Obesity exists at the complex intersection of a clinical condition and a cultural force. Clinically, it comes with a diagnosis and treatment plan. Culturally, it is influenced by beliefs, identity, and self-worth, making it deeply personal and often taboo. Families, healthcare providers, and experts tend to avoid the fraught “o-word,” opting for euphemisms instead. For families on Medicaid, these challenges are even more pronounced. Award-winning health-tech startup Clarity Pediatrics, together with designers from IDEO, IDEO.org, and with support from Rise Together Ventures, sought to uncover the obstacles to healthier lifestyles and create a free report for US pediatricians who want to bend the curve on the childhood obesity epidemic.

Research with kids and parents on Medicaid in Dallas, Texas, and California’s Bay Area, along with interviews with healthcare providers and experts across the country, uncovered stories of stigma and frustration. Parents spoke of the daily challenges of balancing multiple jobs, sourcing affordable healthy food, and finding time to make necessary lifestyle changes. They described rushed pediatric visits that left them with unclear next steps and feelings of blame. Provider conversations echoed these struggles, noting time constraints and limited follow-up options.  

Ultimately, food had become a daily torment for these families. Eating was unavoidable and also one of the few affordable indulgences low-income parents were able to provide. Once kids left their own homes, they were surrounded by unhealthy temptations, making it feel impossible for parents to maintain control. The popularity of costly new weight-loss medications and surgical procedures added another layer of complexity for families who had been underserved by—and therefore distrustful of—America’s healthcare system. With so much of the responsibility placed on parents to self-direct care, inequities deepened, adding to the burden of families already at a breaking point.

To design a path forward, IDEO and IDEO.org mapped a family’s needs before, during, and after pediatric visits. This work revealed critical parts of the journey where families needed more support: recognizing early signs of obesity, navigating provider conversations, and sustaining healthier habits at home.

These insights informed a theory of change framework that provides actionable guidance for stakeholders involved in obesity care. Grounded in three opportunity areas along the patient journey—building awareness, confidence, and capacity—the framework highlights how trust, dignity, and systemic support can lead to lasting outcomes.

IDEO and IDEO.org also developed 10 user-centered concepts spanning digital, physical, and service offerings to reduce stigma and empower families to sustain healthier lives. These ideas address dignified diagnoses and structural inequities, among other pressing issues. Complementing these concepts, IDEO created a short documentary of a mother discussing her family’s experience navigating childhood obesity to help pediatric providers—many of whom have had very different lived experiences from the families and patients they serve—better understand the realities of the daily struggles of many families on Medicaid.

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Designed for the public good, the interactive website and free downloadable report, Reimagining Childhood Obesity, contain research findings, design recommendations, and a theory of change framework. The goal: provide practical, actionable guidelines for pediatricians, educators, healthcare organizations, and innovators to meet families and kids where they are and support them as they move toward a healthier future.

21% of US children are obese. 40% of Latino youth are either overweight or obese.

26% of kids on Medicaid experience childhood obesity, compared with 11% on private insurance.

525,600 minutes: Total time per year parents spend caring for their children. 17 minutes: Average time a pediatrician spends with a child during their annual exam, a small window to address a complex chronic condition such as obesity.

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user-centered ideas to help pediatricians reduce the stigma of childhood obesity in an accessible report

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opportunity areas for building trust with young patients and providing family support

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With its reach, Acer saw an opportunity to power positive choices in the billions. ‍

But new products and services won’t succeed if consumers don’t want them, no matter how sustainable they are. A few years go, the Harvard Business Review’s report, "The Elusive Green Consumer," found that about two-thirds of those surveyed said they wanted to buy brands that advocated sustainability. But only a quarter actually did.

Meanwhile, the market for climate era products is only growing: In 2022, Forbes found that nearly 90 percent of the Gen X consumers they surveyed said they’d be willing to spend more on sustainable products, compared to just over a third two years before. The desire was only higher among Millennials and Gen Z; they just didn’t like what was on offer.

To drive sales and growth, and meet its sustainability commitments, Acer needed to capitalize on desirability, deepening the connection between Acer’s sustainable options and consumer needs, lowering the barrier to purchase. To that end, Acer and IDEO created the Acer Climate Lab, a cross-organizational team and initiative, to launch the company on a transformative journey to deepen the connection between Acer's conscious technology and the realities of people's lives and needs across four strategic areas.

Together, the combined team conducted extensive research to better understand consumer attitudes and behaviors toward sustainable products, and identified everyday areas where Acer’s conscious technology might be able to have the most significant impact: living, working, moving, and learning.

