How do you lift up the middle class in a developing country?

That was the challenge facing Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who hired IDEO to build an entire network of schools powered by a progressive new learning model. IDEO’s mandate: to redesign Innova’s entire K–12 learning experience, from the curriculum to the teacher training to the school buildings, with an eye toward expansion and a goal to provide international-quality education at an affordable price—about $100 a month.

Innova Schools is a part of Intercorp, a family of 35 businesses that span everything from banks to retail stores and added schools to its portfolio. In 2010, the company had five existing schools but realized that its existing model could not grow. The shortage of well-trained, high-quality teachers in Peru, combined with rising land costs, meant the schools would need to radically change course to succeed.

To learn about scalable school models around the world, IDEO researchers visited inspirational schools and learning programs, and looked to analogous systems like retail, hospitality, and health care to understand their approaches to scale. Throughout the project, they collaborated with teachers, students, and the Innova Schools team in co-designing the work itself.

Together, Innova Schools and IDEO developed the curriculum, teaching strategies, buildings, operational plans, and underlying financial model to run the network of schools.

"I was blown away by Innova Schools," said Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. "It's inspiring to see such an affordable school deliver a quality of education that would rival schools in the richest countries."

The new Innova Schools combine teacher-led, project-based learning in small groups with self-directed time using digital learning tools. Teachers monitor students’ work online and offer personalized guidance. Parents can view their children’s progress online as well.

Dynamic learning environments include community spaces, media labs, rooftop study areas, amphitheaters, and cafés that are optimized for flexibility: furniture on wheels, movable walls, and efficient uses of space to allow for different modes of learning.

An online Teacher Resource Center includes a database of more than 18,000 custom lesson plans based on a progressive new teaching approach. The center helps teachers learn their craft and gives them a chance to connect across the network.

The business model of Innova Schools was developed at the same time as the school experience. Designers leveraged the economies of scale that come from building a network of schools and centralized tools, such as data systems that allow all the schools to learn together.

The project has allowed Innova to open more schools at an affordable cost to families, ultimately giving more of Peru’s youth the chance to compete in the global economy. This comprehensive approach to system design ranks as one of Latin America’s most ambitious privately funded educational projects, and is on track to become the largest private school network in the region. To date, Innova has opened 63 schools in Peru that are serving more than 50,000 students.

A good system design doesn’t end with strategy. The work on Innova Schools also had a huge influence on the company, according to Rodriguez-Pastor. Through the creation of new roles and an aligned set of values, Innova’s central office has become a much more nimble and creative organization. They’re constantly scanning the world for inspiration in how to best educate their students, while building out the new innovations. They realize that design thinking can become an integrated part of their daily management of this growing network of schools.

Western Digital, the leading provider of external digital-storage solutions and a pioneer in the field, and IDEO collaborated on a number of products that produced reliable, secure, high-performance hard drives for personal and professional use and have won numerous design awards.

The projects include:

• MyBook external hard drive: IDEO and Western collaborated to find a new design language for their external hard drive MyBook. In just six months, MyBook became the number-one hard drive in the Americas, and grew US market share by more than 50 percent.
• MyBook II: Looking to regain MyBook’s original number-one position in the hard drive market, IDEO and Western came together again to refresh the original design, finding ways to further differentiate the product and the brand, and winning a 2008 Spark Bronze Award.
• MyPassport: Western and IDEO designed the 320GB, ultra-portable USB-powered hard drive that appeals to the mobile user, which won both the 2008 IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, and the 2009 iF Award.
• MyBook and MyPassport 3.0: Again, IDEO and Western collaborated on bringing the popular MyBook external hard drive to the next level in the hardware, the software, and the packaging. IDEO also created in-store merchandising, the graphics and information featured on product packaging (and the “out-of-box experience”).

The city of San Francisco wanted to help its people become better prepared in case of emergency. While no one feels totally prepared for a natural disaster, people who are most connected within a local network fare better in an emergency.

