Over more than a century of leadership in the food and beverage industry, The J.M Smucker Company has expanded its range of products to maintain its relevance and address market demand. Today, the company leads numerous categories, with beloved products like Jif, Milk-Bone, and Folgers, which are the top choices of millions of Americans. By growing and diversifying their brands over the decades, Smucker has successfully weathered major shifts in consumer habits and technology. Today, though, CPG companies are experiencing unprecedented disruption, and leaders at Smucker understand that the escalating pace of change will require more than just new products.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company recognized the need to identify new market opportunities and establish practices that put innovation and growth at the heart of their business. And he saw the potential to bring those goals to life through his relationship with IDEO.

WATCH: Balancing innovation and efficiency through design has helped Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company, brave the unfamiliar, transform organizations, and ultimately bring game-changing ideas to market faster.

Geoff has stewarded a close partnership with IDEO for over a decade and throughout roles at numerous organizations. Together, Geoff and IDEO have worked on 25 projects, beginning while Geoff was VP of Marketing at Big Heart Pet Brands, and continuing on throughout his career at The J.M. Smucker Company. By working with IDEO to adopt a design thinking approach, Geoff has enabled collaboration across teams and empowered his organizations to find new ways of working that result in measurable business impact. For The J.M. Smucker Company, the partnership has brought creativity and human-centered design to the forefront of its operations, strengthening its ability to bring new products and brands to market and create a pipeline of growth.

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company has shifted to embrace growth and innovation as a mindset throughout the organization to bring more consistency to the innovation process.

Looking to the past to creatively connect with the future

As an example of this, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company suggested to IDEO that they explore how Folgers, America’s leading at-home coffee brand, might resonate more deeply with a millennial audience. Design research revealed that the mindset of today’s millennial coffee drinkers aligned with Folgers entrepreneurial brand roots. The teams collaborated to create a new concept: a brand called 1850 and an end-to-end, go-to-market product experience, including packaging, retail, and merchandise. 1850 hit shelves in 2018 and has since been reported by IRI Advantage as the top launch in the Coffee Category for 2019.

Frankly, I don’t think innovation gets any easier. You just get a little more comfortable with the discomfort, and that’s when the work starts to get consistently better.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

Creating an innovation pipeline that’s inspired by consumers’ needs

With 1850 underway, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company continued to invest in human-centered design to drive new offerings. The next collaboration with IDEO explored how Jif, the iconic peanut butter brand, could extend beyond the jar and become more readily accessible and appealing to busy parents who want to feel confident about the snacks they give their kids.

The design team was moved by the challenges that parents face: They want the best for their kids, but struggle to choose between what’s wholesome and what’s convenient on a daily basis. The ideal foods are filling, nutritious, and energizing, but often take more time to prepare and aren’t backpack or carpool-friendly. On the other hand, more convenient options tend to be full of empty carbs. Based on this insight, IDEO and Jif decided to tackle the snack-time parenting struggle. The IDEO and Jif teams worked side-by-side to prototype multiple product ideas and formats and tested them with on-the-go families to ultimately create Power Ups.

Available at over 200 retailers worldwide and online at Amazon, Jif Power Ups make wholesome, delicious grab-and-go snacking possible for kids and parents alike, across products ranging from Soft Baked Bars to Creamy Clusters, which are filled with peanut butter and rolled in whole grain oats. All are made with peanuts as the first ingredient and contain no high fructose corn syrup. Since going to market in 2018, Jif Power Ups has been named the top innovation launch in the Snack Bars category by IRI Market Advantage.

Design thinking underpins everything we do.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President & Corporate Officer, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company is on a transformational journey, committed to three pillars of growth: Lead in the best categories, build brands consumers love, and be everywhere.

The J.M. Smucker Company has experienced accelerated growth and speed to market by testing bold new ideas and evolving the role of innovation at the company. Design thinking and consumer empathy have permeated the organization’s new product development process, making it easier to uncover sharp, human-centered insights that lead to thoughtful and uniquely differentiated brands in a competitive, ever-shifting, and overcrowded industry. The work has fueled Geoff’s vision to inspire a culture of innovation at the company so that it can move at the speed of consumers and remain a best-in-class family of brands for future generations.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Oakland, California. A line of lunchtime diners snakes out the door of dosa by DOSA. Upon entering, eaters are greeted by the smell of tangy dosa—a large paper-thin crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils—and sweet, spicy chai. Turquoise chairs pop against a floor-to-ceiling mural by Oakland artist Namita Kapoor that transports diners to Chandni Chowk, one of the busiest markets in Old Delhi, as if enjoying their food at a local vendor.

