More than 7 million people each year came to the Boston.gov site to tap into all sorts of city services: reporting a pothole, learning the assessed value of their property, paying a parking ticket, checking recycling schedules.

Boston wanted to create a beautiful platform that would make the process of finding and navigating information easy and intuitive, one that prioritized the needs of its people.

The Boston.gov site had outgrown its existing structure and needed an overhaul. The user experience was mired by the fact that Boston City Hall has nearly 50 different departments, each with its own microsite, navigation and content standards that feed into a centralized site.

So the City of Boston hired IDEO to design its new digital home, Boston.gov. IDEO designers worked with the major stakeholders—department heads, employees, and Boston residents, with a focus on those in underserved communities and those with varying levels of technical proficiency—to gather insights into what users needed.

The objective was to design something that would simplify how people navigate the site, to make it easier for residents to find answers to common questions, and, in the process, serve as a community facilitator—an up-to-date, reliable resource that makes life in the city more manageable.

Rather than organize the site by the city’s departments, the design solution was rooted in illuminating relevant content by topics—people’s life moments—many of which overlapped through different branches of government. Owning a car in the city, for example, is closely related to preparing for winter, so bridging those common threads allowed for a more intuitive organizing principle.

In the process of the site redesign, IDEO also helped to create a visual identity system that underscores Boston’s strengths: the city’s confidence, humility, personality, and optimism.

In addition to the web architecture and redesign, IDEO also produced a comprehensive style guide to help maintain design consistency, so departments can add content without compromising the overall integrity of the site, as well as a brand look that the city has decided to adopt across nearly all of its consumer-facing media. Now you’ll see the famous underlined B on T-shirts, banners, and even snow shovels.

Holding true to its mission to include Boston residents and all site users in its design process, the new Boston.gov site was piloted for six months, and the process document on the city’s blog (including the IDEO designed brand guide), before a full launch was rolled out in July 2016.

“The website should act like a helpful human. This is one of the big differences between the old site and the new site,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city’s chief of information technology in a Boston Globe article. “Oftentimes, when you looked at something on the old site, it would feel like you were interacting with some sort of lawyer-robot that was speaking to you in government-speak, using very formal language. We are trying to move away from that so your experience is akin to a person.”

The City of Boston was in need of a new digital home—one that emphasized a shift to a more welcoming tone and commitment to its citizens.

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In the Western Hemisphere, The North Face brand has long represented an active, sporty lifestyle that’s filled with challenges and adventures. But appreciating “the great outdoors” in China is less about extreme sports and more about connecting with nature in a communal, spiritual way. This research-based insight led the team to identify new opportunities for The North Face to better target its messaging.

Designers found a key opportunity: Encourage Chinese consumers to escape the pressures of hectic city life by enjoying the freedom and renewal that comes with spending time outdoors.

Today, as people find less time to enjoy the benefits that lie just beyond China’s large cities, there’s a tangible desire to return to the outdoors to refresh, reassess, and renew oneself. The North Face aims to help consumers do exactly that.

To create a compelling new brand vision for The North Face in China, the team’s design research tapped into Chinese ways of spending time outdoors. IDEO’s insights and creative brief provided the essential brand story for The North Face in China and informed the tagline of the company’s current marketing campaign, “Go Wild” (去野). The North Face brand’s new messaging links “old nature” and “new outdoors” through a combination of digital, retail, and interactive community channels.

IDEO also collaborated with the company on designs and prototypes for a new digital platform and an updated store-within-a-store merchandising display. The digital community aims to attract newcomers and connect them with more experienced outdoors enthusiasts and clubs. As the platform evolves, it will help aspiring adventurers plan trips, learn skills, and share their experiences through photos.

The retail community space aims to integrate this digital community with in-store shoppers and an effort to turn the “buy-a-product moment” into a “join-the-outdoors moment.” Both will be integrated to provide a holistic brand experience in China centered on nature and community.

In the West, The North Face, with its decades-long history, has long symbolized an adventurous, active lifestyle. In China, however, the outdoor market only began accelerating in the early 21st century.

