All moms want to give their babies the best start in life, and for many, that means nourishing their babies with breastmilk. However, breast pumping is often inconvenient and uncomfortable. Tethered to the wall, undressed, and surrounded by cords and dangling bottles, most mothers who pump are interacting with technology that hasn’t fundamentally changed in more than 25 years.

Passionate about solving this challenge, the startup Willow set out to completely re-imagine the breast pumping experience. The team at Willow envisioned a “dream pump” that would deliver what moms want most: mobility and discretion.

The Willow team approached IDEO to be a close partner in bringing their product to life. As a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, industrial designers, and mechanical engineers, IDEO, Willow, and Function Engineering worked together seamlessly to identify mothers’ unmet needs and resolve engineering complexities with a simple and elegant design.

The resulting product, Willow, is the first all-in-one, wearable breast pump that cuts the cords, ditches the mess of bottles, and fits easily inside a bra. Mobile, discreet, and hands-free, Willow allows women to achieve their breastfeeding goals without pressing pause on their own lives.

The final design of Willow was informed by research and in-person interviews with dozens of mothers, ranging from first-time to experienced pumpers. Insights about their personal routines, challenges, and workarounds guided the design team as they built more than 60 physical prototypes to understand how Willow could best fit into mothers’ lives. Learnings from those prototypes helped the team to define the size, shape, color, and materials of Willow, as well as each step in the pumping process.

One key design element that emerged from this iterative process was the simplicity of Willow’s architecture, which makes the pump easy to use, assemble, and clean. The pump contains just a few basic parts that snap together, and only two parts that need to be cleaned (both are dishwasher-safe).

Considering how personal the breast pumping experience is, the team aimed to help the pump feel less like a stark, mechanical device and more like a considered, modern, and personal accessory—a goal ultimately achieved through the pump’s colors, texture, and finish.

Because of Willow, mothers no longer need to plan their lives around pumping—it can happen anywhere, at anytime. Willow gives moms back their time and freedom and gives them choice; now moms can play with an older child, work, or enjoy precious relaxation time at home. With Willow, pumping breastmilk finally fits seamlessly into women’s active everyday lives.

More than 50 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, yet only half receive psychiatric treatment. When they do, it usually involves medication and one-on-one therapy to treat the most visible symptoms, including hallucinations and paranoia. But the disease can also cause debilitating symptoms that medication can’t easily treat, such as social anxiety and isolation, lack of motivation, and memory deficits.

For people living with these symptoms, what might seem like simple activities—socializing, spending time outdoors, exercising—can sometimes feel overwhelming. And if patients aren’t given effective care, they can become even more isolated, and their physical health and quality of life suffer. They’re far more likely to let the rest of their treatment regimen slip, skipping medication or therapy sessions.

To help address these challenges, a digital health research group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) approached IDEO with an idea to supplement the longstanding medication-and-therapy model with a tool to alleviate hard-to-treat symptoms, and more importantly, improve patients’ quality of life. It would require identifying unmet needs among patients and determining which kinds of interactions could have the greatest impact on young people with mental illness.

The outcome of that collaboration is PRIME, or Personalized Real-time Intervention for Motivational Enhancement, a digital platform that empowers young people with schizophrenia with the tools, motivation, and community of support they need to achieve their goals.

The simplicity of PRIME belies its deep functionality. The easy-to-use mobile app helps patients stay motivated to stick with behaviors that boost their health, social skills, and productivity, and it provides motivational coaching from trusted professionals and social connections with other patients.

How It Works

The PRIME app lets users set daily goals based on their particular needs. There are more than 500 small challenges to try—from inviting a friend to play basketball to spending time with a family member—and users can see their progress tracked through incremental successes over time.

Whenever users need help, trained motivational coaches are on hand to provide cognitive behavioral therapy coaching, encourage patients to achieve their goals (and to push beyond their comfort zones), and support their interactions with other users.

