Life Technologies, a global biotech company that supplies scientists with products and services, needed to grow big, from a $4 billion to a $10 billion enterprise. So it hired IDEO to help seed innovation across the company.

"When we started out, it was an R&D thing for driving innovation in new products. Now it’s not just R&D; user-centered innovation is a central part of our culture. It’s what we do throughout the organization," said Amy Cuneo, Associate Director, Customer Insights.

Over a three-year engagement, IDEO helped transform Life Technologies’ corporate culture through the introduction of User-Centered Innovation (UCI), an optimistic, experiential approach to problem-solving. Far outperforming its ambitious goal, Life Technologies is now a $13.6 billion company and uses UCI to inspire innovation throughout the 10,000-person organization.

After working with Life Technologies, IDEO designers came up with three products that have gone to market, including, a new bottle that showcases superior handling and storage, easier identification, and additional room for supplements. And Life Technologies has transformed from a company that aspires to focus on customers to one that truly does.

Unplanned pregnancies are a big problem in the US, especially among unmarried 18- to 29-year-olds. Seven in 10 pregnancies in this demographic are unplanned, a statistic that applies to women of all ethnicities and socioeconomic levels. Complicating matters are the social tension between abstinence-only and contraception-inclusive education, and the difficulty and expense associated with obtaining prescription birth control.

Since 2009, IDEO has worked closely with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit NGO, to address this pressing social challenge. One of the first insights on the project was identifying the need for comprehensive birth control support. Designers looked at ways to transform birth control from a prescription (a piece of paper that is handed to you by a doctor) into a subscription (a program that ensures you start using birth control, use it correctly, and migrate to more effective methods).

Given the complex and potentially overwhelming subject matter, the IDEO team interviewed women in the target demographic; talked with doctors, counselors, and other experts with varying opinions about birth control; and hosted roundtable discussions. They developed several concepts and scenarios that allowed members of the National Campaign to see sex and pregnancy through the eyes of the young women they’re working to reach.

Research and prototyping efforts led to the design of Bedsider, a multi-touchpoint birth control support system with a carefully crafted sex-positive brand, which is uncommon for the healthcare industry. Bedsider focuses on five key areas (awareness, motivational drivers, digital offerings, services, and loyalty) and acts as a vehicle for behavioral change that’s flexible, with room to grow into a much larger movement.

The Ad Council and the National Campaign debuted a multiyear, multimedia public service campaign in November 2011. The Bedsider website offers comprehensive education about existing birth control methods. This includes opt-in reminder services, personal stories from women across the country on why they chose a particular method, a phone service that provides information in both English and Spanish, features such as “Fact or Fiction” (hilarious animated clips debunking popular myths), a “Frisky Friday” newsletter, and more.

Bedsider has launched nationally with the help of an Ad Council campaign that drives sexually active women ages 18–24 to Bedsider.org. The multimedia Public Service Announcement effort includes television, radio, print, web, and nontraditional advertising, as well as an integrated social media program.

“We hope that Bedsider will be a useful tool for women to learn about their birth control options, better manage their birth control, and in the process avoid getting pregnant until they’re ready,” said Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast in its monthly newsletter. Planned Parenthood and Philliber Research Associates joined forces with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to help test and evaluate Bedsider.

Through a social media campaign called #ThxBirthControl, people are voicing their thoughts about what birth control has made possible for women, men, families, and society. It’s all part of Thanks, Birth Control Day, launched in November 2013 as part of a continuing initiative to encourage positive conversations and more consistent use of birth control by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. To celebrate the movement, IDEO wrote, scored, and performed an animated musical featuring condoms and pill packs dancing the cancan.

According to an independent evaluation of the program, Bedsider is the first digital intervention in reproductive health in the U.S.—with adults as an audience—that has shown to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Turns out that when women and men have the ability to plan, prevent, or space pregnancies, they’re more likely to finish school, achieve their goals, and ultimately have healthier families, according to the nonprofit organization.

Chicago’s federally funded, citywide bike-sharing service, called Divvy, makes a fleet of bicycles available to commuters and tourists 24 hours a day. Alta Bicycle Share (which runs bike-sharing systems in Boston, the Bay Area, DC, and New York City) collaborated with IDEO to spread Divvy’s message, “Divide and Share!” to the cyclists and would-be cyclists of Chicago through the brand.

The new brand would appear on its bikes, stations, company vans, member fobs, and website—and it needed to be ready to hit the streets in just six months. IDEO partnered with local brand strategy studio Firebelly Design to collaborate on a solution. IDEO led the early research, conceptual brand development, and naming phase of the project; the Firebelly team led the visual design and developed the brand guidelines.

The brand has become a functional and fun part of Chicago’s transportation landscape and has been embraced by Chicago commuters. Just three weeks after it launched, the City of Chicago called the Divvy Bikes program the busiest bike-sharing system in the world. Six months into the service, enthusiastic cyclists have racked up over 780,000 trips and 1.7 million-plus miles, and over 12,000 Chicagoans have become members.

