To bring students healthy food at school, San Francisco Unified School District had already hired Revolution Foods, a caterer that serves some of the highest-nutrition meals in the nation. But when the lunch bell rang, 72 percent of those who could afford lunch weren’t showing up; students didn’t want to wait in the long lines or rush to finish, so they headed off-campus to eat.

Working alongside more than 1,300 students, parents, union leaders, nutrition staff, board commissioners, principals, teachers, and community groups, IDEO and SFUSD redesigned school lunch. Together, they developed recommendations for three age-appropriate dining experiences, from communal eating to student-designed spaces to new technology platforms, and worked to develop a robust business model.

In September 2013, the San Francisco Unified School Board expressed unanimous enthusiasm for IDEO’s work, clearing the path for this new vision of student-centered lunch to take root.

You can learn more about the cafeteria, and hear firsthand from the students, in this immersive, interactive story.

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Steelcase and IDEO have been collaborating for more than 25 years. The relationship has influenced furniture design across a range of environments, from work spaces to hospitals to schools, and has resulted in numerous design awards for iconic pieces like the Node Chair for classrooms and the innovative modern office chair Leap WorkLounge.

At the heart of the relationship lie trust and a spirit of collaboration, said IDEO founder David Kelley, allowing the space for innovation. “It has to be the collaboration between our inherent innovation capabilities and their extraordinary internal knowledge about the market and what they do best,” Kelley said. The way IDEO began working with Steelcase decades ago has influenced the way they continue to work today, involved in all areas of the business, from design and engineering to strategy and marketing.

The first collaboration in 1989 was for a new Steelcase division called Details, and featured desktop products to go along with its already successful line of office furniture. From the beginning, IDEO founder David Kelley and a group of designers were involved in helping Steelcase with decision-making on every level of the new division, from product strategy to hiring and everything in between. The particular blend of strategy, design, and engineering used to help Details become successful actually became the prototype project for the future IDEO, and is the blueprint for how IDEO works today.

What followed were a series of projects in which Steelcase and IDEO explored moving away from the traditional office cubicle toward furniture that was more architectural and open. More than 10 years ago, Steelcase noticed that the way people worked was changing from static work in offices to more fluid environments that were technology-enabled with laptops and mobile phones. This insight led to two collaborations, Room Wizard and media:scape, design efforts that captured this changing landscape by extending intelligent work to be supported by digital products, not just physical ones.

Jim Hackett, former CEO of Steelcase, said that an early brainstorming exercise in IDEO’s Palo Alto studio made him realize the power of a human-centered design approach. “They asked me to come to Palo Alto for a brainstorming exercise, so I went through the literal exercise that IDEO was having clients do at the time,” Hackett said. “As I was cutting foam core on the floor of one of the studios, I was thinking: I would never work the same way again after doing this. Not just designers should work like this, but anybody who is a knowledge worker should work like this.”

The collaboration’s many successes had a profound impact on Steelcase, and on Hackett personally: “I’m so humbled, I can’t even express it. I can’t tell you how many waves of joy come over me when I’m at IDEO. It’s just an extraordinary part of my life.”

Over the years, the two companies have been in nearly daily communication, a practice that has informed the work of both. While Hackett brought Steelcase’s perspective of corporate boardrooms and running a global company, Kelley and IDEO were working in the most innovative place in the world, saturated in design. Both companies agree that neither would be the same today without the experience gleaned from the other.

Some of the projects include:

RoomWizard
Aiming to connect the convenience of digital technology to physical spaces, the teams designed RoomWizard, a web-accessible touch-screen display that provides the real-time status of shared meeting rooms, simplifying the process of reserving and managing those spaces.

Leap WorkLounge and Ottoman
Building on their earlier work on the Leap Chair, the teams created a work chair with the comfort and style of a classic club chair, a luxury Leap Chair that takes work away from the desk.

i2i Chair
In researching the needs of a growing number of collaborative settings, Steelcase identified an opportunity to combine task and lounge seating. Named for the collaboration it enables, the i2i chair supports a variety of postures, including sideways, reclining, perching, and leaning. Winner of the Spark Gold Award, 2010, and the IDEA Silver Award, 2009.