In 2003, Emily and Anjan Mitra spent their honeymoon in India, savoring the street food of Anjan’s childhood in Mumbai (often still called Bombay). After returning to San Francisco, they found themselves longing for those distinctive flavors and dishes. Realizing that most Bay Area diners had never seen nor tasted these foods, Emily and Anjan founded DOSA, an upscale, full-service restaurant that introduced the Bay Area to Southern Indian cuisine. Locals came to try the unique, plant-forward dishes, and left with satisfied bellies and a broader understanding of Indian culture.

The entrepreneurs envisioned a brand extension of DOSA: a counter-service restaurant that could scale nationally. The hospitality venture, called dosa by DOSA, would offer healthful Indian street food made from local and seasonal ingredients. Emily and Anjan also set out to expand their existing product line-up—including cold lassi beverages, simmering sauces, and grab-and-go-meals—to national grocers and retailers and needed launch-ready packaging that was convenient, eye-catching, and environmentally-friendly. The new expression would enable consumers to experience dosa by DOSA and Southern India in a variety of forms and places. Emily and Anjan partnered with IDEO to establish a cohesive and consistent brand experience, from the restaurant and to-go meals to retail stores and mobile delivery.

In close partnership with the founders, their staff, Feldman Architecture and MPADA, IDEO set out to bring dosa by DOSA to life and help it scale through brand, environment, and experience design. This included creating everything from the logo and packaging to the menu and operations strategy, with each element tying back to the founders’ vision of sharing Indian heritage and traditions through cuisine.

The group began by seeking cultural inspiration for dosa by DOSA’s brand identity system—the logo, colors, values, fonts, and messaging—to guide future designs. They were inspired by Indian truck drivers who decorate their trucks with garlands, signs, or flags that engage other drivers or bring luck. The dosa by DOSA logo design and its wood-cut typeface are inspired by the dimensionality of this homespun art form, while the vibrant, eclectic colors reflect the streets and textures of urban Mumbai.

The goal of opening people’s minds to Indian cooking and culture extends to the packaging, which meets customers’ needs and playfully educates them. The food containers—made from recycled and compostable material—feature brightly patterned labels reminiscent of the trucks. Some have built-in compartments suited to multiple dipping chutneys, making it convenient to sample a variety of Indian flavors. Paper tray covers resembling Mumbai newspapers offer eating tips like “Be civilized. Eat with your hands,” encouraging diners to experience an Indian custom.

The vibrant brand comes to life across an array of packaging, including cold cups printed with the phrase “thanda thanda pani”—meaning “cold cold water”—which comes from a popular Indian parody of the Vanilla Ice song "Ice Ice Baby."

To design the diner experience and restaurant environment in a way that invites curiosity about the culture and cuisine, the team started with diners: They identified key moments in their experience like entering, waiting in line, and paying. The floor plan, furniture, lighting, signage, and menu were designed around these touchpoints. For example, while customers wait in line, they can watch dosa being prepared, as if they’re eager and hungry travelers awaiting street food.

The dosa by DOSA menu includes distinctive items like coconut kale mung bean salad and hot masala chai made with caramelized milk—the way Anjan’s mother prepared it. To help the restaurant scale, the team created a preliminary furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) budget, 3D renderings of the space, and an operations strategy for the founders and their employees.

The dosa by DOSA flagship launched in January 2018 in Oakland, California. The IDEO brand guidelines have enabled the dosa by DOSA team to independently and easily shepherd new product lines to market, including salads, wraps, curry bowls, samosas, and simmer sauces. The brand’s packaged food launched in over 200 natural food stores in 24 months—including over 100 Whole Foods locations—as well as online retailers and delivery services like Good Eggs and Caviar. These items and the restaurant have helped Emily and Anjan realize their vision of bringing the flavor and spirit of Southern Indian cuisine to new communities around the world.

