New Yorkers experience policing differently depending on who they are and where they live. Some communities are patrolled; others are profiled. When your neighbors’ experiences are starkly different from your own, it can be almost impossible to understand their perspective.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), a state branch of the ACLU, hoped to spark a dialogue around race and police tactics in over-policed communities, and to engage voters on this divisive issue before New York City’s mayoral election. But the NYCLU also understood that traditional slogans and billboards weren’t enough to foster deep personal conversations and effective political action—the city needed real talk.

The organization engaged IDEO to help create a city-wide, nontraditional campaign. In talking with New Yorkers, the NYCLU advocates and IDEO designers honed in on two simple truths: Transformative conversations happen only when people feel safe enough to listen—and to speak. And people become more compassionate listeners once they themselves feel heard. In a time of entrenched interests and growing social conflict, listening can be a radical act.

Together, IDEO and the NYCLU designed Listening NYC, a grassroots campaign to promote interpersonal listening, meaningful discussion, and collective action around policing.

To get New Yorkers—famously brash and always bustling—to stop and listen to their neighbors, they created a pop-up installation called the Listening Room that travels through the city to catalyze one-on-one conversations. It’s a portable safe space, with tables, chairs, two walls that provide a degree of intimacy, and two sides left open for a feeling of psychological safety.

At the center of the experience is a deck of Conversation Cards that encourage New Yorkers to share their stories and hear those of others. Simple prompts like “I believe the role of police is to _____,” and questions like “A cop stops you in your neighborhood. What do you do?” empower people to find common ground. Through straightforward but structured activities like these, many New Yorkers who enter the Listening Room expecting to disagree instead find themselves sharing stories and opinions in ways they never imagined.

Beyond face-to-face dialogue, the Listening Room also features a radio loaded with stories from different neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. By turning the dial, visitors can learn about encounters with policing culture from fellow New Yorkers, including two NYPD officers.

To turn talk into action, visitors are invited to send a postcard to the mayor. People choose the policy proposals most important to them—from, “Police shouldn’t be disciplining kids in school” to, “If police want to read our emails, they should have to get a warrant”—and add them to a pre-stamped postcard dropped into a special “ballot box.” The NYCLU delivered more than 2,000 of these cards to Mayor Bill de Blasio upon his reelection in late 2017.

IDEO and the NYCLU also led an interactive campaign event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Residents, students, philanthropists, and police were led through an exercise called Creative Tensions, positioning themselves around the room according to their views on everything from surveillance technology to school safety. Experts helped guide the conversation including Sheriff Jerry Clayton, director Liesl Tommy, and NYCLU organizer Brandon Holmes. The process allowed participants to see how fluid people’s positions can be.

Listening NYC has now reached thousands of New Yorkers at more than 35 locations. Schools, from a public middle school to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, have requested visits from the Listening Room, and the installation’s modular design has inspired new incarnations on topics including student safety and discipline.

The NYCLU has sent Conversation Cards to celebrities, influencers, and every member of the New York City Council. Sending postcards to Mayor de Blasio and Conversation Cards to the city council led directly to passage of the Right to Know Act—legislation that incorporates some of the NYCLU’s proposals for police reform.

Today, the impact of Listening NYC has moved beyond city limits. The NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter is introducing the pop-up installation there, while in Boston, mayoral candidate Tito Jackson even promised a visit from the Listening Room if elected. To keep dialogue flowing, the ACLU plans to distribute Conversation Cards nationwide.

Fashion thrives on reinvention. Now, digital platforms and tools are reinventing fashion. E-commerce has reshaped the shopping experience and social media has democratized the once-exclusive industry.

Amidst this furious whirl of change, the fashion platform Zalando, founded in 2008, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Headcount has ballooned to 15,000 and revenues grew 23 percent year over year. More than €1 out of every €100 spent on clothing in Europe is spent at Zalando.

In 2014, Zalando’s co-founder and CEO Robert Gentz approached IDEO to help think about the organization’s future in the face of increasing competition. Gentz realized that building design thinking capabilities across the company would allow Zalando to make systemic business shifts, like building better experiences for customers, and balancing operational excellence and execution with innovation.

So, he invited a team of IDEO designers and Zalando employees to create an innovation lab in its Berlin headquarters. They called it The Studio, and in the three years since its launch, it has helped the company build new products, experiences, and modes of working that are powering a digital transformation across Zalando and in the broader fashion world.