‍

After watching her husband suffer from cancer, Tomoko Namba, founder of Japan’s leading mobile internet company, DeNA, wanted to empower people with better health information to aid them in making medical decisions. DeNA partnered with IDEO to help with the design of a genetic test that had mass-market appeal.

Together, IDEO and DeNA designed all the consumer touchpoints from the ground up for the expanding new business, called MYCODE. The aim was not only to create a functioning, usable product, but also to introduce the notion of genetic testing in a privacy-sensitive country that for the most part, hadn’t yet considered it an option. What would make MYCODE resonate with mass-market Japan? How could genetic testing results be shared in a way that was accurate but also actionable and motivating?

The team worked with doctors, nutritionists, medical governing bodies, and more, setting up fast, iterative cycles, and conceptualizing and prototyping almost every aspect of MYCODE in just 16 weeks. Data design, home testing experience, purchase flow, and how the service would be used over the long-term were all considered, along with traditional branding elements, like name, logo, and visual identity.

The result is a product that puts reliable genetic information into the hands of Japanese consumers, helping them to make more informed healthcare decisions. MYCODE went to market in August 2014, just nine months after the engagement with IDEO began. Not only did MYCODE fulfill Namba’s mission, it helped the company find new ways to grow: Upon announcement of the new service, DeNA’s share price jumped 6.7 percent.

So I decided to pursue my own absurd hobby that would combine my twin passions for beer brewing and fictional cartography into what I hope is the ultimate beer drinking experience. Or at least the most ridiculous. I call it Bean Brew.

We talk a lot about the user journey at IDEO. It’s a way to break down how a person experiences important moments when interacting with a product or service. While bottling my first few batches several years back, I obsessed over the taste of the beer and the bottle's label design—two key moments in the beer drinker's user journey. But then I realized that there are so many other moments that I was leaving out of the design process.

So I asked myself: Could I contextualize the combined drinking experiences of each person who received a bottle of Bean Brew? Could I turn that into a map? And could I deliver that map back to Bean Brew drinkers months later in the form of a delightful silkscreen poster? That became my design challenge.

So what have I learned from my side gig?

1. Quantitative data inspires design

Bean Brew has taught me a lot about how to integrate quantitative survey data into a cohesive storytelling experience (something we’re trying to do more and more of at IDEO these days). I start with questions like these, which I include as part of a survey wrapped around the bottle’s neck:

• What are your three favorite board games?
• Complete the following sentence: If I were on a ship for 1 year, my ideal job position would be ________.

I then transform the responses I get from people who received a particular batch of Bean Brew into a poster that looks something like this.

2. There's more to design than what meets the eye

Sometimes, as you go through the design process, you realize the thing you think you're designing (a bottle of beer) isn’t what you're actually designing (a beer drinking experience). This is true for most of the projects I’ve worked on at IDEO, and for Bean Brew, too.

3. Side gigs = side skills

Finally, I’ve learned a bunch of tangible skills throughout the process of making Bean Brew: Arc GIS (cartography software), best practices for glue adhesion (getting elaborate labels to stick to bottles), and how to use the power of analog experience to blow away anything an iPhone can do. I’m confident that I’ll be applying at least some of these skills to an upcoming IDEO project.

Bean Brew is my attempt to bring as much joy and delight to my hobbies as possible, and in doing so, I find that I’m more more creative and productive as part of my day job. And so much happier.

I am not training for any marathons. Just an expedition to Antarctica. In a submarine. With beer.

Years ago, I was working at a law firm in Boston. Many of my colleagues had the same hobby—training for the Boston Marathon in the middle of the frigid New England winter. This was what they did for “fun.” I was so amazed that these people with such unhappy day jobs would choose what seemed like such an unhappy hobby to fill their nights and weekends. Many years and two careers later, I moved to San Francisco to take a job as a designer at IDEO. In my first months here, I remember being struck by all of the wonderful and absurd hobbies that my new colleagues had. It was a delightful and inspiring contrast to my dark days in Boston.

For this method of animation, make sure to use only lines in your Illustrator file. The idea is to animate the lines across their own path, so the way you design them will play a big part on how elaborate your animation will be.

Watch this video for a quick step-by-step guide to animating lines in After Effects:

1. When your Illustrator file is ready, import it to After Effects. You can simply drag your Illustrator file to the Project area or go to File > Import > File.
2. Drag the imported file to the Timeline. It will automatically create a Composition.
3. Now you must turn your Illustrator file into Outlines that After Effects can control. On the timeline, right click on the layer and select "Create Shapes from Vector Layer.
4. The next step is to animate your outlines. For that, you will need to add a Trim Paths feature to your new layer.
5. On Trim Paths, use keyframes for Start/End to change when and where you want your paths to animate. If your file has multiple lines, you can choose to animate them simultaneously or individually.

This technique is a simple and effective way to create powerful motion graphics for storytelling, user interface behaviors, or even a simple animated gif. Hope you enjoyed it!

Adobe After Effects is one of my favorite tools for prototyping user interfaces, creating video scenarios to communicate a context of use, or simply crafting stories through animation. It's a tool that allows you to explore and visualize ideas, and there's no right or wrong way to use it. Here are a few tips for using After Effects to animate vector lines imported from Adobe Illustrator.

