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.”

1. THE DIXON MULTIPLEX

Multiplex is a pop-up "department store of tomorrow" trading for a month as part of the London Design Festival. It features contributions from a wide range of brands curated by legendary product designer Tom Dixon and Wallpaper magazine.

Billed as immersive and multi-sensory, I was super curious to see the designer's vision of an multi-brand store that is fighting for the attention of tomorrow's customers by offering experiences, not just products. That included British botanicals brand Haeckels’ mist spa (like walking into an aromatic greenhouse), to booking in for a fashion shoot or even a vitamin injection.

2. MINDBLOWER

Mindblower is a new 'idea to product' platform showcased at Multiplex, which invites you to pitch ideas for physical products you would like to create, to help bridge the gap between the amazing ideas we dream up and our ability to tangibly own them.

A blend of TV show Dragon’s Den and Kickstarter, its inclusion within a prototype store of tomorrow was interesting, blurred the boundaries between consumer, inventor, and entrepreneur. It's still super early days, but interesting to see someone responding to the citizen maker-economy without assuming that everyone is well-versed in design, 3D printing or engineering.

3. THE GOOD JUDGMENT PROJECT, AND SUPERFORECASTING

The Good Judgement Project is an experiment to explore how well the 'wisdom of the crowd' is able to predict future world events (e.g. will a nation's government collapse in the next six months). It's headline-grabbing finding is that within the thousands of people taking part, there is a small group of ordinary citizens dubbed 'superforecasters' whose predictions are 30% better than intelligence professionals armed with confidential data and subject expertise.

Philip Tetlock's new book - Superforecasting - looks at what sets these superforecasters apart. It's not just about raw intelligence (Superforecasters are clever but not off the charts) they demonstrate a 'growth mindset'; an openness to consider information from many different origins, to change their predictions, and to look back at their predictions and learn from their mistakes. Forecasting is something we could all potentially become better at, and Tetlock has now described how.

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Every Monday morning, the London studio shares a coffee and some inspiration. This week, design researcher Kate Wakely talks through an immersive, pop-up retail experience from famed product designer Tom Dixon, a Dragon’s Den meets Quirky-style product development platform, and a book on the emerging art of super forecasting.

Have you ever experienced one of those mornings when you are in the middle of an argument with your partner at home, but you’re late for work and you can't make peace? This was one of those days.

On my bike ride home, I get a text from her: Buy paper towels, please.

When your partner breaks the silence for something like this, you are either screwed or she is giving you a chance to reconcile. I already had in my head this image of the two of us, speaking words of love while wiping the kitchen counter with the newly bought Scottex roll.

So I enter the corner store down the road and find it. As I walk to the counter I see a bunch of red roses. Come on, cliche? I think to myself.

"I'll take them!" I say out loud. But how do I hold the roses on my last mile home?

It's then that I realize I have the perfect solution. I stab my bunch of roses through the hole of the paper roll so I can hold them under my arm, but no spike can sting me.

You might wonder if I made peace with her when home. I did. And I had also found an approach to conflict resolution. When in doubt, wrap your thorns in something soft.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

This requires finding people who are willing to share personal stories that can inspire and inform us as we design solutions. We call this Design Research Recruiting.

It’s a process that requires great trust and great responsibility. We know that if people are willing to let us into their lives, our most important job is protecting their stories and confidentiality. And without speaking with the right people, we can’t do our jobs.

So how exactly do we do this? How do we get vulnerable people just like us—or totally unlike us—to open up their lives and even their homes to us? And how do we protect their confidentiality as we do it?

Successful design research recruiting is equal parts knowing who to speak with and how to reach them. Here are five practical tips for recruiting people for your very own design research interviews.

Make screening surveys real conversations

Screening surveys are a useful tool and an important first step in figuring out whether or not someone is a good fit for your project. But they aren’t always the best way to make someone feel comfortable talking about themselves.

I don’t want screening surveys to feel like a standardized test, so I make sure to structure them like a conversation. I dive straight into gathering stories and perspectives and save the typical stuff, like collecting email addresses, for later.

