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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Designers prototype everyday. It’s an essential part of the design and development process that involves translating early ideas into tangible prototypes that we can test in real life with real users. Prototyping is about being able to understand a challenge or an opportunity and find creative ways to move toward a solution, step by step. Essentially homing in on “building the right thing,” before “building that thing right.”

But the prototyping process doesn’t have to be limited to what you do for work. In fact, bringing this approach to your everyday life has the magical effect of turning common challenges into moments of playful exploration. It’s not necessarily about finding the ultimate answer, but enjoying the opportunity to experiment, improve, and learn along the way. You can prototype anything as long as you have the right mindset and get creative with your tools.

Here’s what it looked like when a sous-vide experiment took me down a prototyping rabbit hole (and how it could take you down one too).

Step 1: Get inspired

Inspiration can come from many places, like frustration with tools or objects that are not easy to use or the simple joy of creative exploration. For me, the latter happened when I stumbled across a recipe that used sous-vide, the technique of slowly heating meat or fish to its perfect core temperature so it doesn’t become dry or overcooked.

I thought it would be fun to try out for a dinner party, but didn't want to invest in a professional sous-vide machine. A typical moment where my prototyping obsession kicks in…

Step 2: Start out low-fidelity

An essential step while prototyping is identifying the simplest way to obtain the intended result—to achieve more with less. Isn’t the sous-vide technology just slowly heating up ingredients and stabilizing the temperature over a long period of time? That seemed pretty simple. So I gathered my materials: heat-proof bags, an electric thermostat, and of course, a couple of beautiful steaks.

I sealed the steaks in the heat-resistant bags, put them into a pot of water and used my oven to heat them up to 53°C/127 °F (the perfect core temperature for a medium rare steak). Unfortunately, the thermostat of a regular kitchen oven is relatively inaccurate, with the actual temperature being ±10°C/18°F compared to what it shows! That can make the difference between your meat being bloody as hell and completely overcooked.

That meant I had to place myself in front of my oven for over two hours, staring at the tiny LCD display of my electric thermostat and manually balancing the inaccuracy of the oven by turning the temperature up and down.

Step 3: Analyze your results

The good news: the meal was perfect—the meat medium rare—and my friends were impressed. But sitting in front of my oven, watching a thermostat for multiple hours, was less than ideal. This was the perfect starting point for the next iteration—looking into ways to automate and refine the temperature stabilization and improve my personal user experience.

Step 4: Iterate on key features

That’s how I found myself on a Saturday afternoon hooking up a simple heating rod, my electronic thermostat, and a milk stirrer with an Arduino board.

I mounted my thermostat to the top of the pot and coded my Arduino board to activate the heating rod as long as the temperature of the water bath stayed below 53°C/127 °F. Triggering the milk stirrer every once in a while ensured that the temperature stayed consistent throughout the pot. My prototype ran this process every 10 seconds and freed me up to focus on other parts of the dinner preparation while delivering another round of perfectly cooked meat and fish.

Step 5: Repeat until satisfied—or pivot

Each iteration of a prototype will reveal more detailed feedback and help you get closer to an actual solution. That’s why prototyping is the best way to learn while moving forward, and to de-risk decisions on product innovation or bigger investments.

Using my sous-vide prototype several times helped me identify multiple opportunities to improve it, like how to make it as compact as possible for easy storage (a great design and prototyping task in itself!). But most importantly, by using the prototype, I realized that I missed the sensorial experience of cooking. Simply waiting for ingredients to reach their core temperature in the water bath felt like an artificial, chemical experiment and was not the rich sensory experience I was looking for when spending time in the kitchen on weekends.

So I decided to pivot. After not using the prototype for months, I disassembled it and freed up the components for my next prototyping rabbit hole. Even if the sous-vide prototype actually never made it into a final solution, it helped me better understand what I enjoy most about cooking, and taught me something that I’m sure will be applicable to a future experiment—because the prototyping obsessive’s job is never done. Now, on to the next project!

On a Saturday afternoon (pre-COVID), I found myself in my kitchen, hooking up an Arduino board to a heating rod with one hand, and handling an electronic thermometer and a milk-stirrer with the other. How did I end up here? A hunt for the perfectly-cooked steak—and a typical result of my obsession with prototyping.