Tapping into its vibrant social network to help patients feel less isolated, PRIME prompts users to snap photos of happy moments, highlight important events in their lives, and share challenges they’re proud to have accomplished. Unlike Facebook, which can be overwhelming for some patients with schizophrenia, PRIME is a closed community where users can talk freely about their challenges with others who are just like them.

Click above to hear our audio story, or listen on SoundCloud.

To measure the efficacy of PRIME, UCSF and IDEO combined traditional metrics, such as Patient Health Questionnaire scores and time spent in the app, with new metrics evaluating patients’ quality of life. For example, they studied the pictures of things that made users happy before and while using the app, and measured the frequency, depth, and quality of patients’ social interactions in the app based on word choice and punctuation.

Learnings from these human-centered metrics helped the team iterate further on PRIME’s design, so that the platform would generate even higher levels of engagement and stronger improvements in patients’ motivation and social functioning. In this 2016 peer-reviewed, clinical study, 80 percent of patients with schizophrenia achieved their daily goals, and users logged into the app an average of 4.5 times a week, far more than the expected rate of once a week.

PRIME has also made an impact on patients and their families on a personal level. The mother of one research participant was thrilled with the results. She told IDEO, “I wish you could have witnessed my daughter’s first response to seeing the faces and profiles on her phone. She looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Everyone looks normal. Everyone looks like people you see every day.’ It was as if she looked into a mirror that reflected possibility and hope.”

Human-Centered Design

The PRIME platform is an example of how the human-centered design process can lead to first-of-its-kind innovations in the field of mental health care. PRIME designers conducted comprehensive interviews that led to a deep understanding of patients as whole people, not just conditions or sets of symptoms.

For Dr. Danielle Schlosser, lead researcher on the PRIME project at UCSF, collaborating with IDEO and applying design thinking to her research on mental health was illuminating. "[It] showed us that in order to engage our users, we needed to provide a safe and supportive community that directly catered to their needs. The insights we gained enabled us to create an experience that inspires patients to improve their quality of life by emphasizing their strengths. Working with IDEO helped us make powerful, creative leaps in our process, and build a digital health platform that’s already deeply impacting patients’ lives.”

The success of PRIME in treating schizophrenia has led to additional federal research funding, and the platform is now being expanded to treat a wider range of mental health conditions.

For example, in this recent, peer-reviewed study, PRIME helped patients with moderately severe depression experience a 50 percent reduction in symptoms, with a noticeable difference in just two weeks—far faster than the average of four to six weeks it takes for traditional medication and therapy to yield improvements. By the end of the depression study, 90 percent of participants said they had achieved their treatment goals, such as to “become happier” or to “feel less lonely.”

Numerous patients with schizophrenia and depression have already benefitted from PRIME’s unique offering, and the team is exploring ways to commercialize and scale PRIME to reach more people with mental health conditions.

New Yorkers are a tough lot, but damaging coastal storms will continue to test their resilience. More than 400,000 people live within the city’s floodplain and are at physical and economic risk. In the face of both natural and manmade challenges—from superstorms to confusing insurance regulations—many New Yorkers are not aware of their flood risk, or even that they should be thinking about it at all.

The Center for NYC Neighborhoods‚ a nonprofit that champions affordable homeownership for middle- and working-class families and communities, engaged IDEO to create a resource that could help New Yorkers keep their homes and finances safe. Launched in September 2016 with funding from New York State's Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, FloodHelpNY is an expansive platform that dismantles the complexity surrounding flood insurance and gives homeowners clear and simple guidance for assessing their flood risk and taking action toward resiliency.

Facing the complexities of insurance policy, shifting flood regulations, climate change, and citizen engagement, the design team began by engaging two vastly different groups of New Yorkers—those who had been battered by past storms and those not yet affected. Homeowners in the first camp were angry and frustrated by a system that had let them down after Superstorm Sandy. Homeowners in the second camp were simply unaware of their risk and had little idea of what might happen. The right design solution needed to encourage both groups to take action and learn about flood risk and insurance regulations, while also addressing divergent levels of need and preparedness.

