Keeping diabetes in check isn’t easy. Between checking blood sugar multiple times a day, keeping a detailed activity record, and logging food intake, staying healthy can be daunting.

But a recent advance in smart diabetes management—Ascensia’s CONTOUR NEXT ONE blood glucose meter and the CONTOUR DIABETES app—can give patients more clarity and control.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE is the latest product to spring from a multi-year collaboration between IDEO and Ascensia Diabetes Care (formerly Bayer Diabetes Care). In 2009, Ascensia and IDEO developed the award-winning CONTOUR USB blood glucose meter—the first meter to plug directly into a computer, providing patients and their doctors with instant access to blood sugar data and personal trend reports.

Buoyed by the success of the first collaboration, Ascensia asked IDEO to help design a next-generation diabetes management system (and the company’s first internet-connected device).

To help reduce the stigma of checking blood sugar in public, IDEO designed the CONTOUR NEXT ONE to look and behave like today’s modern tech devices. The highly simplified, seamless system allows patients to upload blood glucose readings automatically to the app, which helps guide informed, real-time decisions. The meter’s red, green, or yellow smartLIGHT feature gives instant feedback about whether blood sugar levels are below, within, or above the target range.

Seeing contextual data, which includes physical activity logs and photos of meals, paired with recent and historic blood sugar levels, nudges patients toward healthier lifestyle choices and better control of their condition.

For doctors, the accuracy and quantity of the data combined with the app’s easy-to-read pattern views invites more comprehensive, actionable conversations with patients.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE hit shelves in Europe in 2016 and is now available in the U.S. Ascensia is poised to develop more products enabled by rich, personalized data to help people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives.

What if we could use the sky to provide alternative solutions to these problems, creating more space for living and transportation? What exciting future awaits us?

At JAXA’s Aeronautical Technology Directorate (ATD), researchers are conducting research and development on aviation science and technology for the future. They are working to affect positive impact through research like noise reduction of airframe and an integrated aircraft operation management system for disaster relief and crisis management.

Normally, JAXA begins their projects by examining the needs of the aircraft industry or comparing themselves against global technology standards. This approach often leads to ideas that are merely an extension of the current technology. JAXA needed a new approach in order to create radical ideas and real change.

The key question was: What solutions would emerge from prioritizing people’s needs over the most advanced technological possibility—taking a human-centered approach to tackling the most pressing societal challenges?

JAXA ATD voluntary partnered with IDEO to attempt to answer this question, identifying new research areas by envisioning people’s needs in the near future. Together, JAXA and IDEO developed four scenarios of future societies.

The scenarios do not necessarily focus on technologies. Rather, the focus is on telling stories that help readers put themselves in the shoes of the four personas. At the same time, the team worked with industrial designers to illustrate convincing demonstrations of the vehicles and machines of the future.

JAXA’s team embraces the belief that “technologies developed at JAXA should incorporate emotional aspects to blend seamlessly into people’s lives.” Driven by this philosophy, the visual design of the four scenarios used a friendly illustration style intended to be approachable and understandable for people of all ages.

In order to develop human-centered concepts from scratch, the IDEO and JAXA team first undertook research and inspiration-gathering. They skydived, observed cities from above, brainstormed with students from the department of architecture at Waseda University. They interviewed airline employees, a former Judo world champion, skyscraper lovers, a business producer who focuses on new working styles. Throughout the research phase, the team explored the possibilities of the sky as a “living space,” not just a place for transportation.

The team was surprised and excited when they learned from a former fighter pilot that old cockpit designs were inspired by the Japanese tea room, highlighting a historic precedent for taking inspiration from real life to inform new technology designs.

The team synthesized their research and developed several concepts, each informed by a different social issue or pressing concern. Each issue was brought to life through a fictional personal narrative.

How might we relieve city congestion and pollution using the sky, while still keeping it clean and blue? Floating public lights, a skyway that regulates air traffic, camouflaged planes that keep the sky blue—concepts introduced in this scenario were the closest to the technologies already being researched at JAXA ATD. They show us how the sky could become an infrastructure that supports our daily lives. Meet Ayame, a girl from Gunma prefecture, ready to begin her college life in Osaka.

How might we make travel feel easy for people of all ages, no matter how far they need to go? While the researchers at JAXA ATD are working to improve the mobility of aircraft, like reducing air friction or increasing the engine efficiency of aircraft, this scenario explored how people could travel door-to-door through the sky with or without aircraft. A day-in-the-life of Naoto, a 72-year-old man who commutes twice a month from Tottori to Tokyo for medical checkups.

