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.

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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.

Here are three juicy ones to get started thinking more deeply about blockchain, the unique experiences the technology enables, and how it could be integrated into our everyday lives.

1. Designing for ownership

The beauty of cryptocurrency is that it’s possible for you, and only you, to have access to your crypto wallet and assets. That means you get to have true ownership; your “account” information isn’t stored by a bank or central authority that can use or take away your assets at will (think of governments seizing funds, for example). Instead, the data is stored in a universal ledger across a distributed network that can independently verify who owns what—so it’s much more transparent than most of today’s banking systems.

Of course, that power also comes with great responsibility. There is no password or account recovery if you lose or reveal your private key (sometimes expressed in the form of a 24-word phrase), which is used to “unlock” your wallet. Giving that away is like dropping cash on the street—you likely won’t get it back.

Challenge: Design secure and user-friendly ways to store private keys.

A few questions to get you started:

• How might we design better ways to securely store private keys that balance security (keys cannot be easily copied or stolen) and ease of use?
• What are some digital and physical features for secure storage that we could utilize?
• How might we design ways to securely transfer ownership of private keys in case of loss or death?

Some inspiration:

• Fractional Custody: What are some ways you could divide up and distribute private keys among five of your most trusted friends and family members?
• Book of Codes: Inspired by Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, what if custom die-cut cards could reveal your passphrase when placed over the right book?
• Multiple Points of Verification: Could you have a mobile app that verifies your identity through multiple social networks before revealing the passphrase?

2. Designing transparency in network transactions

Every time you transact in Ethereum, a platform for blockchain applications, you have to set your gas price—the amount you are willing to pay for the computation needed for your transaction be confirmed. An easy analog is paying more for expedited shipping to get your package mailed there sooner.

Those prices and speeds are not determined by any one party (like FedEx, for instance), but by how busy the network is, how many other transactions are waiting to be confirmed, and what gas price those other transactions are using. But information about current network state is rarely communicated to the user—adding frustration and confusion when setting your best guess at gas price. Too low? Your transaction might not go through for a long time (or ever). Set it too high, and you risk paying more than you need to.

Remember the early days of eBay, before they included shipping rates in transactions? You had to wait for a day or so until the seller got back to you with the actual shipping costs. Sometimes it was what you’d expected, sometimes it bit you in the butt.

Challenge: Design better ways to help users make a decision about transaction costs, or find ways to abstract it away all together.

A few questions to get you started:

• How might we make transaction costs and prices more transparent to the user?
• How might we reveal high-level and useful data on network status?
• How might we better automate gas estimates to remove friction from decision-making?

Some inspiration:

• The Slider: Could the user first select their desired transaction speed to reveal its implied cost?
• The Wallet Just for Gas: Could there be a separate wallet just for transaction costs, which gets topped off at regular intervals?
• The Toggle: Could you offer the user be a simple choice—speed vs. value?

3. Designing for readability

Crypto wallet addresses currently look something like this: 0x04De111196aCE9764b6eCAcC4f849b6b59193443—a string of 40 characters, which serve the function of being cryptographically unique (i.e. impossible to guess). While there are experiments like ENS, a human-readable domain system for blockchain addresses, they aren’t widely adopted yet. Sending a crypto transaction today means checking and double-checking 40 characters that look like gobble-de-gook. And you need to get it right the first time, since there are no refunds or rollbacks for crypto transactions.

That’s like having to type in the bank account number of every merchant or person you’d like to transact with, every single time. If it’s off by one digit—cue instant regret.

The challenge: Design ways to display blockchain addresses in a more readable or recognizable format.

A few questions to get you started:

• How might we use algorithmically-generated images or symbols to create visual recognizability?
• Are there industry standards (like checksums) that could help reduce errors in address entry?

Some inspiration:

• Cryptographic Visual Tags: How might we use unique color codes or symbols to tag address typologies or to verify addresses?
• 4-Digit Verifications: What are some industry standards that financial institutions use that could be relevant for these addresses? One such example is typing in the last 4 digits of a credit card number to verify ownership.
• Whitelist of Verified Addresses: Are there ways to maintain a registry of trusted addresses without relying on a central authority?

These are just three challenges (ahem, opportunities) that blockchain offers designers—there are (and will continue to be) many more. Have an idea? We’d love to hear it! Tweet your thoughts to @ideocolab.