• Living: Envisions homes as hubs of energy efficiency and climate resilience, leveraging technology to optimize energy use, enhance air quality, and enable proactive climate management. These concepts include technologies like smart energy systems, adaptive air solutions, and integrated home management platforms explore how technology can support sustainable daily living.
  
  
• Working: Reimagines the workplace with flexible, sustainable technology solutions that prioritize resource optimization and circular practices. Concepts such as Acer Loop could provide a subscription-based model that ensures access to the latest technology, supports remote work, and reduces electronic waste through effective recycling and rehoming practices.
  
  
• Moving: Focuses on the transformation of urban mobility by integrating technology into systems that promote sustainable transportation. Concepts could include e-mobility hubs that highlight how urban spaces could offer seamless access to shared, low-emission travel options, reducing reliance on traditional carbon-heavy methods.
  
  
• Learning: Explores pathways to sustainable education by imagining environments where technology supports circularity and accessibility. This includes ideas like refurbished devices for students, repair and reuse programs, and educational spaces designed with climate-positive principles, nurturing eco-conscious habits in future generations.

Together with Red Peak and Sid Lee, the team launched the culmination of the work at COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, positioning Acer as a pioneer in climate positive technology. The exhibit included immersive experiences and interactive displays demonstrating how Acer's sustainable solutions seamlessly integrate into everyday life. Visitors could engage with scenarios depicting sustainable living, working, moving, and learning, emphasizing the practical benefits of Acer’s innovations.

Acer's journey through the Climate Lab project underscores a commitment to sustainability that goes beyond mere compliance. With this new cross-business team tackling the real-world barriers faced by consumers, Acer is paving the way for a more inclusive, sustainable future. This initiative not only aligns with global climate goals, but also sets a precedent for the tech industry, demonstrating that with the right approach, sustainability and innovation can go hand in hand.

In a survey, 65% of respondents said they want to buy brands that advocate sustainability, yet only about 26% actually do. 

Nearly one in two consumers say they either don’t know what information to trust, or that nothing can influence how much they trust a business’s commitment to sustainability.

1 cohesive strategy

for climate era products across 6 different fields

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With the introduction of generative AI, Ethiqly and IDEO saw a unique opportunity to help teachers, by cutting down the time it takes to provide each student with feedback on their writing assignments. But to get there, they had to learn from the experts themselves. To kick off the project, the team headed into the classroom to co-design with students and teachers.

One of the first problems they discovered? Traditional methods of grading essays are laborious and inefficient for high school teachers, who are already notoriously busy and overworked. What teachers really wanted was to spend time giving each student the personalized feedback that helps them grow. Meanwhile, students really struggled to get started on their writing assignments, overwhelmed by looking at a blank page.

Together, the team started to think about how it could harness AI to make personalized instruction more accessible for all students, helping teachers provide better feedback at scale, and giving students the support they need to not only get started on their writing assignments, but improve their work. 

With insights directly from students and teachers, the IDEO team built working prototypes, allowing them to beta test the product in schools, and demonstrate value to investors. They also developed a brand identity and style guide for launch, which came to life in a pitch deck, landing page, and other brand expressions.

The resulting product is a sophisticated blend of AI technology and user-friendly interfaces that empower teachers and inspire students. The goal isn’t just to get to a finished essay, but to assist students in developing critical thinking skills. Ethiqly's tools help students organize their thoughts and get writing by providing contextual prompts and suggestions—without doing the work for them. And the AI assistant supports teachers by suggesting comments based on evaluation criteria they have set, and teachers choose which feedback is relevant for their individual students. Students never see it without teacher approval.

As one teacher told the team, “With leveraging AI more in education, there’s this fear that it’s deprofessionalizing the field or it’s a direct replacement of a teacher in a classroom. I think it gives us meaningful data, so that we can actually teach the way that we want to in order to support our students.” Now, Ethiqly is in use in classrooms in 25 countries, positively impacting students across the globe.

Teachers know 1:1 interaction is key to student success, but an EdWeek survey found only 46% of teachers’ time is spent teaching, while 25 hours/week goes to other tasks like grading and making lesson plans.

25 countries…and growing

Ethiqly’s reach in classrooms around the world

Designing a piece of a city, like a park, doesn’t start with a blank slate. There are always traces of the past and the present, and the lived history of its residents.

To create a full picture of that story, the IDEO team built workshops for the community centered around questions about the unique experiences of living in Frisco. They invited them to reflect on the communities they grew up in, the city of today, and the public spaces that have played formative roles for them. 