To co-design solutions with homeowners, IDEO set up pop-up stations at neighborhood meetings in Canarsie, Red Hook, and Gerritsen Beach, and had flood-affected residents create paper prototypes of the resources they wanted in place the next time a storm hit. The team learned how residents contextualized their individual risk, which information they prioritized, and how their frustration could inform a better outcome. In Lower Manhattan, where residents are less aware of flood risk, the team set up a pop-up station with virtual reality viewers that simulated water rushing into the surrounding streets, a visceral wake up call that got them talking about flood recovery.

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Less than a month after launch, FEMA began promoting FloodHelpNY as a key resource for building flood resilience. The platform helps all New Yorkers learn what flood zone they’re in, or will be in, how that affects their insurance rates, and what steps they can take to mitigate their risk. It features a first-of-its-kind flood insurance rate calculator that can help homeowners get a rough idea of the costs they could face as insurance prices go up. It is also the main conduit to apply for the Home Resiliency Audit, a New York State-funded program that equips at-risk homeowners with vital documentation valued at over $800 that confirms their actual elevation and insurance costs—all with the personalized assistance of an engineer and housing counselor team. In the coming months, FloodHelpNY will expand further to offer homeowners free backflow valves that reduce the chance of sewers backing up during flooding, as well as access to more existing benefits for resiliency.

The New York City floodplain, which is expected to grow as tides continue to rise, threatens neighborhoods that are among New York’s oldest and most historic. The people who live there make the city work: teachers, police officers, subway operators. Many of these homeowners will watch their flood insurance premiums surge, year over year. It’s a troubling future, but one that FloodHelpNY is designed to help New Yorkers face, by guiding them toward greater resilience and assuring them that they aren’t alone.

Athletes looking to score big on game day could hit the gym, but they’d probably be better off hitting the sheets instead, according to Rise Science, a sleep analytics startup. Harnessing the latest sleep science, Rise helps players significantly improve reaction time and decrease false starts, lapses, and injuries, among other benefits.

While attending Northwestern University, the co-founders of Rise Science created a simple sleep app and light-touch coaching service, which they prototyped on the school’s Big Ten football team with positive results. They came to IDEO to optimize their customer experience and scale the business, and joined IDEO’s Startup in Residence program.

While observing coaches and players using Rise, IDEO saw the opportunity to better integrate the digital and hardware experiences and design a more robust, intuitive, and service-heavy on-boarding experience during the first few weeks using the system, when breaking old habits and incorporating new ones are most challenging.

At the end of the residence program, Rise left IDEO with a rebranded and optimized sleep training system. Here’s how it works: Players and coaches receive a short, in-person introduction to sleep coaching by a Rise employee. Players who opt in to the service receive a sleep-training kit that includes the Rise Coaching App; adaptive sleep plans tailored to their chronotype, age, game schedule, and training load; a part-human, part-machine sleep coach that continuously supports each player, monitors progress, and gives timely feedback; in-context education that provides daily and weekly sleep insights; and products like UV glasses, sleep mask, and bed sensor. In just a week of using Rise’s full sleep program, 97 percent of players report getting 54 more restorative minutes of sleep per night.

Recently, Rise Science added the Chicago Bulls, Miami Dolphins, and the University of West Virginia to their sleep-training roster, enhancing their performance, one good night’s sleep at a time.

“Coming into IDEO, we knew our service was letting customers down. When we left, we had the blueprint for the next version of Rise. We were able to solve and optimize sleep at a much larger scale,” said Jeff Kahn, co-founder and CEO of Rise Science.

As we wrap up the year, we’re reflecting on the power of creativity to inspire change in ourselves, our work, and the world around us. We've pulled together The Octopus’s top ten most read stories of 2019, each of which offers tips, tools, and mindsets to help you cultivate creativity as a tool to navigate the constant ambiguity facing us in these turbulent times.

And as always, a heartfelt thanks from The Octopus team for stopping by. We can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store.