Finding purpose

Gentz came to IDEO with a simple request: “I want my daughter to be proud of the company I created.” With that directive, the first order of business was to home in on the organization’s new strategy—to shift from an e-tailer to a full-blown fashion platform—and resurface purpose. After a series of interviews and workshops across the company, a unifying intent emerged:

Zalando exists to reimagine fashion, for the good of all.

To share that message, the team designed a five-day Festival of Purpose at the company’s Berlin headquarters and satellite locations, coupled with a long-term plan to help leaders and their teams weave that sense of purpose into everything they do.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando used purpose to mobilize its community

Building Innovation Capacity

With a shared purpose to rally around, Zalando started to design and build at a clip. The Studio experimented and prototyped, launching products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street style photos, and a digital tool called Collabary that connects online fashion influencers with brands. Projects are enabling cross-disciplinary teams to get into the practice of aligning around joint goals, making fast decisions, and building with agility.

But just as important as identifying growth opportunities for the company has been The Studio’s role as a hub. Zalando employees from across business units cycled into the Studio, teaching IDEOers about their business and the company’s culture, while IDEOers helped them master the design thinking process so they could lead future projects.

Studio graduates ensure that anything prototyped there is implemented, and integrate what they’ve learned into their day jobs. Their experience makes them design ambassadors who spread the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando pioneered a new innovation studio

Teaching Leaders How to Scale Change

It’s one thing to start working differently in a small innovation lab, but how do you scale change across an organization and determine how it will affect each major business unit—product, technology, commercial, and logistics? IDEO interviewed Zalando employees to better understand how to embed what we called new Ways of Working (WoW), a method that combines design thinking with lean and agile approaches. WoW was then deployed by a centralized team that ran workshops and coaching sessions to help leaders adopt it, measure its impact through OKRs, KPIs, and NPSs, and help their teams understand the new processes.

Today, the Ways of Working method is being rolled out across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees.

Together, the relationship between IDEO and Zalando and their multi-year project of change is spurring double-digit growth, and making good on the company’s vision of reimagining fashion, for the good of all.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando scaled new ways of working across their organization

IDEO helped position Shinho’s ingrained respect for food, family, and good health as a guiding principle for how the organization interacts with its employees and the wider world. The IDEO team integrated a new motto—“treat the world as family”—into every part of Shinho’s work, from sourcing and hiring to new ventures to the care employees take in handling each bottle of sauce destined for someone’s table.

To help transform Shinho’s internal culture, the IDEO team also crafted a narrative to communicate the company’s beliefs to new staff and outside partners. The team expressed Shinho’s foundational story through a published brand book and film, reimagined logo, and codified employee values.

“My proudest moment was when we brought the brand identity IDEO developed to life, and interpreted Shinho’s mission and vision through that lens in front of 2,000 employees at our annual meeting,” said Hanzhong Dong, Shinho's Head of Product, “It made me feel that even though we’re a group of ordinary people, we’re working on a great and meaningful thing."

Shinho’s heightened confidence and focus on supporting families has empowered the company to expand beyond soy sauce and snacks and explore new offers, from culinary training to sustainable farming to food experiences.

In July 2017, Shinho stepped onto the international stage as a tastemaker by participating in an event called Food Forward, hosted by the Michelin Guide and IDEO. Michelin-starred restaurants are synonymous with superb ingredients and service. Shinho crafts safe, organic, high-quality products that are staples for Chinese chefs, and the company shares the Michelin Guide’s aim to celebrate and expand the role of fine dining in China. IDEO brought all parties together with the shared goals of elevating China's culinary craft and culture, inspiring people around the future of food in China, and encouraging fruitful connections and partnerships.

IDEO and the Michelin Guide organized the day-long event, which included guest speakers, panel discussions, and tastings with four international, Michelin-starred restaurant chefs. Speakers and panelists discussed culinary education, inclusion, and the interplay between tradition and innovation in food. More than 200 people attended from across the food ecosystem: chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, investors, and educators. The event’s livestream garnered 30 million global views and 800,000 engagements.

Shinho’s products now reach 30 million families in 232 cities around the globe, driven by a cohesive mission and brand message. This kind of values-driven growth and hunger for new partnerships is setting the course for the future of food in China and throughout the region.

Despite the rapid growth of China's economy and increased access to a wider variety of food since the opening up, the market is saturated with unhealthy, processed snack foods. Consumers are increasingly seeking better-quality options, highlighting a significant gap in the food system.

