided more than insights—they steered design decisions and helped transform the relationship between NIFB and the community.

Northern Illinois Food Bank’s My Pantry Express app allows people to browse and order groceries online and to choose a pickup time and location that works for their schedule. We designed the app to provide useful information on dietary preferences and to be inclusive of cultural differences. The result allows choice and flexibility, helps prevent food waste, and preserves the dignity of shoppers throughout the process by making My Pantry Express feel like any other grocery site.

Ultimately, Northern Illinois Food Bank and IDEO’s strategy for success relied on new metrics. In addition to measuring effectiveness in pounds of food distributed, we found new ways to measure shoppers’ satisfaction—a solution that works better for all parties involved because it was designed by all parties involved.

An estimated 1 in 8 Americans experience food insecurity.

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The food insecurity rate is 2-3x higher for persons of color than for white households.

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60% of food insecure households do not use food pantries.

1.9M

meals distributed through My Pantry Express in 2021

50%

increase in distribution from prior year

To create Bendable, IDEO worked alongside the people closest to the problem, so every important decision grew out of their experience.

IDEO and the Drucker Institute aligned with the library system and city leaders in South Bend, Indiana, on a single objective: build a learning platform that offered education opportunities to people affected by the decline of manufacturing in the region. But even the earliest phases of research revealed that there’s no common profile that matched the diversity of learners. There are innumerable reasons why people seek to learn and as many barriers holding them back.

Knowing this, South Bend residents were the acknowledged authority for this work, and a design consultancy all their own. This radically simplified crucial decisions. Negative associations around traditional education led people to seek knowledge from those they already trusted. And they often lacked awareness about or the ability to access the many free resources already available.

The residents of South Bend helped the entire consortium see that the city wasn’t under-resourced but under-connected. That insight, and the power the community and the library system held to rectify it, made Bendable into the people-driven, connection-based learning platform it is today.

By 2025, as many as 85 million jobs will be displaced by automation, yet 97 million new ones could emerge.

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More than a third of adults pursuing postsecondary education before the COVID-19 pandemic were forced to abandon those plans.

25

programs and other resources offerings are now available to residents of South bend

4

states have begun to integrate Bendable into library systems

Protecting the right to vote means ensuring that all citizens can cast their ballots privately, independently, and easily.

With that principle in mind, Los Angeles County sought out a design strategy firm to create a next-generation, customizable system that would meet the needs of its large and diverse voter population while satisfying myriad voting regulations. The result: an accessible, self-enclosed ballot-marking device with a touchscreen that allows any voter to easily navigate, mark, verify, and submit a paper ballot. We also worked to improve the entire voting experience, including vote-by-mail ballots, interactive sample ballots, and the tally process.

As with any inclusive design, details matter. Voters with vision impairment or reading disabilities can opt for audio and tactile experiences with the push of a few simple buttons. And for voters who prefer to read the ballot in their native language—Spanish, Chinese, Korean, or any one of the 11 others supported by the county—the device lets them select their preference.

After extensive research and testing with constituents, we designed a solution that makes voting easier for anyone. And knowing that the only constant is change, we made the system flexible enough to adapt to emerging needs and technologies, protecting voters’ rights now and in the future. Read the full case study here.

26% of American adults have some type of disability. In the 2020 election, 18% of disabled voters nationally reported difficulty voting, about twice as many as non-disabled voters.

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In 2020, national voter turnout among disabled people was 7% lower than among non-disabled people in the same age group.

"Intuitive & secure"

was the sentiment most Los Angeles County voters expressed about the new voting system after the 2020 primary election

Conservation International is made up of conservation experts. To bolster its work, we bring a focus on scale, speed, and the human element to every project.

How does that look in the field? To restore the forest of Fiji, Conservation International paid a cash incentive to the community to buy, plant, and care for new trees and foliage. But once those cash incentives stopped flowing, the work ground to a halt. Taking a human-centered-design approach, one employee uncovered an insight: Fijians are more motivated to help in exchange for longer-term, noncash incentives like building infrastructure in villages. Small projects such as footpaths, repairs to communal trucks, beehives, or sports programs for youth continually reminded the community that the environment is a provider for their families, imparting a feeling of shared ownership in its conservation.

Stories like this, repeated around the globe, are how we hope to help Conservation International find sustainable outcomes. Our work together, including a six-month fellowship to help emerging leaders develop new capabilities, and a series of strategic, future-focused events for executives, has brought more tangibility and deeper collaboration to the organization.

Together we hope to create businesses, food solutions, and energy alternatives that conserve nature, and improve human health—because humans are a part of nature, too.

The scientific community overwhelmingly agrees that we have ten years to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions or humanity will suffer devastating consequences.

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We need to conserve one third of the global ocean using area-based measures and ensure at least 75% of seafood is harvested using socially responsible, environmentally sustainable methods by 2030.

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75% of the world’s poor rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, which in turn depends on nature for pollination, irrigation, and soil replenishment.

20

leaders integrated human-centered design into annual goals, project pipelines, and fundraising efforts

20%

of the organization is now involved in design-thinking projects

“While I had done a good deal of research and was familiar with evidence-based design in an academic setting, I had little knowledge about design-related career paths,” she explains, a scenario she sees as typical for a lot of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) students. “I think there are only certain paths presented to you as viable,” she says, “which is unfortunate because I think a lot of the systems and things that need redesigning disproportionally affect people of color.” And yet less than three years later, the public health and sociology major would find herself working on an IDEO design-research team.