1. 10 Exercises to Build Your Creative Confidence

Creativity is like a muscle—it can be strengthened with practice. Try these activities from David Kelley & Tom Kelley’s book Creative Confidence to get started.

2. Corporate Innovation Needs a Shakeup. Here’s a Blueprint.

Innovative ideas don’t happen by accident. Check out these tips for creating an environment that fosters innovation from the team behind IDEO’s newest digital tool, Shape.

3. The 3 Mindsets of Great Interaction Designers

Being a successful interaction designer is about more than mastering digital tools—it’s about the soft skills that help you push your designs to the next level.

4. The Best Managers Understand Their Employees’ Emotions—And Their Own

There’s no denying it: your relationship with your boss makes or breaks your experience at work. Here’s how the best bosses create positive emotional environments for their employees.

5. Practice Your Prototyping Skills with These 4 Resources

An old IDEO proverb states, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” These resources from IDEO designers will help you prototype efficiently, effectively, and creatively.

6. 3 Creative Exercises to Make Change Stick in 2019

We kicked off 2019 with intention, sharing three activities to help you actually reach your New Years’ goals. So, how’d you do?

7. Turns Out Emotions Do Belong in the Workplace—Here’s Why

The definition of professionalism is changing. Here’s why organizations should invest in their “emotional culture” and allow employees to express feelings at work.

8. An IDEO Recruiter’s 3 Strategies for Writing a Better Resume

Planning to start off the new year with a new gig? Use these three tips to help you create a resume that stands out in a sea of sameness.

9. AI Needs an Ethical Compass. This Tool Can Help.

Artificial intelligence is the product of those who create it—biases included. That’s why IDEO data scientists created a tool to help teams design ethical AI solutions.

10. Design an Organization’s Purpose Statement With This Tool

Why does your company exist beyond making profit? IDEO organization designers built a colorful tool to help you arrive at an answer.

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2019 was widely regarded as a year of tumult—politically, environmentally, societally. But in the face of it all, 2019 brought us unparalleled human advancement, from Greta Thunberg’s movement of youth-led climate activism to NASA’s first-ever image of a black hole. For better and worse, 2019 kept us on our toes.

Unsurprisingly, this trend didn’t last long. Car companies gave up the schtick and went back to traditional approaches to notification. But the story of talking cars in the 1980s speaks to a classic move in industry: Companies are often eager to find a way to use the hottest technology, even if it’s not a fit for their team, their business model, or the problem they're trying to solve. It's a classic case of FOMO.

As designers committed to a human centered approach to developing new products and services, we look at things a little differently. We start by uncovering a need—for example, helping tired drivers stay awake and alert while at the wheel—and then search for the right technology to solve the problem. We relish the opportunity to take a journey away from the "tech hype" landscape and explore what problems, challenges, or needs the desired tech may help address. It’s about focusing on the people behind the problem before finding the right technological approach.

How, exactly, do we get ourselves in that mindset? We tapped our design research colleagues in our Cambridge and Chicago studios for their best tips on cutting through the tech hype. Here are three distinct strategies for a technology detox at the start of a project.

1. Start by taking the tech apart and exploring the value proposition, then make decisions

Design researcher Hannah Rosenfeld worked on a project where she had to dive into a potentially-disruptive, blockchain-based technology that could have serious applications in the fintech space. For some products, it was the perfect fit. She needed to figure out, though, if it was the right fit for what she was working on.

Throwing an existing, well-formed product that uses the tech in front of her team might have shifted the customer focus away from the big picture toward feedback about functionality and usability, questions that matter on the latter end of product development. Instead, she and her team unpacked the functional and emotional benefits of the technology—what blockchain could unlock for customers or allow them to do that they couldn’t before—and used these as the basis for their exploration. From there, she was able to develop early stage prototypes she could put in front of customers to test the resonance of potential benefits rather than the appeal of an ill-understood technology.

In doing so, Hannah was able to highlight for her clients the potential impact and inherent limits of the current technology as well as make recommendations for how they could evolve their offer to align with real world challenges.