30M families

purchase Shinho’s products

60 countries

around the globe offer Shinho products

Narvar, a software-as-a-service startup that provides a post-purchase engagement platform for retail clients, was scaling fast. The company had grown from 20 to 90 employees, and was well on its way to reaching 300 over the next two years. As the company grew, its leaders wanted to make sure it could sustain its vibrant, innovative culture. Narvar came to IDEO for help identifying and defining its values in a way that would would scale with the organization.

For the IDEO team, that meant articulating a system of values that supported existing behavior, reflected the company’s aspirations, and aided in evaluating new talent and development. The team started by interviewing key “culture carriers,” from the CEO to new hires, to learn what makes Narvar special. Based on this research, the team crafted a working set of values, then invited the entire company to share their feedback. In doing this work, IDEO was also able to surface organizational issues and tensions within the company for Narvar leaders to address.

Now, Narvar lives its values every day. Team members use them during candidate interviews, employees see them daily on company walls, and managers reinforce them during performance reviews. Every quarter, leadership gives out a Narvar values award to reinforce their importance. Through this project, Narvar was able to not only capture its core values, but also use them as an active ingredient in the company’s growth.

“We engaged IDEO to really understand the challenges we faced as an organization, and IDEO helped us define and articulate our culture and values. I can honestly say that all the growth and success we’ve achieved in the past two years—we couldn’t have done that without the foundation from IDEO,” said Narvar CEO and founder Amit Sharma.

A founding member of the alt-rock band Garbage, Steve Marker had generously agreed to an interview on one condition: that he could read an advance copy of my book, Two Beats Ahead, before we talked. This made me sweat, not because he was a rock star—my co-author and I had spoken to many of them while writing—but because he was the first rock star reading the book about the inventive mindsets of musicians. It was like waiting on Julia Child for feedback about the omelet you just served her.

“I’m enjoying your book so far,” Steve said. My shoulders relaxed.

I first heard Garbage on college radio in the mid 90s. The band had an unmistakable sound—a combination of shoegaze, hiphop, and electronic dance, with the pouty attitude of the Cure reinvented by a feminist fatale. It was an unexpected direction for the band given that Butch Vig, another founding member, had rocketed to fame as the producer of Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind. Grunge—as that Seattle sound was called—was nowhere to be found on Garbage’s debut. And it turns out, that was by design, or as Steve implied, maybe an un-design.

“You know, it was interesting reading about the intention that so many artists have had in making their music,” Steve told me. “It wasn’t like that for us. We didn't have a written-out plan or even something we really talked about that much. It was just a combination of everything that we loved.” He shared a story about Butch seeing My Bloody Valentine in New York and being blown away by their white noise and pop melodies. He mentioned Public Enemy and their gritty noise loop samples. He talked about 60s rock.

“Garbage could have turned into a totally pop thing. Or it could have turned into a noise experiment that would have been an interesting album to listen to once or twice. Luckily, we found a combination that worked for us. A lot of that had to do with Shirley [Manson], as she brought this whole other thing into the mix that we couldn't have planned. The combination of all our different influences is what the band became.”

Well, maybe there wasn’t a plan, but there was definitely a principle of designing the conditions for creativity and letting the outcome emerge from that. Steve and the band had figured out how to bring together all the things they loved, and at the same time, reject all the things that were popular in the mainstream. They chose a new path, which became their own path to mainstream success. Their debut sold 4 million copies in its first 12 months.

As I reflected upon how this happened, I was thinking about the numerous client teams that I’ve worked with under rapid deadlines and inflated expectations.“We want to be the next iPod of banking!” they say. The bygone days of Bell Labs open briefs feel like business mythology now. And yet, that was exactly the situation Garbage had. “We were lucky enough to have somebody say, ‘Okay, go make a record,’ mainly because Butch had a great reputation. We had the luxury to take as much time as we wanted to figure out what we were going to be.”

In Two Beats Ahead, Panos Panay and I interviewed Imogen Heap and Steve Vai about music and product breakthroughs they had in their own careers. We also spoke with folks at Amazon’s PillPack about launching their startup idea. What ties these stories together are mindsets of curiosity and learning. Experimentation wasn’t confined to any single part of a workflow or to particular roles. It was more like a cultural attribute, the water they swam in. For Garbage, that culture looked like persistent play. Steve illustrated this with a story about making Garbage's first record.

At the time, they were often just sampling other people’s songs to find elements they liked. During one session, he grabbed a handful of CDs looking for a beat and happened to play “Train in Vain” by the Clash. “Right there, we had a good four-bar loop to use as a click track...I put down a bass line and that was the foundation of the song right there.”

The next day, Butch came up with the lyrics:

you stupid girl
pretend you’re high
pretend you’re bored

“It can take minutes or months to make a song,” Steve continued, “and you’ve just got to stay open to letting it make its own path.”