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Success in this growing market depends on building strong and deep connections with Chinese consumers.

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20% sales growth in China

from 2012 to 2013—the year the project was completed—propelling the brand from sixth place to a market-leading position

Over the last 36 years, IDEO and Lilly, along with the pharmaceutical giant’s other design, development, and manufacturing partners, have collaborated on more than 250 projects. During this time, Lilly has not only honed its engineering-focused internal device-development team but also transformed into a human-centered organization with extensive, robust in-house innovation capabilities.

Early in the relationship, a team of IDEO designers and Eli Lilly leaders traveled the world to understand how people with diabetes live with the disease. Their findings led to the design of a series of award-winning insulin injection pens like SAVVIO. Portable, aesthetically pleasing, and discreet, the pens are suitable for use in both medical and personal settings. Combined with Lilly’s technical design prowess, this human-centered focus allows the devices to seamlessly integrate into patients’ lives and routines, making a challenging disease like diabetes feel more manageable.

Fast forward to today, Lilly’s innovative, easy-to-use auto-injectors are not only continuing to provide life-saving treatments to people with diabetes but also enabling the adoption of the popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, which together accounted for the majority of the company’s annual revenue in 2025. Perhaps most importantly, patients consistently rate the experience of using Lilly’s auto-injectors as relatively pain-free, easy to use, and preferable to competitors’ brands, improving adherence, satisfaction, and health outcomes.

This unwavering focus on driving innovation through a patient-first mindset is evident in some of the most impactful projects Lilly and IDEO collaborated on over the years:

GLP Auto-injectors
Convenient and cutting-edge, the first Trulicity injection device was originally designed to deliver the GLP-1 drug to treat type 2 diabetes. Today, it has been adapted for use with other GLP-1s, Mounjaro and Zepbound, which are increasingly popular weight-loss drugs and are also administered once weekly via fixed-dose injections. A wide base enables the pen to be held securely against the injection site, and the device automatically regulates the dose and needle depth.

Taltz Injectors
For most patients, living with severe plaque psoriasis means being your own medical technician—metering your drug dosage each time, and attaching and removing needles by hand. Taltz provides patients with clear visual and auditory feedback throughout the injection process through simple icons, bright colors, a translucent material, and clicking sounds. The devices are available in both autoinjector and prefilled-syringe formats and are adapted for Emgality, a preventive monthly migraine treatment, and Ebglyss, which helps treat eczema or atopic dermatitis.

HumaPen SAVVIO Injection Pen
Key insights informed the design of SAVVIO, including patients’ preference for insulin pens that look less like medical devices and more like everyday objects you’d find in a backpack or purse. The sleek, colorful device was created to help patients feel comfortable and confident about fitting mealtime injections into their everyday lives.

Refillable Human Growth Hormone (HGH) Injector and Reconstitution Device
Designed to be kid-friendly, the Refillable HGH Injector leverages insights into pediatric treatment adherence to create a more integrated, systematic approach to treatment, while the Reconstitution Device makes mixing Lilly’s powder-and-liquid drug easier and less intimidating for parents and healthcare professionals alike.

KwikPen Insulin Pen
KwikPen is a next-generation, prefilled insulin injection pen that builds on the success of two previous designs, reducing its size to 5.7 inches and enhancing ease of use for patients.

HumaPen(R) Luxura™ Insulin Pen
HumaPen Luxura combines several innovations into a robust yet elegant pen that can be carried and used anywhere—an insulin pen solution that improves dosing accuracy, dose setting, and injection force.

In addition to designing products to meet the needs of people with diabetes, IDEO and Lilly have developed innovations in areas of oncology, autoimmunity, and men’s health. The results of this collaboration and expansion have won numerous design awards and produced one of the longest and most fruitful innovation relationships in IDEO’s history.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Eli Lilly had a number of new, life-changing medications and two big challenges: Most of its drugs were self-injectables, not pills, so patients were hesitant to take them. And its drug-delivery device platform lagged behind its drug pipeline.