Amia Chair
Steelcase and IDEO designed a task chair with modern ergonomic capabilities that accommodated a wide range of body types at a lower price point. Winner of the IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, 2009.

media:scape
Steelcase asked IDEO to help evaluate and design a “walk up and connect” experience that merged furniture and technology to help teams access and share information. Designed to look light, open, and inviting, media:scape used a pedestal table with cleverly embedded hardware and interactive technology to foster group work. Winner of the IDEA Bronze award for Office & Productivity, 2011.

Node Chair
IDEO collaborated with Steelcase to design a platform for improving the classroom experience. The final product, dubbed the Node chair, has received praise for promoting student collaboration, allowing educators to reconfigure classrooms to fit different teaching styles, and enabling institutions to save money by making spaces more flexible and accommodating for varied uses. Winner of five design awards.

Watch: A love letter to Node.

A great healthcare experience shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be available to everyone, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they need.

Planned Parenthood health centers have opened their doors to every woman and man for 100 years with this core conviction, offering services ranging from pap tests, cancer screenings, and breast exams to contraception, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, counseling, and education.

As the healthcare landscape continues to shift, Planned Parenthood is evolving to lead the progress. For the past year, the organization worked side by side with IDEO to rethink and prototype a patient and employee experience that elevates individuals and their health and well-being.

Together, the teams designed a number of patient and employee interactions and corresponding prototypes that address different patient needs: education, personalization, connection, and support for any decision.

Concepts in Development

These concepts are being rolled out across health centers around the country:

Welcoming Waiting Areas
To help set the right tone for patients from the time they enter the door, the teams designed waiting rooms that offer different types of environments for different needs. The Hub is an area that transforms the passive waiting room experience to a greeting area that’s staffed by knowledgeable guides who help orient patients, and quiet nesting spaces for reflection and privacy. Patients can spend time with friends and family in a social, kid-friendly common area, and those who want to get involved to support Planned Parenthood’s mission can learn about health and advocacy information. This modular design toolkit can adapt to the individual buildings, budgets, and community needs of any existing Planned Parenthood health center.

Restorative Recovery Rooms
For women who are recovering from surgical procedures, small thoughtful details have a magnified positive impact. Redesigned recovery rooms have been separated into semi-private spaces, accommodating loved ones who want to join patients after a procedure. Soothing colors and soft, warm fabrics create a comforting environment, and service gestures including cards with words of support and encouragement from staff reinforce Planned Parenthood’s promise. A take-home kit provides clear information about what to expect during recovery and recommendations for follow-up care.

Unifying Employees
Because the heart of Planned Parenthood is its dedicated employees, we developed and launched an engagement and training program that provides staff with the tools and support they need to do their best work. In This Together, an employee engagement training, prepares staff to work with a vastly diverse community, reduce stigma around health choices, and empower patients to take control of their care. It’s based on a clearly defined set of workplace values and service standards, common goals that help employees across the global organization work together to provide top-notch experiences at every location.

Vision for the Future

These concepts are in varying stages of development, with plans to launch coming soon.

Patient-Physician Tool and Educational App
Visit Companion is a prototype for a suite of digital tools that help patients learn about their reproductive health choices and create personalized plans with their clinicians. While they wait, or anytime before a visit, patients can learn the answers to common questions related to their appointment and see side-by-side comparisons of their care options. The app uses familiar language and symbols to describe symptoms and side effects, and it provides a record of what was discussed during the visit as well as reminders for follow-up appointments.

Simplified Medical Forms
For the 2 million-plus patients who visit Planned Parenthood health centers, there’s an opportunity to make appointments more convenient and straightforward. Currently in prototyping stages, Friendly Forms is an easy-to-understand, interactive digital questionnaire written in simple, conversational language that was designed by replicating how Planned Parenthood clinicians speak to their patients. The forms adapt as patients answer questions, giving only the prompts that are relevant. Patients will be able to complete Friendly Forms any time before their appointment, so it’s easier to complete the forms accurately.

Holistic Women’s Health Care
Women who rely on Planned Parenthood for their sexual and reproductive healthcare can benefit from having trusted clinicians guide their care throughout their lifetime. Through the Well Woman Plus program, Planned Parenthood will connect women to trusted providers for care beyond physical exams and birth control consultation. Clinicians will use interactive digital and physical tools to map out lifelong health care milestones and help patients think proactively about their future, from family planning to preventive screenings.