2. Try on a few different options to find the right fit before committing

When a team from the Cambridge studio was working on a project to create an immersive, digital experience for a new flagship retail store, they needed to dive into the role tech would play.

To explore this question, Gabe adopted a Goldilocks approach, taking the team on an inspiration trip to three museums, each with contrasting approaches to using technology: a cautious museum that sticks to straightforward displays of content in the museum and online; a lavish techno-fantasy museum with touch screens in every corner; and museum with a more careful balance where physical artifacts are brought to life with additional layers of digital content.

From the museum with the more cautious approach, the team learned about its core values, and how it carefully leveraged digital technology by offering online access to its archives for audiences that might not otherwise come to the museum. At the tech-heavy museum, we saw best-in-class interfaces that were great at engaging one visitor at a time, but missed out on opportunities to connect people in shared activities. And at the museum that created a balanced approach to digital and analog displays, we saw how stories projected onto artifacts added a layer of depth to what we learned.

By taking the Goldilocks approach, Gabe and the team generated a shared set of design principles that articulated the role digital technology should play in their store and how it would be used strategically to tell the story of the brand.

3. Think of fantastical means to address concrete needs

When former IDEO design researcher Ovetta Sampson was working on a project about technology-enabled cabinets, her first question was, what human need would this technology serve? She could have started by having her team prototype a few different kinds of tech-enabled cabinets, but she needed to answer the question above first.

Short on time, Ovetta framed a brainstorming session around literature from cognitive scientific research and fantasy novels. She used the Max-Neef Fundamental Human Needs Scale, a human development matrix, to ground the team. Starting with a human need like freedom or identity, she asked team members to add a magical action to real-life objects to help focus on how it could meet a human need or motivation.

The team was inspired by fantasy novels where characters have magic objects that help them accomplish tasks (think Dorothy’s red slippers sending her home in The Wizard of Oz). By pairing research about real needs with a fantastical vision for how to address those needs, Ovetta and her team gave themselves the flexibility to dream up big technological solutions while staying grounded in the reality of human needs and motivations.

Businesses will always feel the pressure to maintain a competitive edge, and the allure of new technology will often present itself as the solution to staying ahead of the curve. Sharpening our skills as advocates and practitioners of human-centered design—and making sure we put user needs first—is critical. Whether you’re partnering with a client, or taking on a project of your own, resist the FOMO of new, shiny technology. Start with user needs, then search for the right solution. Shift the conversation from tech-first to humans-first.

Special thanks to IDEO alumna Ovetta Sampson, who contributed to this article. Illustrations by Katie Kirk.

Believe it or not, KITT the talking car on Knight Rider had some real-life counterparts in the 1980s. They may not have had grappling hooks or turbo boosters, but for a short time, talking cars were trendy. Almost out of gas? Don't look at the fuel gauge; the car can tell you you’re low on fuel. Forget to buckle up? No need for that annoying dinging sound—the car just asks you politely to buckle your seat belt.

We heard back from colleagues around the world with reflections on technology, identity, health, food, aging, climate, and more; then synthesized the observations into a series of glimpses into a near-future reality where meat is grown in a lab and remote teams holo-call into all their meetings.

At the moment, many of these patterns exist at the periphery of our lived experience, hinting at emergent realities. But as we head into what will surely be an eventful 2020, they can offer some clarity, set expectations, and trigger new thinking about where we’re going as organizations, as individual leaders, and as a society in pursuit of a bright future.

1. Attention Economy Backlash

We love our phones, but will they ever love us back? Despite round-the-clock connectedness, millennials are being called “the loneliest generation,” suffering endemic anxiety and depression as social media activity replaces in-person interactions. Along with our privacy and attention, we give away our data—which is for sale, but we don’t get the profits. Clickbait lures us with content that causes outrage, disgust, or anguish; but we click anyway, and that has measurable impacts on our mental and physical health (not to mention society).