How might we leverage the sky as a resource for reusable energy and economic growth? One of the criteria of JAXA’s R&D activities is to improve the environment. While JAXA has been focusing on “protecting” the environment, this scenario focused on “creating” new environments. A day-in-the-life of Toshi, who runs a “sky-to-table” farming business.

How might we help people live with peace of mind, even during a disaster? JAXA’s disaster relief technologies have been extremely valuable in countries like Japan, which frequently suffers from natural disasters. In this scenario, we approached the problem from victims’ point of view while exploiting the potential of a network of aircrafts and other flying objects. Here's the story of Yuri, a victim of an earthquake in Tokyo who reunites with her family after evacuating to the sky.

The purpose of the project website is not to present answers, but to introduce new directions towards an exciting future. By presenting JAXA ATD’s vision through these four scenarios, the team invited people from all industries and of all ages to participate in co-creating the future.

Just like movies, cartoons, and novels from childhood stimulate the imagination, this project aims to spark new conversation and vision for a radically different, positive future.

By illustrating and communicating a more human-centered future to a wider audience, Japan’s top aeronautical technology development agency may already be changing the future of the sky for the better.

The speed and scale of change in our world are unprecedented. As more people relocate to cities, our lives are impacted by urbanization problems such as pollution, congestion, depopulation of rural areas, resource, and energy deficiencies.

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For factory operators, a smart valve is a game-changer. It gathers data on how smoothly the system is running and feeds it to an app, making it easier to troubleshoot from anywhere. And when things get overheated, it can automatically shut down the machinery, avoiding a meltdown.

Georg Fischer (GF), the Swiss-based, B2B industrial manufacturer collaborated with IDEO to design that valve, along with a system that adds value for generations of engineers to come.

And there were some surprises along the way. When the team set out to interview customers, they learned a lot about their real needs. “We showed a customer a sacrificial concept of a smart valve and asked, what do you think about this?” says Laura Barrabia, GF’s Head of Corporate Design Thinking. “The customer answered, we don’t want your valve to be smart, we want to be smart. If GF is providing a smart valve, where is my value?”

For GF Piping Systems, these insights helped shape initial prototypes and guided the direction of the design to something that would tie parts together into smart systems and more efficient industrial facilities—a competitive advantage.

Yves Serra, GF’s CEO, recognized early on that his company needed to strengthen its customer-centricity and digital capacity, so he approached IDEO to begin shifting GF’s culture from engineering-led and procedural to customer-focused, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and flexible. That kicked off a decade-long relationship that would help GF take a design-based approach.

Learn what it means to move from being technology-driven to being truly customer-centric.

To help GF identify clients’ pain points and address them with new digital offers, IDEO proposed three “lighthouse” projects, one for each of GF’s divisions: Piping Systems, Casting Solutions, and Machining Solutions. Lighthouse projects (also called “Beacons”) are proofs of concept that light the way for an organization and help it shift its way of working.

For example, GF Machining Solutions built a prototype for an application that uses real-time data to help customers identify and fix problems in the machines, laying the foundation for truly predictive maintenance. Making data streams more transparent for customers also simplified life for the GF service engineers, who keep the machines running.

Learn how Georg Fischer is moving from hardware offerings to digital solutions.

For GF Piping Systems, the design team developed the GF Digital Line, a set of products, apps, dashboards, and other services that help customers plan, install, and maintain water and chemical piping systems. GF teams went back to customers to test several prototypes and gather feedback on the Digital Line and make sure it addressed current and future needs. They also built internal capabilities to support product development, laying the groundwork for future innovation.

Lastly, IDEO helped GF Casting Solutions escape the “commodity trap” of competing with foreign automotive suppliers. To better understand the pressures car manufacturers face, the design team explored the development cycles of two car manufacturers. They learned how challenging it is to implement solutions to reduce vehicle weight—essential for cutting fuel consumption. As an expert in aluminum die casting, GF was well positioned to help manufacturers meet that challenge, not just with quality parts, but also with digital engineering to deliver cutting-edge lightweight casting solutions, which are harder to replicate.

By the end of these lighthouse projects, GF had rolled out a global design thinking training program that had touched more than 1000 employees. After the training, employees throughout the organization adopted a new way of working and became passionate ambassadors. The enthusiasm spread from the R&D department to HR to finance and many other departments.

Today, GF has permanent design thinking and digital teams to continue this work. All three divisions aim to launch the first releases of their lighthouse projects by early 2019. And with every project, GF’s business—and solutions—get smarter about how to meet the needs of a fast changing world.

IHG’s ambition is to grow in service of its guests around the world. IHG’s Atlanta-based team had identified a major opportunity for hotels in the midscale space—a market segment known for its inconsistency.

