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.

Early concept testing is essential to the design process. Without it, a seemingly great idea could turn out to be a flop, totally misaligned with consumers’ needs. Remember “New Coke”—a new version of the classic soda that replaced the original? Although the company had run tests, they only focused on validating the new taste; they neglected to see the potential impact of changing an iconic brand. It’s one of the most well-known missed opportunities by a company many know and trust.

These days, though, getting feedback is easier than ever. Thanks to social media ads, email campaigns, and digital surveys, we can reach thousands of people—and fast. Our colleagues at IDEO have even built a tool called Shape that allows designers to collect quantitative and qualitative feedback from prospective users in just a couple of days. But with powerful tools like these comes great responsibility. Now that we have the ability to test ideas at scale, we need to adapt our old-school rules of design ethics to account for new methods.

Ethical considerations have always been at the heart of our work. We even provide new IDEOers with a book called The Little Book of Design Research Ethics, which outlines three principles—responsibility, respect, and honesty—that guide us through the design research process with the end-user top of mind. However, as the technology we use continues to evolve, so must the way we apply these principles.

Here's what those three principles mean in practice:

• Responsibility: We act to protect people’s current and future interests. We make participants aware of how we will use the information they share, and we take carefully considered steps to safeguard their information. Our priority is making sure our research is not harmful to people in any way.
• Respect: We honor participants’ limits and value their comfort—because participants are people, not subjects. We strive to be considerate of their cultural expectations and sensitivities at play.
• Honesty: We’re truthful and timely in communication, and we want to help participants make informed choices about what they share, when they share it, and how they share it. Consent is key, and every action taken should be with the user in mind. Our goals and motives must remain as transparent as possible.

Recently, we sat down to interview people with a chronic illness to gauge their interest in a daily caretaking service to take pressure off of families and themselves. In person, we were able to make it clear that the service was still just a prototype—it wasn’t something they could actually access. But what if we went the digital route and ran social media ads for the service? What if we unintentionally misled a large group of people to believe that a service that could improve their quality of life existed when it was just a prototype? The consequence could have been huge.

With that in mind, our group of design researchers have created a guide to ethical concept testing to evaluate design concepts before launching a test, to make sure that they’re fair and beneficial for all involved. Think about it like a list that pushes you to consider the impact of sharing your concept before it goes live.

A few notes before we dive in: If you’re a business, keep in mind that under GDPR—the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in May 2018—there might be some formal checks you need to do even before you start to use targeted ads. It may be worth checking with your legal team before moving forward. Lastly, while this guide specifically deals with digital concept testing, we encourage you to adapt it for any concept testing at scale.

In addition to going through the plan provided above, we always recommend running your concept test with a small number of people prior to going live so you can catch any flaws that you might not have noticed. After all, you're only human.

This tool is a first step in molding our design ethics to new tools, but it’s just the beginning of a long, collective conversation about the ways they will need to adapt over time. While $5 can get you started with concept testing, that scale creates more considerations for responsible designers to make. For now though, we want to leave you with our community’s top resources for learning more about ethical design.

• Website: Humane by Design. "A resource that provides guidance for designing ethically humane digital products through patterns focused on user well-being."
  
• Website: Smashing Magazing - Ethical Design: The Practical Getting-Started Guide. A crash course to all things about designing ethically.
• Website: Children's Design Guide. “A set of key principles written from the perspective of children as consumers to designers of products for them.” Put together by some big names like UNICEF and Frog.
• Podcast: Your Undivided Attention. A podcast on how we can better respect people through design by Tristan Harris, former design ethicist, and Aza Raskin, the former Head of User Experience Design at Mozilla.
  
• Book: Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles. After advising clients like Twitter, Ford, Cisco, and the BBC, Cennydd has published this book on the ethics of emerging technology.

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How many people can you reach online with $5, a few hours, and limited advertising expertise? During a recent early-stage concept test, we found an answer: more than 2,000. Our goal was to get our prototype into the world prior to launching it to gain a better understanding of how the concept would be received in the market.

Since 2015, IDEO has measured innovation in more than 100 companies, and discovered that leaders who create effective and sustainable work environments give their teams more capacity to experiment and solve problems in creative ways. These teams tend to outperform teams that stick to the status quo.

So what kinds of changes can you make (and scale) to help your company become more innovative? It starts with simple methods like adopting digital tools, implementing new internal processes, and introducing modular physical spaces that can be flipped around to support modern modes of working. Here are five ways to get started.

1. Create a shared vision

Illustrate the future of your team to show your colleagues what they’re working toward, and what new behaviors they’ll need to adopt to get there. A vision for the future should not only create a shared understanding about what needs to change, but more importantly, explain why. To get started, identify who it is you’re serving, what value your team can provide, and what you need to achieve your goals. Next, create a set of guiding principles to help contain the scope of the initiatives you’ll take on. This list will help you maintain focus, and avoid doing too much at once. Then, compare these guiding principles with the strategic priorities of your organization to make sure that your plan is scalable, will have a positive impact on your business, and can influence the daily work of your teams. According to our research, teams that use their purpose to guide their decision-making have 61 percent more successful launches than teams that don’t.

