When you’re under 40, buying a life insurance policy may seem about as practical as buying a Humvee. That makes insurance a tough sell for a 165-year-old company like MassMutual. To find a way to become relevant to this generation, MassMutual partnered with IDEO with a mission to get young people interested in their own spending habits.

Over the course of two years, the teams set out to learn about how people across the US spend and save their money, and they uncovered a simple theory: you either have a smart money mindset or you don’t. When it comes to being mature about financial issues—chipping away debt, saving to buy a car—it doesn’t always come naturally. If anything, many feel disconnected from money-related matters, even if it’s in their best interest to know more.

"I hate going to a bank and not really knowing what I am doing when it comes to money," said Simon Bowers, a 31-year-old who works in public relations, featured in an article in Fast Company about the MassMutual-IDEO collaboration. "They don’t seem to take into account that this might be scary for us."

So how to invite this wary demographic to the table? Design an accessible way to meet them wherever they are: online and on their phones. IDEO helped build the new venture from the ground up—designing a brand identity and experience focused on transparency, meeting users where they are, and helping people navigate complicated financial situations so they can live life on their own terms. It’s called Society of Grownups, and you can think of it as a sort of master’s program for adulthood. Each piece of the program builds on a common vision that continues to iterate every day.

After building and testing full-scale, live prototypes, the brick-and-mortar Boston location opened in 2014 and operated much like a supper club—a warm, inviting space where young people could hang out, feast on delicious meals, attend talks, and learn about things like 401Ks, living on a budget, and how to pick good, cheap wine. After two years of continued prototyping, MassMutual recognized that the digital channel has the most potential to grow and closed the brick-and-mortar location to focus their investment in building out the bespoke online financial tools to reach more people across the nation.

From leeches to gene therapy, how we treat sickness has changed beyond recognition over the centuries. But one question asked by ancient healers and modern doctors alike remains the same: “How are you feeling?”

“We’ve had the ‘quantified self’ for a number of years—sensors that measure steps, weight, blood pressure,” said Bruce Hellman, cofounder of UK-based digital health startup uMotif. “But by only focusing on the quantitative, we miss the whole picture of a person.”

Hellman cofounded uMotif in 2012, inspired by the self-awareness he gained when tracking his sleep after his baby was born. uMotif gives people the tools to record and track their mood, sleep, and clinically relevant symptoms like dizziness or breathlessness on their mobile phone app, and share the resulting data with their doctor and care team to better inform appointments, and treatment plans.

Named as one of 50 UK "scale-ups" that could grow to over £100m in revenue by not-for-profit organization Silicon Valley Comes to the UK, uMotif’s software and apps have been deployed in dozens of hospitals, and profiled in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The London Times. With a view to scaling strategically, Hellman applied to IDEO Europe’s first Startup in Residence, a three-month-long program to accelerate companies through design thinking. “We brought the whole of uMotif to IDEO: product, organization, branding, approach, and business model,” said Hellman. “We were keen to re-consider just about everything.”

During the residency, the uMotif team embedded with IDEO’s London studio to work closely with an eclectic team of interaction, business, and communication designers, and design researchers, to explore every aspect of the business.

The team found that although uMotif’s organic growth had reflected the rapidly expanding digital health market, the offer was somewhat fragmented as a result. In response, uMotif decided to tighten its sales focus from 14 branches of medicine to just two: oncology and cardiology (with mental health as an R&D area).

In-depth interviews with patients, nurses, doctors, and executives revealed a clear opportunity: “simple symptom tracking for people going through an acute or serious period in their health, to activate and extend the patient-care team relationship,” Hellman says. The focus switched from the Quantified Self to the Qualified Self, coined by the team to reference uMotif’s unique approach to measuring how people feel.

Designers set about reconfiguring and prototyping aspects of the brand, product, business, and organizational model for delivery. Whereas the original uMotif product had been designed with a single clinician in mind, the team designed a new dashboard catering for the reality of modern healthcare—multiple caregivers.

Ultimately, uMotif’s offer is not just about helping patients understand their own health; it’s about providing meaningful insights that enable them to have richer conversations with their care teams—allowing them to work together to improve care plans and outcomes.

“We are a much more focused, confident, and clear organization, truly prepared to scale sales, delivery and clinical impact,” says Hellman, referring to the impact of their participation in the Startup in Residence program. Now back in its own headquarters, the team takes with it a toolkit of IDEO systems and processes with which to run their business and to apply to new projects, products, and services.