To learn more, go to PlannedParenthoodExperience.org.

Find out more about Planned Parenthood's approach to creativity in this Q&A with executive vice president and chief brand officer Dawn Laguens.

La Victoria Lab (LVL) is a group of designers, anthropologists, architects, and entrepreneurs working on improving the lives of the Peruvian middle class. Founded in 2014, LVL is the Innovation Lab of Intercorp, an economic group of 35 companies spanning banks, malls, cinemas, schools, health care clinics, and more. Intercorp was founded by Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, one of Peru’s most successful entrepreneurs, employs more than 90,000 people, and accounts for almost 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Peru is one of South America’s fastest growing economies, with a healthy 6 percent year-on-year growth from 2007 to 2017, on average. That rising economic tide, along with government policy, has created extraordinary social mobility: Between 2005 and 2017, the share of poverty fell from 55% to 22%, of a population of 32 million.

Know The Customer

As Peruvians’ lives have improved, the new middle class's needs and aspirations have changed: They’re entrepreneurial, expect great services, and want the best for their children. That challenge and opportunity led Rodríguez-Pastor to enlist IDEO to bring our empathic approach to the construction of Innova Schools, a new school system, and to redesign Interbank's customer experience"

Success in these two projects bred ambition. Intercorp, Rodríguez-Pastor realized, needed to build two capabilities: a deep, bedrock understanding of the new middle class, and an innovation capability with which his companies could create new products, services, and experiences. “I want a little IDEO,” Rodriguez-Pastor said, and the germ of LVL took root.

A Lab Takes Shape

In early 2014, as contractors broke ground on the Lab, its founders set about hiring an eclectic team from across the globe and undertook their first project: to deeply understand the needs, desires, hopes, and dreams of the emerging middle class.

Three months of ethnographic research was followed by three months of bringing their insights to life. LVL’s team surrounded themselves with mementos of people’s lives: toys, products, ads, as well as video interviews with families, to help Intercorp’s executives literally step into the lives of their prospective customers.

Solutions and Skills

Powered by those insights, La Victoria Lab has brought human-centered problem-solving to a variety of Intercorp’s companies, including new retail ventures, and improving the cinema-going and banking experience.

In 2015, the Lab began scaling its efforts to build innovation capabilities across all of the portfolio companies by using IDEO’s innovation readiness assessment, Creative Difference. Each company received a report of their strengths and improvement areas, and as a result, LVL facilitated workshops and community groups focused on building essential capabilities.

"Creative Difference is the first tool that has allowed my team and the organization to have a precise picture of where we are in the spectrum of doing truly innovative work. Now, we can identify our strengths and areas of improvement, we can develop work plans and actions based on data, and can start to really dig deep into innovation,” says Aurelia Alvarado, Director of Innovation, Innova Schools.

La Victoria Lab’s experiments are catalyzed by Intercorp’s scale, reach, and national ambition. Innova Schools, for example, is now Peru’s biggest private school network (read more about Innova here). And Interbank’s new retail experience rolled out to more than 180 branches nationally.

As LVL matures, its focus is changing, says Hernan Carranza, Chief Innovation Officer, Intercorp. “There's a transition taking place at La Victoria Lab, from a studio undertaking typical design projects, to a platform for impact-led journeys that start at pipeline discovery, defining key performance indicators, all the way to implementation and stewardship."

Just as important as the projects it delivers is the wider intent of LVL. The aim is for IDEO’s role within La Victoria Lab to wane, as Intercorp’s waxes, and the company’s internal Innovation capability and culture strengthen. LVL’s ventures range from mindset-changing initiatives, such as curating Peru's largest innovation festival, to deeply transformative endeavors targeted at reinventing the core value propositions of Intercorp's insurance, drugstores, and medical services. It envisions massive cross-organizational transformation.

“Innovation,” said Rodríguez-Pastor, “is too important to be outsourced.”