I can imagine someone reading this and thinking to themselves, “So that’s it? The secret to innovation is to try a bunch of random stuff until it works?” But remember, this wasn’t just any band coming up with songs. This was Garbage. And this led Steve and I to an interesting discussion about team dynamics and experience.

“I guess we were lucky that we all worked with bands for 10-15 years before Garbage. We were in dozens of bands that hated each other. You learn by doing that.” He went on to talk about fluidity, respect, and vulnerability—the essential chemistry of the band.

It would be misleading to suggest that musicians somehow have a more natural ability to collaborate than others. It's not about an inherent gift. We all know the stories of a band breaking up over creative differences, sometimes with incredible public meltdowns. The reason musicians have so much to teach us is that the conditions in which they work are the ideal classroom for these mindsets.

Great creative talent is in every company, but the structures and social norms of the organizations often dictate who is permitted to collaborate. I’ve been in situations where clients have asked me not to talk to their colleagues because they didn’t trust them. I’ve seen departments make competitors of one another because they were incentivized to do so. I’ve been in buildings that have rooms dedicated to innovation rather than cultures committed to it. To get the best teams, it's often left to the creativity of the project leader to work around these organizational constructs and find the ideal contributors, no matter where they are in the organization.

Garbage set themselves up without defined roles—except for Shirley, who always sings. Otherwise, roles and contributions are left up to the person with the best ideas. “Being in a band is the most fun thing I can imagine doing. It's a dream come true from when you were a kid. And I've done it as a job, as my livelihood for a long time. It's amazing,” Steve shared with a smile.

Those words, “I’ve done it as my job,” have stuck with me because they really are the premise of Two Beats Ahead. We often don’t see the musician’s life as a job. And yet the mindsets that Steve and Garbage bring to work are the mindsets that we are regularly striving for in the corporate world. We’ve categorized the rock star life as something else. But on my best days, I’m working just like those legendary musicians, pursuing curiosity, building on new ideas with my teammates, and trying to get the video lighting just right.

Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation, by IDEO partner R. Michael Hendrix and Berklee College of Music Senior Vice President for Global Strategy and Innovation, Panos A. Pany, will be available worldwide in April.

Preorder in the U.S. here and the UK here.

Steve was supposed to be in bright colored lights on stages across the U.S. along with Liz Phair and Alanis Morrisette. Instead, he was on a video call with me, trying to find a camera angle that didn't make him look like he was in witness protection.

Yun believes the purpose of food is more than sustenance. Every dish is a cultural story and an ode to generational resilience.

Yun is one of hundreds of women entrepreneurs San Francisco’s beloved food business incubator La Cocina ( "The Kitchen" in Spanish) has supported over the last decade. Graduates from La Cocina have scaled industry barriers to establish restaurants and factories around the Bay Area, served millions of nutritious, multicultural meals, and generated tens of millions of dollars in sales. Yun’s story is one of success for one woman, but also for her family, her culture, and for a business that supports community health.

Business and community health can form a virtuous flywheel. Businesses thrive when their employees lead happier, healthier, and more productive lives. Communities thrive when the businesses that serve them support their health holistically. However, despite considerable investments in the healthcare system, the cycle has sputtered and stalled: every year, $2.6 trillion of productivity is lost to chronic disease. Businesses could play a broader role in addressing these inefficiencies and inequities, but investments in health have largely been limited to the traditional healthcare system and ignored where people live, work, learn, and play—in the space we call The First Mile of Health. By “First Mile Health” we mean making a deliberate effort to design for the patterns of everyday life that keep people well—emotionally, physically, financially, and socially. First Mile Health means creating and investing in businesses that provide compounding health benefits like intergenerational housing, food cooperatives, insurance to combat loneliness, and digital technologies that enhance trust and social cohesion.

What do we mean by the first mile? First Mile Health looks at people living their full life—not just their diet, exercise, insurance—not just things in isolation.

Animation by Claudio Fresneda

Building blocks for First Mile Health exist at the interpersonal, community, and city level.

Interpersonal: Nurture lasting relationships

The first mile of health is built on a basic human need: to relate with each other. As a species, humans rely on each other to survive and thrive. In today’s world where so much of our lives are digitally-mediated, it’s critical that our digital relationships foster mutual care and support.

