As a small, young nation, Singapore has come a long way in a short time. Its cost-conscious education system enables social mobility, its public healthcare system is a model of success, and it has achieved financial independence. What’s more, 80 percent of its citizens reside in Singapore’s desirable and attainable public housing complexes.

But even with these successes, Singapore wanted to improve upon its existing systems. In 2008, government agencies came to IDEO to help connect the intention behind their policies with how their services were delivered to the public. To bridge the gap, IDEO Singapore partnered with five government agencies on more than 12 projects.

A few highlights:

Singapore’s Ministry of Health
The Ministry subsidizes up to 80 percent of healthcare costs. Understanding their financial options may, at times, be difficult for patients, especially in situations where they’re grappling with stressful medical conditions. Although the government has reassured Singaporeans that no one will be denied medical treatment even if they can’t pay, public sentiment that healthcare in Singapore is increasingly unaffordable still pervades.

So the Ministry worked with IDEO to give patients financial peace of mind at a time when their well-being is of utmost importance, and to improve their healthcare experience overall. Inspired by doctors’ ability to talk about patients’ diagnoses across a range of potential outcomes, IDEO designed a more patient-centric care cost discussion guide, and developed a new digital tool designed to help patients better understand and predict healthcare costs. The care cost discussion guide is currently being prototyped in two hospitals.

IDEO’s work with the Ministry of Health (MOH) extends to the communication strategy for a newly introduced government-sponsored insurance policy, MediShield Life. MOH recognized that government communications needed to incorporate important nuances to engage citizens around the new policies and benefits. Together with MOH, IDEO developed ideas for a citizen engagement strategy that brought to life a journey that includes how Singaporeans learn about a policy, sign up, and understand benefits and subsidies.

The Ministry of Manpower
One of the Ministry’s roles is to process work passes for foreigners, who make up 30 percent of the nation’s workforce. The Ministry was known for its speed and efficiency, but not its customer service. IDEO partnered with the Ministry’s Work Pass Division to design all of the touchpoints around acquiring a new work pass—from the letters applicants receive to the website, physical space, and the interactions that occur there.

In addition, IDEO embarked on a series of projects with the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) aimed at streamlining and simplifying its communications. Together, they addressed the question, “How do we create communications that are easily understood and better engage MOM’s customers?” Starting with the most common letters sent out by MOM’s Work Pass Division, they defined a more customer-oriented tone of voice and visual style. To scale up the new approach, IDEO trained many MOM officers to write with the customer’s perspective in mind.

The National Population and Talent Division
The agency asked IDEO to better understand the underlying reasons for Singapore’s all-time-low birthrate and design ways to encourage Singaporeans to have more children.

The Ministry of National Development
More than 80 percent of Singapore’s citizens live in public housing. The Ministry asked IDEO to bring to life Singaporeans’ notion of home and identify ways to keep their aspirations at the center of their work.

Building creative confidence across Singapore’s public sector will be an ongoing journey, but the country is actively building the tools it needs to maintain its citizen-centered approach in an increasingly complex world.

After losing both legs below the knee and half of one arm in an accident, Dr. BJ Miller knows what it feels like to be near death. But after recovering, Miller became a doctor, joined the faculty of UCSF, and is now leading a conversation about patient-centered care and redesigning the experience of how we die. But such systemic change will require pioneering thinking, as our healthcare system, designed to cure, not caretake for the long term, prepares for an exploding elderly and chronically ill population.

Together with IDEO, Dr. Miller and Zen Hospice Project are bringing design to a broken system in hopes of helping people live fully right up until the end. Miller was invited to TED in March, 2015 to deliver the closing talk. In concert, IDEO designed a landing page and call to action to support Zen Hospice Project’s mission, flagging the campaign with the hashtag #designabetterending.

Early renderings for a new palliative care facility that would enliven end-of-life care with rich, engaging experiences are also in the works. Read more about the collaboration in California Sunday Magazine and join the movement to help us design a better ending.