So the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (SF DEM) and IDEO teamed up to create SF72, a revolutionary platform that helps to reach people where they are. In times of emergency, the city will need citizens to be self-supporting for 72 hours (or longer) before local services or outside help kicks in. With that in mind, IDEO developed an accessible platform to help people prepare for those 72 hours in simple ways that fit into their daily lives.

The SF72 website helps people with five important tasks: Get connected, gather supplies, watch stories, make a plan, and have access to an updated Google map. SF72’s content is hyperlocal, but IDEO and SF DEM also created an open-source toolkit for cities worldwide. From San Jose to Denver, other locales are using the simple toolkit to create a City72 platform of their own. Most recently, the city of Oakland collaborated with Code for America to develop its own platform. The City72 Toolkit enables SF72’s ethos of social connection for resilience to scale and grow—city by city.

Team Rubicon, formed in 2010 as a response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti, is made up of former military veterans who swoop into help in times of disaster. The organization started with six vets in the US who were eager to transfer their battlefield readiness in to frontline relief efforts, and has grown to more than 28,000 volunteers across the world.

To explore its growing global effort and to shape the future of the organization’s venture, Team Rubicon approached IDEO for help. After an 11-week collaboration with government, military, and veteran groups, a vision for Team Rubicon Global emerged. Inspired by sources as diverse as TED and The Hell’s Angels, the three-tier model consisted of an anchor network to share best practices across the organization and two supporting platforms designed to help countries with varying capacity and needs.

Team Rubicon Global coordinated its first deployment in April 2015, when a quake struck Nepal, sending US and UK teams to double down on the rescue effort. According to Vince Moffit, Team Rubicon USA Incident Commander, that incident alone validated the network effect of IDEO’s work. “We couldn’t have done this without Team Rubicon UK,” he said.

And for the veterans who are part of Team Rubicon, the shared desire to serve—applying skills ideally suited for disaster response—creates a renewed sense of purpose, community, and leadership that helps reintegration to civilian life.

What should a passenger’s experience feel like? How much space should be allocated to each passenger? What were the tradeoffs? The folks in marketing had one idea, while the folks in engineering had another. Spreadsheets were involved, but we weren’t making much progress.

Our project team didn’t have all of the answers either, but we thought of one way that we could help. We took over a section of our San Francisco studio and spent a week building a full-scale shell of a plane out of wood, foam core, and cardboard. Our intention was to create a dynamic space for physical and digital experimentation. We then invited our clients to host their next meeting inside the “plane.”

Once inside, the trade-offs were clearer. The team could picture what different seat configurations might feel like; they could move things around as they visualized various options. Prototyping revealed a level of granularity and specificity the team simply couldn’t access over Zoom or through conversation. What started out as a series of abstract questions suddenly became tangible.

When you work in the mobility space, the projects you work on are big—literally. It’s not just the size of a car, but the size of a train, an airport, even a city. While creating low-fidelity prototypes of products and systems of this magnitude might seem impossible, prototypes are a tried-and-true tool for learning about your customers and refining your product design. They are also equally valuable for learning, aligning, and collaborating as an organization. When it comes to larger-than-life challenges in the mobility space, here are three ways prototyping can help.

Prototyping breaks down barriers

Many established mobility companies have spent decades developing processes that have allowed them to build safe, high-quality products at scale. But those methods don’t always work when adapting to a rapidly shifting market. When it came time for our team to work with a leading automaker to rethink the future of the commercial van, we all knew it would demand new ways of working. Together with their team, we built a new collaboration space in the heart of their engineering building to shake people out of their usual workflow. The walls were covered with pictures of vans in action, quotes from potential users, and in-progress work. In the middle of the space sat “the rig,” a purposefully unfinished prototype van made from modular aluminum and hand-cut cardboard parts. This was far from the polished models of car shows.

Instead of putting this space under lock and key, the team put up posters throughout the engineering building inviting folks to join them. When that effort didn’t get much traction, a member of the team proposed an idea. He simply wedged the door open and posted a sign that declared: “open door policy.” The message was simple. We wanted people to build with us. And the people, and the ideas, followed.