For years, I’ve watched smart companies buy into big data. Yet despite huge investments, some of them fail to reap the rewards. A 2017 MIT study revealed that 63% of executives expected to see a large impact on their offerings from AI in the next few years. But of the 14% of executives who reported already seeing a large impact, most cited examples in automation, decision-making support, and operational diagnostics for internal capabilities. Those kinds of advances can contribute to higher profits and short-term differentiation, but operational efficiencies do not generally help organizations grow beyond their peers. They also aren’t the deciding factor that will carry you through a yo-yoing economy. So how, exactly, do successful organizations unlock sustained and differentiated value in an AI-enabled world, at a time when immediate change may seem necessary just to survive?

It starts with experimenting and iterating with data—in a responsible way— to find your organization’s unique value proposition. Intentional experimentation mitigates the risks of failure by ensuring that you learn which data skillsets are critical to your organization, while at the same time identifying product-market fit. It’s a process that can happen before, during, or after a broader digital transformation, and there are three different ways to approach these intentional experiments: scaling internal offers, piloting to stretch, and purposeful venturing.

Scaling internal offers

In 2004, a web design company called 37signals needed a project management tool to keep all of its work streams on track. Initially, its solution—Basecamp—was meant to be a tool that would help the company be more efficient, and serve as a single source of truth for all its projects. But the more valuable it became internally, the more the company realized that it could be valuable externally. Eventually, Basecamp became 37signals’ core business; it adopted Basecamp as its name, and folded other offerings under the new brand.

Scaling internal offers is a smart way to create new revenue streams that can also help drive an organizational purpose. It’s a particularly good approach for companies that value creating internal capabilities and investing in their employees.

Another example comes from a liability insurance company that had recently gone through quarterly reviews. The company took a deep dive into large lawsuits, setting case direction and identifying where liability existed and standards had been breached. These observations were used to set financial reserves and, after months of manual curation, create risk-management training materials. While this company had already developed a technique for improving best practices, leveraging data to create a digital tool would give them an opportunity to scale up dramatically. The resulting in-house product allows the company’s claims and risk management representatives to rapidly identify new and emerging trends, as well as strategize case management on the portfolio level, saving thousands of human hours and much more in lawsuit expenses over the course of a year. With a bit more refinement, the firm could offer a version of its tool directly to policy owners, which could allow them to adopt best practices in real-time.

Piloting to stretch

A classic example of this approach comes from Netflix, which started offering streaming video services in 2007, alongside their penalty-free mail order DVD rentals. When the streaming service was born, it was a digital replica of the video store experience, browsing and selecting movies from a wall. But as Netflix accumulated ever more data about what people watched and their preferences, the streaming service became a data-driven way to personalize and recommend content, better fulfilling its purpose of “entertaining the world.” In fact, developing this data-driven capability in-house has given them sufficient insights into viewers’ preferences, which they are now using to create their own content, dramatically shifting the entire media landscape because of the data they own.

Piloting to stretch is a method of launching a new venture that brings in cash and stretches the organization to more intentionally fulfill its purpose. Often, that can require an entirely new business unit, with a new culture and team, so that it can grow without absorbing existing constraints. This approach is particularly appropriate for organizations that are seeking a new lever for growth, or are looking to disrupt their industry.

For Ascensia Diabetes Care, it was about recognizing a service gap for patients newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Most people, shortly after receiving their diagnosis, are scheduled for a brief consultation with a certified diabetes educator (CDE) who helps them learn the basics of managing the disease. But the short time a CDE spends with a client isn't nearly enough to establish new habits and enable sustained lifestyle changes. Ascensia saw an opportunity to create a new remote care service that would allow people with diabetes to interact with CDEs over a prolonged period of time through a telehealth platform, helping them better acclimate to their condition. To design the right program and path for each patient, Ascensia created data-driven tools that would help CDEs know how and when to interact with users. Initially, the company piloted the app with 60 people, and early results showed that users were willing to adopt and adhere to the program. Only two participants failed to complete the study—a stunning success rate when adherence to therapy for chronic illnesses in developed countries averages around 50%.