From their answers, a common value emerged: heritage. Frisco is a rapidly growing city, with residents whose families have lived there for centuries living side-by-side with more recent neighbors from diverse cultures and ethnic groups. Participants shared a vision of Grand Park as a unifying, shared space, a backdrop where many families can form foundational memories in Frisco.

Next, IDEO brought in multisensory design prompts to help participants further conceptualize the park. How did they want it to feel, sound, and smell? In the built-up, suburban city of Frisco, residents imagined a space that was less planned, enabling guided wandering and exploration. They also hoped that the park would inspire loved ones and descendants to feel a sense of curiosity and wonder.

At the end of workshops and sessions with community groups, the IDEO team took Polaroids of participants, asking, “What’s one word you want to describe Grand Park in the future?” Those words informed the collective vision that IDEO delivered to the city of Frisco, which included spatial concepts, user journeys, and branding for the park, all designed to showcase its unique landscapes. In January 2024, Frisco City Council approved the vision statement, and officials expect to break ground in the second half of 2025.

The population of Frisco is growing rapidly; its population is up 516% since the year 2000.

At more than 1,000 acres, Grand Park in Frisco is even larger than Central Park in New York City.

Less than 1% of Blackland Prairie soil remains in the region, and some of it is in Grand Park.

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Frisco residents were engaged in the process, from City Council members to high school students

200+

respondents shared anonymous feedback on what they imagined the park should be

To better understand the madness of the focus group, I decided to do a bit of research on how it came to be.

The story begins in 1938, when a psychoanalyst named Ernest Dichter left Vienna to escape the Nazis and headed for the US. When he arrived in New York, he made an interesting career decision. Instead of helping individuals understand their problems, he decided to offer his psychoanalytic services to corporations.

One of Dichter's first clients was General Mills, which had a problem with its Betty Crocker cake mix. Its food scientists had formulated a dry mix that required only the addition of water. Once placed in the oven, it miraculously blossomed into instant cake. But after a good start, sales flattened. The executives were baffled: The product was more convenient. Why weren’t the housewives buying it?

Dichter gathered groups of women and put them through exercises derived from Freud’s methods of probing the unconscious, including free association and Rorschach tests. He explored their feelings about relationships and their role in the family. And then he started asking them about cake.

What he took away from these sessions was that cake was more than just a sweet baked product. It was loaded with sexual symbolism. He was particularly fascinated by the ritual of the wedding cake, which featured the husband taking a long knife and plunging it into the white cake.

His conclusions, like a good cake, were multilayered. First, the cake was symbolic of the wife’s relationship to the husband, and so she felt guilty making it by just adding some water to powder. Second, the sexually charged nature of the cake meant that it had associations with fertility, even childbirth.

Ernest Dichter and a Betty Crocker ad from the 1950s that anoints cake as the great unifier—almost as good as make-up sex.

His solution to these complex issues was simple: General Mills should remove the powdered egg from the formulation, and instead require housewives to add their own fresh eggs.

It’s hard to know whether the executives were swayed by Dichter’s Sexual Theory of Cake, or whether they liked the fact that removing the eggs would save money. Either way, they took his advice. And, sure enough, sales soared.

In the following decades, Dichter imitators turned his methodology into a hackneyed formula, and the focus group lost its way. We wondered if we could bring emotion and surprise back with a 21st-century reboot of the technique. Here are the five principles we followed:

1. Break the mirror

Hiding in a dark room behind a two-way mirror distances you from the consumer. If you want to find out what makes people tick, get eye to eye with them in the room. If you find this uncomfortable, suck it up: Discomfort is a sign that you’re learning something.

2. Lose the clipboard

The dynamic of “moderator and participant” creates an authority relationship in the room, which can lead to participants saying what they think they are “supposed” to say. Try having the questions served up differently—such as pulling them at random out of a jar. People will share more when they feel they’re having a natural conversation.

3. Think dinner party, not jury service

The original idea of focus groups was to create an environment in which people encouraged each other to share their feelings. Today’s sessions are often stiff and with the same amount of social interaction you’d expect from people doing jury service. So, do whatever you can to create a warm social environment. In our recent experiment, we started the session with 30 minutes of improv exercises, run by a trainer from Second City.

4. Record video confessionals

When Dichter ran focus groups, he would make all the interpretations and deliver a report to the client. These days, the client needs to feel some empathy themselves. The best way to achieve this is video, but an intrusive camera lens can cause people to clam up. We solved this by running interviews using a hidden-camera technique pioneered by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (see below).