Unfamiliar faces started to pop into the space and populate the prototype van with new mirrors, door handles, and smart sensors while other groups debated strategy across the room. What started with a single project space grew, eventually morphing into a dedicated innovation lab that is collaborating across the organization to tackle the future of mobility.

Prototyping challenges assumptions

Several years ago, IDEO worked with Toronto Pearson International Airport to revitalize the airport’s operations from the passenger experience to the baggage handling process. Baggage handling operations are particularly important, as they’re a key metric for measuring airport efficiency, service quality, and performance. They’re also very complicated. Baggage handling involves multiple organizations, thousands of contract workers, and even more suitcases, moving between planes and carousels all around the world.

As contractors, baggage handlers aren’t often brought into the process to help redesign operations. But their perspective is invaluable. So together, IDEO and Toronto Pearson decided to hold a “baggage olympics” for operations employees, passengers, and baggage handlers to test, build, and improve prototypes of early baggage handling ideas. They landed on a simple but effective solution: color-coded signs, clear iconography, and guidance on where baggage should be placed. Not only did the exercise streamline airport operations, but it also changed everyone’s idea of how different groups of people could work together and how operations should work in the future.

As Darin Juby, Director of Baggage Services, told IDEO: “The work to reimagine baggage handling taught us how to prototype and collaborate—it reprogrammed us with a new mindset and way of working. When the pandemic hit two years later, because we had laid the groundwork, we were able to pivot quickly and cost-effectively in the midst of an unforeseen crisis."

Prototyping reveals unexpected needs

Bringing in potential customers to test out prototypes is a pretty common practice among design teams. But often in the automotive space, users do not have a chance to interact with prototypes until much later in the design process. Even then, they are often restricted to testing out highly refined models in tightly controlled sessions.

It’s far more rare to bring parents and children into your design space and invite a range of stakeholders with different perspectives, hypotheses, and critical questions to watch them play in an early prototype firsthand. But that’s exactly what we did with our partners at one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers.

While we had been talking about bringing people into the lab, it wasn’t until families were engaging with our designs that we realized just how eye-opening it was. In one session, we watched alongside marketing, design, strategy, and product development leaders as a family played a game in the front of the car. Halfway through the game, a child pulled her mom to the back for some one-on-one time, pretending they were looking out at stars.That seemingly simple interaction inspired our team.

The team renamed the prototype Stargazer, and it helped changed the conversation about these vehicles. Decision-makers for this vehicle portfolio were bringing an empathy for the lives of these users into meetings, and talking more about how to foster quality family time than vehicle features and functions. Seeing our prototype in action extended customer empathy and understanding beyond marketing execs, ensuring that teams across the multinational organization were considering user needs from the outset.

Prototyping unlocks possibilities

Throughout my work on mobility projects at IDEO, prototyping has been the best tool for shaking up entrenched thoughts about how teams should work together. It not only provides teams with an opportunity to test assumptions and generate radically new ideas, but it also helps spark alignment and build confidence across disparate stakeholders. In some projects, embracing prototyping has even led to the development of new ways of working and labs that live on far beyond the launch of a product.

For those tackling challenges within the mobility space, and are eager to experiment with prototyping, start small. Take over a conference room, invite different voices in, construct a cardboard model, and watch your organization transform.

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Late last year, we sat on a Zoom call with executives at an organization redefining commercial aviation. They had some critical decisions to make about their first commercial aircraft.

“You had to build serious cred with them for them to give a sh*t at all, because there’s no consequence,” she says.

Her solution: Making lessons less about the curriculum, and more about engaging kids in the scary, quickly-evolving events shaping our lives. “I’d show some slides and ask if anyone had heard about [the event] and what their questions were. We’d talk about the facts of the situation,” she shared. “I tried to get them excited about their knowledge of [current events].”