“Health systems around the world are quickly adopting digital channels,” he said. “We aim to be at the forefront of this inevitable shift, using design thinking to put people at the centre of their care, improving quality of life, treatment outcomes, and healthcare experience.”

WATCH: uMotif: Sam's Story.

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IDEO designers wanted to take on a challenge: How might we help kids make better decisions around food and being active?

Designers moved forward with three concepts that addressed this challenge from three completely different directions:

• Top Chops, a hands-on cooking adventure that builds kids’ confidence in the kitchen by working toward becoming a Top Chop “master chef.”
• Daredevils, a wearable device that measures the intensity of energy exerted, but doesn’t prescribe the activity, which kids can use to dare each other to reach activity goals.
• Presso, a set of child-size kitchen tools that slice and dice fresh food in imaginative ways, making cooking fun and helping kids feel they have a role in making their own healthy food.

The design team behind this work was featured on 60 Minutes, and some of the resulting concepts were featured on CBS This Morning.

In updating the popular and industry-defining PalmPilot, Palm Computing wanted to reposition the next-generation Palm V as a high-design accessory to set it apart from its many imitators.

Together with IDEO, it crafted a sleek, elegant device, half the thickness of the original in an anodized aluminum housing. Incorporating an internal lithium-ion battery that recharges in the dock, the side rails act as an open architecture to provide attachment for a variety of styluses, cases, and other add-ons.

At these conferences, attendees are split up into group sessions: some big, some small, some on specific topics, and some designed to create new connections. Though grouping folks together might seem like a straightforward task, there is actually a dizzying number of ways to put people together—for one recent conference, the number in the neighborhood of 14 duodecillion possible combinations. That’s 1.4 x 10 to the 40th, which is close to the number you would get if you were to multiply the number of grains of sand on Earth by the number of stars in the universe.

Fortunately, for data scientists, sifting through haystacks to find needles is our bread and butter. We looked at this dataset with one goal: to create groups of individuals that foster conversations and catalyze new cross-disciplinary research. Easy, right?

We built an optimization algorithm that scores combinations of people based on diversity, trying to create well-mixed groups. To make sure we had truly excellent combinations, we needed to run the algorithm more than 1,000 times, after which a human had to examine the top scoring combinations. A human ultimately judging the top few options is crucial to making sure we incorporate nuances that the algorithm does not get. But at more than four minutes per algorithm run, it took an average of three days to get results. Three days! Three days between prototypes wasn’t going to cut it.

To solve our time problem, we turned to serverless computing. While we typically use it to deploy microservices, we couldn’t resist using it to massively scale our computational ability on the cheap. After all, we love hacking and repurposing things for atypical use cases, and digital tools are no different.

In a way, putting these groups together is like making chili—there are many different ways to make it, and all are valid (and many are tasty!). But to have a truly great chili, it’s essential that the ingredients are balanced and cooked properly to produce a dish that is elevated beyond the sum of its parts.

Think of each set of groups produced by the algorithm as a chili recipe. In the spirit of experimentation, you start putting together recipes that vary randomly in terms of ingredient amounts and cooking procedure. You’ve written down 1,000 recipes, and you’re going to cook and score them to find your ideal chili.

After a day of chopping, sautéing simmering, and tasting, you’ve only made 10 batches of chili. That's great, but in the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. So you think of ways you could cook and test your recipes more quickly. The most basic way is to make your cooking process (or code for your algorithm) more efficient: Chop faster and keep ingredients nearby. But this yields only a marginal gain. You would only crank out one or two more batches a day.

To really speed things up, you’re going to need some help. You could rent space in an industrial kitchen and hire chefs (servers on the cloud) who take a recipe, follow it exactly, and deliver the finished product to you. The downside: It takes a non-trivial amount of time and money to recruit and train chefs (much like setting up servers with the algorithm code).

But what if you had an army of 100 food trucks that are fully stocked, equipped, and happy to help you? That’s the equivalent of our serverless computing service. Serverless computing allows us to simply upload and then execute our algorithm code on cloud servers, taking away the hassle of setting up machines and allowing us to scale to hundreds or thousands of simultaneous runs effortlessly.

By using serverless tech, analyzing Scialog results goes from a process that runs in about three days to one that takes less than 10 minutes. With pricing schemes that only charge for the time the servers are being used, we can complete our thousand runs for less than $5.