If social media is the modern public square, today’s digital technology remains far from the agora of Athens or Central Park, places where people from diverse backgrounds gather and build shared understanding. Most social tech is still new in the grand scheme of things, and there's ample opportunity to develop them in a health-centered way. If we are to avoid the “social recession”—a loneliness epidemic exacerbated by COVID—digital experiences must help people spend meaningful time together, moving away from doom-scrolling and toward lasting relationships.

One positive example of this appears in IDEO data science research supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which revealed that social media posts tagged as “inspiration” strongly correlate with posts about health. This signals that health can be a unifying topic that catalyzes positive conversation and builds social cohesion. Talking about health can lift people up, motivate them, and activate them toward taking care of their own well-being, sometimes just by giving the words to describe how they feel.

Health is also strongly correlated with personal identity, especially among younger people still in the process of learning and affirming who they are. When the pandemic hit, the social innovation organization Hopelab had been working on a tool called Nod, an intervention for loneliness among young people. At first, they determined that getting young people off their devices was the top intervention for tackling loneliness—but when COVID happened, they took a step back and asked, “What are the underlying principles of social connection?” and, “How can we build a tech-mediated intervention that will catalyze meaningful social connection digitally?” Nod shifted from a tech-centered framing—get kids off devices—to identity-centered framing based on principles such as positive psychology and mindful self-compassion to equip young people with the skills to nurture meaningful connections both online and offline.

How might digital products and services better support positive self-awareness and well-being?

How might we create digital experiences that feel like being in proximity with those we love? And importantly, how might we foster connections among those we don’t already know?

How might we design policies and regulations to ensure that digital experiences create reciprocal value for people and businesses?

Communities: Support local economic resilience

An inclusive local economy supports health: grocery stores that stock fresh produce, shared bikes and scooters to help people get around the neighborhood, small businesses and local services that connect and convene community members, and more.

Co-investments build strong, resilient local communities. Organizations that share economic power with communities at the local level are, in turn, more resilient themselves. Through co-investment, organizations and communities form a virtuous cycle. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis businesses that diversified their community of co-investors were not only able to weather shocks, they were better set up to support the health and economy of the communities in which they operate in the long-run.

Businesses new and old are now taking part in a cooperative renaissance. Project Equity, a member of the Ashoka network of changemakers, is helping businesses transition to employee-ownership. Start.coop, a national accelerator for cooperative entrepreneurs, is advancing new business solutions addressing all of the social determinants of health. From creating affordable housing to increasing access to nutritious food, cooperatives have equity built into their DNA. These are examples of businesses that engage their community members beyond pure consumerism to become active decision-makers and co-designers of their local economies.

This cooperative renaissance is part of a bigger conversation to imagine a political economy that’s not centered on short-term value extraction but rather community health and wealth. From Platform Cooperative to Zebras Unite to RadicalxChange, the movement to build a new economy grounded in steward-ownership and long-term purpose is gaining momentum around the world.

How might we supercharge local entrepreneurship, starting with women and minority-owned businesses?

How might large businesses build local enterprises and steward-ownership models into their ecosystem in ways that create value for all?

How might innovations in the distributed web and decentralized governance enable alternative ownership and exit models?

Cities: Build multi-city coalitions

American cities are places of extremes: the most diverse places in the country and also the most unequal—a deadly intersection as shown by the disproportionate impact of COVID. Over the past few years, an experiment has been in the works in Stockton, California, the most diverse city in the country. For two years, Stockton’s former mayor, Michael Tubbs, gave $500 per month to 125 randomly selected residents living with low income. As the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) website describes it, “the cash was completely unconditional, with no strings attached and no work requirements.” Two years later, the data collected on the project has been released, and among other striking findings, one stands out: recipients of the funds were “healthier, showing less depression and anxiety, and enhanced well-being.” COVID demonstrated the compounding effects of an economic crisis on top of a public health crisis. In showing a way forward that solves for both, Stockton’s success story has catalyzed a coalition of mayors to launch guaranteed income pilots in 29 cities across the country. When decisions center on the diverse voices of those who live closest to the problem, cities can rise the tide and lift the health and wealth of all of their people.

Cities are effective units of change, where people could work on challenges that are big enough to matter and small enough to make things happen. When diverse partnerships of organizations rally around a shared purpose, cities become containers for collective imagination. One example of this shows up in Cities Changing Diabetes, a 36-city network advised by Gehl that conducts research, crafts strategy, and collaborates across cultures and geographies. The coalition creates neighborhood-level strategies for health that are unique to local conditions but offer lessons that can be applied across the network.