Interested in collaborating with us on a future project, or got another blockchain-based design challenge you want to talk about? Reach out to IDEO CoLab, IDEO’s collaborative platform for emerging technologies, here or on Twitter!

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Despite all the media hype about the rise and fall of cryptocurrencies, blockchain technology is still in its infancy, meaning it’s an ideal time for designers to step in and help build new systems. There’s no shortage of challenges to address.

In an effort to be more conscious of our own health and the health of our planet, we’re being told to eat a plant-based diet, while, at the same time, lab-grown meat is gaining traction. How do we wrap our heads around all of it?

We think design can help. But a few things have to shift if we’re going to drive the global food system toward greater sustainability. At the consumer level, it’s about supporting people to make healthier decisions about how they eat. At the level of large companies or complex systems, it’s about helping organizations reinvent themselves, ask bigger questions, and make more thoughtful changes from within.

In either case, change isn’t easy. To help our clients in the food space get inspired and energized, we often recommend looking for insights in unexpected places—we call it “analogous inspiration.” It’s easy to get caught up in what you already know and mired in the same cyclical ways of thinking; to innovate, you have to break out.

Here are a few ways for folks to innovate in the food landscape (and beyond):

1. Design for emerging behaviors

During a recent project to help a global beverage company think beyond its current business, we set up interviews with people outside the industry, including one with a company that makes charging stations for electric vehicles. When the car charging company was just starting out, leaders assumed they would follow the model of gas stations by building stand-alone charging stations spread throughout a city. That’s how people had fueled cars for decades, right?

But it turns out consumers don’t want to stand around for 30 or 40 minutes while their cars charge; instead, they want to fold charging into another errand, such as a trip to the grocery store. Because their lives are increasingly complex, they want to streamline wherever they can. This insight prompted the charging company to completely rethink its approach.

Though the beverage businesses has nothing to do with cars, seeing the charging company’s abrupt change in tactics to address a human need inspired our client to think far beyond existing consumer behaviors and to advocate for big changes in the business model.

The takeaway: Instead of taking the established route, innovators should be on the lookout for new and emerging behaviors that indicate an alternative path to designing for the future.

2. Get up close and personal

A lot of living happens outside of conference rooms and surveys. In order to capture what’s really on folks’ minds, we often spend days or weeks shadowing people and looking for unconscious behaviors that can influence how we design for them.

Recently, we were working with a baby food company looking to expand its line of products. We met real customers and shadowed them for days—at home, on their commutes, while shopping, and when preparing food. By traveling on the subway with them during feeding time, watching them buy groceries, and sitting with them in their homes, we noticed how many workarounds they used when feeding their infants and a few common issues they faced with existing baby food.

These insights, while seemingly small, helped inform how we designed our client’s food packaging. It was the little observations we made by diving in head-first with parents that enabled us to create a feeding experience that feels a bit more parent-centered.

The take-away: Double down on real human interactions and don’t overlook the small stuff. Sometimes, subconscious behaviors and common workarounds indicate the need for a redesign.

3. Look beyond your industry

When you walk into a hotel room, you’re often greeted by signs encouraging you to save water by reusing your towels or foregoing a change of sheets. While no longer new to most of us, these reminders were fairly revolutionary when they first appeared and have helped to save millions of gallons of water since.

When we set out to help the Rockefeller Foundation find ways to reduce food waste, we looked for examples of waste reduction in other industries, including hospitality. Hotel signage cueing visitors to reuse towels is more than just a pesky reminder to save water; it’s a way for people to incrementally change their behavior while feeling like they’re a part of something bigger for the betterment of the planet. In this case, understanding what motivates people resulted in a drastic drop in water waste.

With the Rockefeller Foundation, we tapped into data around food waste and were able to use it to predict human behaviors and test subtle changes in a number of industries. Hyatt Hotels prototyped some of this thinking in their buffets—by switching from whole cakes to individual sweets, for example—resulting in a 10 percent cost savings for the company and an enormous reduction in food waste.

The take-away: Instead of looking within your own walls for inspiration, look outside to other industries and sectors to see how they’ve solved similar problems.

We've found these three design approaches useful. Have other ideas? We’d love to hear them! Tag @IDEO and use the hashtag #designforfood.

The world of food contains all kinds of internal tensions: On the one hand, we’re faced with hunger and food shortages, while on the other we’re fighting an obesity epidemic.