Stephanie is a college student. She runs a successful beauty blog and shares new finds with her 20,000 followers. Jennifer is married and lives in Chicago. She considers fashion to be an expression of her identity. How do we know all of this about Stephanie and Jennifer? They’re both eBay shoppers the IDEO team met while designing a better way for the retail giant to get to know their customers.

It’s easy to forget that behind data cells exist flesh-and-blood people. eBay has 128 million buyers and sellers, and wanted to find meaningful stories about real people in order to uncover their wants, needs, and behaviors.

The company partnered with IDEO to create a digital ecosystem that integrates Big Data, business opportunities, and customer stories drawn from IDEO interviews to give employees deeper insight into how and why people use the site.

The app, which launched in September 2012, is available on desktop and mobile devices to eBay employees worldwide. It’s an easily accessible resource for eBay employees where they can glean insights about their customers by learning about key customer types. The app brings customer needs to life using words, images, and video interviews from select research participants. The power of that experience prompted eBay to overhaul its website, too, giving it a fresh, human-centered appeal.

Many younger customers described venerable fashion retailer Belk as “their grandmother’s store.” Belk, with 300 stores in 16 Southern states, was looking for ways to stay competitive and woo these style-savvy millennials. The goal was to create a trendy, social, affordable, and distinctly Southern shopping experience.

Belk’s innovation team and IDEO conducted research with twenty-somethings to develop the look, feel, merchandising strategy, and service experience of a new offshoot brand. Fresh and modern, Belk’s new pop-up store Belle & Ty features contemporary fashion along with a real-time Instagram wall, a style lounge, personal stylists, and weekly trunk shows. The pop-up store also serves as a learning lab for Belk, a place to prototype offerings for a new generation. Local fashion bloggers called the store “a must-stop shop during Christmas,” and Sue Curley, VP of Innovation at Belk, said, “Belle & Ty has been a great learning lab for us to connect with an important customer segment, test new ideas, learn, adjust, and test again.”

Each mythic tool/medicine could be used to combat common childhood ailments and illnesses in a way that celebrates each malady from beginning to end.

We are big fans of design fiction as a means to push our thinking and to explore what the future could look and feel like. For this design fiction exercise, we challenged ourselves with finding ways of turning kids into the heroes of their own young lives. We set out to create empathetic tools for childhood ailments and illnesses that recast painful, awkward and embarrassing experiences as rites of passage, spirit journeys and superpowers. To that end we asked ourselves a few questions to get started:

How might we turn embarrassing childhood moments into badges of honor?

How might we empower kids to celebrate the sometimes awkward illnesses of childhood?

How might we design for rites of passage, or inspire rituals that spark a contagious creativity?

So, we let our imagination go into a world with monsters in the closet, serpents under the bed, and yellow eyes peering out of the darkness. And we asked ourselves how to take the trauma and the terror out of routine childhood experiences. One thing we knew for certain: solving problems technically and explaining them rationally wouldn’t get us very far. First, we had to address them on an emotional, even mystical plane.

Childhood can be full of play and promise, but also pain. What might seem like a temporary annoyance to grownups can be felt as an unending bout of humiliation and suffering for young hearts and minds. Pink eye, lice, ear infections, zits—the barrage of indignities can wreak havoc on even the most self-confident kid.

But what if these childhood ailments were recast as rites of passage and superpowers? What if the telltale itchy scalp or bloodshot eyes could be framed as something to embrace, even be proud of? That’s what Phantasy Pharmacy seeks to capture in its design fiction collection of mythic tools that could be used to combat common childhood ailments and illnesses in a way that celebrates each malady from beginning to end.

To get the full, unadulterated experience, check out phph.ideo.com.

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Did you ever have lice as a kid? A bunch of us here at IDEO Cambridge did and we haven't forgotten how awful and embarrassing it felt. And when designers are faced with never-ending, wish-I-could-forget-you experiences, they start looking for ways to fix them. Recently, the studio banded together to create Phantasy Pharmacy, a bit of design fiction to help us stretch our imaginative limits and wrestle down unhappy childhood memories.