Ask one or two thoughtful, open-ended questions that get applicants thinking creatively about the topic at hand, such as, “What gets you excited or frustrated about your commute?” Or, “What are some key ways you take care of your health and wellness?” Questions like these make the survey feel more personal from the get-go, and they enable you to understand whether a potential interviewee has opinions or experiences that might benefit your research.

Get the word out on social

IDEO's Design Research Facebook page is our go-to channel for sharing our interview opportunities. People can follow the page and apply for interviews that interest them directly, or share research opportunities with their friends.

These "warm connections"—people who've been referred by friends who feel they'd be a good fit—are key to ensuring interesting and qualified people are signing up to share their stories. Cultivating a strong social media presence and making use of these platforms' built-in advertising tools are powerful ways to reach the right audience.

Give interviewees a preview of what's to come

An on-point questionnaire isn’t enough to ensure you’ve found the person to talk to. Hopping on the phone for a 10- to 15-minute phone chat is the finishing touch to ensure you've recruited articulate folks who are just the right fit. It also helps them have a better sense of your mission and what you’re looking for.

I start the conversation by giving participants an overview of IDEO and the project they've signed up for, then answering any questions they have. This establishes some trust and familiarity before I start asking more about them.

The phone call is also an important opportunity to make sure recruits feel comfortable with what's in store for them—it’s never our goal to just get them to talk to us; we want them to be comfortable sharing their lives, and to feel assured that their confidentiality will be protected.

Keep it confidential

We have to be certain the personal stories people share with us—which can sometimes include intimate details about their lives, like health struggles or the loss of a loved one—are kept confidential and used for design research purposes only, never for marketing or promotional uses. In fact, IDEO is so serious about it that we have a whole book dedicated to the practice.

When I’ve recruited folks to discuss potentially sensitive topics, like experiences getting emergency contraception, I make sure to reassure them that we’ll never share their information. I also send a copy of our consent and confidentiality form ahead of time for participants to review, so they can familiarize themselves with our privacy practices and ask questions ahead of the interview.

Prioritize quality, not quantity

When I first started as a design research recruiter, I was obsessed with hitting target interview numbers. If a team requested eight participants for a group discussion, I felt obligated to recruit exactly that amount. What I didn't grasp is that numbers don't count for much if the group isn't filled with thoughtful, articulate people who can participate meaningfully in a conversation. Worse, a group dynamic can be ruined by one person who hogs the conversation or creates an uncomfortable atmosphere.

The latter once happened during a group discussion on an intimate topic: personal lubricants. Because I wanted to hit the target number, I ended up recruiting someone I wasn’t sure would be a good fit. I figured that they'd be fine in a group setting, but they ended up making comments that made the other participants uncomfortable. The project lead ended up dismissing the participant early, and I learned a powerful lesson that it’s not about quantity. Giving yourself enough advance time to recruit will ensure that you have time to weed out anyone you feel skeptical about.

There are multitudes of interesting people with rich stories ready to delight, surprise, and most of all, inform you. I hope these tips will help you find them.

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As designers, it's our job to solve real problems for real people. To fulfill that mission, we first have to understand what is and isn't working well about a product, service, or even experience—anything from wearing a football helmet to paying a hospital bill to optimizing commutes.

While Lotbot has started to calm down and find its rhythm, another story has emerged. It’s the story of how our studio has adapted to living with a robot. It’s a story about how the design of AI, no matter how small a role it might play in our lives, has implications beyond its intended use—and can even influence the culture of an entire organization.

As a researcher with a background studying and designing human-computer interaction, I was enamored by the social bot. I started observing Lotbot’s day to day operations, and over time, I noticed that while most people were interacting with the bot using commands that it was trained to understand (e.g. “spot today”), a small group of people were holding on to the social norms they’d typically use in interpersonal interactions. This made me think: What motivated people to use words like please and thank you, when they knew that the AI wouldn’t know the difference anyway? And what does this mean for future interactions with robot coworkers?