The 2020 census revealed the faces of a changing nation: a pronounced aging population and an increase in diversity among Millennials and Gen Z. Already home to eight out ten people over the age of 65, cities are the ground zero of these macro demographic shifts. Aging is a main risk factor of chronic diseases and COVID has made race-based health inequities abundantly clear. If business-as-usual persists, we will face a grave prognosis: an aging population burdened by chronic disease will be catastrophic for the American economy. The solution is as simple as it is inevitable: just as chronic diseases like diabetes and obesity are risk multipliers that devastate the economy, First Mile Health could be a resilience multiplier for both people’s health and the economy.

How might we create pathways for economic mobility for those who face the biggest barriers of systemic inequities?

How might we build trust between governments, businesses, and residents?

How might networks of cities unite across divisions and heal together?

Every business leader should see an opportunity in First Mile Health

First Mile Health is an “and” to all the work being done today. It’s shifting the mentality from fixing to designing. And we can only do that by seeing one another fully.

Depending on where you stand, you might see a different path toward First Mile Health. Healthier communities make better customers, making them and the businesses who serve them more resilient to unexpected threats such as pandemics; improved mental health and well-being generate higher levels of engagement; extended healthy lifetimes increase the talent and customer pools available to business; healthy family and work life encourages a sense of belonging, which in turn builds organizational knowledge; and lower health costs benefit all. All of these outcomes are examples of First Mile Health.

This week marks the grand opening of La Cocina Municipal Marketplace, the first women-led food hall in the country. This 7000 square foot development in the heart of the Tenderloin will give entrepreneurs who follow in Nite Yun’s footsteps an even bigger platform to innovate, while offering affordable, healthy food to longtime local residents. La Cocina Municipal Marketplace is an exemplar of First Mile Health: it serves as an inclusive gathering space for the community, a catalyst for business leadership from the ground up, and a demonstration project for health-centered economic development to inspire cities around the country.

Runners know that the first mile is always the hardest. When you start out, your body has to adjust to the new demands of physical activity. But as you run, your body adapts and the experience naturally starts to get easier. The same is true for First Mile Health: while the first mile might be the hardest, it will create many happier and healthier miles down the road. As Mark Twain said, “The trick to getting ahead is getting started.”

We wish to thank Steve Downs at Building H for his thought partnership and collaboration that helped shape First Mile Health.

‍

While having a bowl of soup on a trip to Cambodia, Nite Yun, who was trained as a nurse and is now the chef-owner of the award-winning restaurant Nyum Bai in Oakland, realized that eating could be a way of healing.

This is done by leveraging human-centered design as a tangible skill set for building useful products and services for diverse communities. Students are introduced to internships, professional roles, and entrepreneurial opportunities as trained professionals contributing to positive social change in the marketplace.

Color by Design (CxD) is RepresentEd’s newest fellowship program designed for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) in partnership with IDEO that is invested in transforming the boundaries of design. This program provides participants with the necessary professional development skills, mentorship, and on-the-job training to make impactful and empowering career decisions in design. Additionally, fellows will participate in seminars, workshops, and networking events that will expose them to professional designers from various fields who will share their knowledge, provide instruction on design components and support them in successfully completing CxD projects.

It is a 9-month program spanning September 2021 to June 2022.

The 9 months include a 3-month part-time professional training course (September - December 2021), followed by a 6-month paid full-time Fellowship with IDEO (January - June 2022). The Fellowship will have an opportunity to convert to a permanent full-time role after 6 months.

Update, May 6th 2022: We’d like to share our decision that we are postponing the next cohort of the Color by Design program in partnership with ReprentEd Leadership until 2023.

We are about to wrap up our pilot program and we want to take the time to debrief and learn from the experience of our current Fellows and take those inputs into the design of the next cohort. In particular, we want to consider if and how to scale the program to a broader set of design disciplines beyond design research and the impact this will have on the curriculum design, and how to best place Fellows in different communities within IDEO to ensure the most productive experience.

Based on this review, we intend to iterate on the next Color by Design program and launch it by the end of 2023. We will share more updates as we get closer to the recruitment season.

We hope that this has not caused any inconveniences and please know that we welcome your feedback and suggestions as we work to build the next version of the Fellowship.

If you have any questions, please contact cxdinfo@ideo.com.

RepresentEd Leadership builds pathways for college students of color who are harnessing their power as socially conscious leaders.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the World Health Organization's designation of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. In the past year, we've changed our routines and behaviors, and many of us have established a new normal that's not terribly different from the old one. Except...with so much less entertainment, interaction, and spontaneity. With options narrowed, it helps to ask others what they're doing to keep things joyful. At this strange milestone, we asked IDEOers around the globe how they’re designing for more moments of joy these days. Here’s what they had to say.