Purposeful venturing

Google may have started as a search engine, but in 2015 Alphabet emerged as an umbrella organization that made space for Google to pursue other ventures, some that might seem far beyond the scope of the core business. Alphabet’s interests— everything from life science (Calico) to transportation (Waymo)—are all in service of doing the right thing, and separating Alphabet’s other ventures from Google kept them from getting mired in particulars of the Google organization. This nimbleness has allowed Alphabet to fulfill its broader purpose, even during the extreme uncertainty of a global pandemic; the company quickly launched one venture, Verily’s Project Baseline, to research COVID-19, while Google and Apple have partnered to develop an exposure notification system.

Purposeful venturing is a way for an organization to create new business lines that drive growth. These ventures operate independently, with their own teams and cultures, and may require dramatically different ways of working that would be distracting for the core business’ operations. It’s a good fit for companies that might have many different ways of achieving their purpose, or for firms that can create symbiotic effects with auxiliary offerings.

In practice, it can also look like this: A nimble venture firm called 1848 Ventures (a subsidiary of Westfield Insurance) recognized that staffing is one of the biggest uncertainties business owners grapple with. Over-staffing eats into their already razor-thin margins; under-staffing means long lines and lost revenue. By rooting their innovation efforts in their purpose—to help their customers mitigate risk and uncertainty—the firm saw an opportunity to create a service that would help small businesses better manage their expenses through a tool that combines large data sets and an intuitive interface to optimize operational decisions. This new product was piloted with restaurants to help them offset the thin margins they need to survive.

Regardless of whether you experiment by scaling internal offers, piloting to stretch, or purposeful venturing, there are ample opportunities to simultaneously unlock product-market fit while getting a better grasp of the capabilities your organization needs to grow. Design offers a way to mitigate the risk of missing product-market fit and improve your odds of success in a way that dovetails with your existing capabilities and long-term vision. So after you pick your path, get out there and start prototyping early and often with data products, just like you would with anything else. It’s the best way to make sure that your data investment will push you past operational efficiencies, to sustained and real growth.

Illustrations by Nate Kitch

Over the past six months, the pandemic and the economic uncertainty it ushered in have sent companies in every industry flailing; to survive, many have leapt to major digital transformations. Scrambling CEOs have bought into the hype around data and AI that has been swirling for the last decade, all in hopes of making it to the other side. It’s a smart move. Even in a moment as stark as this one, with no sure path to a return to normalcy, data has the potential to ethically deliver unprecedented value to consumers, organizations, and shareholders. But just because the potential is there doesn’t mean the full value of these investments is being realized.

But we recognize that convergence, too, is an opportunity for creativity. These moments can contain sensemaking—the finding of patterns or shifting of perspectives that brings your team to a new, shared understanding of what you have and what lies ahead. In making choices, you are collectively committing to a common vision of what the future could be. It can feel optimistic, unifying, and clarifying. And we know it can be extra challenging to converge when you’re not all in the same room.

I started writing this piece a few months ago, before COVID-19 forced a lot of folks to shift from working in offices to working at their kitchen tables. I’m of the mind that every meeting deserves a warm-up, and I believe it’s even more true today. If your team is working remotely, they’ll be (virtually) walking in from a greater diversity of physical and mental places (for example, perhaps they’ve only taken 72 steps today and their brains and bodies have turned to video-call-induced oatmeal), so creating the conditions for focused, convergent work is even more important.

Here are 4 warm-ups to help your team creatively and remotely converge:

1. Rank this

Instructions: Before your meeting, using a live collaboration tool, set up a spectrum (a simple horizontal line will do) in the virtual space. On the left, write “least”; on the right, write “most.” Pre-create 3-4 Post-its or colored squares per person. Place them off to the side.

To begin, have everyone type a noun in each of their stickies. Then have one person propose an adjective and add it to the top of the spectrum. (If your adjective is crunchy, your spectrum would be least crunchy on the left to most crunchy on the right.)

As a group, as fast as you can, collectively sort all the noun stickies along the spectrum of that adjective. (For example, sort all nouns according to where they fall on the scale of least to most hairy, grumpy, or miraculous). Attempting to do it all at once should feel like joyful chaos.