Keep up to date with the latest projects from La Victoria Lab: lavictoria.pe

"For the latest developments on our work with Intercorp, head to "The Possibilities Business: An Oral History of Organization Transformation"

But in organizations wired for efficiency, it can be difficult to quickly adapt—a potentially fatal shortcoming in a world where disruption and technological change are constant. We often see these organizations unravel and reassemble abruptly, resulting in jarring employee experiences and decreased productivity; or change course entirely, building something new that causes more damage than value. As a result, companies are dying more quickly than ever: Today, the average age of an S&P 500 company is less than 20 years old; in the 1950s, it was nearly 60.

Given all the factors threatening the vitality of companies, what factors can instead contribute to their longevity? One source of inspiration comes from cities—and the planning and development that underpin their resilience. While the best cities do seem to function like fine-tuned machines, their systems are in fact much more adaptable, flexible, and resilient—more like a living organism than a machine. In his book Scale, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West asks, “if cities are indeed some sort of superorganism, then why do almost none of them ever die?“

The reason is that they learn to evolve in response to changing conditions—a quality that is equally critical to companies. Every business leader stands to glean some adaptive tools by taking a page from urban leaders who’ve deployed adaptive responses to their local challenges.

The “just enough” strategy

After the massive 2010 earthquake destroyed 80 percent of buildings in Iquique, Chile, architect Alejandro Aravena was tasked with developing a new city plan for Iquique. His solution was unexpected: he designed a replicable house that would be half-complete when handed over to the inhabitants. On one side, the home would be move-in ready, sufficient to meet the legal requirements for low-income housing; on the other side, a vacant frame would give residents agency in determining how their own home would ultimately be. Concrete foundations, plumbing, insulation, and electricity were all provided for inhabitants, who could expand on the basic design by taking workshops and buying building materials through the city. This design gave residents a starting point to design their future, rather than a mandate. In the end, they each owned their homes.

This kind of “just enough” strategy could help businesses adapt, too. In times of change, organizations tend to set new visions in multi-year timeframes — forecasting three, five, or even 10 years ahead. Leaders develop detailed road maps explaining how every part of the organization must change in order to reach these goals. But these macro-level and long-term mandates often don’t feel tangible or attainable to employees, especially when they’re asked to report on progress every three months. This results in a lack of momentum, support, and internal innovation.

Instead, organizations can think about creating a “minimum viable organization” (MVO)—the basic foundation and tools needed in order for talent to step in to help create and shape the company’s future innovation and growth.

Zalando, Europe’s largest fashion retailer, is one of the companies that has successfully employed this approach. To more quickly adapt to industry changes, and carry out their new vision to reimagine fashion for the good of all, IDEO designers and Zalando employees established a dedicated product innovation team and lab. Rather than devoting months to strategizing or establishing an entirely new innovation department, the lab offered the MVO conditions to yield faster, more tangible progress on a long-term vision that the company could internally rally around and take to the market. In the three years since its launch, the lab has built and sent to market multiple new products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street-style photos; and Collabary, a digital tool that connects online fashion influencers with brands.

A nimble plan for scaling

Curitiba, Brazil, is considered one of the best examples of urban planning in the world. When the city’s population exploded in the 1960s, residents worried that overcrowding and traffic congestion would threaten the city’s history and character. To address the issue, architect Jaime Lerner rolled out the Curitiba Master Plan. The plan introduced a public bus system, and required all new development to be concentrated along the bus routes to maximize use. He also introduced the Trinary Road System, which features dedicated bus lanes at the center of the thoroughfare, with parallel streets on either side for private vehicle traffic.

Rather than primarily investing in new infrastructures, Lerner focused on innovating within existing conditions, focusing on roads, public spaces, and downtown areas. As a result, he designed a system that facilitated the city’s scale while still preserving its culture.

What can businesses learn from Lerner’s approach? When organizations scale, many companies rely on structural reorganization to address challenges with stakeholders, process, and other complexities. But while that approach adjusts the high-level org chart and shifts reporting lines, it does not change informal human dynamics, relationships, and emotions, which largely influence workplace culture, engagement, and productivity.

In his TED talk, designer Alastair Parvin tells the story of an architecture firm that was working with a school to help address narrow hallways in light of a growing student population. In between classes, the corridors became congested, resulting in difficulty monitoring student behavior and bullying. But rather than expanding the hallways or building a new space for the school, the firm redesigned the school bell system. “Instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places at different times, and distribute the traffic through the corridors,” says Parvin. “It solves the same problem.”