In recent years, due to shifts in Japan’s demographics, the food industry has faced challenges such as a decrease in market size and a shrinking number of producers. As a result, social impact opportunities abound in this field.

When Japanese software company NJC (Nippon Jimuki Co. Ltd.) approached IDEO seeking to identify new business opportunities that would build on the company’s core strengths, the food and agriculture industry rose up as a promising area of focus.

NJC is a well-established software company that has spent over 50 years helping to build backend business systems for small to medium enterprises. NJC works across healthcare, retail, and food and beverage, computerizing core processes to support and improve operations.

In partnership with IDEO, NJC explored its strengths and potential as an organization, as well as the ideas and visions of the employees, and emerged with the goal of using their capabilities to address large-scale issues facing regional farmers.

During research across Japan, local growers described challenges with multi-layered supply chains and analog systems, which led to “overwork for minimal profit,” as well as a gap between supply and demand. Because agricultural wholesalers lacked clear information in advance on the status of crops or the volume to be harvested, they struggled to negotiate with buyers, which led to wasted food On the other hand, the farmers who grow the crops are engaged in manual labor, and do not always have the energy to focus on business aspects such as efficiency or the pursuit of increased profitability, which leads to a diminished interest in farming among young people.

One question that emerged through research was why agricultural producers weren’t utilizing IT. This evolved into “How can profitability be improved for all stakeholders?” and, “How might we create a system that will provide useful data without creating a burden for either farmers or agricultural wholesalers?”

The result was fudoloop.

fudoloop is an app that enables farmers and wholesalers to conduct business more profitably by bringing transparency to the fluctuating produce market. Through fudoloop, wholesalers receive information from farmers a day in advance, and can coordinate the various requests of buyers, such as order size, production location and other special requests. As a result, wholesalers can function as “community managers,” doing business with both producers and buyers at a more appropriate price point.

NJC aims for fudoloop to be the first step in a cycle that brings value to all stakeholders, from farmers to wholesalers, retailers and even customers, by redefining the “middleman” role of produce wholesalers.

The population of Tokyo’s metropolitan area is twice as big as New York, and the daily influx of workers from the suburbs increases that number sixfold. Congestion on trains traveling through the center of Tokyo during commuting hours is said to reach somewhere close to 200 percent of the trains’ capacity.

East Japan Railway Company (known as JR East) is the world’s largest railway company by revenue, operating 12,000 trains daily and serving 6.4 billion passengers per year.

In March 2014, JR East leveraged their extensive operations and passenger data to publish a consumer app that provided train location information, congestion status, air conditioning temperature, and wayfinding tools.

The app was downloaded more than 3.8 million times; however, its features and usability proved unsatisfactory to users. In an attempt to be comprehensive in addressing passenger needs, the app was weighed down with data and worked sluggishly. Competitors’ apps were named above JR East in customer satisfaction surveys, highlighting the company’s need to address the tool’s usability.

JR East’s Technical Division approached IDEO to help design an attractive and consistent user-centered experience through its digital ecosystem. With a team of interaction designers, they launched a project to create a new version of their app.

During the research phase, the IDEO team observed passengers’ behaviors and decision-making processes and noticed that people were using several apps at once to get more personalized and complete information.

The team created a set of paper-based prototypes to test how users would react to various functionalities. Surprisingly, users ranked versions with limited functionalities higher than those with a broad range of features.

This insight informed a new prototype that enabled a customized user experience based on traveler needs. Wayfinding proved to be the most frequently selected feature, so the new app was designed around helping passenger navigate during their trips.

Although JR East had traditionally outsourced their app development, IDEO encouraged them to organize their own internal team. In cooperation with Pivotal—a frequent IDEO partner familiar with human-centered approaches—the internal team was trained in agile development and built the new app themselves. A prototype was released in November 2017 as “Go! by Train.” It was so successful in the market that the earlier JR East app was replaced entirely with the content of the new design.

JR East's internal development team was recognized by the company for their exceptional output, and will be integral to the company's human-centered digital transformation going forward.