Alongside colleagues at London-based forpeople, IDEO was invited to help IHG shepherd that business opportunity into a human one, by asking how IHG might reimagine the everyday travel experience for people relying on this category of hotel. What kind of offer might resonate equally with guests and with the owner/operators who’d need to buy into a new brand and bring it to life?

IDEO began by talking to travelers to better understand their lives, values, and needs—travelers who spend one or two nights on the road a few times every year; travelers who regularly take short trips to small cities or away from city centers; and travelers who live on the road, moving from hotel to hotel. These included court stenographers, medical technicians, consultants, conference-goers, and more.

Early research insights evolved into two distinct concepts for a new hotel brand, which were built out into two full-scale physical prototypes at IHG’s design center in Atlanta. Over three weeks, IDEO and its IHG partners led potential guests and hotel owners through each model, gathering their feedback on new formats for breakfast offerings, service details, booking experiences, and overall tone.

The investment in prototyping paid off with surprising and actionable insights. Despite wide variation in occupation and income, these guests are sophisticated and self-reliant; they know what’s out there, and they know what’s reasonable to expect. In fact, many describe a syndrome IDEO dubbed “anticipation anxiety:” the sense of dread that comes from not knowing whether a lower-priced hotel is going to be clean or safe, or provide a bed that enables restful sleep. Many have so little confidence in the cleanliness of hotels in this price range that they travel with their own packs of wet wipes.

IDEO, along with the IHG team, recognized these behaviors as an unanswered cry in the market. The purpose of the new brand crystallized around extinguishing that anxiety and rewarding guests with something much better. avid hotels exceeds its competition by doubling down on quality in just a few select areas: an extraordinary mattress; rigorously high standards of cleanliness; a focused, high-quality, grab-and-go breakfast and coffee experience; and an overall tone of warmth and straightforwardness.

These guests made clear that for trips like this, they aren’t interested in bells and whistles, or communication that isn’t frank or to the point. That led to an insight that upends an industry truism: for these guests—and there are many of them—choosing a hotel is rarely only about the price of the room. avid guests can often afford to stay in a more expensive place for a honeymoon or a vacation or a trip with friends; they’ll spend more when they need more. But for functional stays of one or two nights, it just feels wasteful. It goes against their values and their principles.

IHG and IDEO heard a clear call for a sense of focus and affordability—but never at the expense of quality. Guests should be able to access a simple booking process, rooms designed for sound sleep, and a quality breakfast, all at a fair price. And hotel owners ought to be able to deliver that experience with confidence and consistency, at costs that build a compelling case for their own business.

That’s what avid hotels is designed to deliver, every single time. Early traveler reviews have been exceedingly positive and have noted specifically the unique differentiating offers avid brings to the market.

Within a year of partnering with IDEO, IHG had issued 150 avid hotels licenses to franchisees in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and announced a development deal for 15 avid hotel locations in Germany over the next five years—a scale of success that came at unprecedented speed for the industry. The collaborative, inclusive design process is now serving as a model for how to develop robust, guest-centered hospitality brands that deliver where it matters for people.

One of the ways they deliver this value is by being more approachable and responsive to a wide range of user behaviors. Or, seen another way, by being social and emotional by default. Designers of these tools can lean into the power of emotional engagement, or pretend it isn’t actually there at all. Count us on the side of emotional engagement: We believe that designers should understand and intentionally integrate emotion into data analysis tools.

Why does emotional engagement with data matter?

Data is at the heart of decision-making, driving everything from product development to customer service. Every presentation of data is ultimately telling a story, from a dry spreadsheet to Florence Nightingale’s famous casualty diagram. But how effective, impactful and, perhaps most importantly, intentional is that story? Emotional engagement is vital because it not only makes data more relatable, but also invites curiosity and deeper reflection. By intentionally crafting the personality of conversational AI systems, we can create experiences that enhance functionality through emotional connection.

Personality-driven AI interfaces help transform the process of making sense of data into an experience that can spark empathy, understanding, and even enjoyment. This approach offers a way to help AI systems humanize data, making the interaction with that data feel less transactional and more like a conversation.

The role of personality in AI systems

Integrating personality into data presentation systems is more than a party trick to add life to your pie charts. It’s about designing tools that can communicate with users in ways that reflect their mood, tone, and even sense of humor. Large Language Models (LLMs) make this not just possible, but accessible to everyone who needs to present data. By generating natural-sounding dialogue and infusing it with personality, LLMs allow for conversations that resonate emotionally—and at times playfully—rather than just delivering dry data. We believe all data tells a story, and LLMs can help you tell a better one.