2. Let your teams influence their space

Often, organizations over-regulate the way teams work, either in an attempt to limit liability, or maintain control. But that extreme oversight suppresses creative judgment and collaboration. It also signals to employees that they are just cogs in a machine; if their work doesn’t seem important, they’ll detach mentally and emotionally. When leaders design work environments with their teams’ needs in mind, they are more likely to be engaged and willing to adopt new, better behaviors.

Think about how your values and vision are represented in your team’s space. Do you have early prototypes hanging around represent the value of experimentation? Do your communal work spaces actually encourage collaboration? (Do you have communal work spaces?)

Modern work environments should encourage, but not dictate, the most productive behaviors. The idea is to design an environment that encourages the collaboration and experimentation so crucial to creative work, while also empowering teams to adapt as new challenges arise. Data shows that teams that work collaboratively and have flexible spaces and tools to experiment are 32 percent more successful than teams that don’t.

3. Learn how your teams actually work

It seems basic, but many leaders don’t know the ins and outs of how their teams work, which means they don’t know how to craft the conditions that will set them up for success. Make sure to check in with your teams to get a sense of what they love, loathe, and want to tweak about the way your company works. Keep an eye out for work environment hackers who are using tools and spaces in unconventional ways—manipulating what’s available to support their work as best they can. And make sure that everyone has the tools that they need: For example, people in organizations that restrict access to online collaboration tools are sometimes forced to recreate the same benefits using a combination of project management, file sharing, and messaging software.

4. It all starts with prototypes

Have an idea for a new method of brainstorming, or a more effective workspace? Test it out by prototyping with high-performing teams. The key isn’t to start with the perfect solution, but to arrive at something that works and continuously improves. Identify teams that are enthusiastic about change, and start there. And don’t forget to look to your employees for suggestions—not all change needs to come from the top, and teams have a better sense of their own needs. Prototyping is an iterative process, so teams should be given the freedom to test a lot of ideas. According to our data, teams that test five or more solutions in parallel are 42 percent more likely to create successful solutions than teams that don’t do rapid prototyping.

5. Codify and share what you learn

As teams grow and mature, the lessons they gather from experimenting with their work environments should be packaged and shared with the larger organization. Codifying the characteristics of effective work environments can help new employees develop productive behaviors more quickly. Consider creating events or programs that allow teams to share the lessons they’ve learned from prototyping and inspire others to adopt similar changes or begin their own experiments. The data shows that teams that have access to information about prior initiatives are 51 percent more likely to create successful solutions.

Creating change and empowering people to determine their optimal work environments are the most powerful tools leaders can use to set the conditions for innovation. These changes have a material impact on a company’s ability to compete in an uncertain future. But don’t be intimidated by the enormity of the challenge. All it takes is empathy, empowerment, and curiosity to set yourself and your teams on a journey toward self-discovery.

Executing innovative ideas requires creativity. And creativity thrives in a work environment that fits the dynamic needs of modern teams, from hyper-collaboration to heads-down time. As today’s organizations strive to become more innovative and resilient, they must adapt their spaces and modes of working to promote creative problem-solving across teams.

Here are three exercises and strategies that might come in handy next time you’re applying for a new job.

1. The “so what?” test

Sadly, most bullet points on resumes read like a laundry list of job tasks, and many feel redundant if those tasks can be assumed by reading the company name and job title. Instead of telling a resume reader what you did day-to-day, tell them about achievements and things you are proud of. Tell them about the moments when you went above and beyond.

Read each bullet point out loud and ask yourself this question: So what? Why is this bullet point important? Why is it taking up room on your resume? Now imagine someone else—a stranger, someone who has never met you—going through your resume the same way.

If you get defensive or fired up when you run the “so what?” test, that’s good! That means there’s something you’re proud of in that bullet point that you need to communicate. Make that the heart of your bullet point.

When I run resume writing workshops for people starting out in their careers, they can become self-conscious and feel that their limited experience isn’t worth bragging about. To prove that you can take this approach with any job or experience level, I’ll provide you with the wait-server example. (Back in the day, I worked at a restaurant and firmly believe it teaches you great skills.)

If I were to take the laundry list approach, my bullet points would read:

• Greeted patrons
• Took food orders
• Provided friendly service

That's all great, but it's assumed that a server would do those things. It’s the job, after all. With that list, I’m not telling you anything new or unique about myself.