99%

of Trulicity users reported the auto-injector was “easy” to “very easy” to use in a JDST study

$36.5B

of Lilly’s $65.2B 2025 revenue came from sales of its auto-injectable GLP-1s, Mounjaro and Zepbound, a 45% increase from 2024

‍“…the Advisory Council will recommend transformational programmatic, cultural, and physical change to San Quentin that can serve as a practical model that can be replicated and scaled to other institutions.”

Source: Office of Governor Gavin Newsom: Governor Newsom Names Leading Criminal Justice and Public Safety Experts to San Quentin Transformation Advisory Council, May 05, 2023  https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/05/05/san-quentin-transformation-advisory-council/

The Advisory Council included the expertise of established criminal justice, public safety, healthcare, academic, reentry, and rehabilitation professionals, along with system-impacted/formerly incarcerated community leaders, and representatives of crime victims/survivors. The premise of IDEO’s involvement is to augment the Advisory Council Co-Chairs’ and members’ expertise in evidence-based best practices and lived experience living and working in prisons, with expertise in collaborative design, synthesis, visualization, storytelling and bringing visions to life.

Specifically, IDEO was brought in to facilitate input-gathering, and assist with incorporating the many viewpoints into a single, cohesive report of recommendations to the Governor. This included meeting the challenge of bringing together the viewpoints of 21 people on the Council (17 members, three Co-Chairs and an advisor to the Governor); incorporating the views of people who are most impacted (those incarcerated at San Quentin, San Quentin staff, community-based organizations, victim/survivor groups, among others); and formatting and designing the final report.

IDEO’s facilitation included workshops with the full Advisory Council, individual interviews and check-ins with Council members to gather their input to inform the recommendations. Each Advisory Council member was asked to speak with, and record feedback from, no fewer than five people at San Quentin or in affected communities and to share this feedback with IDEO. IDEO integrated this information and feedback into this report.

Research activities included visits to San Quentin to speak with and facilitate conversations with:

• San Quentin residents (100+) including the Citizens/Inmate Advisory Council, focus groups with Spanish-speaking residents, former gang members, ACT (LGBTQIA+), Voices Heal, People in Blue, San Quentin Citizens Advisory Council.
• San Quentin staff (100+) including interviews with numerous officers.
• San Quentin staff and residents together.
• Current participants and staff at Amistad (MCRP) and Beacon (former lifer) campuses (many who were previously incarcerated at San Quentin).
  
  

IDEO also organized listening, information sharing and feedback sessions, both at San Quentin and in the community, between Co-Chair representatives and various stakeholder groups, including victim/survivor groups, labor unions, and advocacy organizations. These perspectives were also brought into the report.  

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But dig a little deeper, and McMaster’s restaurant is a modest poster child for a grand ambition: to create a pre-industrial food system. We’re filming Doug as inspiration for a project for IKEA about future solutions for home food waste. His ultimate vision is a tight-knit network of conscientious producers, shops, restaurants and consumers working together to create a healthier, more sustainable, transparent, and financially viable alternative to the industrial food system.

At the heart of that is a principle of zero waste, explains McMaster, who trained at top restaurants like Copenhagen’s Michelin-starred Noma and nose-to-tail stalwart St John, in East London. Zero waste proponents argue that people, and businesses, should aim—as the name suggests—to generate no waste, through refusing, reducing, reusing and recovering the products they use every day. Over a sandwich, McMaster proudly tells us the story of his pop-up precursor to Silo in Australia, Joost, where, over two careful years, his team reduced the entire restaurant’s waste to just one, one litre jam jar.

He’s similarly conscientious at Silo. All the food and drink served, he explains, comes from local producers with whom he has a strict no packaging policy. Ingenious recipes make creative use of ingredients to minimise waste—a whey ice cream, and pickled rose petals (the byproduct of cheese production and a florist, respectively) are clever examples. Organic waste, from coffee grounds to leftover cake, is fed to ‘Bertha’, the affectionately-named anaerobic composter which takes pride of place on site. The compost it produces goes back to his producers to fertilise their fields. Silo's fittings are all upcycled—from old floor tiles that have become tables, to former school chairs, to the carrier bags that have found new life as colourful, swirl-covered plates.