Pick out a new adjective and re-sort, reminding folks that anyone can move any Post-it, not just their own. Go through a few rounds until laughs abound.

Why it works: Prioritizing is a critical and challenging part of convergence. And it is made even harder when the options you are deciding between feel like they exist on diametrically different axes. This warm-up will help you get comfortable in the ambiguity that is comparing apples and oranges (or perhaps even apples and orange shoes).

2. Goodbye, hello

Instructions: Ask everyone to come prepared to the meeting with a pen and something to write on.

Before you dive into the content of your meeting, have everyone reflect on something they let go of last year and capture a quick sketch of it. Then, separately, have them draw something that was able to fill that newly open space. Have everyone go around and share their drawings by holding them up to the camera.

Why it works: Saying no can feel like the hardest part of convergence, especially when people feel ownership over or connection to the ideas on the table. This reflection exercise will help folks remember there’s power and opportunity in choosing what not to do—because it allows us to focus more energy on the things we do choose to do.

3. Object convergence

Instructions: Ask everyone to come prepared to the meeting with a pen and something to write on.

Have everyone sketch a noun—things like a stapler, a mother-in-law, a glass of water—then go around and share. Pair people up and give them 30 seconds to brainstorm and find a new noun that connects what each individual drew (for example, stapler + glass of water = anchor). Have them do this using the chat function on your video call platform. Multiple conversations will be happening in the chat. But don’t worry, that adds a laughable challenge. Once each pair finds their linking noun, have one person sketch it, then go around and share.

Pairs pairs into quads and have them repeat the process, finding what connects those new things (anchor + lemon = scurvy). Repeat until the collective group has arrived at a single object that has united them entirely. (Hint: like in a game of telephone, this will likely look nothing like any idea anyone started with.)

Why this works: The way forward may not look like choosing person A’s idea or person B’s. It may require finding a third way that draws from the best of both. This warm-up will help you avoid the Frankenstein compromise, where, rather than making decisions, the team mashes all of the ideas together, and dilutes them all to uselessness in the process. In this exercise, teams practice the skill of looking beyond individual ideas to a higher connecting goal or purpose, and collectively aligning on this new vision.

Convergence can feel heavy. This will bring a bit of levity to the process, allowing your team to find the optimism and energy to build on one another’s ideas moving forward.

4. Shake it out

Instructions: Have everyone stand up and close their eyes. Then give these directions, while doing it with them: Reaching out all around you with your hands, shake them vigorously to manifest into the space the multitude of what if’s, what could be’s, and fears of the future. Now, use a pushing motion, clear a bubble of safe, fresh air around you. All together, let’s take a deep breath in and ground ourselves in this space.

Having everyone close their eyes creates an important sense of safety. No one can look like an idiot if they can’t be looked at. Worried that people have stopped wearing pants to video calls, and won’t want to stand up in front of their camera? Have everyone turn off video first, then give the instructions.

Why this works: Our physical state is intricately connected to our mental state. So often at work we ignore our physical bodies, thinking them a distraction, nuisance, or simply irrelevant. In the world of working remotely many of us spend our working hours glued to a screen, ceasing to exist in the three-dimensional plane. Getting your body in the right place (and remembering it exists at all) will help get your mind right too.

It is not infrequent that a team gets to a point of convergence and all feels like a swirling mess of hypotheticals. This warm-up will help create the mental clarity and space to step back and find the broader picture.

Go forth and prototype

Decision-making can be hard and stressful. You’ll probably have to kill some darlings. But you don’t want your team to walk away feeling unheard because the phrase most commonly used in your meeting was “we can’t.”

If instead you can galvanize them—catalyze their creative, collaborative brains in finding and forging the path forward—you will leave with teammates bought into a future they want to build together.

Take these warm-ups and hack them, make them your own, and iterate on them. How can you prime your collaborators to optimistically say “no” to make way for “yes,” find a third way forward, and see past the chaos to clarity?