Like Curitiba, organizations can shift the way they operate while maintaining existing structures, rather than creating entirely new ones, which often disrupt workplace culture.

Taking a “regional” approach

Cities also offer guidance for how to work with partners—and even competitors—to achieve a big, important goal. As a part of the Helsinki City Planning Department’s 2009 Strategic Spatial Plan, the city decided to think about serving the needs of the whole region, rather than those only within the city’s boundaries. This meant that Helsinki had to redefine its existing economic, social, and environmental relationships, changing who it served. The city also formed new principles and policies for key issues like business activities, housing, and the city landscape, enabling development beyond Helsinki’s boundaries.

Most companies intentionally define clear boundaries and relationships between themselves and the outside world. To a certain extent, this is expected: Nearly every business school student is introduced to Porter’s Five Forces, a popular model used to inform corporate strategy. As part of the framework, future managers learn that by reducing the number of competitors in the market, a business can ensure long-term dominance. But as a result of adopting traditional business frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces, organizations naturally view their relationship to other industry players as competitive or transactional. This creates boundaries between a company and those outside its walls.

Like Helsinki, organizations are rethinking the boundaries of their responsibility by working to address big issues like climate change. Despite being considered industry competitors, leaders from Danone, Rabobank, Nature’s Path, McDonald’s, and Starbucks recently joined forces through CoLab, IDEO’s platform for collaborative impact. During a week-long design sprint, they worked side-by-side to develop solutions, emerging with one concept that helped food companies access better ingredients; and another that used a circular model to offer food delivery to apartment dwellers.

These companies recognize that there’s an opportunity to both stay ahead of the market and generate broader impact by looking beyond their organization’s own walls and intellectual property. This requires companies to form new collaborative relationships to push industries forward together.

While companies can still benefit from using Porter’s Five Forces—and even sometimes from structural reorgs—fresh, innovative thinking is required to address the complex challenges businesses face today. To that end, cities can serve as inspiration for organizations navigating change, helping them to rethink the efficiency-driven approaches that once enabled success, and orient instead toward nimble, flexible, human solutions.

Illustrations by Ryan Johnson

Organizations have long been engineered like fine-tuned machines: They allocate processes and resources (sometimes human) into specializations, each churning and passing their output to the next group. This efficiency has allowed companies to scale, prevent competitors from entering the market, and dominate their industries.

In the hacking world, capture the flag (CTF) describes a competition that requires participants to complete challenges that vary in topic (hardware, software, social engineering, cryptography, etc.) and complexity to—you guessed it—capture digital flags. Not only does winning these competitions mean bragging rights and great prizes, it’s also a great way to learn and teach new skills while working with others in the community.

To prepare for the competition, we doubled down on the design thinking process we rely on in our work: We built a multidisciplinary team so we had a wealth of resources on our side, and we relied on rapid prototyping to create tools that helped us solve puzzles. Here are our best tips for getting through a challenge like this one, borrowed and modified from the best practices and processes of design thinking.

Assemble a dream team

CTF challenges are usually designed to push the bounds of competitors’ knowledge and abilities, and this one was no different. When we were preparing, we knew we’d need a team that could handle embedded systems and hardware as well as web and networking. Luckily, between the two of us, we have those covered, but we also teamed up with friends at the conference with specialties in cryptography, wireless hacking, and other skills to round out our abilities.

As we thought about the types of challenges we might face, we broke down the kinds of skills we'd need and assigned them among the team. Once the challenge kicked off, we huddled to share ideas and make sure that none of the teammates got stumped on their pieces of the challenge. Even though assigning roles to work efficiently is really important, you can’t get through a challenge without leaning on one another.

Adopt a beginner’s mindset

When you go into a challenge like this, you often face things you’ve never seen before, like long strings of garbled text that make absolutely no sense at first glance; hardware that is completely new to you; antiquated and obscure software that you need to exploit somehow.