Silo’s part of a wider movement, though, looking at smart ways to make the food system more sustainable, from farm to table. It’s a pressing problem: by some measures we’ll be 9 billion people by 2050, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production. We currently waste a third of food produced, consuming land, water, and using pesticides in our insatiable appetite for juicy prawns and plentiful pork chops.

Squint hard enough and you can spot a view of the future: one where we use fewer raw resources, waste less, and build new businesses mopping up what’s left from the supply chain. One underpinned by digital, where we care more where things come from, grow things more economically, closer to where they’re eaten. Where we connect with a network of fellow foodies, making a little extra money on the side, and talk to our neighbours more. Where we’ll be more conscientious about where our food comes from, and how we dispose of it, too.

What’s shaping this? First, people’s attitudes are shifting. Alongside a longstanding, and growing segment of society choosing sustainable products, a more radical, quiet zero waste movement is emerging. Influential bloggers like 42-year-old Californian Bea Johnson and her book Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide To Reducing Your Waste are championing a very different approach to consumption, and inspiring followers worldwide. Expect their expectations to move sustainability from a nice-to-have to a central part of their buying decisions, and shaping brands accordingly.

The first signs are perceptible at every turn. Take packaging: long a problem, the EU produces 15 million tons of plastic a year, or 156.9kg per person. We’ve been geeking out about Ooho, from Skipping Rock Labs, which is pioneering a seaweed-based spherical container that’s hygienic, biodegradable, and even edible. Going one step further, Berlin supermarket Original Unverpackt, has done away with food packaging entirely.

One big source of food waste, meanwhile is supermarkets’ drive for ‘perfect’ produce. According to the Soil Association, a whopping 20-40 percent of fruit and veg is thrown away for not looking right, despite one survey finding 65 percent of people would buy it, for a discount. Supermarkets like Asda, Intermarche and Tesco have capitalised: you can now buy ‘Ugly’, Inglorious’, or ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ parsnips, potatoes, apples and strawberries that once would have been discarded, for 30 percent cheaper.

But one man’s trash is another’s treasure. There are also smart opportunities for businesses to capitalise at every stage of the farming, distribution, and disposal chain. As part of the IKEA project we also met Londoner Tom, who runs a small company called Rejuce. We joined him as he collected surplus fruit and veg heading for the rubbish from the vast New Spitalfields market, to turn into juices and soups to sell at festivals like Green Man, Bestival and Field Day. Companies like Regrained, and BTTR, meanwhile, take used wheat and coffee grounds, respectively, and turn them into cereal bars or compost.

Closer to home, we’ve seen a raft of companies exploring urban farming and in-house hydroponics at a consumer level, as a way to dramatically cut down food miles and water, and make use of underutilised urban plots. Those include INFARM, which is building digitally-controlled microfarm units, and Growing Underground, a startup in London growing microgreens in the old World War 2 tunnels under Clapham, in South London. Further out, efforts by biofabrication companies like Memphis Meats and Modern Meadow to grow meat in labs might end up as machines on our kitchen countertops, eventually.

Technology isn’t just providing the hardware, though, but a platform to connect. Startups like Farm Drop and Farm Direct are using digital as a way to build more peer-to-peer systems, exploring ways to connect farmers to foodies more directly. The likes of Cassoulet, AmpleHarvest.org, Leftover Swap and Olio are cutting food waste by sharing or selling surplus produce, or leftovers person to person in cities. The Pare Up app, meanwhile, allows New Yorkers to find bargains from local stores on about-to-expire food. For the laziest among us, perhaps we’ll be sending our leftovers off via autonomous delivery robots like Starship Technologies.