In 2020, America’s students and teachers experienced a full-blown disaster, and teachers were the front-line responders. As they and their students were reduced to rectangles on a screen, they had no choice but to lean into innovation, coming up with solutions like having students create hype videos about their favorite books to encourage classmates to read them, leveraging home kitchens to create lab lessons, and using data to evaluate how their students are doing with learning from afar. Under the worst possible circumstances, they came up with solutions that will improve education for the better, in this moment, and for the future.

IDEO and PowerSchool were so inspired by their work that we partnered to research the way teachers hacked, persisted, and made do to uncover clues to innovation. Last year, we interviewed teachers, administrators, teacher coaches, and education experts to get a close up look at how teachers innovated in 2020 and 2021, and how we as designers and makers might learn from their work.

Breaking down silos in the name of collaboration

When this crisis thrust even first graders out of their classrooms and stuck them in front of computers with varying degrees of Wifi—and supervision—teachers had to throw out the rule book. Both expert and mentor teachers alike were caught on their heels, and their only option was to innovate.

To meet this extraordinary demand for real-time innovation, they turned to one another—peers in their buildings as well as online learning communities. Teachers were no longer experts, they were almost “lead learners”—humbly fostering collaboration with one another and pushing forward to develop an entirely new way of working in real time. "The pandemic has enabled so much more collaboration than before,” explained Christine, an elementary school art teacher in Massachusetts. “I've seen techniques done in new ways, skills taught in ways I never would have thought to teach them. This is an opportunity to see how each other teaches!" What’s more, when even seasoned teachers were getting used to an entirely new context, mentor/mentee relationships began to shift, as everyone had ideas to share with each other. A new teacher manager in a district in California told us that “there were a number of examples where the mentor was certainly a more experienced educator, but not nearly as experienced or fast at learning technology, so there was an exchange of skills.”

Teachers were forced into this situation, but their reaction is one that makers and designers should learn from. You might ask yourself—who is it absolutely nuts that I don’t already work with? Who would you call for help if everything fell apart? It might be a person you think of as a friendly competitor. Or it could be someone whose work context just seemed too different—maybe they are more junior, or work in a non-profit setting. At this point, what humanity really needs is connection with one another. To create it, we must break down the silos we’re keeping up. It’s time to rethink the divisions we have between departments, companies, and even sectors to speed up our collective innovation.

Building tighter learning loops

One of the biggest challenges that teachers faced in experimenting with so many new tools was determining what was actually working. After all, rapid prototyping is only as useful as the learning you can apply to the next prototype. Teachers couldn’t afford to wait until grading periods to analyze how it was all working out.

The remote setting opened up the opportunity to work more closely with individual students one-on-one and to personalize learning experiences and methods to meet their needs. Technology also helped them better understand each student’s progress, enabling them to tailor their instruction the next day. More teachers began leveraging instant feedback tools, even as they faced more variability in student knowledge and skills.

Hannah, a secondary math teacher, dove into new apps and services she started using to track student progress to make instruction more personalized, explaining that rather than going on gut feel, “I can genuinely say I know which kids aren’t making the right progress.” When students and families could see educators iterate on lesson plans each week, and make feedback immediately actionable, everyone was able to take a collective breath and feel the progress. Even if the changes were relatively small, they knew that they were being listened to. Teachers built new processes and improved trust.

Maybe you already do rapid prototyping in your work and have formed tight learning loops. Consider how you might use them as a means of not just learning, but showing your users that you’re learning. Internally, we all could be using technology to do daily micro-check moments with our teams and collaborators, and get even more serious and actionable after receiving real time feedback. Imagine a working world where the last five minutes of every meeting or collaboration were dedicated to asking ourselves how did that go? What could we do better next time?

Maintaining a laser focus on what’s most relevant

In some ways, students had their own form of a “Great Resignation” in 2020. They had previously been held captive in school rooms that weren’t catering to them, and their new at-home context meant teachers had to rethink how they were reaching students. “We’re messing around with our schedule,” explained Evan, a middle school principal. “We’re trying to create more space for more things that we say we value.”