This is great news, because it allows us to prototype our algorithms at scale much faster. What if, after looking at the results, we realize our scoring is missing a specific kind of input, like the balance of cat people vs. dog people? Previously that would necessitate another three-day wait for results. Now, we can tweak our algorithm, upload the new code, grab a cup of coffee (or chili), and come back to analyze the results.

We love the creative freedom that serverless computing enables (the ability to iterate on prototypes), and especially being able to get tons of computing power on demand—and cheaply.

If you’re interested in doing something similar, we’ve had great experiences using Zappa to deploy to AWS Lambda, but you can do the same kinds of things with other serverless services like Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions.

Now go forth and prototype at scale. And if you get hungry, you know what to do.

For almost 10 years, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement—or RSCA—has tapped IDEO for a little data science help. It's a good match, because RCSA shares our enthusiasm for helping people meet and collaborate. Every spring and fall, they organize conferences called Scialogs that bring together scientists of different disciplines to converse on important topics and inspire further collaboration through grants.

Six months ago, Dawn announced she’d step down from Planned Parenthood, having successfully helped transition the organization from the leadership of long-time president, Cecile Richards. Instead of hurling herself straight into leading at another large organization, Dawn decided to dedicate a year to experimentation and discovery as expert-in-residence at IDEO.

Dawn is now working with teams across IDEO and IDEO.org to find new ways to catalyze change. In particular, she wants to uncover how best to use data and technology to improve service delivery and support movement-building. Coming to IDEO, she says, “I saw an opportunity to ask, How do we use human-centered design principles, entrepreneurship, and data and technology to transform how we are reaching people and working alongside them?”

Not one to be daunted by ambitious goals, the first official project Dawn is helping to launch is The Billion Girls CoLab—an initiative aimed at harnessing new coalitions and diverse expertise to develop innovative solutions that will support young women’s power and health worldwide. This joint effort between IDEO.org and IDEO CoLab will bring together cross-sector collaborators to think about reproductive health in new ways. Dawn sees this work as a chance to create impact at scale, but also as a means to continue empowering others to become leaders.

“I think established leaders are afraid to leave their roles and what they know,” Dawn reflected recently. “But if we're talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, some of us who have been privileged to lead—especially as leaders of a certain age—have a real opportunity to move and make space and build up a cadre of new leaders. They need room to lead.” It can be scary, she acknowledges, “but you just have to say to yourself, ‘Well, I'm going to step off this diving board into the unknown, and what can I report back from the other side?’”

Dawn sat down with Whitney Mortimer, IDEO CMO and partner, to talk about what the other side is like, how her perspectives on creative leadership are evolving, and what she hopes to build in the near term to support a healthy, empowered generation of future leaders.

Whitney: Let’s begin with the work you’re doing with CoLab, where you’ve been deeply immersed. You’ve said that the CoLab model, which brings disparate groups and experts together to collaboratively solve problems, aligns well with your vision of how to work better on women’s health.

Dawn: We’re building a cohort that is not just people in the sexual and reproductive health field, but also others who are thinking about adolescent girls from very different perspectives and industries, including the for-profit corporations. The idea is a cohort that is domestic and global, which is something kind of new for the sexual and reproductive health ecosystem. We’re trying to catalyze a very different kind of conversation and output, researching and designing in close collaboration and asking what would it look like to build something that unlocks the power of a billion girls who are coming to adolescence around the globe over the coming decade? And what would that change for our world?

[When I was at Planned Parenthood], as much as we all tried to promote that kind of ‘fail-fast’ culture, we mostly lived in a fail-never culture, because the stakes were so high. And yet we know we’re going to have to experiment some to figure out what is going to catapult us to the next level.

Whitney: How is this approach to work different from how you were working before?

Dawn: I have to constantly remind myself, it's only been six months since I left [Planned Parenthood]. I really had to learn to live without a grenade as my metronome. Our days were so driven by constant distractions and firefights, even though I feel like we made real progress and built real things. So now [at IDEO] I’m gaining a different way to approach problems—to step back and have time to be more thoughtful. I'm more convinced than ever that this is not just a narrow fight. We now clearly have a global set of forces at play.

Whitney: You've always been clear with everybody that what got us here won't save us—we have to be looking ahead to the next thing. You're sitting on that horizon now, asking how does technology and everything we're learning about healthcare play out in a world that has such unequal access? As a creative leader, what do you need? What helps you shape something completely new, as opposed to just wanting to fall back into the matrix of an organization that already exists and will tell you what its priorities are every single minute of every day?