Grass roots as these efforts are, zoom up to 30,000ft, and organisations like the Ellen Macarthur Foundation are taking a system’s level view, specifically the radical shift to a more Circular Economy. Partnering with huge multinationals like Unilever, Nike, IKEA, and many others, they’re arguing for eliminating waste from the supply chain, and every byproduct fuelling another part of the ecosystem within in which it exists, mimicking nature. Companies like Patagonia are successfully pioneering how these new businesses might put sustainability at the heart of their company, and be wildly profitable in doing so. Take their new bison jerky, sourced to foster better grasslands, as well as provide delicious food.

Back in Brighton, looking around at the ingenious zero-waste solutions in the restaurant, McMaster muses on what has made Silo a microcosm of a sustainable business, and a glimpse of a more circular future. It’s creativity. “Waste,” he says, “is a failure of the imagination.”

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Tucked in the quiet backstreets off Brighton’s lanes, Doug McMaster’s restaurant Silo is a typical modern eatery in many ways: industrial-chic fittings, chalkboard menu of vegetarian fare, white brick walls, chipboard tables and world music soundtrack.

Fast forward a few years and the big whiteboard has been replaced by a nimble digital tool that allows us to track and collect data about our projects, leads, and teams. Fantastic—except we lost the communal hoopla of physically erasing the board in front of our friends. Somehow clicking to archive didn’t have as much pizzazz.

What could we create that would provide that same, satisfying sequence of tangible action and group celebration in our now purely digital reality? Enter the Big Green Button.

It’s exactly what it sounds like—a massive green button that says “Push to Celebrate,” affixed to the wall next to the large monitors that track our projects. When a project is complete, a team member hits the button and a ridiculous animated gif overtakes the displays while music from "The Price is Right" plays over the speakers. It’s not confetti cannons, but it's fun and triggers the same enthusiastic cheering we enjoyed at the whiteboard.

So how did we do it? Here's the step by step.

The button itself is from Adafruit, and it’s huge. (Think the size of a grapefruit). The housing for the button is a 3D printed cowling that encases the button and the wiring and connects via an aesthetically pleasing audio cable. The audio cable allows us to unplug the button easily—no complex wiring to worry about.

At the other end of the cable is the brains—an Arduino with Adafruit’s ethernet shield. It receives the signal from the button, then sends out a POST request to the website’s server, which runs on IDEO’s network. Because multiple people can view the website at any given time, the user must locally “arm” the button on the AngularJS website with an option box. The option box tells the website that this website will respond to button presses. The go server running the server can then route the incoming request to the large screen’s website only.

This whole setup uses only a few lines of code to add a physical layer and a heightened level of excitement to our project completion ceremony—and everyone loves it.

A button like this is just asking to be pushed, but we added the sign to give people an extra nudge, and a hint as to what it actually does.

Few things are more satisfying than wrapping a months-long project. Back when the New York office tracked its active projects on a whiteboard in our kitchen, we’d celebrate these completed projects at our weekly meetings. Each team would walk up to the front of the room and—as the rest of the studio clapped and cheered—triumphantly erase their project from the board. It was a small thing, but it was ours, and it was pretty satisfying.

What was IDEO’s contribution? Giant beach balls. But not for the beach. More like magical floating orbs that made music when you touched them.

“We wanted to build an instrument with play as an interface,” said creative director Peter Hyer. “An interactive environment in which anyone can play music without giving it a thought.”

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How do they work? Here's the layperson’s version: The team fitted the balls with sensors that mapped the force of the impact to notes. Those notes were then matched to an algorithmically-generated backing track.

For the more technical version, keep on reading.

The process

Ideation

We knew that we wanted to channel the spirit of Bob Moog in our installation, so we began with a brainstorming and prototyping phase where we focused on bridging music and technology with creativity. We really wanted to break the barrier that prevents people from expressing themselves musically, and we also wanted to capture something of the Moogfest zeitgeist. Two ideas emerged—one around music, and one around narrative and synthesis based on the statements of the people at the festival. We loved both and wanted them to coalesce, but we were concerned they might be oil and water.