It’s daunting, but it’s not so different from taking on a design challenge. When you rely on the methods and processes of design thinking to find an unknown solution to a complex problem, you don’t know what you’re trying to build until you figure it out. CTFs work much the same way. And to succeed at them, we rely on the same methods we use to create a new product or service, or solve an engineering problem: we adopt a beginner’s mindset. When we start a project, we take significant time researching the client, the industry, and of course, the users. When we sign up for a challenge, we start working to learn as much as we can in advance, thinking about the creators and what kind of challenge they might be looking to hand us. Having little to no idea about what we’ll encounter once the challenge starts, we do our best to prepare.

Build, test, fail… repeat!

Seldom do we participate in a CTF without having to develop custom tools on the fly, like software scripts for cracking cryptography or custom hardware for probing and manipulating physical challenges. Given our time constraints, we have to slap these tools together, focusing on scrappy versions that will last just long enough to help us solve the challenge and find the flag. CTFs tend to last only a couple of days, so time is a valuable resource. It usually doesn’t matter how well a tool is designed, as long as it can be made quickly and help get us closer to the flag.

It’s a strategy straight out of the design thinking playbook. When designers are coming up with a new solution to a problem, we don’t always have time to take one idea from concept to completion. We work on many solutions in tandem, figure out which ideas are going to fail fast, then advance the others forward (or come up with totally new concepts). The tools we develop during hacking CTFs are no different. It’s a cycle of quick development, testing, and processing the feedback in order to inch closer to a solution.

Get out of your head

These challenges are called challenges for a reason. At this point, the two of us have been around the CTF block before—and yet we still get stuck and fail spectacularly.

This time, for example, we ran into an issue with listening to an audio clip that played from our ID badges. We couldn’t make out what was coming out of the tiny speaker, so we started thinking about ways to rip the firmware off the badge and download the file it was playing. That was going to take hours (if not longer), but Rob suggested we just needed a better speaker. We were thinking way too technically—we didn’t need to rip the file, we just needed to hear it better.

By articulating the simplest problem and searching for the simplest solution, we were able to move forward much faster than if we had tried to solve the problem in a much more “correct” way. It’s about knowing when to take a step back and allowing yourself to be curious about other possibilities.

Just like with our other work, failure is part of the process. Sometimes your seemingly perfect solution fails in testing, or your prototype isn’t what a client wanted. You get sent back to sketch out new ideas and start again. After our momentary fiasco with the ID badge speaker, we got the message from the audio file, moved forward to the next challenge, on and on, until we won!

Enjoy sweet, sweet victory

By pulling from our IDEO skills, and with support from some new friends, we ended up winning our first hacking CTF at this competition. We’ve since gone on to compete in other hacking competitions around the country, including winning DarkNet at the notorious DEFCON, thanks to our experience in things like breaking out of handcuffs and having a basic proficiency in Vulcan. (Yes, knowing the fictional language from Stark Trek was an actual part of the competition). Part of the challenge even involved cracking codes to gain access to a secret party—super cool.

If you can’t tell, we’re huge fans of the way CTFs push us to think quickly, pivot fast, and challenge our expectations. And Rob is such a fan that he’ll be heading back to Thotcon this year as an organizer. That's handy for the rest of us, because even though he won’t be sharing any hints as to what’s coming, we already know the way he thinks. We're ready to hit step number two, thinking about the kinds of challenges he might be all too excited to throw at us.

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You’ve infiltrated the other team’s base, found the hidden flag, and are anxiously navigating back to safety in order to score. For many people, this might bring back adolescent memories of playing capture the flag with their neighbors; for the two of us, this was what it felt like to compete in Thotcon, a two-day hacking conference. Instead of running around in someone's backyard, we were gunning for flags over wireless connections, hacking into devices, and deciphering puzzles.

His winding path evolved from leading teams at Facebook, Pinterest, and serving on the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA)'s board to interrogating the systems that shape our reality through fine art and design. I first connected with Brian while creating a public art installation inspired by his work. Sitting down for a chat with him reminded me why art at the edges is key to activating social change and reimagining our future.

In one sentence, who are you?

I’m the guy you root for in the movie who doesn’t actually win in the end, but also doesn’t get eaten by zombies. I’m also an artist and designer who gravitates towards thought-provoking work.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

At the core of my work is deconstructing and reconstructing words, symbols, and objects in order to shift their meaning. I wish I could say how I learned it. I can trace some of it to my roots in the design and communications profession. And by being curious. Well, that and just trying and failing and trying again.