Teachers had been operating under a 180-day school year for decades and have optimized their content to fit standard school hours—maybe you’ve been doing the same with your five day work week. During distance learning, teachers had no idea how much time they would actually get with students on any given day, leading them to simplify their content and get strategic about making every minute count.

In an essay from 2003, Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great, stresses the importance of “subtracting.” “A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit.” It isn’t just about prioritizing what’s most important; it’s about not holding on to the parts that don’t serve us anymore, even if they have already cost us years of effort. We need to consider how to do more with less, and how to subtract what’s not serving us and those around us.

Be human first

Teachers have always been concerned about their students, but the pandemic brought that concern to a new level. (You, too, might have experienced more personal stories, tears, and vulnerability at work!) We saw teachers get creative about meeting students’ emotional needs—trying things like swapping out detention for meditation, or having a weekly “campfire” in class to circle up and share how everyone was doing. They extended deadlines, accepted late work, and allowed students to retake exams. Teachers brought more of themselves to school, showing up as humans first and foremost and prioritizing care before content.

As Jennie, a high school teacher in Ohio explained, “I just have more grace for everyone. Are you lying to me about homework? Maybe. Do you have a reason to be lying? Maybe. I think it’s made me a better teacher. I’m more compassionate. Life’s hard."

As innovators, we too need to build in flexibility for the fallibility that comes with being human, and find ways to bring more humanness to our leadership. We must find ways to prioritize the health and wellness of the people we work with above everything else.

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At both of our organizations, and hopefully at yours, teachers are inspiring us to break down arbitrary siloes, cut the fluff, show we’re listening, and be more human. But they’re not the only innovators we should be watching right now. The heroic, hard-working, dynamic first responders of the pandemic—nurses, social workers, librarians, counselors—are also on the front lines of innovation. They are adapting, growing, testing, and changing at a rapid pace in a way that all business leaders could be taking lessons from.

Read the full Teaching in Flux report, authored by Jen Halls, Ridima Ramesh, and Brian Standeford.

When COVID-19 lockdowns were in full effect, Amanda, then a reading coach in a California school system, was faced with an impossible challenge: figuring out how to get kids, home alone, to log into Zoom for lessons, when no one would be there to make them do it.

In the first phase of our work, we tackled what some might consider “low hanging fruit” in the work toward Net Zero: we estimated our carbon footprint, offset our greenhouse gas emissions, switched to renewable energy, experimented with a modest carbon tax, and improved our responsible retirement investment options.

While these strides are significant, there is still so much more to do—and time is of the essence. There are countless ways forward, but we’re eager to share four next steps we have in mind.

1. Track and manage emissions (Part 2)

Building on our previous exploration, we’re ready to tackle phase two of emissions accounting. At the top of our priority list is identifying a comprehensive emissions accounting solution to track and manage down our Scope 3 emissions. It’s difficult to imagine how we will empower IDEOers to make sustainable decisions without giving them access to data about the environmental impact of those choices. Afterall, what’s the point of managing down your emissions if you don’t get credit for working with Clean Co. over Dirty Co.? Investing in an emissions accounting platform will help get us one step closer to estimating IDEO’s carbon footprint and identifying viable climate-friendly alternatives at scale. From there, we hope to experiment with things like internal carbon taxes or incentives for individuals and teams to manage their carbon footprint.

2. Embed sustainability throughout the project cycle

Despite the increase in climate-forward projects IDEO has taken on, we are still not fully set up to account for the downstream implications of our work. With that in mind, we’re exploring what it would look like to introduce sustainability at every touchpoint of the project lifecycle—from initial client conversations to final deliverables. In practice, this might look like sustainability design reviews with external experts or developing design principles and toolkits like The Circular Design Guide to support climate-conscious work. Ultimately, we hope to foster a culture where teams feel equipped to explore and develop best practices around sustainable work. Regardless of what form this takes, we need to develop a way to track the downstream impact of our projects and deliverables. Ideally, that system would plug into our emissions accounting platform—neither of which we have today.