What can that look like in practice?

During a recent workshop we hosted at HCI International 2024, we asked participants to design AI-enabled systems using an evolved version of the "Talking to Docs" framework. Our goal was to strip back the LLM interface as much as possible, until it contained just the elements we wanted to explore: a base prompt and a searchable vectorized document set. This simplification let our participants experience how setting intentions around personality and emotional framing through prompt engineering can recontextualize their unstructured data (held in the vectorized document set). Each participant took a unique approach to how their unstructured data could be presented in a more intentionally humanized way, blending functionality with personality. Here are some of our favorites.

1. Exploring Newton’s Principia Mathematica with an enthusiastic fitness coach

One participant created a conversational system to explain Newton’s Principia Mathematica in the style of an overly-enthusiastic fitness instructor. This personality is rooted in humor and contrast. Principia contains some of the most revolutionary ideas in physics, not to mention that it’s written in Latin–not an inviting combination. By choosing the framing of a fitness coach, the system immediately added a whole different set of cultural signifiers. But, the benefits went beyond style. The system actually framed its explanations of the ideas in the text as fitness metaphors, making them more relatable to a common human experience—like when it explained the concept of gravity.
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"Just like your muscles build momentum during a run, gravity pulls that ball down the hill! Keep up the energy,—you’ve got this!"‍

This example shows how AI can make even the most challenging material feel dynamic and engaging and, perhaps most importantly, welcoming to audiences who might not be seen as the core one for a particular subject​.

What could this mean in real-world applications? Imagine large multinational corporations creating engaging experiences for AI adoption and upskilling their workers; hospitals could explain complex medical treatments to patients in digestible ways, and schools and education companies could make tough subjects more fun and accessible to learners.

2. Demystifying Picasso’s Guernica for the curious

Another participant used a friendly, approachable art teacher personality to explain Picasso’s Guernica to younger audiences. By using relatable language and a conversational tone, the system helped break down the complex themes and techniques of the painting, making art more accessible as a patient teacher might:
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"Picasso broke things apart and put them back together in strange ways to show the confusion and chaos of war. It’s like a giant puzzle, and you’re the detective figuring it out!"‍

LLMs can be prompted to use existing pedagogy techniques (for example, Socratic dialogue or reciprocal teaching) to deepen understanding of topics a user might normally just skim over. This approach could be used by art and fashion players like museums and brands to explain the backstories of their artifacts, or by travel companies to add greater context to a visitor’s experience of a new place. Or, even more provocatively, this technique could be used to create understanding, consent and trust when agreeing to data usage, especially in highly-sensitive but complex areas like genetic data and other personal information.

3. Adapting the approach to user behavior

A third participant introduced a humorous twist to the bureaucratic process of filling out tax forms by creating an interface that changes its entire persona based on the attitude of its user. If the system detects the user’s tone as positive  and polite, it responds with the personality of a bubbly, cheerful government worker right at the start of their career. But if the system sees that the user is grumpy or rude, it replies with a sarcastic and grudging attitude, and adopts the persona of a government worker on their very last day on the job.
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"Ugh, all right. You do not put your ITIN here. Grab a coffee and take a deep dive into section 4 of Pub. 15 if you really want to know more."‍

What happens when you no longer have to design your interface with an assumed user intent, but instead can dynamically adjust it based not just on explicitly gathered user preferences, but on their tone and attitude?

There are many applications where creating some intentional friction when users don’t behave as intended is desirable, from financial planning to medical treatment plan adherence. Instead of building these frictions on a one-size-fits all design, we can use LLMs to estimate user attitudes and create the right behavioral nudges at the right time. And maybe they can even manage to be funny while doing it.

The future of emotionally-engaged AI design

Designing AI-enabled systems isn’t just about efficiency and ease. It’s about creating meaningful interactions that leverage how humans think and feel to make data more accessible, relatable, and even enjoyable. With their ability to understand and transform human language, AI systems naturally evoke emotional responses that differ from those triggered by traditional software or hardware. Even the absence of a defined personality becomes a personality in itself. As designers of these systems, it’s our responsibility to think deeply about how they’ll relate to users, not just how technically accurate their responses will be. The applications of personality-driven, emotionally-infused AI interfaces can span sectors from technology to healthcare, culture, media, education, government, consumer products, and beyond, potentially making data more vital, relatable, and actionable in all of our everyday lives. It all depends on design.

As AI technology advances, so does the potential to reimagine how we experience data—where even the most abstract information can evoke curiosity, empathy, and engagement.

