kate spade new york has been an iconic fashion brand since the early 90s, when its handbags first stormed the Manhattan fashion scene. Since then, the company has expanded and evolved into a global lifestyle brand.

With e-commerce reshaping the retail landscape and redefining the role of brick and mortar stores in recent years, kate spade new york leadership asked: How can we make the kate spade new york specialty store experience, well, more special?

kate spade new york already held the key to a new way of thinking about a multichannel customer experience: a brand promise “to inspire her to lead an interesting life.” Hoping to bring that promise to life in store, they engaged IDEO to help make it happen. The solution was for kate spade new york to take the brand message from words to action in the form of a customized guest journey. The team created more than 100 design concepts and strategies for building a retail experience that rewards curiosity and sparks artistic and literary exploration.

“In partnership with IDEO, we spoke extensively with our customers and associates to better understand how we can provide the most engaging and fulfilling in-store experience,” said Mary Beech, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Spade & Company. “The new store elements that we introduced speak to our customer’s personality and appetite for adventure while aiming to enhance engagement with new and existing customers.”

The team knew that striking the right balance of digital tools in in-store interactions was pivotal in allowing two people to have a more rich and collaborative face-to-face connection. The concepts include things like “pack a purse” to test drive how many everyday items can fit in different style handbags, cheeky “dare cards” that challenge customers to go on an exciting adventure with their new purchase, and digital moments like the “shoe selfie” platform that would allow a guest to share “I’m thinking about them” heels or just-purchased flats with her social network. IDEO live-prototyped a selection of concepts in stores around the country and saw a high correlation between customers’ positive reactions and their subsequent purchasing decisions.

“At kate spade new york, our brand promise is to inspire women to live a more interesting life,” said Jenica Myszkowski, Vice President of Stores at Kate Spade & Company. “Our new and improved guest journey experience puts our customers at the center, allowing us to more fully deliver on our brand promise in our retail stores with a stronger vision and purpose for our stores and our store teams.”

To deliver the newly envisioned guest service experience, the role of the sales associates needed to be redesigned, as well. The kate spade new york and IDEO team created a new role: the Muse, whose job is to live the brand promise of an interesting life and to inspire customers to do the same. The reimagined role ultimately shifted the focus in specialty stores from selling to inspiring and building long-lasting relationships with guests.

Athletes’ Performance and its subsidiary, Core Performance, were both founded on a single mission: to enhance human performance through a holistic approach to mindset, nutrition, movement, and recovery. Athletes’ Performance focused on elite professional athletes, and Core Performance provided corporate fitness programs and workouts for employees hoping to lead more healthful lives, and both found a footing in the competitive health and fitness market.

Faced with a challenge to redefine the brands, IDEO designers collaborated with the founder and integrated marketing team to unite Athletes’ Performance and Core Performance under one name that would cut across the health, fitness, and wellness markets to reach a full breadth of audiences and partners. Under a new name, EXOS, the teams created a brand identity system unified by its founding mission and focus on human performance.

For the new EXOS brand, IDEO designers created a visual language using “x” and “+” to highlight the progress from goals to achievement, as well as a system of interaction for athletes of all performance levels. The team also created a bespoke digital tool, outfitted with custom software, which gave designers both guidance within the brand guidelines and creativity to explore new products and contexts.

Imagine this: Your company has just gone through a $2 billion merger. You show up at work to find an invitation from the CEO asking you to help shape the bank’s future. This is what happened when Umpqua acquired Sterling Financial Corporation in 2014, doubling its size and resulting in the creation of the West Coast’s largest community bank overnight. With a mission to be “the world’s greatest bank,” CEO Ray Davis seized the moment to reinvest in design across the organization.

Umpqua asked IDEO to help examine the brand they had and take it to a new level. They wanted to find out: how can we leverage our strength and reputation by activating the brand in new ways to deepen employee and customer engagement and foster continued growth?

IDEO identified three core brand opportunities and a newly articulated purpose statement that became a launch pad for more than 15 different concepts to express the brand internally and externally.

Inside Umpqua, company evangelists handed out notebooks with tips on “how to be better-makers,” and associates now participate in collaborative design challenges through an internal tool built on IDEO’s OI Engine, software that fosters open innovation. The design challenges are drawing unprecedented participation of 84 percent among employees and are having a real impact on the organization. Of the five they’ve run in two years, the company has implemented three winning ideas including a buddy program for new hires or transferees that upwards of 1,000 associates could experience over the next year.