1. More than meets the eye

Tracking shots of winding country roads, and lingering peeks of sheet metal: car ads might seem as lifelike as it gets, but they’re often surprisingly realistic CGI, particularly for new cars that might not be public yet. To keep up that realism, post-production house The Mill’s neat solution has been to create a Transformers-like rig, with adjustable wheelbase, height, and driving style, to help its artists mimic pretty much any car, without costly shipping and availability worries. Take a closer look at the rig here.

2. The weird satisfaction of a close shave

For the crafty and OCD-inclined people—like us—who find pleasure in perfectly cubed fruit, watching cans being crushed, or a Leica body being painstakingly filed, relax and enjoy these slightly hypnotic videos of master Japanese ceramicist Abe Haruya at work.

3. Welcome to our open house

Kitchen of the future exhibitions stretch back half a century, but Arduino founder Massimo Banzi and acclaimed sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling have gone one further: they created Casa Jasmina, an open-source apartment in an old factory in Turin, to test what a connected home might look like in the future. Furniture and fittings are modular and hackable, and artists and companies are invited to submit ideas for connected appliances. Eventually, you’ll be able to rent the space out on Airbnb, says Banzi.

4. Getting conversational with computers

When Google’s AlphaGo deep learning software beat Go champion Lee Sedol, the world saw, via the media, a firsthand view of the power of artificial intelligence. But we’re still a long way from solving real problems, in part because interacting with AI is stuck at the computer science level. But an intrepid gang of interaction designers are building clever new ways for humans to better interact with these systems, argues computer vision and machine learning expert Greg Borenstein on Medium. Read the article here.

5. Go local with Airbnb

Fancy dining with a sumo wrestler, feeling frisky at a burlesque show, or getting your hands dirty with an urban farmer? Airbnb is helping travelers belong anywhere with a new product they’re testing. Called Experiences, it helps adventurous guests book escapades with local hosts. Check out Airbnb Experiences here.

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In this week’s Creative Caffeine, IDEO London serves up a quintuple shot of inspiration: post-production house The Mill’s transformer car; the weird soothingness of shaving ceramics; a visit to Arduino’s open-source apartment; designing with artificial intelligence; and drinks with a sumo wrestler, courtesy of Airbnb.

Name: Shruti Ramiah
Location: Munich
Role at IDEO: Design Research Lead
Joined IDEO: 2011
Website: www.shrutiramiah.com
Titillating Fact: I travel a lot for work, and one thing that helps me make every new place feel like home is the BBC World Service Radio (plus a healthy dose of BBC Radio 4). My grandfather used to tune into the World Service News every evening on Shortwave Radio. Now I have the digital radio on almost all the time, and I find the familiar voices very grounding. It’s also why so many of my conversations start with “So, I was listening to this show…”

1. Flash Forward

Flash Forward is a podcast about the future. Each episode starts with a little audio story playing out one potential future scenario—from the believable to the bizarre. I love the way Rose Eveleth brings intangible futures to life in these stories and then breaks them down to investigate the elements of the scenario.

2. New Philosopher

I discovered this magazine in Sydney. It’s one of many great independent magazines coming out of Australia. Each issue focuses on one theme that is relevant to contemporary life, and explores it from a variety of perspectives. I am amazed at how they make philosophical questions accessible and understandable. Don’t be put off by the name.

3. Jean Jullien

Jean Jullien is a wonderful graphic artist with a great light-hearted sense of humour in his work. Following him on Instagram ensures that there’s always a smile (or a smirk) waiting for me in my feed everyday. @jean_jullien

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In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Shruti Ramiah.

OUR FIRST TIP COMES FORM NJOKI GITAHI, SENIOR COMMUNICATIONS DESIGNER AT IDEO, WHO RECENTLY LED INDESIGN NOVICES IN NEW YORK THROUGH AN EMAIL-BASED INTRO TO ADOBE'S POWERHOUSE PUBLISHING TOOL.

Sometimes you need to cut to the chase. If you're learning a tool outside your discipline, it's usually because a deadline is looming and your go-to experts can't help. There's no time to luxuriate in lessons. You need Quick + Dirty tips: bite-sized tool tutorials to beef up your skills, one morsel at a time.

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.