Try it for yourself

We created this process to make engaging with the fundamentals of AI tools more accessible to designers–and that means you too! If you’d like to try your hand at our personality crafting exercise you can find instructions here. We’d love to hear about what you make! And if you’d like to partner with us to help solve an AI problem of your own, get in touch.

AI data analysis tools are promising a lot: efficiency, adaptability—even enhanced comprehension.

That was a key message we took from our time at the second annual TED AI conference, hosted in our own backyard of San Francisco. Two days full of panel sessions, robot demos, and classic TED Talks had us considering the nature of time, the power of language, and transcending human cognitive limitations. The biggest theme: The urgency for bringing human centered-design to AI is only getting stronger.

Here are five key takeaways from our time on the ground.

1. Beware the black box

The black box approach to AI’s foundational models are the root cause of issues around ownership, copyright, credit—and in the case of certain industries like healthcare—exclusion of entire userbases.

Not knowing what the training data was, where it came from, or who it originally belonged to, means that:

1. We’re not able to give credit or reimbursement to the original creators of that data.
2. There are unknowable but impending legal ramifications from a copyright perspective.
3. Healthcare professionals are unable to use models such as ChatGPT, because without being able to verify or validate the training data, they’re unable to confidently (or even legally) use the answers the models provide.

Already, though, some companies are pioneering more transparent and more widely-usable data sets and model developers. HOPPR, for example, is building the first multimodal AI foundation model for medical imaging and radiology, while the non-profit Fairly Trained is based on the belief that that many consumers and companies “would prefer to work with generative AI companies who train on data provided with the consent of its creators.”

The concept of designing for transparency is reflective of a lot of research we have done in the past with users and data. Our 2019 work with Mozilla exploring more ethical and user-centered solutions to the Surveillance Economy highlighted the pitfalls of data collection, and the opportunities for tech companies to build value by handling user data in more human-centered ways. Combine that with our blockchain work at IDEO CoLab, and there are lots of interesting spaces to explore and draw inspiration from—including individual and collective control, consent, and value generation.

2. Consider the human consequences

A lot of industry specialists are focused on the near-future of the technology, as opposed to the mid-term opportunities and AI’s long-term effects on humanity. Some speakers were concerned that we're spending too much time worrying about what the technology will do for us, while others think we're too concerned about what it will do to us. There was a lot of focus (for better or worse) on the productivity benefits, but relatively few people were thinking about the consequences for humans.

Eugenia Kuyda, founder and CEO of Replika, noted that we should “stop designing for productivity, and start designing for joy,” which is a lovely provocation. We don’t need to forsake one for the other, but designing for joyous experiences can make productivity far more desirable. Our work with Ethiqly around integrating AI and writing exercises in schools focused not on the power of the technology or how many more essays kids could write, but on making the process of getting your creativity on to paper more joyful and rewarding, and focusing on the relationship between teacher and student.

There were also several conversations around the idea that technology will free up time for us to spend with our families instead of working. As romantic as this sounds, it’s not realistic. Organizations will simply reduce headcount, and then increase the other workloads for employees. Articles like this one from the BBC hint at a workforce feeling more burnt out due to AI implementation, showing a glimpse of the human consequences we should be designing for at the application layer.

3. Embrace quality over quantity

Several people spoke about the exponential growth of investment in computing power for large language models (LLMs). Currently, 70 cents of every dollar invested in AI models goes into crunching the data.

As an alternative to this massive use of resources, several speakers brought up the concept of small language models. SLMs are literally smaller models, trained on just 1 billion tokens. (LLMs can require upwards of 1 trillion tokens.) These SLMs can be created with a fraction of the time and energy, and offer great specific utility. Consider the example of the telecom call center. Its model doesn’t need to be exposed to the nuances of Shakespearean sonnets; it just needs to know the words and phrases needed to operate a call center, so you can spend less time, money, and energy on creating your model.

With the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars we’re spending to train LLMs, how much are we willing—or is financially feasible—to spend on models? If we continue down this path, the financial / physical / electrical requirements are going to become unsustainable. One panelist mentioned that “we should be feeding the machine the right information vs. all the information.”

The potential futures for more intentional and nimble SLMs seems much more approachable and both financially and ethically feasible.

4. Spoken language is irreplaceable

One of our favorite speakers was Jessica Coon, the linguist who consulted on the movie Arrival. She argued that human language is rich, nuanced, and endowed with the histories of our cultures. An input text box attached to a keyboard populated with Roman characters is never going to be able to express a fraction of it.

Rikin Gandhi, the co-founder of Digital Green, a company using AI to provide agricultural information and guidance, spoke about the company’s work with farmers in rural India, where illiteracy and nuanced local dialects and translations make-text based offers unviable. But AI models’ abilities to understand spoken language, locational context, and nuances of a given agroecology and a given time of the year means those farmers can interact through images, video, and spoken word.