I first began creating cartoons as a way of communicating with Marta, my wife, when we started dating. I hate texts, so instead, I would draw a cartoon, take a picture, and send it to her. We are both New Yorker readers, and at some point she said that mine were better than most of the the magazine’s. She is not biased. Neither is my mom, also a fan of mine, so I thought it was worth the shot.

I submitted for the first time in the summer of 2016. A former coworker is married to David Sipress, a classic New Yorker cartoonist, and one of my favorites. David kindly offered to take a look at my cartoons. He said that they were totally publishable, and encouraged me to submit to the magazine. He also shared a few pro tips, like that The New Yorker very rarely publishes puns, and when it does, it’s almost always ironically (almost a quarter of the cartoons I sent him were puns).

Almost every week, the New Yorker cartoon editor meets with artists and reviews their work. This meeting is open to anybody. You just show up, sign up, and present your cartoons. So, one hot day in June, I printed my cartoons and showed up at the offices at One World Trade Center, ready to make an impression (good or bad).

The great thing about the cartoon meeting is that you sit with the editor and he gives you feedback, right there. Back then, Bob Mankoff was still the cartoon editor. The opportunity to have a private critique session with somebody like Bob was fantastic. On our first meeting he said that he liked my cartoons, that the drawings were very good, and the jokes were “not bad,” which is quite a compliment coming from him. He picked four of my cartoons and I was thrilled. I thought that I had it made and I was going to start selling cartoons right away.

Not quite. It turns out, the meeting is just the first filter. The editor has a subsequent meeting with David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, where he shows him his selection of cartoons for the week. David decides which to keep, but before the magazine buys anything, they will peruse their archives—and cartoons from other major publications—and check that they have not published anything similar first. It’s quite the process. They didn’t buy a cartoon that time. Nor the following week. Nor the next one.

In my meetings with Bob, he was quite blunt, but always funny, and he often built on my cartoons, coming up with new iterations or different ideas for the same joke. The main criticism I received was that my captions were not sharp or punchy enough. That makes sense because English is my second language. In Spanish, I am hilarious.

After many rejections, you might think I’d have gotten discouraged and stopped trying, but I have fun making cartoons. Rejection is just a part of the process that every cartoonist has to endure. It took David Sipress 25 years of submissions until The New Yorker published his work. Bob Mankoff himself sent more than 2,000 cartoons before he sold his first one. However, there are geniuses like Ed Steed who sell after their first submission. He is my favorite. I hate him with every fiber of my soul.

I’m also a bit of a masochist, perhaps as a side effect from attending a Catholic school for 13 years. I am an atheist now, but I still think that the only way to reach salvation is through suffering. I come up with projects that require a high level of commitment, take a painstaking amount of work, and provide low returns. I am very smart.

You can say that there is some sense of pride in a perfect record of 100% cartoon failure—otherwise I wouldn’t put them up with a big red REJECTED stamp on them. But the thing that I am most proud of is that Bob Mankoff said of one of my cartoons that it was the worst he had seen in his entire life. Hell, that’s something to brag about. I said, “Don’t worry, I can do worse,” and he burst out laughing.

However, I am not going to lie. Sometimes it hurts, especially after a few rounds of rejections. But that’s just my ego itching. Who wants to be published in The New Yorker after all? What a bunch of snobs.

That being said, I plan to go back to The New Yorker very soon to meet the new cartoon editor. I might get luckier with her. Getting into the rhythm of drawing ten cartoons every couple of weeks helped me hone my drawing skills, and I’ve missed it since I stopped. The style of the drawings I make for our projects, which often end up in front of clients, is the direct result of those dozens of hours of making cartoons. It’s like illustration gym.

And it’s interesting, the more cartoons you create, the more ideas you generate. At first I was afraid of running dry, but I was surprised when the opposite happened. I have a little red book where I write down ideas for cartoons, and the list keeps growing.

But, most importantly, I just enjoy making cartoons. Sometimes you can see me sitting by myself in a cafe, laughing out loud at my own drawings, which is quite a pitiful scene if you think about it. We are all going to end up as human compost, so we might as well laugh a little on the way to our graves.

Thanks to Lawrence Abrahamson, Michael Hendrix, and Lindsey Rodabaugh for encouragement and help with the exhibit.