To find out, we began prototyping. We made a quadraphonic phase-music vocoder sampler in hopes of making spoken phrases musical; a computer-vision Post-it® Note step sequencer to bring musical life to an unintimidating object; and generative word games to try to tease out a crowd-sourced narrative arc of the festival. But nothing felt quite right, so we went back to the drawing board and asked ourselves, what is it that we want people to feel?

A Step Back

To get more perspective, we looked for reference points. We found inspiration in large scale installations from artists like Zimoun, where a simple idea like the sound of a cotton ball hitting a cardboard box took on new effect and meaning when scaled. It prompted us to wonder, what if we scaled the acoustic sound of balloons? What are the sounds the balloons should make, where should the sound come from, and how might that capture or express the narrative of the festival?

Iteration

Quickly and tragically, we discovered that combining a bunch of large balloons with an industrial fan was not quite as mind-blowing as we had expected. But, still, their innocuous beauty made balloons seem like a magical invitation to play.

We sought out people who had worked on similar projects, and who were not steeped in our brainstorming assumptions. We talked to Jack Gale from CCA, who had created an interactive balloon project, invited a group from San Francisco's Exploratorium to brainstorm and test out a rough prototype of balloon word games, and worked to find balloons that were big enough and robust enough for us to embed light elements and sensors in them.

Flexibility

Originally, we had based our design around an 8-foot by 16-foot box. Instead, we chose a covered outdoor basketball court. Huge! Central! Beautiful!

But the scale was drastically larger and the lights we had planned to embed couldn’t compete with daylight. To make it work, we scaled the beach ball diameter from 2.5 feet to 8 feet to better fit the space (we had already swapped the balloons for beach balls, since the materials are more robust), eliminated light elements, and put the emphasis on sound derived from beach ball interaction. Since we were at a music festival, it was poetic for sound to be the primary feedback mechanism.

Our friends at the Exploratorium invited us to do a trial install at their museum, which quickly brought the interaction questions to the forefront. You learn a lot quickly when the public kicks the tires. When people walked up to the beach balls, their first instinct was to hit them. But we didn’t want the beach balls to just work like a button—we wanted the installation to be more nuanced, and produce different sounds based on where and how each ball was hit. To do it, we used the nine degree of freedom inertial motion unit to map directional acceleration to pitch, which worked as though there was a keyboard wrapped around each beach ball.

How it works

The Beach Ball Sensor

Each beach ball has a sensor package in a custom made mechanical holder that is held captive by a carabiner. For sensing and communication, we used an Arduino with WiFi, a nine degree of freedom inertial motion sensor that detects acceleration in X, Y, and Z directions, rotation about X, Y, and Z directions, and magnetic field in X, Y, and Z directions. We also opted for an external antenna for added WiFi robustness.

This package communicates raw sensor data via OSC messages over WiFi to a computer that processes the sensor data. A USB battery designed to recharge your smartphone on-the-go powers the hardware and provides enough energy to run each system for about 14 hours—more than enough for an entire day of uninterrupted play.

Signal Processing and Gesture Recognition

On the computer, Max processes the streaming sensor data, recognizes gestures, and outputs a MIDI note with velocity whenever it detects a beach ball impact gesture. Ableton Live takes the MIDI data from all the beach balls, filters the notes to work with the current harmony, and triggers instrument sound.

Feedback

We wanted to be certain that participants could hear how they were changing the music, so while the background music played evenly throughout the installation, each individual beach ball generated a sound in the speaker closest to it—kind of like stage monitors that bands use playing live. That feedback encouraged everyone to play more.

Collaborative Music Design

To set the stage for musical confidence, we wrote algorithmic music that acted as a backing track, so no one felt the pressure to play the first note. Depending on where a beach ball was hit, one of 15 possible chromatic notes was generated. So, we filtered the beach ball notes so that they always fit consonantly with the backing track—you couldn’t play a “wrong” note. Even still, six different instruments playing over background texture can be too dense. So we opted for a section approach—three sets of two instruments. A trio with backing felt like the right balance of individual voice without cacophony.