This perspective shines a spotlight on the potential for more diverse and inclusive design principles, and our spoken language is a key part of that future.

5. Discover a new impetus for responsible design

We also heard from Pratyusha Sharma, a leading researcher and member of Project Ceti, who shed light on how we might be able to leverage generative AI to understand the unsolved mysteries of the ecological world.
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Sperm whales communicate through clicks, or codas. While researchers for decades have understood that this is the primary communication pattern by which this social species coordinated, it had been impossible to untangle the spoken language and what it meant. Sharma spoke about a novel use of generative AI—using a generative adversarial network, or GAN, to surface both the alphabetic principle and deeper understanding of coda meanings. With this technology, not only could we hear the sperm whales’ communication—we can understand what it means and predict from their communications what they might do next, whether that’s diving for food or coordinating childcare.

As AI tools become more and more powerful in helping us understand the language of the world around us, the impetus for responsible design will become clearer and clearer. If we can start to interpret the language plants, animals and earth use to communicate, how can they not be a stakeholder in everything we design?

Curious how human-centered design could help you make more desirable AI products? We’d love to chat.

We need to start pulling the human signals from the technological noise, and weaving them together.

A good purpose statement articulates a passion to boldly make an impact. It can differentiate you from competitors, grounding your work in deeper meaning. It can serve as a beacon to draw like-minded individuals to your company—as consumers or employees. And it can align and motivate leaders, guiding strategic choices.

To do all that, a good purpose has to make you FEEL something.

But too often in crafting a purpose statement, marketing and business jargon sneaks in, adding extra bloat. Or conversely, the language gets watered down to the point where it doesn’t mean anything anymore. The emotional gets sacrificed for the intellectual.

If you feel yourself or your team starting to slip into the weeds—or floating too high above the clouds—here are three ways to re-inspire and re-calibrate your thinking around purpose.

1. Get out of your own head: Collect love letters.

‍If you’re feeling lost at where to even begin, start with some on-the-ground research. Approach employees, end users, stakeholders—whoever interacts with your brand or company—and ask them to write a love letter to your organization, talking about what they’re most proud of, or what they appreciate most.

How we’ve used it: Last year, we were working with the team at Dartmouth Library to develop its strategy, starting with a clear articulation of its purpose. As part of a series of co-design workshops with faculty, staff, and students, we asked participants to write a letter to their library: What did they treasure most? How did it make them feel? While the stories we gathered covered a broad range—encompassing everything from intellectual exploration to belonging—they revealed the deep connections people had with their library, an attachment that was central to both its purpose and strategy.

2. Push past “what” and “how” to uncover your “why.”

‍If you’re feeling like your purpose is stuck in details and logistics, try the classic Golden Circle from Simon Sinek. Draw three concentric circles: the biggest should be WHAT you do; the next, HOW you do it; and the center WHY you do it. Brainstorm your answers to each and put them in the appropriate sphere. Focus on what landed in your center circle—your whys start to articulate your purpose.

How we’ve used it: The Boston Society for Architecture reached out to us to help the organization shift from being program-driven to being impact-driven. In a series of collaborative workshops, we had stakeholders list all the practical and emotional benefits for member architects, partners, community leaders, and students. Together, the team mapped these examples on the Golden Circle, setting aside functional positioning statements to focus on elevating the why—the emotional purpose that the organization could rally around.

3. Fast forward to the future to ground purpose in greater context.

‍If you’re struggling to make your purpose feel more aspirational and evergreen, consider taking an imaginative journey five, 10, or 15 years into the future. Spend a few minutes generating as many future signals as possible: What are things you observe in your industry, your customers, or your organization today that might indicate bigger trends over time? How might you evolve your purpose to stay relevant amid these changes?

How we’ve used it: In the earliest days of the pandemic, we were working with a large consumer electronics company to design a bold new strategy for the organization. To kick off the work, we spent a couple of hours with the core team generating signals. Even though we had no idea what the impacts of the pandemic would ultimately be, we were looking to uncover and better understand trends that were already starting to emerge in the world around us. These explorations into themes like hybrid work, climate resilience, equity (and more!) helped us paint a picture of the future that gave us a context for defining a purpose that could fit the company for years to come.

Articulating a bold and inspirational purpose is hard. It requires creativity, empathy, and constant iteration. And in the swirl of “are we there yet?” it can be easy to sacrifice the emotion, chopping the “feeling” in favor of generic language that—if said with enough oomph—sounds smart enough. But it’s not worth it.