WATCH: Umpqua Bank on using the OI Engine platform

IDEO also worked with Umpqua’s team to conceive digital products including a new digital app called Raindrop that lets people bank in the way that they think about saving and spending, not the way a bank does. It’s due for release in 2016.

To introduce all of this work, IDEO set up an immersive exhibition at Umpqua’s headquarters in Portland. Teams large and small, including the executive and associates from across the company, walked through the exhibit and witnessed how the brand impacts every aspect of their business, from employee engagement to product development. It was signed on the spot by Davis, who invited employees to sign their names, too.

The sweltering summers in China can be insufferable—especially for people who like to wear jeans.

Lee Jeans, in its quest to boost its brand differentiation among an expanding market of apparel brands that also use fabric performance as their unique selling point, like Uniqlo and Levi’s, developed denim that’s cooler to wear during hot weather. It found a novel solution in an ancient material: jade. When woven into denim, crushed jade particles maintain the coolest temperature and, alongside other technological enhancements made to the fabric, pull sweat away from the body. The fabric dries quickly, creating a refreshing cooling sensation.

The immense popularity of jade in China makes the denim a natural fit for Lee’s Asian market, and although Lee’s jade-infused fabric was entirely unique, the company needed to differentiate its inventive new product from a rapidly expanding market of high-tech fabric alternatives made specifically for hot weather.

Lee and its parent company, VF Corporation, saw an opportunity to create a new product that helps position the company not just as a premium brand, but one that leads with innovation. Lee came to IDEO to help design the go-to-market and launch strategy for the new line of jade-infused fabric. Looking for insight, designers conducted research in multiple cities in China and India, seeking out those who were committed to wearing jeans despite the most extreme circumstances—the denim-clad bicyclists pedaling through sweltry city streets, the basketball players on the court, commuters who stripped to their underwear while driving and wriggled back into their jeans upon arrival. The common thread: They were all steadfast in their preference for thick, heavy denim, no matter how hot it got.

The resulting strategy for product launch: positioning jade—a traditional material that has strong cultural and spiritual meaning—as a high-tech solution for the contemporary lifestyle of young people. IDEO helped Lee name the new line JadeFusion and created a system of messaging to communicate that these aren’t just jeans—they’re jeans with a fascinating narrative woven within; a hierarchy of messaging that blends jade’s exotic premium significance with a very modern technical story. Lee salespeople learned how to share the story with customers, encouraging them to talk about jade-cooling technology at work, on the streets, and even on the basketball court.

The JadeFusion line sold out within seven weeks of its debut. The launch, which was originally limited to mainland China and Hong Kong, was expanded to India, Malaysia, and Thailand, and sales orders doubled for the following year. Along the way, Lee developed a new understanding of how to incorporate customers’ input and be open to discovery and inspiration from the very start of planning a product launch.

How can we shape our businesses to live up to the challenges of the climate era?

That’s a big question, but right-sized for this moment. Like the digital and industrial eras before it, the Climate Era will shift industry and enterprise. It will also change our day-to-day lives—the way we work, live, and relate to one another—in a profound way.

This era calls for us to think regeneratively. If we are to heal the human and environmental costs we’ve incurred over the past 250 years, we need to take the sum of what we’ve learned—from every era—to redesign energy, transport, finance, agriculture, retail, travel, fashion, construction, and yes, even sustainability itself.

We believe this is the biggest design challenge we face as a species. It’s work that simply can’t wait.

With that urgency in mind, we invited executives and sustainability leaders from across sectors to a series of events in our European outposts to talk about how businesses are thinking about sustainability.

Aside from the necessary efforts to decarbonize business operations, we drew our attention to how organizations must evolve if they are to boldly innovate their way into this new era. Here are five takeaways that emerged:

1. Bring sustainability to the design stage

What we heard from leaders is that the mindset around corporate sustainability efforts has shifted from "Why should we do this" to "How do we do this?".

That’s good news, as 80 percent of sustainability-related challenges go back to the design stage. Today, the majority of energy and investment is still spent cleaning up the mess downstream. That prevents businesses from seeing sustainability as a driver of regenerative growth.

What we know from our work with Ford and many other companies is that sustainable design choices are not at odds with growth. Producing an electric version of the best selling vehicle in America—the F-150—meant, first and foremost, designing a better truck. The point wasn’t to convince their customers to go electric. It was to design vehicles that drivers love that also happened to be better for the planet.

The F-150 Lightning was so popular, Ford had to shut down its preorders. By building Climate Era decision-making into its earliest design decisions, Ford was able to deliver upon their sustainability goals and deliver shareholder value.