She got there viaColor by Design (CxD), RepresentEd’s newest fellowship designed for BIPOC in partnership with IDEO. The first cohort of design-research fellows will finish the program in June, and the experience has been groundbreaking: for IDEO and, we think, for the fellows, fewer than five of whom came to the fellowship with any previous design experience. That’s, well, by design.

“The program is about increasing access to design—not just to IDEO but the design industry as a whole,” says RepresentED CEO and founder Rashida Hanif. “CxD has served as a proof of concept that someone can go from zero design knowledge to designer and bring value from day one.”

After completing a three-month part-time professional training course that ran from September through November 2021, the 14 fellows have been integrated as full members of the IDEO community during their six-month fellowship. They’ve been working alongside IDEO employees on key client projects, among them engagements with a major tech company, projects around access to abortion, and the reimagining of the student experience at colleges like NYU.

They’re a month away from wrapping up, and IDEO had planned to keep the ball rolling by launching the application process for the next round of fellows this month. But we’ve decided to take a beat and will be postponing the next cohort until 2023. It’s not hesitation, it’s preparation. Together with RepresentED, we have a shared eagerness to keep growing and expanding, but that’s paired with a shared commitment to scale the program in a thoughtful way.

So many rich learnings have emerged since September. Rather than try to synthesize them and make adjustments in real time, we want to spend more time with our questions and give ourselves space to put our insights to work.

One of the biggest ones is that the fellows only participated in design research. We want to expand and scale CxD to other disciplines—perhaps communications design and experience design—and other divisions of IDEO have made it clear that they’d love to welcome fellows of their own. The opportunity is there, but it’ll take some additional work to put the pieces in place.

We’d also like to finesse the bootcamp aspect, the three months of training that precede the paid, full-time fellowship. As it stands, the bootcamp is largely focused on design thinking as a whole, with modules about design research, methodology, etc. We realized some of our fellows need deeper design research support, and we’d like to get ahead of that earlier in the bootcamp.

Getting the foundation right is important, and we are glad to be able to provide it. One fellow in this cohort was a freelance graphic designer who worked as a bartender. He told me CxD has changed the trajectory of his career and his life—and that’s a real gain for the industry. The fellows may not have deep design backgrounds, but they bring rich and varied experience to the table. Another worked as a doula and felt ready for a career change. Yet another worked on the White House’s National Economic Council. Others did content marketing for international fragrance companies, spearheaded community initiatives to inspire change, and co-founded creative agencies.

The reality is that if not for a program like this, IDEO would have probably overlooked their applications. There are so many barriers to entry within the design industry, and Sasha puts it so well: “It’s not that the fellows don't have experience that would make us successful designers, but that what is seen as relevant experience is often so narrow.” RepresentED has an uncommon ability to take a wide view, which has in turn allowed us to welcome folks whose perspective is missing.

The design industry has long been a homogeneous one (IDEO is no exception, with a U.S. community that is still only 5 percent Black, less than 1 percent Indigenous, and less than 7 percent Hispanic/Latinx.) We needed to expand access, and RepresentED excels in recruiting non-traditional candidates and among communities of color.

“Our sweet spot is people who studied the social sciences and humanities, the ones always told, ‘What are you going to do with that major?’ The ones who are told they have to get a graduate degree, or go into academia,” says Rashida. “They often aren’t aware of how vast their options are and how to present their skills to the job market as viable candidates. English students are incredible writers. Anthropologists understand people and culture. Transfer students bring an amazing life context to the table. We teach them how to use human-centered design to their advantage.”

She thinks of these candidates in a striking and insightful way: “I often feel like we live in a society where we like to throw away the beautiful things. I see them as this collage of beauty. There’s more of that than there is of the status quo.”

And CxD is proving to be a viable way to shift that status quo. It has also shifted things in IDEO’s internal structure. The program touches so many different parts of IDEO—the marketing team; team building, which oversees project teaming and staffing; IDEO’s Research and Insights cohort; and IDEO U, IDEO’s online learning platform. In the process of building up the program we’re learning how to create more equitable structures and thinking about how we onboard employees differently, too.

The fellows very intentionally have a strong network of support. In addition to their interactions with the CxD leadership team, each is assigned a manager and a craft mentor as well as a steward, an IDEO designer who holds a non-evaluative role and creates a safe space for the fellow to take any challenges to. As Sasha puts it, “It helped with building creative confidence. The attitude is, ‘You’re supposed to be here, but if you have a question you know where to go.’”

As for Sasha, she spent 14 weeks on the IDEO design research team that partnered with a major baby retailer to reimagine the registry experience. “The video of a Zoom interview I led with a parent—the first interview I had led—was used continually throughout the project,” she recalls. “That always felt like a rewarding moment: being reminded that those were insights I helped to uncover and the affirmation it provided that I had done a good job.” She moves to a new project this week.

“I’ve developed confidence in myself as a designer. I’ve been equipped with this toolbelt of skills that will be useful no matter where I end up,” Orewa says of her experience. “Last week I had a call with someone who saw I was a part of CxD but had a background in public health and reached out on LinkedIn to ask questions. That makes me excited, that there are people like me who are learning that the opportunities are out there. It’s the ripple effect.”

The next CxD cohort will launch by the end of 2023. We will share updates as we get closer to the recruitment season. If you have any questions, please contact info@representedleadership.org.

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By the time Sasha Orewa graduated college in 2019, she had been exposed to plenty of things. Design research wasn’t one of them. Ditto UX, interaction design, or experience design.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.