5. Talk about the why

All the clever methods in the world won’t help if you don’t have the core goal in mind: understanding the motivations behind human behavior. We live in an age of data: We have more information than ever before that will tell us what people are up to. But the greatest inspiration comes when you can form theories about the why. Despite being more than a half century old, the focus group is still one of the best techniques for achieving this.

The Errol Morris–pioneered "Interrotron" puts interviewees at ease by giving them the impression they're speaking to another human, not a camera lens.

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Focus groups suck, right? Bored people sitting in front of a mirror, delivering canned opinions on demand. Everyone from Silicon Valley to Amy Schumer pokes fun at them. But it wasn’t always this way: When focus groups started in the 1950s, they represented an exciting new way to probe the emotions and motivations underpinning human behavior. How did they get so staid and safe?

How did it all begin, you ask?

Long-time IDEOer Alan Ratliff was using the loo in Santa Cruz a few years back and took note of the graffiti on stall walls. He was struck by how openly and honestly strangers could share their most heartfelt feelings—in a public space. Combining this insight with the pause for thought that often strikes while seated on the throne, we thought we'd try inviting the same behavior on our own walls.

And how have people at IDEO responded?

Though the wait has admittedly increased, which brings no one joy, designing the bathroom as a place to intentionally linger and gin up ideas has become a point of pride.

Curious to learn more about how we nurture a culture of creativity? We tell the whole bathroom story, and many more, in Leading for Creativity, a new course taught by Tim Brown at IDEOU.com.

There's one stop we always make on our office tour: the john. Walls blackened by chalkboard-paint, every month presents a new opportunity to pose a controversial question and weigh in with controversial answers. Indeed, our bathroom has become one of the most—forgive us—productive places on the premises.

Unless I’m at a gig or a concert, it’s rare that I listen to music in the presence of other people. There’s background music, sure, but that feels different—I’m not really listening. Here in New York, there’s always live music on subway platforms, but we don’t listen by choice (and while it’s often great, it can also grate).

Listening to music with others need not be limited to experiences of live music, though. Deliberately listening to recorded music with other people can be a magical experience. That’s especially true if you’re hearing it in a context that's a little unexpected, such as a conference room.

It’s a luxury to be in the same space as others and not need to talk—to just be present.

In our New York studio, we’ve been gathering for a series of shared listening sessions, called the Sonic Shower. It’s a really simple format:

• every month or so
• we spend 15 minutes
• first thing in the morning
• listening to 3 to 5 pieces of recorded music
• from around the world
• that are selected and ordered around a theme
• and played on speakers in a room
• while people listen over coffee
• and glance at light program notes, if they so choose

Three things we like about the Sonic Shower

1. IT SUPPORTS OUR COMMUNITY

It’s just a lovely thing to start the day with music. And it’s lovely to be in the company of colleagues without the pressures of drumming up conversation. Listening together creates a delicate, light experience of community that works for everyone, even if you don’t feel much like chatting first thing in the morning.

2. IT’S A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION

At IDEO, it’s our job to seek inspiration wherever we can find it. It fuels great design by keeping our teams engaged. We’re great at hunting down visual inspiration in art, type, and digital experiments. But it’s easy to forget to open our ears up in the same way—to expose our brains and hearts to sounds we’ve never encountered before. Music is sonic storytelling—it opens up imaginative doors that we’d be crazy not to go through. Each Sonic Shower is a mix of songs that are somewhat easy (or familiar) and somewhat challenging (or likely different to what you might normally hear).

3. IT ENGENDERS GRATITUDE

In so much of our work, we’re interrogating experiences—figuring out what underpins them and picking out aspects that we can replicate or evolve. But during a Sonic Shower we just listen to the music. We don’t feel an obligation to discuss it or derive meaning from it there and then. It’s a luxury to be in the same space as others and not need to talk—to just be present. And, while it does help our work, we don’t treat the Sonic Shower like work. That gives us permission to receive the music as a precious gift. And gratitude feels good.

Sample a Sonic Shower

Here’s what we listened to at a winter-themed session in December. You can find the music on Spotify here.

Hvild (2009) by Hugi Gudmundsson

Now based in Denmark, Gudmundsson is one of the bright lights of contemporary Icelandic composition. A few years ago, in a neat nod to IDEO, he was awarded one of the country’s most prestigious arts prizes: the Optimism Award.

Hvild means "rest." It was written for a friend’s funeral and includes text about carrying water over a mountain...

Snow (1954) by Irving Berlin; performed by Rosemary Clooney and The Mellomen

This is one of the stand-out songs from Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. The movie version features the four leads—Clooney, Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen—singing the song together on a train. As you do.