If I communicate my achievements and proudest moments instead, my bullet points read like this:

• Worked part-time while in school
• Trained all new staff
• Organized a volunteer day for employees
• Selected as employee of the month in my first month

This has a different tone to it. In this new phrasing, I communicate that I'm good at time management, I have the ability to teach and mentor others, I was able to project-plan and activate engagement, and I very quickly made an impact.

So what, you ask? That’s what!

2. The tailoring session

Just like tailoring your clothes, tailoring your resume isn’t about creating something from scratch. It’s about snipping, hemming, and stitching things together so that it fits perfectly. Use this strategy to keep yourself from reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Keep a master resume that lists every single experience you’ve ever had. The master resume is where you don’t have to worry about page count—it’s for your eyes only, so there are no limits. Add sections and bullet points to your heart’s content. Let this master version be everything from your security blanket to your resource library.

When you are ready to apply to a role, create a copy of the master resume and give it a name that is specific to the role you’re applying for.

Now read the job description again. What are the requirements? Use those as guidelines for tailoring your resume. Because you’re starting with a master resume, you don’t need to create new language. Simply delete the text that isn’t pertinent to the role, leaving only the relevant experience.

You are almost done. Before you submit this tailored resume, read through it. Start from the bottom, then move your way up, going in chronological order. Does this new tailored resume show career progression when read from the bottom up? Is there a thread that runs through it? Does it need to be stitched together in some places? When you are ready to go, make sure you convert it to a PDF!

3. Give curly parsley the chop

In the culinary world, NFG stands for non-functional garnish. If you’ve ever ordered a breakfast dish at a restaurant that came with a random slice of orange, and the orange has a piece of inedible curly parsley stabbed into it, you have experienced NFG. This unnecessary addition has nothing to do with your dish; in fact, it may spoil some of the flavors, and you might even start off your meal a bit annoyed that you need to eat around it.

On a resume, NFGs include images as fillers, multiple fonts, italics, bold, a spectrum of colors, and charts and infographics with no data source.

Use these things wisely and sparingly. Remember, you want to create a space that is welcoming, clean, and easy to navigate. A resume with curly parsley is hard to read. If the eye doesn’t know where to look first, the mind will get tired trying to figure it out.

Best case scenario: The person reviewing the resume needs to work hard and find extra mental energy to focus amidst all of the distractions. Worst case scenario: Your resume gets passed over because it’s sensory overload.

If you do want to share more but don’t want to overcrowd your resume, here’s a challenge: Think beyond the resume.

Times have evolved. There are other ways to highlight your work. LinkedIn is the obvious one, and GitHub is useful for engineers. More and more, we see candidates creating personal websites to showcase their experiences in interactive, visual ways.

If you are feeling tight on space, provide links to other resources where you can get more creative. And there’s always the cover letter!

Hopefully these tips help save you time, energy, and a bit of anxiety when you're crafting a resume. Remember, there is beauty in simplicity—after all, the only person who can truly pull off a pink, scented resume is Elle Woods.

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In my career advising days, I’d tell job seekers that one of the most important spaces they will occupy is only 8.5 inches wide by 11 inches long—or about 21 by 28 centimeters for our friends outside of the US. Trying to capture yourself, your experience, and your potential in one-to-two pages is hard. It’s often the first introduction companies have to you. As with any space, there are ways to make it feel empty and impersonal, or crowded and noisy. Luckily, there are also ways to create a page that is welcoming, clean, and easy to navigate, too.

Immigration
There should be an AI bot for navigating the immigration process. If they can do it with TurboTax, they can do it with immigration (and I suspect there may even be fewer edge cases). It’s also easy to make something like that multilingual, which would be key. Right now, my friends in New York are paying $300-400 for an hour of immigration consultation. —Alex Staudt

Price Tags
I would like to redesign the cost of products and services to include environmental cost. This would allow consumers to factor in environmental impact as they make purchasing decisions. Currently, it is hard, if not impossible for consumers to understand the environmental impact of their lifestyles, which I believe is largely due to a lack of transparency on the corporate side, not a lack of interest on the consumer side. —Santiago Seira

Sockets
I’d redesign the electrical outlet—a standard for a century past—with a 'data as a utility' mindset. TV and radio have gone digital, voice is going digital, but power is still analog. —Ryan Osero

Razors
Shaving! It's the biggest waste of time. —David Haygood

How We Entertain Ourselves
I’d want to redesign live entertainment. Like, all of it. But here is where I’d start: There’s a gap between spending 2.5 hours seeing a play on Broadway and spending a full day immersed in the world of Disneyland. I love both of these experiences, but theater is dying (it’s basically only older populations who go, so the majority of current patrons will be dead in 30ish years) and shows (with the exception of Hamilton) aren’t being designed with an eye towards new demographics.