Such success stories prove that we can do well in business by doing  good for people and the planet. But only if climate-friendly decisions are made at the design stage. It’s time to think about making your chief sustainability officer your chief innovation officer. Or vice versa. All innovation going forward has to be fit for the Climate Era.

This raised the questions:

1. “How might businesses invite sustainability teams to participate in their most strategic decisions? And what would have to change about those teams for them to be invited to sit at those tables?”
2. “What skills are necessary in a Climate Era executive team and how might we build those capabilities?”

2. Start small and scale fast

Among the executives who felt their businesses were already making a positive impact, one theme emerged: start small.

Redesigning smaller brands or introducing smaller product lines is a low-risk way to challenge key assumptions without disrupting the core business—yet. Once you have a few small wins, it’s easier to persuade executives that Climate Era innovation pays off.

Catharina Frankander and Hanna Lumikero from the H&M design studio described how they started by testing out new sustainable packaging. Taking a customer-centric, iterative approach, they introduced paper packaging concepts to customers even before they understood whether or not the packaging was feasible at scale. The project’s overwhelming success helped clear a path to adopt the approach across the organization.

This raised the questions:

1. “How might we select the right starting point to show the business value of sustainability?”
2. “How might we translate smaller wins to platform- or system-wide innovation?”

3. Focus on human solutions

Humans caused this problem. We’re also the ones who need to fix it.

There was consensus amongst this group that climate change is not just an environmental crisis, but a crisis of human behavior. If we continue to promise short-term exponential growth to shareholders and unlimited consumption to customers, we’ll never be able to reign in extractive practices.

But aside from assigning a strict regimen of behavioral therapy, how can businesses break the perverse cycle of short-term gratification?

The circular economy offers a paradigm shift that, combined with regulation, can help us start uncoupling extraction from growth. That’s not just a technical challenge. To help organizations become more circular, we must look through a broader human lens—one that considers the collective and longer-term desires of customers, employees, and shareholders without ignoring short-term rewards.

Companies like On, a Swiss-based athletic apparel brand, are taking that approach with sub brands (starting small as advised!). They’ve introduced a running shoe made from beans. To make sure the sneakers don’t enter the waste stream, On offers a monthly magazine-like subscription model. Runners use the shoe until they’re worn out, send them back for recycling, and receive a replacement pair. Such circular models reward consumers with the short-term pleasure of enjoying something trendy and new, while upholding the longer-term shared value of a product that won’t end up in  landfill.

Balancing long- and short-term thinking is a key behavior shift in the b-to-b world as well. A publishing executive shared the story of a client who would only sign a large contract to produce its books if the publisher could report on its environmental footprint at every stage of production, down to how paper scraps were recycled at the printer station. Requiring that level of accountability helped the publisher to examine its own behavior and invest in long-term change—even if it meant incurring a short-term cost.

This raised the questions:

1. “How do we embrace collective, long-term thinking to become fitter for the Climate Era?”
2. “How do we build sustainability into more of our workstreams, knowing they’re the most creative and exciting projects for our teams to work on?”

4. Collaborate or die alone

Connecting the right people to drive green solutions is already difficult. When we broached the idea of collaborating with competitors and regulatory bodies, there was a loud cry of almost impossible.

Companies that are built to compete for market share are not set up for collaboration, so when it happens it is often underfunded and clumsy. And yet, we know that systemic Climate Era problems can not be solved by any one business alone.

One recent partnership designed to break the paradigm is Beyond the Bag, an effort to address the problem of the millions of plastic shopping bags that end up in our streets and waterways.

Closed Loop Partners, a circular-economy-focused investment firm and innovation center, convened a Consortium with IDEO and a group of America’s largest chains including CVS Health, Target, and Walmart. The Consortium worked with a select group of startups who are taking an innovative approach to replacing plastic bags. Those teams were able to pilot in mass retail environments where our designers worked with them to iterate their ideas to get to market faster.

CVS Health, Target, and Walmart typically compete with one another. But to tackle a challenge as large-scale as plastic bag waste, they knew they’d have to join forces.

This raised the questions:

1. “How do we incentivize and fund more cross-industry innovation? Could the public sector play a bigger role here?”
2. “We have developed operational excellence in vertical, extractive processes. How do we develop operational excellence in cross-business collaboration?”

5. Attract talent who give a damn  

Many senior leaders described a major crisis in retention, and without smart, passionate talent, no transformative work can be done. Everyone agreed: We must engage and retain the best and brightest.