IDEO communication designer Juan Astasio knows a thing or two about rejection. His great ambition is to publish a cartoon in The New Yorker. In the last three years, he’s submitted more than 100 cartoons and met with an editor to discuss his work ten times. Still, nada. But instead of being discouraged, Juan has embraced his failure, sharing his jokes with the New York studio on the walls of one of its phone booths. Here’s what he’s picked up in the process, why it’s worth it for him to keep going, and what, exactly, he’s learned from failure.

In one sentence, who are you?

I am Paul, and I run S.E.H Kelly, which is a menswear company based in London.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

We make clothes for men, every aspect of which—the cloth, the buttons, the buckles—is made by suppliers from around the British Isles. There are two of us at the company, and the other one, Sara, learned the trade in a tailoring house on London's Savile Row. I have a background in retail and design and other things, and together we cover most bases.

3 favorite possessions?

I don't really cherish possessions. I like my watch, which was a Christmas present, and—well, my bag is very much appreciated, being as it carries half my life without much complaint. My third favourite possession eludes me, sorry.

What does a typical work session look like?

Wake up, reply to emails, get train to workshop, pick up things, get train to a factory, drop off things, reply to emails, run around chasing up problems with cloth or patterns or making, eat, reply to emails, wrap and pack orders, print order documentation, walk to post office to send orders, walk back to factory, tie up loose ends, tidy up, get train home, eat, update or fix website, reply to emails, bed. Oh—and fit in some design if chance permits.

The workshop is our headquarters, and is first in a row of very small workers' units built at the end of the 1800s. It has a downstairs where we hang a selection of our garments and store various components such as buckles and horn buttons; and an upstairs, where we use a makeshift office and undertake the various more moribund duties of running a business.

It is a good little space—although rather dark—and is difficult to locate even when you're standing nearby. Visitors often remark, "Not easy to find, are you?" which I take as a compliment, since I've always enjoyed visiting places which are off the beaten track, or require some effort to discover. Always more fun, I think, and exciting, and hopefully brings a tinge more interest and character than a typical shopfront.

How do you get over creative block?

I don't force anything. If I struggle for a solution—be it a design solution or some written words—I leave it alone and do something else. I find the best ideas are those that at least appear to come naturally, even if they're the result of days or weeks of subconscious thinking.

What was the last item on your to do list?

"Remove collar from shirt for man in Norway."

How do you see the world in 2078?

Much more convergence of culture facilitated with cheaper travel, cheaper and more widely available communication technology, and hopefully much more mutual appreciation of one another rather than squabbling.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

Be absolutely, fully, and entirely satisfied, without caveat or "to-do," with every piece of our collection.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

The game developer Ojiro Fumoto.

Shopping online often feels like work. To find one shirt, you have to slog through dozens of pages of boring photos of boring people wearing boring clothes. This isn't true of S.E.H Kelly. A visit online feels like a tour through their hidden, rain-damp workshop—from photos of button jars and bolts of cloth to the quirky ways that they describe their proper attire. I absolutely adore it. For this installment of Creative Crushes, S.E.H Kelly founder Paul Vincent shared some details about his label and design process.

I’m not alone in turning to mindfulness during the design process. Here’s how my colleagues and I use mindfulness to move from overwhelmed to optimistic, even during the toughest projects.

1. Adopt a beginner's mindset

When you're approaching a new design challenge, it’s easy to bring your biases and baggage to the table. But this is the moment to stay open: The root of creativity is embracing the millions of possibilities at your fingertips.

The “beginner's mindset” is a Buddhist principle we practice at IDEO. It means starting fresh, assuming nothing, and living the question. We see a lack of deep expertise in a new topic as an opportunity to get creative. Anyone can adopt a beginner’s mindset—all that’s required is openness and receptivity.

2. Practice radical acceptance

When I first learned about acceptance, it seemed to me it was just another word for complacency. As if to say, “That’s the way things are! Why bother trying to change them?” But on closer reflection, I realized that accepting the world as it is today requires a willingness to sit with uncomfortable truths and to see problems from all angles before jumping in to solve them.

By accepting a situation, you’re able to design a better approach from a place of non-resistance. At IDEO, we have a bias toward action: We make lots of tangible designs as a way of imagining the future. But action can be so much more impactful when it’s grounded in reality and driven by clear intentions.