3. Balance what’s impactful with what’s visible

In order to meaningfully reduce IDEO’s global emissions, we prioritized action that tends to be impactful for our carbon footprint, but invisible to everyday IDEOers and our clients. For example, while switching to renewable energy did not trigger obvious changes to the everyday experience at IDEO, it reduced our global carbon footprint by 4%. These changes can seem at odds with changes that are highly visible yet are often less impactful (e.g., eliminating single use plastics across IDEO). In order to ensure our everyday experience at IDEO does not undermine the climate commitments we have made, we need to balance what is impactful and what is highly visible. This might look like developing frameworks to help project teams weigh the tradeoffs between client travel and environmental impact, holding inter-studio competitions to switch to sustainable food vendors, or identifying a broad set of replacement suppliers for more sustainable goods throughout our studios.

4. Reset industry norms

Let’s face it. If a competitor is willing to get on a plane, we almost certainly will do the same and vice versa. To create the conditions for IDEO to thrive while meeting its climate commitments, we need to reset industry norms and work alongside other creative consulting firms to reimagine the ways of doing business in the 2020s and beyond. This may look like joining or starting a creative climate pledge for companies operating in a climate-forward way, or inviting direct competitors to join our kyu climate action learning group.

As we make progress toward IDEO’s climate commitments, we will continue to experiment, iterate, and learn. Most importantly, we’re eager to learn alongside you. Time is precious and we all need to collectively accelerate toward our respective commitments. In the spirit of co-creating a more sustainable future, we invite you to continue the conversation with us by contacting our team. We’re eager to learn about the steps you are taking, the lessons you’ve learned, and what’s next.

Over the past year, IDEO has been working toward meeting a series of wide-ranging climate commitments.

The report outlined that over the next decade, we need to reduce global emissions by 7.6% annually, a daunting reality that has been reiterated in recent IPCC updates. That means reducing our emissions by over half in less than 8 years. This is one of the most critical challenges of our decade, if not century.

As part of IDEO’s Net Zero strategy, we knew we couldn’t just invest in carbon offsets, we also had to do our part in removing emissions from the atmosphere. In many ways, the pandemic accelerated us toward that path. From 2019 to 2020, our emissions were slashed from ~14,500 t CO2e to ~6,400 t CO2e respectively. But we knew we needed to do more, especially with IDEO’s shift to embracing hybrid working models and their unknown travel-based emissions implications.

In 2021, we implemented three interventions to further reduce our carbon footprint. We switched to renewable energy, incentivized reductions in project-based emissions, and made improvements to our responsible retirement portfolio. Some of these efforts were successful, others less so. We’re eager to share what worked and what didn’t.

Intervention 1: Switching to renewable energy

There are several options for switching to renewable energy, including purchasing rooftop solar grids, participating in community solar programs, purchasing renewable energy credits (RECs), and more.

In evaluating these approaches, we ran into a few setbacks. Since IDEO doesn’t own any of its buildings and each of our studios consume about as much electricity as a couple of big houses, we optimistically hoped that we might be able to sign up for community solar programs across the board. But we quickly learned that community solar wasn’t available for all of our locations. To make matters more complicated, many of our locations didn’t even have the ability to choose their electricity suppliers.

Our next best bet was to either purchase RECs for our global energy consumption, or opt for location-specific solutions. In pursuit of progress over perfection, we purchased 750 MWhr’s of RECs from Bonneville Environmental Foundation to cover energy consumption across all of IDEO’s locations. This not only reduced our carbon footprint by 360 t CO2e, but also meant that effective January 1, 2021, IDEO switched to renewable energy globally.

Looking ahead to 2022 and beyond, we will continue to evaluate and implement the best renewable energy solutions on a local level. To date, we have switched to renewable energy in two locations:

• Chicago: We switched our energy supplier from ComEd and enrolled in community solar through Solstice. Solstice also offers a renewable energy program for employees to mitigate energy impacts from working from home. For every employee that signs up for Solstice’s community solar program, Solstice donates $100 toward their nonprofit arm, Solstice Initiative, to make renewable energy accessible for underserved communities.
• Munich: We switched our energy supply from Stadtwerke München (SWM), Munich's municipal utilities company, to renewable hydropower from Polarstern, a Munich-based renewable energy pioneer and social business promoting the energy transformation in Germany and worldwide.