So, when the opportunity comes up, I like to turn off the computer and focus on creating artifacts. While an object is just a thing that serves its purpose until it’s tossed out, an artifact sparks an invisible conversation, a connection between the human who made it and the human experiencing it. Even something that people don’t think twice about, like an event name tag, deserves to be well designed.

That belief drove me to create a collection of one-of-a-kind name tags for a CoLab event. I wanted to make something with my hands that would bring a level of craft to our content. The tags served as the icebreaker for more than a few conversations, and reminded people at the tech-focused event that there's a human element to everything. Many attendees we reached out to a month later said that they still had the tag on their desks.

The process was simple, but arduous: I laser cut blanks, etched the names, spray painted each tag using unique colors and angles, and finished it off with acrylic screen printing ink to make the names readable.

Here's how I did it, step by step:

1. Creating the blanks

I designed the negative of the template so that I could later use it as a jig. I used 18 x 24 inch sheets of 3mm acrylic, so that with the name tags at 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches, I could fit about 32 comfortably in each batch (as opposed to 38 if I used all available space and threw away the negative).

Acrylic sheets tend to melt and then cool quickly in the laser cutter, leading to possible sticking, so I usually add about .2mm to my thickness settings to compensate (i.e. I was using 3mm acrylic, but put 3.2mm in the settings). There are two benefits: One, you guarantee that you actually cut through the sheet. Two, it also gives you a little bit of wiggle room so you don’t end up with hard to pick out joints.

Pro tip: The key to making the most of your acrylic is to leave space for future cuts on the same piece. Instead of designing my reusable jig with all the name tags in the center, I threw them to one side so that I could use the other end again. After I cut the jig, I could get 38 tags out of each subsequent batch because I could simply throw away the negative. Another bonus: When there’s excess acrylic on one end, you can always tell which side goes in which direction.

2. Etching the blanks

Once the blanks were cut, I needed to take the protective plastic off of one side, so that I had a clean surface to etch onto. I peeled the tags, slipped my template jig back into the cutter, and dropped the blanks into place.

The etch file is the same as the template jig, just with a red cut box around the perimeter of the file denoting the edge of the acrylic.

Once I had an etch file ready to go, all I had to do was push the file to the top left of the cutting area and check the focus points of the laser on the first tags on the first and second rows. Since the etch file is in the same grid form as the old cut file, everything is already spaced for me. The etch settings held ink best at around 74 to 76 percent power at 100 percent speed.

One final thing to note: We don’t want to cut anything (we’re just etching), so after setting my etch power, I set the cutting lines to 0 percent power and 100 percent speed, so we just blow right past them.

3. Taping the etched tags*

Once the blanks were etched, I peeled the plastic off of the back of the tags, then covered the etched side of each in painters tape to keep them clean.

4. Spraying the tags

After everything was taped, I slapped some aluminum foil in the vent hood and got to work spraying each tag. The process allowed me to bring out some of the old airbrush tricks my dad showed me as a kid, like holding a tongue depressor at a 60 degree angle in front of the nozzle to create thicker splatter. I used two to three colors for each tag, at varying angles.

I used Montana brand spray paints, and I definitely recommend using the BLACK formula. Over the course of the project, it dried on the acrylic within four and-a-half minutes, which is pretty insane. The GOLD formula was comparable, but my run of the mill Krylon paints took much longer, so it’s worth the extra bucks to buy Montana.

Pro tip: If you’re spraying a bunch of parts in a hood, aluminum foil is actually a great material for coverage as it tends to not stick to your parts like paper.

5. Sealing the tags and revealing the beauty

After the sprayed tags had dried, I hit the painted side with a couple quick coats of the Montana clear matte varnish so that they wouldn’t stick to each other. When everything had dried, I peeled off the painter’s tape—my favorite part of the project.

6. Applying the ink inlay

Next came the most time-consuming part: the ink inlay. I used speedball acrylic screen printing ink for its fast drying time, and how easily it wipes off acrylic. I liberally brushed and swabbed the ink into the etch using a Q-tip, then quickly wiped the excess off with a paper towel. Once dry, they were ready to go.

That's it!

*Imperfect process: I know what you’re thinking—why didn’t you just remove one side of the plastic before etching, spray that side, then remove it from the other side, then etch that? I did! After a few batches, I added the taping step because I noticed the spray paint was eating away the plastic coating that kept the paint off the front of the tags.

I work with CoLab, IDEO’s tech-focused R&D group. I’m also someone who’s committed most of my life to craft. Luckily, my day job allows me to bring the two together. But the minute you start making a living from your craft, problems start to surface. You get burnt out. You compromise your vision to deliver things on time. At that point, you're no longer transforming objects—you’re just pushing matter around.

I snapped this photo in the Amazon jungle town of Iquitos, Peru. A jar full of individually cut blister packs sat in the corner of a general store set up in front of a family’s home. By making individual doses available—not even a daily dose, but a single, one-time dose—more families were able to afford treatment for their ailments. In a community where money is very scarce, this family was filling a very real, pressing need that wasn't being addressed by local stores.

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.

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.

‍

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.