A recent survey done by the Pew Research Center points out that students and young professionals are more sensitive to the climate crisis than previous generations.

One executive described how working on sustainability projects across functions has led to unseen levels of motivation amongst employees. Companies that can clearly show they have a purpose and a plan for climate action will find it easier to recruit and retain those who can help us address the challenges at hand.

This raised the questions:

1. “Can sustainability teams partner with HR to attract top talent?”
2. “How do we make climate challenges a platform to activate talent across the organization?”

This work can’t wait

These conversations, which felt less varnished than the typical business roundtable, were revealing. While leaders are committed to becoming more sustainable, they often feel stymied and unable to make substantial progress. My conclusion is that we need more of these forums to share progress and speak candidly about what’s holding us back.

How is your organization designing itself for the Climate Era? I’d love to hear from you.

We are living in the shrinking window of time when our awareness of climate change can still be matched by our ability to act.

If it was that easy, we wouldn't have the problems we do. But there is one standout case study of a renewable system that can go on endlessly and at any scale: the forest.

The nutrients created through photosynthesis are interoperable. Anyone in the system can use them. An underground mycorrhizal network connects individual plants so they can transfer water, nitrogen, and carbon based on the needs of the system. The big trees feed the little trees knowing those little trees are going to be big trees one day, and what's most important is the overall health of the system. It’s generous and collaborative and ingenious. It’s a circular economy.

Those principles that nature uses to create abundance can be hugely guiding for us. No one wants to be told we're heading toward a place where we will have less. And less is not IDEO’s vision—abundance is. But it’s a different definition of abundance, one that’s the outcome of a truly circular economy where the whole system is healthy, regenerative, and sustainable, where we’re not just exchanging value all the time, we’re building value.

Circular Design + Sustainability | IDEO

Data point after data point make clear that solutions are needed now. IDEO has long been working to surface some of those fixes, and through that process, our approach and view on how design can and should be part of the climate solution have crystallized. This marks our first piece in a series on climate, our chance to share how IDEO is thinking about and actively working on this challenge.

Since IDEO’s start we have seen the power that comes with having design in your toolkit across all industries. Design enables the development of purpose and strategy, can bring both like-minded and disparate partners together, and is proactive to change coming down the line. Its human-centered nature, tangibility, penchant for prototyping, and optimism allow it to cut through big, abstract challenges—exactly what we are staring down right now. The change that is required is a dramatic one: We need to move as a society into a state where we start living within our planetary boundaries. Circular design can help get us there by making the circular economy vision real.

The role of circular design

There are models for living in harmony with nature, and models that extract as much as possible from it. The problem is that many of our policies, governments, businesses, and lives have been based on that extractive model. We’ve long operated under a linear system: you pull resources, you sell, you consume, you dispose. Value ends. Waste is built into the system. Circular design is the antidote. You're designing with a continuous loop in mind, with the idea that value doesn't have to end. We don't extract as much from the Earth. We keep the products we use in the system.

For businesses, the circular economy is fundamentally about adopting a different kind of operating brain—one that doesn't focus on profit at all costs but instead looks at different ways in which we can create and share value. What if, instead of making money at the point that you sell something, you make it when you buy something or when you repurpose it? What if we give more weight to the people and communities who've been doing this for a long time, resurface what has been designed out by the dominant model, and find new pathways forward together?

But we still see a lot of businesses taking incremental steps towards sustainability. We'll cut a little bit of plastic off our packaging. The mindset is let’s make things less bad. That’s a model that deals with consequences rather than redesigning upstream. We aspire to be part of deeper, more foundational change. At its most successful, circular design can lead to creating a system of abundance because resources are regenerated and remain within the system. It’s a system that is not designed to be less than but greater than, and IDEO is actively working on moving us toward that greater-than future.

How we get there

Embedding circular design into your business requires transformation, which is something we as humans and organizations tend to fear. One way to circumvent that fear is to maintain a people-centric view. Who are the people within your company at this very moment who you can motivate and activate to start working toward climate solutions? IDEO helps companies and organizations take the first step by simply showing them they already have resources who can start to unlock gnarly problems like climate change, but we do so with empathy—acknowledging the pressures at hand and any current limits to their capabilities.

From there, you can begin to build awareness and understanding around what circularity means in the context of your organization and your leadership. What are the possibilities? What might change and how? What’s the first move that you can test? By doing that, you take a staggering question and start breaking it down into addressable parts.