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When I say “creative meeting,” what comes to mind? What’s the energy like? What are you and your colleagues doing? My bet is that you’re imagining a brainstorming session. Generating ideas. If you’re lucky, it’s joyful, full of potential, and exhilarating. What I’m guessing you’re not thinking of? Those moments where you have to make decisions. Prioritize, say no, and shut some doors. At IDEO, we call this part of the process convergence: the refining and focusing of options to move forward with a strategic set of choices.

Many say the food system is broken. But the problems that people, the economy, and the environment suffer as a consequence of the system aren’t so much a sign that it’s broken as that it wasn’t designed to generate good outcomes for the world we live in today. We shouldn’t try to fix the existing system but rather design new structures that nourish us.

Design unites what is necessary and desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible, economically viable, and environmentally regenerative. We live in a world of intertwined, inequitable systems—food, education, health, and more—where the problems are dynamic, multifaceted, and inherently human.

By designing for adaptability, trust, dignity, and agency, we can build a more resilient food system.

Designing for Adaptability and Trust

Today’s system was designed for efficiency: We’ve built machines to harvest rows of a single crop, consolidated farms and processing facilities to achieve economies of scale, and established highly specialized supply chains.

COVID-19 has revealed that this efficient system is rigid—it can’t adapt to new conditions. People are trying to help: Grocers are buying produce from farmers and donating it to food banks, and restaurants are repackaging their bulk purchases into household meal kits. But it’s not sustainable to purchase extra food to donate or convert 50-pound bags of onions into smaller one-pound bags.

An adaptable system requires many changes, from digitization of operating systems, to more transparent data sharing, to improved distribution of food to where it’s most needed. Investment in processing and logistics infrastructure closer to farms is key, thus designing redundancy back into our highly consolidated system.

There’s also value in examining what makes the current system work and carrying these elements into a new structure. One positive enabler of today’s efficiencies is the network of trusting relationships that farmers have built over time.

Due to COVID-19 and other factors, it’s impossible to build new relationships in person. Farmers can’t travel to meet buyers. Instead, building on existing trust, farmers need innovative ways to establish new partnerships rapidly. Farm2People is helping farmers and fighting hunger by designing for adaptability and trust. The platform enables produce to be directed toward those who need it by connecting farmers to buyers and donation recipients.

• How might we design for trust in a contactless world?
• How might we look to circular economy models to rethink the supply chain?
• How might we apply technology to rapidly build relationships?

Designing for Dignity and Agency

The system’s resilience depends on the resiliency of those who power it. The essential workers who make the food system run are at the greatest risk of illness and the lowest paid. Many are people of color. Society’s racist systems—including the food system—have marginalized Black, Indigenous and people of color and left them more susceptible to the health and economic challenges of COVID-19.

The pandemic demonstrates how essential these individuals are and how tenuous their livelihoods are. Given the nature of their work, it’s impractical for farmers to maintain the social distance necessary to protect themselves, and for some employers, personal protective equipment is too expensive to provide.

Solutions have been swift and well-intentioned but short-term. Some restaurants created campaigns raising money to cover employee costs, and Portugal extended temporary residency to migrant farmers so they can access health care. Workers will need employment that can withstand advancing technologies, like automation, which will require training in a new set of skills. This is not just a food crisis but an education crisis. The interlinked nature of our systems means that solutions must have broad scopes and address multiple factors to be sustainable.

We have an opportunity to design for dignity and agency.

• How might leaders share the responsibility for worker livelihoods?
• How might we empower workers by having them design solutions for what they face?
• How might leaders help the industry become one of continuous learning to enable professional resilience?

No one knows what will happen. But as today’s system demonstrates, we know our actions will have impact for years to come. By designing for adaptability, trust, dignity, and agency, we can build a more resilient food system.

This essay first appeared in the Milken Institute’s Power of Ideas collection focused on building and rebuilding lives in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay series features insights from thought leaders across industries.

With hotels and schools closed, farmers are destroying millions of pounds of produce they can’t sell. Despite this waste, the number of people with food insecurity could rise from 130 million to nearly 300 million due to COVID-19. This estimate doesn’t address the millions whose means of making a living have evaporated. These challenges, while exacerbated by COVID-19, existed long before.

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.