Finding the right “why” can help give your purpose the power it needs to inspire leaders and employees to work in service of something greater. And when you bring it to life, a great purpose can signal your company’s core ethos to consumers, acting like a beacon to those who seek what you have to offer.

For organizations and brands, discovering purpose always starts with a question: “Why do you exist, beyond profit?”

But where is “here” exactly? Here is a tense political environment amidst a divisive battle over “woke” values. It’s a challenging business climate with companies deprioritizing DEIB budgets and sometimes removing entire teams. It’s a design community questioning when and where to push on inclusive practices, in service of moving all of us forward.

Even amidst these hurdles, many of us are still seeking a world where our commercial systems reinforce the world we want to live in. That’s our “there.” To those who believe, the path to more inclusive design practices is not some cherry-on-top afterthought; it’s an imperative facet of our evolving global culture. And for some designers, it’s why we wake up and go to work every day.

Responsible design (or inclusive design, ethical design, or even respectful design, as design leader Dr. Dori Tunstall has dubbed it) has been an emerging focus of design for decades, most often helmed by BIPOC and marginalized folks at design-led organizations. At IDEO, it’s been a movement most recently organized by the Inclusive Design Collective (IDC), a fast-growing crew that meets regularly to discuss design, interrogate our processes, and consider the potential consequences of our work, socially and environmentally.

The IDC has been experimenting with design tools and resources to use throughout the design thinking process (many of these interventions build on tools and best practices from across the worlds of design, engineering, and business). Most of the tools we’ve developed and adopted make space in the project journey to question privilege, power dynamics, biases, and access—all to unlock better outcomes for people and the planet.

Meanwhile, we can feel business shifting. Not all decisions are being driven by profit and shareholder value anymore. We see in our research and in our client work that commerce is becoming more values- and responsibility-driven choice-making. (And in many cases, it’s already there.) Here are five reasons we believe centering inclusive practices in design is the way things are going:

1. Inclusive design is at the heart of global scaling

Capitalism is built on a premise of continual growth. Increasingly, businesses are looking globally to find that growth—but doing so requires that we design thoughtfully and inclusively for consumers and producers in those new markets. For decades now, emerging markets have produced goods for the world, leading to a wave of consumerism. The internet accelerated this change in consumption and exacerbated a trade imbalance that does not serve the needs of people in emerging markets.

But now, we're seeing a shift, especially as historically marginalized countries are experiencing population and economic gains that far outpace the rate of change in other markets. Companies have begun trying to sell products and services to people in emerging markets, delivering to an entirely new set of customers with different values, systems, cultures, needs, and motivations. The businesses that will win—as always—are the ones that deeply understand their customers and how the products they deliver meet those customers’ needs. That means the businesses that will win will be the ones who design alongside them.

We’ve seen this firsthand. Our Last Mile Money program, funded by the Gates Foundation, was a great use case for responsible design. Our work focused on helping companies launch more inclusive products and greater financial access in emerging markets at what is called “the last mile”—underserved women, people in rural areas, and others facing barriers like literacy and internet access. Even companies that were committed to designing for underrepresented users were facing a challenge: Products were often designed with urban, tech-savvy, mostly-male users in mind. Despite pouring money into marketing, promotions, and rebrands, new users weren't adopting their wares. To unlock real growth, these companies needed to expand far beyond their existing users.

In response to these challenges, IDEO developed tools like Designing for Digital Confidence, the Gender Evaluation Framework, and the Financial Confidence Playbook. We centered underserved users throughout the design process, constantly going back to them for feedback to help product teams understand a range of barriers that have kept many people from using and benefiting from digital products. We listened and then took action, redesigning and improving products for needs that have often been ignored.

In India, major e-commerce platform FlipKart (owned by Walmart) redesigned its app to be more intuitive for first-time internet users, helping them serve hundreds of millions of customers. In Kenya, a startup called Leja streamlined its product’s onboarding experience for female small-business owners, leading to 30 percent more sign-ups, and more than quintupling transaction growth. We're seeing many more companies integrate responsible design into how they operate, not just because it’s the right thing to do—but because their own future growth depends on it.

2.  Gen Z won’t mess with anything that’s not inclusive—no cap

‍The number of Gen Z workers—those born between 1997 and 2012—is projected to grow to 51 million by 2030 (overtaking Boomers, who had long reigned as the largest generation of full-time workers, from the late 1970s-2011). Gen Zers are digital natives who grew up in the era of rapid technology development, possess a unique set of skills and perspectives, and are the most diverse generation of our time. Gen Z's strong sense of social awareness and values-driven choice-making guides everything they do. It now has begun to guide business. Companies are shifting their calculus—lack of inclusivity means fewer customers. And businesses who don’t heed this may go the way of Crystal Pepsi.