Such concerns have spawned a movement to regulate big tech. We see it already in the growing practice among tech moguls of sending their children to Waldorf schools and insulating them from technology, even as it’s the root of their fortune. Meanwhile scientists at Northeastern University and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab are working on “adversarial T-shirts,” printed with a specific pattern that can confuse facial-recognition algorithms, thereby protecting people’s identity in surveilled public spaces.

As we watch these phenomena unfold, new questions help us begin to fill in our picture of the future: Will all organizations soon have a Chief Ethics Officer? Will “surveillance-free space” become the new “non-nuclear zone?” Will there be a course-correction in social media, where "positive antisocial" digital experiences emerge?

2. Multi-Track Mind

It’s increasingly common to have multiple careers, many side gigs, and several simultaneous committed relationships over the course of adult life. As digital tools become the means to finding work, partners, and new interests, the bios we use to present ourselves on social media reflect the hybridity and fluidity of the moment. Identity itself is often a composite that includes profession, religion, gender, family, geography, ethnicity, personal passions, and the list goes on.

These currents are already taking shape through organizations like Live in the Grey, which empowers people to blend what they like to do with what earns them a living. As AI replaces many tasks, there will be less need for full-time work, and employers may offer part-time roles to retain people.

To help think through these evolving identities and aspirations, we’re asking: Will banks have to design “rainy-day” funds as people increasingly lack one consistent stream of employment? Will universities have to create hybrid departments, teaching positions, and curricula sourced from multiple disciplines? Will people identify as both their physical and digital identities in the world?

3. Distributed Devotion

Although younger generations are less affiliated with organized religion, they have no less drive to find a sense of belonging, meaning, and spiritual connection. But they’re finding it in a much wider array of locations and communities. Yoga studios, supper clubs, and forest bathing all offer a sense of communion. Megachurches hold rock concerts and sell Starbucks; Kanye West has his own ministry. For some, transcendence can be found at CrossFit.

Sacred Design Lab, a research and design consultancy, explores how modern millennials “gather” to seek out meaning, community, and ritual in the absence of organized religion. The People’s Supper uses shared meals to build trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. Intentional communities are having a resurgence among people who want to live and raise children beyond the nuclear family, and reduce consumption by sharing resources. One example, Kin, is a co-living concept specifically for people with young families.

This prompts us to wonder: Will brands soon have a Chief Belief Creator? Will micro spiritual sects replace organized religion? And will physically distributed workforces and the growing gig economy generate a new longing for community at work?

4. The New Normal

Transgression is the new norm. In large U.S. cities, cannabis has replaced alcohol for recreation and relaxation; psychedelics are administered in therapeutic settings; and gender is understood to exist on a spectrum. Aid in dying is now law in nine states (plus DC). This will be a slow moving pattern in many cultures, but is a fast moving train in many major cities.

Last year, Oakland, California unanimously passed a resolution to decriminalize hallucinogenic fungi, otherwise known as “magic mushrooms.” Aside from academic clinical trials at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and elsewhere, German company ATAI Life Sciences and Compass Pathways (for-profit biotech platforms) are testing psilocybin and other psychedelic substances for therapeutic use. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is pioneering the use of MDMA for anxiety.

All this has us asking: Will cannabis corporations trade on the S&P 500? Will the option of assisted dying be part of any conversation on end-of-life care?

5. G.R.A.S.-fed*

The threat of climate-induced food scarcity is driving a rise in precision agriculture, analytics, IoT, and CRISPR gene editing. Indoor farming heralds a future where even food deserts can produce nourishment. Lab-grown meat and fish have arrived, as have molecular whiskey and wine.

Clara Foods is a so-called “cellular agriculture” company that produces egg whites without hens, using yeast to grow proteins that mimic the animal-derived version. Aleph Farms is growing cultured meat in a lab. And a company called Endless West is creating Glyph, a whiskey made in a test tube rather than a barrel, mapping the flavor profile at a molecular level and building the product in less time and with fewer resources than its traditional predecessor.

We wonder: Will GRAS become the new “natural” on food packaging? Will prehistoric life forms be replicated for contemporary consumption? Will prescription diets be the norm?