What are your three favorite possessions?

My guillotine cutter, not just because of how useful it is, but also because I got it off Craigslist for a great deal. My studio (technically not a possession because I rent it), but it allows me not just the physical space, but also the mental space to create. And a giant crocheted crab pillow that my mom made when I was a kid, because it’s a crab pillow.

What does a typical work session look like?

It truly depends on what I’m making (or if I’m still in ideation phase). For many of my projects, there’s a significant planning phase where I’m just figuring out what approach to take. Once that’s ready, I start production which can consist of tying thousands of knots, or counting and sorting paper. Sometimes I wish I just did one thing, so my routines were more regular, but the truth is each session is entirely dependent on the project (and lately, the projects have been pretty diverse).

How do you get over creative block?

I shift gears. If I’m struggling with a concept, it doesn’t help to keep focusing on it. Instead, I dig into a different project, take a walk, read a book, get high, anything to get my mind off of the initial project. Once that’s done, the ideas seem to come more easily (though sometimes they come at 4am).

What was the last item on your to do list?

This? My to-do list is never ending in that there’s always too many things to do and never enough time, so items get moved to the next day, and the next. Today, I’ve prepped for and conducted a recording session for one of my projects and followed up on a proposal. After this, I’m sending a list of available pieces to a gallery, setting up tax payments, planning my week, getting groceries, and going to my nephew’s birthday dinner. My life is pretty exciting.

How do you see the world in 2078?

I’m not very optimistic about the future of humanity. Not because I don’t think we’ll survive, we probably will. Us, and cockroaches. I just think that humans have a tendency towards power and wealth at the expense of other humans and the planet. Maybe we’ll have flying cars and nanobots and we’ll live to be 200 years old, but society will still be a pyramid, with the masses supporting the very rich at the top. Sorry, that’s so dismal.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

Right now, number one is to leverage the very tactics that the advertising industry uses, but to help parents raise their children. This isn’t packaging carrots like junk food, but more like Brave New World for good. Yeah, wrap your mind around that.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

So many crushes. Miranda July? Rigo 23? Matt Bonner (creator of the baby Trump balloon)? There are so many, but one who continually inspires me is Ivan Cash. He’s a brilliant creative with the right twist to his ideas around the effects of technology on society. One of his recent projects was to create sunglasses that block out digital displays.

From putting photos of texting drivers on billboards to calling out mass surveillance with tech company t-shirts to sending 1000 journals around the world to connect strangers, Brian Singer (also known as Someguy) lives and breathes provocation.

As a designer at IDEO’s CoLab, I’m always working on the kinds of systemic challenges that no single company—or even industry—can solve alone. And every time we start exploring a new problem, I get really excited. So excited that I’ve challenged myself to do things like go 100 days without sugar, 100 days without meat, and 100 days in heels (to varying degrees of success). So when we decided to explore and prototype goods for the circular economy—which focuses on manufacturing goods with a use beyond their lifecycle—I decided to dive straight in, and cut plastic out of my life for 100 days.

I kicked off my new journey with a shopping spree at T.J. Maxx, picking up all of the cute little glass jars that I could find to replace Tupperware, drug store cosmetic packaging, and other hygiene-related items. But when I hit the checkout counter, I realized that I was snaring myself in an expensive catch-22. The second all of my existing plastics hit the trash, I would be creating more waste. Instead, I enacted a grandfather clause: I used everything in my life that I already had—plastic or not—and barred myself from consuming or buying anything that brought additional plastic into my life.

The first of January 2019 was day one. Everyone was super accommodating about New Year’s resolutions. But the rest of the 99 days put me in some situations that were downright weird. Around March, I started to run out of toiletries and hit a low point where I used a Sharpie as eyeliner for a good week (do NOT recommend). I once had to drink bubble tea out of a bowl, and ransacked my bag until I found a random piece of pipe to use as a straw. It wasn’t all bad, though. Here are six surprising advantages to going without plastic.

1. I went on an accidental diet

Cutting out plastic meant no more junk food, snacks, sugar, to-go drinks, or sodas. I ended up eating more things that come in their own packaging, like avocados, yams, and eggs, and buying whole fish instead of pre-prepped fillets that came in shrink-wrapped plastic.