Write down three good things each day

One thing that has personally helped me a lot is an exercise that was recommended to me by a friend and also recently mentioned in a TEDx talk by Lucy Hone as an important technique to become more resilient. It’s brutally simple: No matter how hard your day has been, you jot down three good things that have happened to you, that you learned, or that you are just grateful for. Nothing negative. It’s all about switching your attention to the good. It is a really powerful way to remind you there is always something to be thankful for.

—Pierre La Baume, Senior Interaction Design Lead, Munich

Find time to play

Something that really has helped me is shifting into a more playful mindset. Especially early on during shelter-in-place, when I felt like I was drowning in self-development recommendations for all my “free time,” I found peace in reverting to hobbies I enjoyed when I was younger that I hadn't gone back to in awhile. For me, this meant diving deep into the games I enjoy (such as SpyParty, Team Fortress 2, Into The Breach,Tetris 99, Raji, and Among Us) for months even, as opposed to playing many games “quickly” to learn more as a game designer. It meant spending more time, even an entire day, re-reading comforting books (such as Pride and Prejudice, Tuesdays With Morrie, Dune, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Shingeki No Kyojin, and more) without feeling guilty about it. It meant more doodling, daydreaming, and giving myself moments in the day that didn't make me feel like I had to be “productive” to make up for all the quiet, reflective commute time and socializing that was no longer happening regularly.

—Ridima Ramesh, Play Lab Game Designer, Palo Alto

See life through a child’s eyes

Observing how my three-year-old daughter sees the world has taught me a lot in these dark times. She always lives in the moment, and what she feels right now is not affected by the pandemic situation. Even after a rough day, she jumps up and down with a big smile for every little thing that happens around her, such as finding a butterfly or bumping into her friend on the street. For adults, although we may have a joyful moment, it’s often swallowed up by the overflowing information and chaos at the end of the day. We see more complexity in the world than children do, but my daughter has made me try to be more present, see the world with fresh eyes like she does, and embrace a moment of joy so I can stay positive.

—Kayoko Watanabe, Marketing, Tokyo

Be in your body

Exercise is helpful—especially dance! The brain is cool in that our limbic system is often more able to process emotions and stored energy via movement, than the prefrontal cortex (the thinking mind, which is in charge of executive functions). Moving your body is a consistent hack to shake off the heaviness of this moment in time. One silly (or serious!) dance party a day encourages me not to take myself too seriously.

—Alex Nana-Sinkam, OpenIDEO Community Lead, New York

Invest in yourself

2020 has been an interesting year to say the least. First off, condolences to the lives lost from the past few months; it has not been easy. As the year has moved along, I’ve been running some checks and balances on my life: investing in myself by practicing my skin routine, working out, investing money, and learning new skills. I’m very focused on protecting my energy. I've found myself giving less and less energy to various media outlets; I'm tired of seeing this political battle, police brutality, and pandemic talk. Staying in touch with friends and family is major. I’ve been to more virtual parties than real parties this year!

—Preston Tilghman, Leadership Coordinator, San Francisco

Actively pursue work-life balance

I've started to look after my health more, and have actually started to turn the thought of “work-life balance” into action (though I'm still seesawing more than balancing right now!). I go to morning workouts as early as 6:45am to start the day on a positive note, and have started to incorporate more essential oils into my life: dribbles into my baths (also taking more baths!), dabs onto my wrists or temples, and mixed into my diffuser. I'm taking different routes on my bike rides to and from work to add variety into my days, and am especially enamored with biking under the shade of large leafy trees. I've begun going on day or overnight trips outside of Shanghai, turning weekends into adventures. I've also enrolled in an improv workshop for the month of November, and we will have our first showcase in December!

I think in general this year has forced me to think about how fleeting and fragile life can be, and has prompted me to be more courageous about trying new things. For me, the moments of peace have been rare, but joy hasn't.

—Kiko Zang, Business Operations Lead, Shanghai

Get inspired by other creative people

I wish I had a silver bullet for “feeling good” this year that reliably works not only for myself but for others as well. However, each thing I've held as foundational that I could trust to inject “good vibes” into my life has been challenged, and many haven't made it into 2020 unscathed. That said, there are a few things I've found myself doing that may not make me laugh so hard I need to throw myself out of frame during Zoom calls, but do bring much desired comfort and quiet when I most need it.