It’s something we’ve done with the overwhelming question of how to end our dependence on single-use plastic bags. The planet uses one trillion of them annually despite their average use of just 13 minutes and lifespan of 400+ years. As the innovation partner of the Beyond the Bag Challenge we are working with major retailers, environmental organizations, start-ups, and individuals to prototype reimagined ways to easily and conveniently transport goods as plastic bags have done.

It’s an optimistic view: that there absolutely are answers that we can bring to life when the questions are global ones and the scope is hard to comprehend. We’re comfortable navigating in contexts with a high level of uncertainty and ambiguity and providing people with the creative confidence to come on that journey.

This optimistic view is a lens that is common in playful conditions. The curious and adventurous attitude that children possess is one that easily lends itself to engaging with complexity, as is needed now, rather than running away from it. While play can sound or feel frivolous in the context of the big questions we are facing and the large ecosystem of players, it’s a valuable design and collaboration tool. When we are immersed in playful conditions, barriers begin to lower, trust begins to build, and we become less adversarial and more cooperative. Play allows us to set aside our assumptions and engage with our imaginations. It allows us to imagine a future that does not yet exist.

And when it comes to that future view, a company’s individual climate concerns are almost never siloed, and that means they can’t be solved in isolation. Our bird's eye view across many different industries also has us putting a premium on collaboration. Our answer is to bring together coalitions of people, multiple stakeholders across the ecosystem who may not have collaborated together before but really should in order to design circular solutions for the future.

With the Circular Economy of Food CoLab, for instance, we work together to explore challenges the food system is facing with companies that include Danone, Kroger and Electrolux, as well as many experts and NGOs and foundations and others who are working on making a better food system. Together we are driving towards making some big systemic changes that address the big systemic questions that cannot be solved by any one organization, like how might we make circular behaviors the default in home kitchens? How might we leverage corporate procurement to mainstream regenerative agriculture? How might we increase biodiversity by encouraging a generation of new supply chains?

We envision moonshots and bold ideas, and we use the design process to break them down into actionable steps. We build to learn, to see, to think. Using design sprints, for example, we can make faster, more informed decisions with lower investment. In iterative loops, we test solutions in context, giving people tangible prototypes to use, so we can understand what's working and refine what's not.

The way forward

Humans never set out to design a climate crisis, but we did. We designed linear, extractive systems that have created the conditions that we are all facing right now. Can design have a positive impact? Absolutely, and that's what gives us hope.

Our process of design thinking has for decades helped us connect deeply with consumers and translate those insights directly into opportunities. But the scale and scope of this problem goes far beyond just individuals. We’re applying the same depth of human-centered design to the industries ranging from food to mobility to consumer products and retail, using the same processes to understand the needs, desires, and constraints of everyone from farmers to boardrooms.

That allows us to see the intervention points with the highest potential—because while acknowledging just how complex and urgent this challenge is, we believe design’s ability to get tangible quickly, to hold both individual needs and the big picture at once, is what’s needed to change the system.

The best way to predict the future is to create it. A circular economy or a sustainable economy isn't just going to happen. We've got to make it. That's what drives us.

—A collaborative piece by global IDEO

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In the midst of our climate crisis there’s a desire for certainty. Show me a case study where a corporation has solved this. The thing is, they haven’t.

Alight, a non-profit that provides humanitarian assistance to people on the move, made the introduction to help us learn more about the refugee experience.

After the Russian invasion, Yulia’s family traveled to her parents’ home just outside the capital. But upon learning that friends had been killed while driving nearby, she decided the family needed to leave Ukraine.

Adult males are required to stay back and defend the country, so Yulia said goodbye to her husband and father and headed toward the Polish border with no destination in mind beyond “out.” She had very few friends to assist her; everyone she knew was in the same situation. At the Medyka border crossing, Yulia, her mother, and her children stood in line through the night to gain entry, then boarded a bus to a hotel in Krakow. It was there that she learned about Alight.

*name changed to protect privacy

Address the Human Need

Alight has spent 40 years working with displaced people, from distributing food relief during the Somali famine to building emergency shelters for Burundian refugees in Rwanda. Since February, the organization has been in Ukraine and neighboring Poland, where millions fleeing the war have headed.

Within weeks of being on the ground at the border, it became clear to Alight that refugees were encountering a lack of credible guidance on housing in Poland. Alight quickly partnered with Airbnb, which was offering Ukrainians free housing for up to 30 days.