Disneyland and large-scale theme park experiences are resource-intensive, and I can’t imagine that too many new entertainment experiences on that scale will be created. But, at its core, Disneyland is a fully-designed, alternate reality that guests can immerse themselves in however they’d like for as long as they’re in the park. There’s freedom and choice in this experience that theater doesn’t often provide (hence the appeal and success of Sleep No More). How might we create a flexible yet fully immersive live entertainment experience? —Andrew Evans

The Menu at National Parks
I want to redesign the food served at our national parks so it reflects their mission of preserving the majesty of this nation, its wild places and wildlife, and the happiness and health it brings to humans. —Vivian Barad

Access to the Outdoors
I’d also piggyback on national parks, in particular on access. Camping and outdoor pursuits should be a right for all, and encouraged, if we want to see people care for the Earth. It doesn’t matter your background or mobility level, we should have everybody get into nature, while maintaining a balance to prevent overuse. Our bay-tech-privilege has managed to infiltrate even the basic purity of camping. —Tim Opsahl

The Olympics
I want to redesign the business model of the Olympic Games. What if the games were spread across multiple countries, instead of just one? What if each Olympics pursued an expressed goal of improving some aspect of the host country (i.e. child malnutrition, urban poverty, etc.)? —Rachel Tobias

Incontinence
Ever since I went to design school, I’ve wanted to redesign bed pans. I know this sounds super weird, but I had an extended hospital stay during my time at university, and found that the bedpan is the single most humiliating object on the planet. Obviously, my redesign wouldn't only include the object itself, but also the experience of what it means to not be able to go to the bathroom on your own and the experience of having to assist someone in this very intimate moment. —Annette Diefenthaler

Laundry
Whenever I walk by my local laundromat, I wonder what IDEO could do to make it better. Laundromats are relatively rare public shared-use spaces (similar to bath houses and communal bakeries in the Middle East and northern Africa). They provide a crucial service, especially for low income folks—a group that sometimes doesn’t get the same level of design consideration. What if they focused on some of the benefits of shared-use space, such as relaxing (you have time to read, call family and friends, play video games, etc. while you wait for your load to finish) and building community (you can meet neighbors, read about local events, catch up on the news, etc.)? —Biz Wells

Channel Surfing
F—ing remote controls, man. —Peter Olson

Police Interaction
I want to see us redesign the U.S. police-citizen interaction experience during arrests, traffic stops, and inquiries to help both the police and citizens feel safe and prevent wrongful deaths and excessive use of force, particularly against citizens of color. Maybe it's helping police organizations realign with their purpose to protect people and address any biases they may have developed. Or maybe it's an opportunity for a protective product to help police feel more secure in potentially threatening situations and therefore prevent them from using fatal measures for what they feel is self defense. Or maybe it's restorative community building between populations and the services that protect them in order to understand and break down historical tensions. I think it would be world-changing work. —Hannah Williams

The Gym
I'd like to redesign gym equipment to make it more accessible to women. I'm freakin' tired of using equipment sized for men. —Jennifer Maer

Phone Screens
I dropped my iPhone and the screen cracked. The Genius Bar fixed it in 30 minutes for $140. I asked the guy how many screens had he personally replaced and he said more than 1,000. Apple really is genius to convince us to pay that for a phone falling three feet; imagine dropping your wallet and it breaking! —Brendan Boyle

Life With a Newborn
The first year of motherhood. It’s crazy, hard, and you can feel alone and unsure that you're doing the right thing. And as a working mom, it feels like time is NOT on your side. —Melanie Bell-Mayeda

Adoption
I would love to redesign the domestic adoption process in the U.S. I hesitate to mention it because I’m not sure my heart or my patience for bureaucracy could take it. (I know, that’s all the more reason to go for it.) —Denise Burchell

Political Debate
Can we redesign public discourse in the U.S.? We are divided as a nation and it’s not going to get better on its own. What can we agree on, and how might we we use our common understanding to resist the temptation to demonize one another? —Murphy MacDonald

Emergency Response
I want to redesign the San Francisco 911 call center system. This story is all about how money isn’t solving the response time problem for 911 calls in S.F.; the issue is with training dispatchers and their quality of life at work. This seems possible to tackle from a human-centered perspective, since it’s a well-funded city system that pays its employees above average salaries. —Kim Powers

Misogyny at Work
Culture at Fox News. The organization has famously had huge problems with its treatment of women—even Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes aside. It’s clear that something needs to change and that it needs to be more than their recently announced policy allowing women to wear pants (not just short skirts) on the air. How might we help Fox uncover and adapt to who they want to become? —Joe Brown

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Rethinking products, services, and systems is our bread and butter. And when you spend your days asking, “how might we change this?” radically reframing the way you see the world becomes an occupational hazard. Designers end up sitting back, scratching their chins, and assessing the utility—or uselessness—of everything, with an eye to making it better. From the immigration process to the razor, we’ve come up with a list of 19 things we’d love to redesign, if we only had the chance.

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.