One of those things is Jon Bois. It seems strange to point to someone who you only know through their online output and say, “This dude's videos are what's gonna get me through this,” but it's a gamble I'm willing to take. Jon Bois is a video producer for SB Nation, a sports website I don't read, and he mostly makes videos about weird and niche stories that primarily center around sports I don't watch or know much about. He's a superb writer and a masterful filmmaker, though I'm only calling him those things because there isn't an accurate term to describe exactly what he's doing. He's in the middle of releasing a sequel to his defining work Football 17776 called Football 20020—a multimedia speculative fiction story that follows three extraterrestrial entities watching and commenting on people playing exaggerated football on a post-scarcity, post-death, post-war Earth, where humans are defined by play. It's joyous and there's truly nothing like it. I have an ongoing though incomplete watch guide for things made by Jon Bois for those interested.

—Zachary Clemente, Senior Tech Admin, Cambridge

Share vulnerability with co-workers

The ability to build trust with a team to a point where you can be vulnerable in front of each other has been very important on my projects—being able to slump onto the couch with the team for the twelfth hour of Zoom calls or pull out a pint of ice cream at 3pm when you just really need it. I think it’s also really valuable to leave space to talk about how we're feeling during stand-up or anytime during the workday. With major events surrounding racial injustice, scary wildfires, the political environment, challenging immigration issues with COVID, or generally just feeling low energy—it's not a normal time, and it’s not realistic for us to always “be optimistic” these days. The joy I find with my team is that I feel I'm not in this alone.

—Amanda Amyx, Design Lead, San Francisco

Get in costume

When the pandemic hit and suddenly I was separated from my colleagues by entire continents, we needed new rituals for remote working. As a creative warm-up, my teammate George Joseph suggested a theme and asked that we all dress up, grab a prop, or put on a virtual background relating to that theme for the next meeting. It was so much fun! We decided to do it every morning—and so the “Extras Daily Zoom Theme” came to be.

The night before the meeting, or even early that morning, someone from the team would come up with a new creative theme for us to explore. Most people would find a fun Zoom background, but since I had an old computer that wasn’t able to use virtual backgrounds, I had to come up with a prop or costume to go with the daily theme—often with only five minutes warning! As the themes became progressively challenging and abstract (from animals, fruits and colors, to adverbs) I got more and more into it. Some highlights: For the “recreate a piece of art” theme, I looped in my mom for help dressing as The Two Fridas, and for Halloween, I dressed up as a campfire with s’mores. Every morning my team members would watch for what new invention I would come up with. This was truly an injection of daily joy into my life, and one that brought joy to others, too.

—Arianne Orillac, Design Lead, IDEO.org

Design new rituals

Since April, I have had a new ritual on Friday nights. After my daughter goes to sleep, I pour a glass of wine and sit in front of my computer to virtually meet six of my college friends who call in from Tokyo, London, and Melbourne. Our weekly call has been set up as a recurring event with no end date. You feel no pressure to attend if you’re busy or tired because you know that there is always “next time.” At the same time, we’ve been able to use our meeting as an opportunity to check in with each other. The pandemic happened when many of us were already facing new challenges: becoming a mom, moving overseas, working from home with kids. We needed a place where we could be vulnerable, support each other, and laugh together to keep our sanity. I have never felt them so close despite the physical distance. 2020 has been hard indeed, but having this regular opportunity to stay connected with my friends brings so much joy and peace into my life.

—Kayoko Watanabe, Marketing, Tokyo

Notice the little, beautiful things

The pandemic sent me and my family into the lake-and woods-filled Poconos, Pennsylvania. Quickly settling into a new routine, each day, my two-year-old and I would walk up and down our yard and back and forth the stretch of our street. As my mind circled the themes of the day—the state of the world, the uncertainties of our plans, work—my son observed our surroundings: the sticks in the yard, a squirrel running up the tree, the plane flying far overhead, each passing and pausing bird. It took me weeks to pause myself. I suddenly wondered: How had I never noticed how beautiful birds are? The variety of colorful coats and the stunning range of voices. I soon found myself tracking a particular bright yellow-coated bird on the branches near the lake; each time I caught it perched for an extended moment I felt a simple joy.

Neither the beauty of nature nor the power of mindfulness is a new discovery, of course. But reaping their benefits requires a constant remembering. I am grateful for the presence of my toddler—both his remarkable ability to be present and his presence in my day to day. At two and a half, he is himself transforming and learning about the world at an astonishing pace, while also teaching me everything that I've forgotten.

—Alice Kogan, Business Design Lead, New York

Illustrations by Jenice Kim

Now that the answer to “How are you?” is “Pandemic-fine,” how do we answer the question, “What brings you joy?”

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.