While it took more time and resources to explore local renewable energy solutions than to purchase RECs, we felt it was important to switch to local alternatives wherever possible.

Intervention 2: Incentivizing reductions in project-based emissions

“But what about the emissions from our project operations?”

In our journey to Net Zero, this question came up time after time. It turns out, over a third of IDEO’s non-wage-based expenses come from project-based expenses like flights, food, prototyping materials, and research incentives. When we estimated IDEO’s carbon footprint, we saw that a significant fraction of our emissions came from everyday decisions made by project teams.

After some digging, we saw that consulting firms similar to IDEO approach emission-reduction incentives differently. Some impose strict travel guidelines, while others set a steep internal price on carbon. The concept of a carbon tax as an incentive was appealing, but would clients go for it? We decided to find out.

Inspired by 1% for the Planet, we started a pilot that added new language about emissions reductions in all of our statements of work. In addition to our standard language about project-based expenses, we added:

Expense invoices will include an additional 1% of all billable expenses to offset greenhouse gas emissions arising from this work.

For a project with $100,000 in expenses, we would add a $1,000 fee to fund carbon offsets. From our preliminary estimates, this would sufficiently cover the emissions from our projects and allow us to purchase ever higher quality emissions over time.

While promising in theory, the execution has been difficult. Of the 33 statements of work signed over the past 6 months, only 4 of them included the 1% fee. In some cases, clients objected to paying for IDEO’s carbon offsets and the language was negotiated out of the contract. In other cases, the language was never included to begin with. Many IDEOers were apprehensive about broaching the topic with clients.

Despite the slow start, we are continuing this pilot so that we can gather more data and design an informed approach to reducing project-based emissions.

Intervention 3: Improving our responsible retirement portfolio

While IDEO will continue to vote with its dollars to reduce our emissions, many of those dollars have their own environmental and social implications. With ESG frameworks and ratings agencies scrambling to answer calls to action from BlackRock and beyond, there are a dizzying number of ways to evaluate responsible investments.

Our third intervention involved scrutinizing our existing 401(k) portfolio. Alongside Fossil Free Funds, a non-profit that grades investments using a variety of social and environmental considerations, we evaluated IDEO’s existing 401(k) and came up with a system—or score—for each of the available funds in our portfolio. We then supplemented this analysis with data from Morningstar Sustainability Rating to provide another perspective on how our investments were, or were not, meeting environmental, social, and governance challenges.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many funds in IDEO’s 401(k) were poorly rated. Our portfolio, like most, is dominated by index and mutual funds that track the market. Since the Fortune 500 account for over a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and only 11% of these organizations are hitting their emissions goals, our portfolio wasn’t tracking in accordance with the climate commitments we’d set.

Our Talent team sprung into action. Together with our Empower Retirement administrators, they identified new funds that we could add to our investment mix. In addition to the Vanguard Social Index Fund that was already in our portfolio, we added two new funds: Calvert Balanced Fund (R6) and Calvert Short Duration Income Fund (R6).

A year later, about 1% of IDEO’s $140m 401(k) assets are in these ESG funds. While this is certainly a move in the right direction, we are continuing to explore how we can improve our responsible retirement portfolio even further.

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More than anything, these three interventions have highlighted an intrinsic dilemma of reducing emissions at scale: distributed behavior change is challenging and incremental. We’re still grappling with questions like: Are we focused on the right things? How might we design better incentives that accelerate emission reduction? How might we incentivize our partners to change alongside us?

But this is a design challenge that cannot wait to be solved. We’d love to learn alongside others and hear how others are tackling behavior change within their firms. Please share your reflections, questions, and insights by getting in touch here!

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

In 2019, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released an updated climate report reiterating how critical the 2020s will be in curbing wide-ranging and destructive climate impacts.

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.