And as with any technology, AI can have a dark side, too. Whether it's Cambridge Analytica exploiting personal information for political gain or Northpointe developing prejudiced algorithms for bail and sentencing hearings, danger lurks.

This is a moment for design. A moment for us to imagine the kind of future we want to see. What might it feel like?

To explore those questions, and give shape to the immense benefits that intelligent machines can bring to our lives, work, and society as a whole, we created a speculative design exhibition for Munich Creative Business Week called Hyperhuman.

Here's a peek at the products:

The Purpose Compass

What if a machine could help you better understand your strengths? What if it could help you succeed in a machine-augmented future?

Armies of robots already populate the factory floor and digital lawyers write our contracts. As intelligent machines become a fixture in every aspect of our work and lives, they inevitably start challenging our contribution to society, begging the question, do humans still matter? What is our purpose?

The Purpose Compass helps you determine your unique worth in the future. It understands what you are good at and helps you decide what to focus on to stay relevant, productive, and happy in the long term. Turn towards larger purpose goals—teaching, leading, inventing, or caring—to set a course and learn which skills you'll need to pick up to get there. Over time, many skills will be automated, freeing you up to learn new ones.

Purpose is shaped, not given.

The Expertise TV

What if a machine could identify gaps within an organization’s knowledge and help you figure out how to fill them?

We have unprecedented access to information, but the sheer volume of it prevents us from gaining deep understanding of a wide range of topics. We either specialize in a specific field or become generalists, making assumptions to fill the gaps in our expertise.

Enter Expertise TV: Twist its knobs and it instantly directs you to experts whose knowledge sheds light on unanswered questions that are holding your organization back.

Knowledge resides in people, not machines.

The Creativity Mixer

What if you could describe your personality, and ‘mix’ a visual identity that expresses you?

Even with a creative mindset, people often lack confidence and ability to shape and express their ideas at the highest level.

What does your brand look like? Turn the dials of the Creativity Mixer (produced in collaboration with creative.ai) to set your personality ("playful," "stubborn") and it calls up images, fonts, and colors for you to use when executing ideas. When settled with your choices, hit print for your very own brand style guide.

Creativity is latent, tools make it accessible.

The Empathy Writer

What if you could find the exact right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

Our globally connected lives mean we’re frequently brought into contact with people from different cultures and backgrounds.Despite the opportunities these networks present, we often struggle to communicate, as we are not equally fluent in the other’s language and don’t share the same cultural
mores.

What if you could find just the right words to express your feelings? And nothing got lost in translation?

The Empathy Writer helps you convey what you mean in a way that will be easily understood. Using the character trait tiles, I describe myself and you, then the machine helps me compose a message in a way that reflects who you are.

Empathy is amplified.

The Belief Checkout

What if tomorrow’s supermarkets considered your values and ethics when automatically buying products for you?

We outsource more and more tasks to AI. But how do we know that the decisions AI makes on our behalf are aligned with our beliefs and values? How do we impart them to the machine?

The Belief Checkout’s shelves are full of products that represent values. Pick the ones that reflect you to help steer the supermarket’s algorithm. Say you value sustainability. While eating red meat may not sound like a sustainable choice, eating an overstocked steak might be. The supermarket can help you make choices that square with your values.

We let go of control, but our beliefs stay in tact.

Hyperhuman was a collaboration between IDEO Munich, London, and Chicago. To find out more about our Protopian perspective on augmented intelligence email europe@ideo.com.

We’re in the midst of a revolution. Intelligent machines are able to augment our humanity in ways that seem lifted straight out of science fiction. Self-driving cars, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, even our thermostats learn from us and get smarter over time.

I took this picture at the train station right next to our Palo Alto office. At first glance, I thought it was an unusual fashion statement, but then I realized that the woman in the picture solved a common problem in an elegant way: When your bike lacks a chain guard, your pants can easily get stuck and you risk destroying them—or even causing an accident. By wearing a cut-off sock above her pants she kept them protected from the chain. By going with a chartreuse sock, she made sure she wouldn't be overlooked in the aggressive Bay Area traffic.

Unfortunately, I discovered this helpful little hack the day after I ruined my favorite yellow pants with chain oil. But don't pity me too much; in the end my dry cleaner saved my day, and from now on, I'll always carry a cut-off sock with me.

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.

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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.