Alight’s Housing Guides—easily identified by their vibrant yellow vests—assisted with bookings. But it was a person-to-person effort, done at the border crossing, at train stations, and in conversations over text and social media. Alight knew it had to greatly scale its ability to get Ukrainians into safe and free accommodations—they needed a tool that could be accessible in varied and rapidly changing contexts. And they wanted to make sure that tool was designed to be useful from day one. “The goal was to learn what Ukrainians needed from the moment of arrival at the border to when they settled in stable housing,” says IDEO Design Director Karen Hentschel.

As an organization that has long applied human-centered design to emergency situations, Alight knew that amidst chaos and uncertainty, designers are able to zoom out, spot underlying human needs, and work quickly to prototype, test, and iterate a solution with the intended audience. Alight worked with our teams at IDEO and IDEO.org to make that happen.

Move Fast and Fix Things

Alight knew that Yulia and her family represented thousands urgently in need of housing and support services. Because we work in IDEO’s Munich studio, we were able to deploy to Poland within days, and IDEO.org designed the initial digital tool within weeks.

Once on the ground in Krakow, IDEO’s Alex Eaton, Tilo Krueger, and David Sjunnesson shadowed Alight’s guides—Ukrainians who had undergone the same journey as the people they were helping and now served as experts in the field. Observing them as outsiders allowed us to spot patterns.

“Alight is very focused on the person in front of them. We were able to take a step back, look at the journey, and see how Alight could support in more places,” says Sjunnesson. "One big part of that was creating a journey map of the first 30 days that identified moments of indecision and decision.”

Build Trust

In an emergency, people need more than food and shelter. They need to feel safe. The border is replete with resources, but not all are trustworthy or reliable.

And Alight isn’t a household name, so establishing trust in the organization and its resources was key. We knew that replacing text-based communications with a professional looking, resource-rich digital portal would help.

Thoughtful curation was also key. “You don’t want to have a million different options, you want to have three good ones,” says Sjunnesson. The design team found that information overload compounded people’s sense of overwhelm and recommended that Alight recruit additional guides to travel across Poland to gather data on housing, schools, workplaces, and job boards that the organization could vouch for.

Design for Clarity and Compassion

The digital prototype, which was refined over a six week period, initially featured three cities where Alight had a presence, could provide support, and could guarantee safety and a quality experience. But the way that information was delivered was equally important, says Alight Engagement Guide Leah Combs. The organization hoped for “a softness and a gentleness and a simplicity of navigation, a place where people could land and feel immediately comfortable.”

The resource was also designed to be nimble, with Alight able to make updates to the site within minutes. “The urgency of a humanitarian crisis lends itself to a design process anchored in rapid prototyping and continuous iteration,” says IDEO.org CEO Shauna Carey. “But it’s not just about making something that works well—a human-centered approach helps ensure we’re creating a product that is also responsive to the emotional context of the situation."

Impact

The site gave Alight the ability to scale beyond time and place. Alightguides.org logged roughly 150,000 views within the first month. With its added reach, Alight provided 25,555 days of safe housing through Airbnb. Ukrainians now have access to Alight in moments when its expertise and assistance might otherwise be invisible: in an apartment, on a bus, or in any of the many moments prior to their arrival at the border.

Aside from tangible support, the tool offers something Yulia told us she desperately needed: The peace that comes from knowing where one’s family is going to sleep that night.

Support Alight's humanitarian efforts here.

—This article was written in collaboration with IDEO Europe, Alight, ideo.org, and our partners.

We met Yulia*, a Ukrainian mother in her 40s, at our hotel in Krakow. She had fled from Kyiv with her teenage daughter and toddler and was eager to tell us her story.

Design thinking is an approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit—taking a human-centered approach to translating ideas into tangible strategies and offerings. Design thinking accelerates innovation, helping create better solutions for the challenges facing business and society.

ExperiencePoint, in collaboration with IDEO, created the simulation game ExperienceInnovation to provide a direct experience with design thinking. Teams compete to solve a realistic and complex challenge while engaging with the terms, techniques, and thought patterns of successful innovators.

Built for designers and non-designers alike, ExperienceInnovation creates an energizing, practical, and relevant learning experience that supports tangible business objectives using leading-edge technology. The workshop is optimized for a half- or full-day experience and is available as an in-class exercise, or online for remote teams. To date, over 15,000 people from a variety of companies and industries have completed ExperienceInnovation experience.

Learn more about ExperienceInnovation.

ExperienceInnovation is a workshop in innovation, giving teams meaningful experience with design thinking.

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.