Dawn: Many people called me in the days after I announced and said, ‘Hey, do you want to apply for this job? Can we put you forward for that?’ They were all amazing opportunities, many in the progressive health and rights arena. It was hard to resist going to another similar operation, because of the urgency and the real difference that those organizations are making in this moment. But that urgency can get in the way of stepping back and thinking differently about how to work most effectively. [When I was at Planned Parenthood], as much as we all tried to promote that kind of ‘fail-fast’ culture, we mostly lived in a fail-never culture, because the stakes were so high. And yet we know we’re going to have to experiment some to figure out what is going to catapult us to the next level.

Whitney: Something that you do very naturally and fluidly, is you find analogous examples out in the world that makes sense inside your world. I'm wondering, as you look at scaling something new, what other kinds of methods or mindsets from the designer's toolkit are you able to tap into?

Dawn: There are just these amazing ways to step back and actually use a designer’s approach to think about how companies, organizations, movements could actually be building and thinking more about the early and upstream inputs to get the outputs we want to see later.

With a designer’s mindset, we would ask how to more thoughtfully shape the waves of cultural nurture that will carry these generations to the shores of the future.

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about nature versus nurture. And then I jumped to this bigger idea with the folks at IDEO, thinking about the idea of cultural nurture: What larger cultural wave was I riding that I couldn't see then, but which shaped me—and not just me, but a generation of people?

For example, when I was in third grade, I started a student council because the playground rules were unfair to girls. Exactly around that same time was when Title IX passed. All of a sudden there was a mandate for equality in education—in sports in particular—for girls. I benefited from that immediately but I could not see the profound impact it would have. I would have been radically different had I not been told, “You get to play basketball. You get to run for whatever school office.”

I think about how powerful those forces are, and yet we don't respond to them and leverage them as well as we could. With a designer’s mindset, we would ask how to more thoughtfully shape the waves of cultural nurture that will carry these generations to the shores of the future.

Whitney: Can you see those moments now that are shaping the next generation?

Dawn: I'm thinking about it a lot around the climate and depletion of the planet, with younger people getting messages both of fear, and also of preciousness. We're also looking at stigma. There is a lot of exciting shame-busting going on in the culture right now, which of course is why I think there's so much pushback in our politics.

Whitney: How has your identity and orientation as a leader shifted? How does that alter your sense of your capacity and what you need in order to have the impact you want to see?

Dawn: As they say in IDEO fashion, I'm diverging before converging. What I have tried to do is not converge on a solution or direction too quickly, because by nature that would be what I’d do—solve the problem as quickly as possible. In my previous life you could not sit around and admire the problem for very long. But I’m learning to be in love with the problem for a bit longer. I’m asking, can data and technology unlock a different paradigm of care? Is it stigma or rights or both that are foundational to solving the problem of abortion access? And what is it that I’m best equipped to do and help lead people toward?

Whitney: When you were at Planned Parenthood, you were early to see the potential, say, to use VR as an engagement and empathy-building tool. What technologies are you seeing as most critical and exciting now, as you're exploring what will be the new paradigm for reproductive health and healthcare?

Dawn: Well, I know augmented intelligence is the phrase of the year, but it really does have amazing potential. For example, take the idea of personalized prescribing and apply that to contraception. We know contraception is a game-changer, a life-changer, a life-saver. But we also know that when people get hormonal contraception, some people are going to have side effects. That means they’re either not going to keep using it or they’re going to want to switch. And that’s when there is more risk of getting pregnant. Imagine if we could harness AI to look across all of the prescription data sets and provide doctors with the tools to better match individuals with the product or formulation that suits them best. What if you could, by orders of magnitude, improve the ability of women to get a prescription or method of their choice that works for them right from the get go? That’s one example of how we might use new capabilities to create impact at scale.

Whitney: With the political climate being what it is, and an election on the horizon with unknown outcomes, how do you think about the challenge of something like improving access to and adherence to contraception or of empowering a billion girls around the world, irrespective of what may happen politically in the US and elsewhere?