3. Drop your ego

Mindfulness teaches us that the ego—the part of us that demands to be “right”—is not our true self. Our true self is found in the in-between moments when we’re able to just be—the times when we take in what’s around us, quiet our minds, and open ourselves up to feedback from the people we’re designing for.

One way we try to drop our egos at IDEO is by creating “sacrificial concepts”— prototypes that we design but ultimately cast aside in service of learning. Critiquing a sacrificial concept is an invitation for people to share their reactions without hurting anyone else’s feelings.

I sometimes suffer from the “disease to please,” wanting people to like everything I’ve made. But as I’ve leaned into mindfulness, I’ve realized that my ego can slow me down, and I've learned how to set it aside.

4. Listen deeply

Have you ever noticed during a conversation that the person you’re talking to is mimicking your posture? If you put your hands on the table, so do they; if you sit up straight, they follow suit. In conversation, people are often looking for an opening to make their next point, rather than paying attention to what’s being said. But if you focus on your own replies, you miss out on the words, tone, and body language of the people around you.

In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle says that when you practice judgement-free listening, you’re giving another person the power of your presence. At IDEO, every project starts with listening. Our human-centered, interdisciplinary design approach means that the whole team learns empathy skills and joins in the design research process. Listening elevates the voices of the people we’re designing for and ensures that their dreams and worries are our starting point.

5. Meditate in order to create

One of the biggest misconceptions about creativity is that creative people always wake up feeling compelled to create. The truth is that this compulsion is often blocked by insecurities or external pressures. In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer describes these as “samskaras,” or energy blockages, which can be cleared by acknowledging them and focusing on your breathing. Tolle suggests that when you want to be creative, you should go back and forth between breathing and the task at hand every few minutes. Only when you’re clear-headed can you make.

At IDEO, we have a meditation group that meets every day, and any designer is welcome to be in the presence of others and connect inward. This ritual, and the support of the wider IDEO community, are wonderful reminders that everyone still has room to learn and improve.

By making mindfulness a regular part of my design practice, I’ve not only become a better designer, but hopefully a kinder, more patient, and more empathetic person. It’s been a journey well worth taking.

Illustrations by Cassandra Fountaine

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When I start to feel overwhelmed at work, with too much information to take in and too little time to process it all, I rely on mindfulness. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the fathers of modern mindfulness, describes the practice as “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.” It’s all about tuning into your sense of inner calm so you can be a better conduit for new insights and solutions.

A San Franciscan, Jimmy worried that California’s blue state status might make residents apathetic about voting, even though there were important state and local issues on the ballot that were hardly being covered. “Luckily, there was a proposition requiring porn stars to wear condoms,” he says. “I felt I could help make the local ballot a little more interesting.”

Jimmy created a site called ballot.fyi, an online voter guide dedicated to explaining the issues in a nonpartisan way. To his surprise, it reached 125,000 people in 24 hours, and a million over the course of the election.

For the last year, he and his cofounder Yvonne Leow have been working on the next iteration, By The Bay. Thanks to a grant from the Knight Foundation, they’re helping inform younger voters. “We’re committed to turning residents into citizens by educating them on local issues and elections,” he says.

We chatted with Jimmy about how he and Yvonne designed the guide, what he’s working on for November, and how you can replicate the process.

1. Your guide looks a lot different from the boring, I mean, um, more basic, civic materials we’re used to seeing. What can design bring to a voter guide?

By putting design first, and pairing it with a casual voice, we’re hoping we can make topics like legislation engaging. As consumers, we expect a user experience to have thought behind it, but that’s not something we’re used to seeing in voter guides. We want to make this information digestible, first by making the guide as beautiful and usable as possible, and second by using approachable language.

We assume the reader is smart, but isn’t yet familiar with all the wonky terms in politics, like general obligation bond. Other guides tell you how to vote. We want people to understand what they’re voting on and make their own decision.

Proposition 7: Makes permanent daylight savings, meaning we don't change the clock twice a year.

2. What was your process, and how did you avoid partisanship?

Like any good journalist, we’re first focused on understanding as much as possible, from as many sides as possible. This means reading all relevant materials and talking to people in the orbit of each issue.