*The FDA’s acronym GRAS, or “generally regarded as safe,” is emerging as the framework for accepting scientifically modified food.

6. Peter-Panning

As boomers age, lifespans extend, and full-grown adults reject “growing up,” typical kid activities—video games, escape rooms, summer camp—are marketed to every age. Many millennials shun “adulting” and choose not to have children. Meanwhile, people are working into their 70s and 80s as “middle age” extends and salaries stagnate. Must we "do it all" in our 20s, 30s, and 40s only to peter-pan for 30+ years afterward? As younger people prioritize careers over children, perhaps hearty elders will do the child-rearing while parents play.

Google, Facebook, and other startups choose office design that mimics college dorms. Silvernest is an online home sharing service geared towards seniors. Papa, a service that bills itself as “grandkids on demand,” offers assistance and socialization for seniors. And in 2014, Google launched Calico, a billion-dollar longevity lab.

It begs the question: Will retirement plans have to be redesigned to accommodate longer work lives? Will multi-generational “village” housing become the norm? Will people upload their brains, holograms, and other likenesses to the cloud to gain a form of eternal life?

7. Blue Marble Thinking

Climate anxiety is real and it’s changing behavior. Swedish advertisements shame jet travelers. Consumers at the top of Maslow’s pyramid make decisions based on organizational ethics and potential waste streams. Corporations are being held to account by employees on every front, from sustainability to privacy; and “benefit corporations” (B-Corps) are increasingly common.

Technologies like Rumii allow people to collaborate in VR, preventing the need to travel to meetings, and Microsoft’s Hololens is developing holograms to stand in for in-person meetings. H&M, Everlane, Patagonia, and other clothing lines are focusing on circularity and sustainability in their supply chain.

In a climate-conscious, globalized world, what sacrifices might the West have to make to help developing economies catch up without the pollution toll? Will “Circular” become a product designation, like HE (high-efficiency) washing machines? Will Thunberg-activated youth drive new consumption patterns?

8. Skipping School

The fourth industrial revolution demands new skills, which entails different approaches to how and where we learn. Corporations have brought learning and development programs in-house. In some countries, the aging population means fewer college applicants. Students are also rethinking the investment in and financial burden of college, and instead heading to coding bootcamps; while budding entrepreneurs follow the Zuckerberg/Thiel route and quit school to launch and learn in startups.

Amazon and Salesforce are starting programs to train their internal employees for roles that are hard to fill. There is a profusion of coding bootcamps like CodingDojo, and institutions like General Assembly, that are reinventing vocational education and providing alternatives to college. Lambda School and Flatiron take the ROI of education literally, only charging after graduates find a job.

In the near future, will we see vocational education replace the B.A.? Will kids apply to Google straight out of high school? Will cities—alongside corporations—invest in reskilling their workforces with new guilds and trade schools? Will teachers end up ditching schools in favor of teaching for plum salaries in private industry?

Header image by Brian Pelsoh; illustrations by Joanne Cheung

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A few months ago, with the end of 2019 in our sights, a group of IDEO designers and researchers sent out a query to all of our studios and locations. We asked a simple question: What emerging patterns are you seeing in your work that few are talking about?

As an interaction design director at IDEO, I’ve seen teams fall into this trap countless times. Once you jump into building a product, it’s easy for the intricacies of features, backlogs, and bugs to take priority over the human problem you’re trying to solve. When I’m guiding multidisciplinary teams through product development, my goal is to anchor the user at the heart of the process, from ideation through implementation.

Here are some tips for helping design and development teams work better, together—and for keeping the user top of mind from concept to launch.

1. Let big needs inform small tasks

As a team transitions from design into build, it’s inevitable that the focus shifts to practical details. Most development teams that I’ve worked with use some version of an agile process. Teams identify a set of features to build in short sprints. These features are then broken down into even smaller bite-sized tasks. For example, in a digital build, tasks could include “a user can rotate an item” or “a user can skip a step in on-boarding.” When you're working at a level this granular, it’s easy to lose sight of deeper human needs.