Meanwhile, external signals reflect a similar sentiment, like the rise in demand for environmental, social, and corporate governance-related investment (82 percent of Gen Z have exposure to ESG investments, and 40 percent say their investment decisions are driven by companies with purpose), or the way Gen Z has redefined consumption from ownership to access, show that they're demanding more from the companies, products, and technologies they adopt. Gen Zers hate labels, love “slow fashion,” and more than half of them identify as “not straight.” For them, DEIB needs to be built in, and authentic, and their loyalty will follow.

As many companies are scrambling to build AI products as quickly as possible, we took a different approach: working directly with Gen Zers to learn more about what they really want from AI. As we tested and prototyped product concepts, they sent us a clear message: They only want products that align with their values. Too many of us assumed that as digital natives, they would take to all-new tech like ducks to water; instead their preferences have many folks really considering the ethical and climate consequences of emerging technology.

3. In many sectors, responsible design won’t be a choice—it will be an obligation

‍‍We all know that businesses today are not nearly as motivated as they need to be to make the changes our planet will need. When we worked with H&M’s CEO at the time, the company had made aggressive sustainability goals, driven by their own aspirations for the business. However, they were also aligned with global regulations, calling for less plastic and less waste in manufacturing processes, and placed them ahead of the market in this transition by streamlining their supply chain, and cutting excess inventory, and producing less waste.

It’s too early for this latest AI growth spurt to have spurred much regulation—but it is coming. IDEO’s Emerging Tech Lab is putting ethics first and sees AI and climate at an intersection, ripe with opportunity for designing more responsibly—for the good of the world, but also because one day, companies simply won’t have a choice.

4. Consumer preferences are changing, and businesses that only care about shareholder growth may be penalized

‍Values-based consumption is not just having a moment—it has redefined consumption. More people are choosing to support companies that align with their values. In fact, in a McKinsey survey, 70 percent of Gen Z respondents said they try to purchase products from companies they consider ethical. Nielsen tells us that 75 percent of Millennials are so eco-conscious, they’ll change their buying habits to favor environmentally-friendly products.

Consider Patagonia. With an estimated value of about $3 billion dollars, and $1 billion in annual revenue, the outdoor company announced in 2022 that Mother Earth would be its only shareholder, and “every dollar that is not reinvested … will be distributed as dividends to protect the planet.” Patagonia has made a name for itself with aggressive environmental goals, like completely eliminating virgin petroleum material in its products by 2025, and becoming net zero by 2040. Patagonia products aren’t cheap, yet sales have quadrupled over the past decade, and it has also expanded offerings into food. The company is a great example of how a brand can be very clear about what it stands for, and still find that people will pay for quality—even at a time when consumers are feeling the pain of inflation. Meanwhile, fast fashion, which offers customers lower quality goods at a much cheaper price point, has seen a steady decline in sales. If businesses continue to only value cost savings, they may learn: Cheap isn’t cheap when it loses you a customer.

‍5. Responsible design creates better products

‍We're big admirers of the healthtech startup Kasha, which has leaned into responsible design to unlock pent-up demand with healthtech. Founder Joanna Bichsel saw that millions of women lacked access to health products in Rwanda. So, Kasha listened to customers’ needs and pain points, and it designed a service that delivered tampons, contraceptives, and other women’s products in accessible and responsible ways. Kasha tapped into massive demand by offering unprecedented product choice, high quality, and perhaps most importantly, confidentiality to its customers, who are 65 percent low-income women. Kasha has seen 10 times revenue growth, and has now expanded to multiple markets across Africa. The woman-led startup isn’t stopping there: It’s adding pharmaceuticals, telehealth, and credit services—all to help women better access quality health care. Kasha learned that centering the unmet needs of the voices that are so often unheard was not just the path to more inclusivity, but also to create products specifically tailored for their customers, and succeed as a company.

The opportunities ahead

Whether it’s the values-based consumption habits of the next generation, new opportunities in growth markets, a coming wave of regulations in climate and Gen AI—Bob Dylan said it best—“the times, they are a-changin.”

Companies that plan for this future, this “there,” with value-loving consumers, more diverse needs, more access, more expansive geographies—will not only get “there,” they will reap the benefits, too. If you’re trying to make it through this tough, ever-changing market—inclusive design might be the best way to survive, and we’d love to help.

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(The figure for Patagonia's annual revenue has been updated for accuracy.)

We won’t get “there” by doing what got us “here.”

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.