Dawn: The one thing I 100% believe is you can’t think of anything completely outside of politics. It's just so clear what a powerful shaping force politics and government policy are. At the same time, there is a narrowness to the political lens. And when you start to think of these other actors and other ecosystems, you realize there's a lot that is possible—there’s potential to organize, to employ tools we're not fully utilizing. Part of what I want to do now is build out the progressive toolbox so that we're able to better work over or under or around the political obstacles, even while we recognize they cannot be ignored. The CoLab model has a lot to offer in leveraging many sectors and approaches and drawing them together to power solutions.

Whitney: What is the role of brand in that scenario?

Dawn: I actually think it is very important—not to create a name or brand a product, not that kind of thing—but the idea that we could use the principles of brand to communicate the power of girls to change the world. The idea that we can impress upon people the importance of raising up generations of girls, giving them the tools and the freedom to make their mark. That, I think, is something we need to capture and tell to the world.

We have to do everything we can to connect girls and to empower them and to make room for them. We have to get over some of our false distinctions and start to help them see that there’s a kind of global sisterhood that’s powerful, and that they have the opportunity to save the planet. That’s the small task we're going to hand off to them.

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When Dawn Laguens looks back on her eight years leading brand and public strategy at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she describes a typical work day as “catch grenade, throw grenade back, run two steps forward.” To be sure, the years from 2010-2018 were eventful for everyone, and particularly for people like Dawn, who were on the front lines of vicious political conflicts, while simultaneously doing the daily work of advocating for accessible and effective healthcare solutions for women worldwide.

Spring in London vibrates with the tweeting of birds and the drilling of construction excavators. It’s a surreal symphony of nature and gentrification.

I was late for work and speeding up my usual way when I got detoured by a few meters of plastic barrier. As I walked around the construction equipment, I heard one worker shout to another.

"I'll pick up my gloves and be right back," he said. He walked by me and leaned towards a hole in the temporary barrier where his gloves were neatly stored.

"Excuse me," I started with my typical nosey flair. "Why do you keep your gloves in there?" He must have a locker, I thought to myself, or even a pocket where to store them on site.

"I work on different areas of the site,” he said, “and I need different gloves based on the job. These barriers crack very easily, so they provide the perfect storage space when I need it and where I need it."

As I looked at his hiding spot, I thought about designing for the end of life of products, like construction barriers, mailboxes, and or a simple shoebox. It was the first time I considered the new use cases that can come from deterioration and change.

As he walked away, he smiled tightly; I had acknowledged his hidden creative side.

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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.

1. What a Computer Learns From Watching Hours of Cartoons

Find out what happened when an IDEO CoLab designer tried training a neural network to generate its own cartoons—and what he learned about the danger of bias in training data. Read the story!

2. Inviting Algorithms to the Design Team

Your future design partner may be an algorithm. Here’s what emerged from an experimental collaboration between a graphic designer, a data scientist, and an algorithm. Read the story!

3. To Design a Better Future, Embrace the Uncomfortable

How can we explore the future of technology? By prototyping it. Check out the 5 near-future concepts that came out of a new IDEO exploration called The Discomfort Zone. Read the story!

4. No Beards Allowed: Exploring Bias in Facial Recognition AI

One IDEO designer created a facial recognition AI game that helps users understand how machine learning models are trained—and subtly hints at the areas where bias could creep in. Read the story!

5. We Built a Bot to Assign Parking Spots. It Fought Back.

When IDEO Cambridge moved into a new studio with a too-small parking lot, they built a bot to manage traffic... but the bot fought back. Here’s what this rogue AI taught the team about “raising” a bot—and how they tamed it. Read the story!

Bonus: Check out the follow-up post where a design researcher explores how his colleagues' interactions with the bot signaled shifts in studio culture.

6. Training a Computer to Find Shapes in the Clouds

The average 25-to-34-year-old only spends 13 minutes a day relaxing. Here’s what happened when one IDEO intern tried "outsourcing" some of her leisure time to a computer. Read the story!

7. What the AI Products of Tomorrow Might Look Like

How can designers leverage the power of AI to build a better future? To explore this question, we created an award-winning speculative design exhibition called HyperHuman. Read the story!

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As designers, we help build the future we want to see. So when a new technology emerges, we're always eager to take it for a test run, push its edges, and see how it fits into visions of the future. When it comes to AI, the opportunities are endless, but the stakes are high—our work can have serious implications that affect the lives of real people at unprecedented scale. Designers at IDEO are constantly working on cutting-edge experiments that explore the possibilities—and potential pitfalls—of a future where humans and machines are ever more entangled. Read on to explore a few of those experiments and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

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.