About five weeks after I started this challenge, I noticed that my skin was clearer, my joints were less inflamed, and the number on the scale had dropped—I felt great. But more importantly, it made me realize how much of the real estate in the modern American supermarket is dedicated to things packaged in plastic, from bagged snacks to most of the cold refrigeration aisles.

2. I needed way fewer products than I thought

After rinsing out my shampoo and soap bottles for their final suds, I turned to the beauty gurus and slapped some coconut oil and baking soda together and called it shampoo. It was totally... just okay. But after a rough couple of weeks, my body adapted and my hair and skin were doing great because all the chemicals had worked their way out of my system. It was surprisingly effective.

3. I saved money

My life was a lot more inconvenient, but also much improved. You know when you justify retail therapy as self care, and you go into Target just to grab some toilet paper only to come out with everything you need to redecorate your living room? Most retail was off limits for me, either because of packaging or material choice. Instead, that money and time went toward things I could experience. Shopping used to be entertainment; buying brought the rush of reward. Even now, post-challenge, it feels strange walking into stores.

4. My trash was compostable

With my new rules, I didn’t make that much garbage—mostly just compost that I stored in the freezer, and my experiment brought me closer to the way that I lived when I was at home. My parents grew up in rural China, growing all their own vegetables, so when Mama and Papa Gong bought a house in the middle of urban Chicago, they put a farm in the backyard. When I go home, I’m reminded just how differently they think about waste. Any organic trash goes right back to the chickens and the soil, and they don’t have any food- or shipping-related packaging to deal with. After a season, all their waste has decayed back into the soil, while plastic in our landfills will sit around for 1,000 years.

5. My social life improved

Small talk makes me uncomfortable, but I had to start talking to strangers to ask them to, say, leave the straw out of my drink (flashback to day two of this challenge when I asked for no straw, and somehow ended up with two). These small interactions always turned into real conversations about plastic and climate change. As a bonus, people also started giving me free stuff, like the brewer who was handing out samples of Bohemian Raspberry in plastic cups, but gave me a half-pint of beer in a commemorative pint glass instead. Conversations get a lot more interesting when your opener is, “Have you considered that you consume a credit card’s worth of microplastics a week?”

6. Every day was a challenge

This experiment threw constant small design challenges my way. Getting groceries and forgetting a tote bag meant cradling too many vegetables while chasing a bell pepper that rolled away in the parking lot, until I stopped and made a quick a sack out of a hoodie. It was a fun daily design exercise, finding little hacks to my plastic puzzle.

Though there were a lot of upsides to this challenge, over the course of the 100 days one thing began to frustrate me. A lot of sustainability design aims to shift consumer behavior. But cutting down on plastic isn’t just an individual responsibility. We may have the choice to buy a glass bottle over a plastic one, but by the time we exercise our buying power, it’s too late. We need smart options for what to do with the products we buy after we’re done with them. That starts with design. And until the corporations that provide us with our purchasing choices and set the tone for how we live our lives get onboard with the circular economy, it’s tough to take it on ourselves. Still, I recommend you try. Unsubscribing from plastic is a pretty big wake up call, and it’s changed the way I live.

If you've already blown your original 2020 New Year's resolution, maybe give this challenge a shot? At the very least it might help you lose weight, clear up your skin, and strengthen your social relationships. Let me know what adventures it takes you on and where creativity strikes because of it. Let your favorite brands know, too, so at the very best, they’re motivated to start making changes upstream and join the circular economy. We’ve definitely left our mark with this material—it’s time to figure out what to do about it.

Illustrations by Jenice Kim

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When you go plastic-free for 100 days, you can expect small life improvements, like more aesthetically-pleasing toiletries, and minor inconveniences, like remembering to carry reusable water bottles everywhere. But there were other things that went way beyond my expectations. For example, an incident in Panama in February where I almost landed in “mall jail” after I tried to refuse a plastic bag with my purchase. (The store used bags to determine who had paid for their goods, and they thought I was trying to steal a pair of shoes.) The challenge took me on weird and wonderful tangents like this one, and really made me consider how ingrained plastic is in our purchasing decisions and daily systems.

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.