I launched a full-on design research project. With support from my colleague Justin Wan, I collected quantitative data from Lotbot’s Slack channel to understand how the studio’s language patterns had changed since the bot was introduced. I also conducted a series of surveys and qualitative interviews to understand what motivated people’s approach to interacting with Lotbot.

Here’s what I found—and what it means for how we consider the connection between AI and the culture of organizations.

Language has changed, but we're still holding on to something

Before reviewing the Slack data, I hypothesized that shorter messages of 15 characters or less (“Need spot today”) indicated that the user believed they were interacting with a “robot,” while longer messages (“I need a spot today, please”) aligned with a more human-to-human conversation style. I also looked at the change in frequency of polite language such as please and thank you to see how often people were holding on to human-to-human conversation styles.

It turns out that once Lotbot was introduced to the parking channel, the number of messages that had 15 characters or less increased significantly, while the percentage of total messages using polite language decreased significantly (from 30 percent to 10 percent).

As Danny DeRuntz, the creator of Lotbot, explains, the AI was trained to recognize the basic components of a request—the need (a parking spot) and the timeframe (tomorrow)— so it’s no surprise that our interactions in the channel had started to become more, well, robotic.

The survey data, on the other hand, revealed that some people thought about Lotbot as another member of the studio—they treated it with the same respect they would a human colleague. Others said that they based their interactions on the fact that they knew the rest of the studio was watching. People were conscious of how their commands came across to other human colleagues who do care about people’s attitude, even if the bot doesn’t.

The in-person interviews further supported what the survey highlighted. Those who continue to use polite language are motivated to do so because they feel that it’s important to show gratitude when you’re asking for a limited resource. As one of my colleagues put it, gratitude is an important part of the collaborative culture at IDEO, and that should not be lost just because there’s a robot among us—especially since that robot exists solely to help us do our jobs.

Learning goes both ways with AI

So what does it all mean? The prominent narrative about AI and robots is that they are learning to interact with humans, but this quick study highlights that the learning goes both ways. In the context of the parking Slack channel, the limits of Lotbot’s functionality trained the humans to interact in a different way. A way that, for some who resisted the changes, felt antithetical to our company culture.

A group of data scientists at IDEO recently published a set of AI design principles. One of these principles asks designers to consider how their designs can be sensitive to people’s context and culture. AI systems are designed to provide efficiency, but in some settings, that efficiency might compromise and conflict with other institutional and cultural priorities, like politeness and gratitude. A recent article in Fast Company echoes this concern, suggesting designers of social bots should consider emotional thinking, helping bots be better companions in their interactions with humans.

But what does this mean for the design of Lotbot? Should it be designed in a way that encourages expressions of gratitude? It wouldn’t hurt— but the stakes are low, and the occasional robotic conversation is overshadowed by a number of other rituals and activities that keep our culture feeling friendly and free.

But the question does bring up an interesting opportunity area for social robots and AI in the context of larger offices, especially those that haven’t scaled ritual and culture. As companies grow, corporate culture can be hard to maintain, and as automation becomes more common it could get harder. If social robots like Lotbot can draw attention to the social norms that matter to a company’s culture, we might be able to create and use them to support corporate culture at scale. Social robots may be able to serve as reminders of cultural practice and values.

The possibilities are endless, but one thing’s for sure—human-computer interactions are influenced first and foremost by humans, and the humans of IDEO have spoken. After sharing my research about changes in conversation style with the studio at a recent lunch meeting, my colleagues took to Lotbot’s Slack channel to declare their love and admiration for the tiny bot. In the weeks that followed, I observed an uptick in polite language as well. While I’m in no position to analyze the psychological motivations behind this outpouring of love, it did make me wonder if we all felt the need to make something more human after we found ourselves becoming more robotic.

In November, we shared the story of Lotbot, an AI Slack bot we built to manage parking spots at our Cambridge studio. Long story short: In building Lotbot, we utterly misjudged its personality and found ourselves on the wrong end of a tiny tyrant.

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.