Local issues are less polarizing and ideological than national politics, so avoiding bias is easier than you might think. After we’ve done all the research, my cofounder and I are often more conflicted on where we stand on the issues personally.

We design the information to make it easy to process. If it makes sense to visualize something, we’ll create a graphic rather than explaining it with words. After I published ballot.fyi and it blew up, I received many emails suggesting corrections. As stressful as it was, I took it as an opportunity to debate the sender and absorb their knowledge and perspective.

3. What did you want to give voters in your community that wasn't already out there?

In the past, I’ve left a voting booth feeling ashamed that I was sometimes guessing on how to vote. I consider myself well-educated, but I needed to be a better educated citizen. I suspect a lot of people feel that way.

Proposition 10: Perhaps one of the most consequential initiatives, it would allow cities to enact rent control laws again. There's a huge fight from all sides about whether this is a good idea.

4. What design constraints did you need to think about?

Brevity is our primary constraint, but we also do our best to make everything mobile-friendly, because 60 percent of people will visit our site on their phone. Even if they don’t read through an entire explainer, we write our content so that people can understand both sides within a few sentences.

Above all else, we design for the busy professional, who is educated and well-intentioned, but may not have time to fully research everything themselves. We try to get to the point as quickly as possible, make navigation as easy as possible, and have fun with the content.

We picture our users as three personas: One is the diligent voter who spends hours on their absentee ballot well before election day rolls around. Another is the voter who knows they have to vote on Tuesday, so they’re going to spend some time looking into it the weekend before. Then there’s the oh-shit voter who, on election day, doesn’t want to feel stupid and researches as much as they can at work, then runs to the polls right before they close.

We actually see the most traffic the day before the election and the day of the election.

5. What was the hardest part about building it, and how long did it take? (San Francisco is a wacky place with a lot to vote on, so I would imagine a while?)

The hardest part of ballot.fyi was maintaining accurate and up-to-date information. It was just me, and it’s all manual, so I was debating people via email, researching as much as I could, and trying to wordsmith it all to be as succinct and understandable as possible.

Ballot.fyi took about three months, from concept to election day—roughly a month of design, a month of coding and design, and a month of maintenance and advertising. Knowing 20,000-30,000 people were seeing my site every day made October 2016 the most stressful and exhilarating month of my life.

Proposition 12: Mandates a minimum square footage for animals sold for meat, but there's a clause in there that makes all eggs in California cage-free (like literally, not just in minimum size) by 2022.

6. What advice would you give people in other communities about creating their own voter guide?

I’d recommend using whatever tool/medium you’re most comfortable using. You don’t have to build a whole website.

We've seen people create voter guides with Google Slides or Sheets, or simply put together a blog on Squarespace. I've also seen long FB posts, or PDFs shared around social media. The week before the election, people will be looking for the information, and different formats find different audiences. I have yet to see someone make a comprehensive and compelling YouTube series—I’d love to see that.

My best advice: Focus on a specific part of the ballot, and do it well. Don’t worry about reaching a wide audience. Write it for the people you know: your close friends, coworkers, or club soccer team. Research your way to nonpartisanship. In terms of resources, Ballotpedia is dense but can be a good starting place. When in doubt, you can also call your city hall or state government and request information. Having friends that can translate legalese is also useful.

7. What kind of feedback have you received, and what are you planning for the general election in November?

Most of our feedback is positive. I think most people want to get more involved in local politics and understand more, but people are busy and other things take priority.

For November, we’re interviewing the Supervisor candidates in San Francisco and posting the videos. We’re hoping it’s an easy way for residents to quickly get a sense of who’s running and what they stand for. We’re also beefing up a feature we released in June—the ability to take notes on our webpages and then share that with your friends via a private link. We’ve noticed that people rely on their friends to vote, and friends typically have one or two people who are their go-to political person. We want to empower those individuals and compile the research and summarize for them, so they can simply add their commentary and recommendations. By The Bay does not give recommendations, but we encourage individuals to—it helps get the vote out.

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As the 2016 election approached, and the vitriol around the presidential race grew, IDEO alum and engineer Jimmy Chion wanted to do something to keep voters engaged.

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.