Der Leiermann (1828) music by Franz Schubert; poem by Wilhelm Müller; performed by Jonas Kaufmann (tenor) and Helmut Deutsch (piano)

This is the final song of Winterreise (Winter Journey), Schubert’s monumental song cycle for voice and piano. Grab a whisky and listen to the whole thing sometime—it’s an intimate, crystalline marvel.

Der Leiermann translates as "The Hurdy-Gurdy Man." The hurdy-gurdy is an instrument where, to produce notes, you crank a handle that turns a greased wheel against its strings. Here’s the text of the song:

Behind the village stands a hurdy-gurdy man, cranking his instrument with frozen fingers. His begging bowl is always empty; no one listens to his music, and the dogs growl at him. But his playing never stops. “Strange old man. Shall I come with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to accompany my songs?”

The piano does so much more than simply accompany the voice. Elsewhere in the cycle, it becomes a powerful storm, the rush of water beneath ice, a creaking weathervane, and much more. Listen for how, in this song, it conjures up the sparse drone of the hurdy-gurdy.

Winter Darkness (2014) performed by Nils Økland (Hardanger fiddle) and Georg Buljo (voice)

The Hardanger fiddle is a traditional stringed instrument from Norway. Contemporary players such as Økland have coaxed the fiddle into modern music, working with collaborators near and far.

Buljo has done much the same with joik (pronounced ‘yoyk’), one of the oldest vocal traditions in Europe. A joik is both a style and a song form, deeply rooted in the Sami culture of Sweden, Norway, and northern Finland.

All that said, this is a pretty traditional piece—but modern, close recording lets us hear every crack in Buljo’s voice and every bow across the strings.

Does it sound like "winter darkness" to you?

It’s never been easier to share music with each other: Here’s a link, there’s a playlist, and off you go. At the same time, my experience of music has become more and more private, more and more mediated by headphones.

We thought about the physical context: If looking at a screen put viewers into a mode of judgment, what environment might lead them into a state of openness and wonder? After a few false starts—and ruling out marijuana—we settled on a campfire. Everyone has experienced the magnetism of a flickering flame and its power to open you up to a good story.

Burning wood was going to be a challenge indoors. But then another part of our talk occurred to us, in which we identify iPhone addiction as a scourge that prevents people from engaging in creative daydreaming. What if we took away the audience's phones and used them to stoke up the flames rather than dowse them?

Here’s how the experience played out. We gathered everyone in a conventional classroom setting and ran them through a calendar review exercise (“Look at your last week and count the hours of creative imagination”). Then we shared some recent brain science studies that point to the power of daydreaming to cultivate creativity. Diving deep into the intricacies of neuroanatomy, we could tell we were losing people.

Just before everyone fell asleep, we herded them through a back door to another part of the building. Here, in dimmed light, we had each person load a YouTube video of a campfire and set it on top of a foam-core structure made by our designers in the Chicago office. Soon we had a raging digital bonfire of iPhones, with additional sound effects from having our audience gently crinkle Post-It notes in their hands.

No campfire would be complete without taking turns strumming a guitar and telling stories of things we’d done to rediscover our creativity, so that's exactly what we did. The previously restless audience sat on the floor, gazing at the virtual fire, curious and relaxed.

Look at your last week's calendar and count the hours of creative imagination.

We turned the floor over to the attendees. What strategies did they use in their own practice?

One colleague shared a story of hanging a lamp above his desk to serve as a beacon. When the lamp was on, it let others in the studio know he was available to talk. Another shared her technique of running away from distractions—literally, on foot—until her head was clear. A third announced he would try to change his mindset by drawing for a few minutes each morning when he got out of bed. As the session ended, we asked everyone to write down something they would try in the future to spark their own creativity. Commitments were made and notes were tossed into “flames” as attendees drifted away, dreaming of a new way to work.

In sum, here are 5 ways to design a non-boring meeting:

1. Start conventionally, then lead attendees to an unknown frontier
2. Confiscate phones
3. Commit to a gimmick so they don't complain that you've taken their phones
4. Play music
5. Ask people to share personal stories

*Only one iPhone was lost during the making of this session… but seriously, who took it?

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Our quest: to invent an un-boring meeting. My colleague Michael Hendrix (above, immersed in one experiment—a bubble-bath-based brainstorm) and I were preparing a conference session about the importance of putting yourself in a creative mindset. But the way we were delivering it—two dudes standing at the front of a room with a PowerPoint deck—was about as inspiring as the DMV. We needed the audience to experience the thing we wanted to teach.

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.