Rigging

When we got to the venue, we had to invent a rigging system to get the beach balls to hang at the right place and height. In a divine moment of MacGyver-like inspiration, Diem Ho devised a hierarchical beach ball wiring system that could be lowered and raised quickly with precise control. When we were swarmed with little kids, this system allowed us to raise the beach balls just enough so people could see little kids behind a beach ball and avoid hitting them; things became a lot safer.

Improvisation

The most important design practice throughout the entire process was to stay nimble and improvise. We repurposed problems into constraints that catalyzed our evolving platform. In a sea of unknowns, improvisation allows you to find generative ways to translate even the simplest knowns into a compass toward meaning, and have fun doing it.

Lead engineer and composer Aaron Soloway couldn’t help but smile as he watched festival attendees interact with the balls. “Whether it was a huge bearded dude into modular synths, or a 5-year-old who just wanted to hit things, everyone was into it.”

For Hyer, that universal spirit of play was key. “It created an opportunity for people to connect with music that was unexpected and in the spirit of the festival,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s about celebrating the convergence of art and engineering. That’s what that Bob Moog was all about.”

Moog hit the big-time when his company started producing portable versions of his giant synthesizers (aka the Minimoog). For now however, the beach ball synth will remain enormous.

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The name Moog conjures up images of retro-future machines and space-age sounds. In the mid-60s, Bob Moog created the synthesizers that unleashed an era of electronic experimental music. Today, as a tribute to Bob, we have Moogfest, a gathering of musicians, DJs, performance artists, and technologists. This year’s performers ranged from Gary Numan and Grimes to a classical guitarist having his toenails painted by a cybernetically-augmented accomplice, and an 8-hour DJ set during which the audience slept in provided beds.

Each mythic tool/medicine could be used to combat common childhood ailments and illnesses in a way that celebrates each malady from beginning to end.

We are big fans of design fiction as a means to push our thinking and to explore what the future could look and feel like. For this design fiction exercise, we challenged ourselves with finding ways of turning kids into the heroes of their own young lives. We set out to create empathetic tools for childhood ailments and illnesses that recast painful, awkward and embarrassing experiences as rites of passage, spirit journeys and superpowers. To that end we asked ourselves a few questions to get started:

How might we turn embarrassing childhood moments into badges of honor?

How might we empower kids to celebrate the sometimes awkward illnesses of childhood?

How might we design for rites of passage, or inspire rituals that spark a contagious creativity?

So, we let our imagination go into a world with monsters in the closet, serpents under the bed, and yellow eyes peering out of the darkness. And we asked ourselves how to take the trauma and the terror out of routine childhood experiences. One thing we knew for certain: solving problems technically and explaining them rationally wouldn’t get us very far. First, we had to address them on an emotional, even mystical plane.

Childhood can be full of play and promise, but also pain. What might seem like a temporary annoyance to grownups can be felt as an unending bout of humiliation and suffering for young hearts and minds. Pink eye, lice, ear infections, zits—the barrage of indignities can wreak havoc on even the most self-confident kid.

But what if these childhood ailments were recast as rites of passage and superpowers? What if the telltale itchy scalp or bloodshot eyes could be framed as something to embrace, even be proud of? That’s what Phantasy Pharmacy seeks to capture in its design fiction collection of mythic tools that could be used to combat common childhood ailments and illnesses in a way that celebrates each malady from beginning to end.

To get the full, unadulterated experience, check out phph.ideo.com.

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Did you ever have lice as a kid? A bunch of us here at IDEO Cambridge did and we haven't forgotten how awful and embarrassing it felt. And when designers are faced with never-ending, wish-I-could-forget-you experiences, they start looking for ways to fix them. Recently, the studio banded together to create Phantasy Pharmacy, a bit of design fiction to help us stretch our imaginative limits and wrestle down unhappy childhood memories.

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.