One way to prevent this is to articulate and make visible the user goals that your team is trying to achieve. In a recent sprint, we identified our goals as, “Help users collaborate and share, inspire users to create content, and provide relevant advice.” The product manager wrote this statement on Post-its that she stuck to each team member’s monitor. Throughout the sprint, it was always visible and top of mind, and our team would constantly refer to it in conversation. We used it to prioritize our work as requests crept in to tweak features; if a request didn’t support the user goal, it was cut.

2. Make digital work physical

In addition to keeping user needs top of mind, it’s critical to also keep an eye on the holistic experience. When your team is moving quickly through sprints, there is a risk that it will build one group of features and quickly move on to the next without making a connection between the two. At a larger scale, product teams are often organized around features (such as check-out, product page, or search). If these teams don’t communicate, and no one owns the full experience, it creates a confusion for customers.

This is an instance where tangible visual reminders can be useful—in making your digital work physical. During a collaboration with an agile team, I recognized that we were losing sight of the full user journey for our product. I hunted down a large foam core board, printed out all the screens we had designed, and arranged them into user flows. The engineers were baffled by my paper-based technique, but it gave us view of the full experience. We scribbled on the printed screens, added sketches, and continually tacked up new versions. As we went deep on building certain features, we made sure to look across the system to ensure consistency.

3. Prototype while building

A common pitfall among product teams is to jump to a single solution and then tweak details through usability testing. This type of testing may reveal how a user best engages with an interface (do they expect to click or swipe?) but it may not prove that a feature meets core needs.

It’s beneficial to keep prototyping with users through implementation to ensure that the team is continually building the right thing. Take a few hours or a few days to throw together a quick prototype (with paper, a prototyping tool, or code) to de-risk the process and potentially save hours of development time (not to mention budget).

I worked with an online retail team that wanted to build a new feature that would respond to shoppers' desire for more targeted recommendations. The team had jumped to a solution based on the best technical solve—a feature attached to the user profile that mimicked a closet with drawers.

While the virtual closet was an easy tech solve, I questioned whether the complexity met the need. The team took a few days to do lightweight testing of multiple concepts. They discovered that shoppers actually preferred to receive tips while shopping. Eventually, we landed on a simpler solution that not only saved hours of development time, but created an experience that customers actually wanted.

4. Create one team

The best way to remain human-centered is to create a healthy overlap between design and development teams. Merging methods and rituals can be a messy process, but ultimately, it’s worth it. Engineers become open to creative problem solving and designers are willing to be more flexible with their ideas when they understand what it takes to build them. In the best case, a multidisciplinary team is located together in one space, and a designer can simply roll their chair over to an engineer to chat. When this is not possible, we do our best to make remote teams feel connected, in one case setting up a video “wormhole” between designers and developers in different cities.

Beyond co-locating, it can be surprisingly useful to intentionally create a shared culture and team identity. I came around to it after seeing many teams with awkward beginnings eventually bond around shared identity, jokes, and rituals. One project that I worked on brought together designers and developers from three different companies. They were tackling a mobility challenge, so they aptly named themselves “Mötormouth.” They devised a back story about a ‘90’s metal band, printed sweatshirts, and even took a break during a grueling sprint to take band photos. By the end of the project, I was convinced that this wacky band identity helped a diverse group work effectively as a team.

The best digital products are the ones that solve a human problem. And the best digital design teams are the ones that keep that human at the center of their process, from early ideas through final build. By combining disciplines, prototyping often, and allowing the user to guide decisions, teams set themselves up for success. And along the way, it's important to not neglect play—it may seem extraneous, but it’s the glue that bonds teams around a common purpose.

Illustrations by Cassandra Fountaine

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Picture this: You’re three weeks deep in a digital product build, under pressure to hit a launch date. You’re in the zone, typing out tasks and churning out features. But in the chaos, you start to lose sight of why these features matter. You pause, push back from your desk, and ask the team, “Wait, why are we building this feature again?”

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.