The IDEO team quickly discovered that the challenge of designing a Digital@FEMSA super app for tens of millions of customers was matched only by the operational complexity of bringing together different teams that had already created various apps with separate value propositions. Not to mention the 22,000 stores specifically tailored to local communities.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team built on FEMSA’s already deep understanding of its customers by meeting them in their homes and communities. The team discovered that users didn't care about long-term rewards; instead, they wanted everyday help to thrive long-term. Connecting omnichannel rewards to regular spending would allow them to save time and money—something they said was particularly important. Along with market research, insights like these directly informed the app's design, ensuring that it was compatible with users' everyday habits and preferences.

Meanwhile, the project team also worked to ensure the app fit the priorities of the various teams inside Digital@FEMSA, designing a comprehensive process for testing joint value propositions. Together, the team created a new design system, iconography, and set of unifying principles. IDEO also worked closely with the Digital@FEMSA teams to ensure that the app's design was in line with their strategic goals and technical capabilities, and built the app's initial information architecture. They incorporated secure transactions, effortless coupon redemption, personalized offers, and a cohesive loyalty program.

From there, the IDEO and Digital@FEMSA teams quickly transitioned into the design and development phase, producing prototypes of the new app, dubbed Spin Premia. With the help of user testing, they were able to continuously iterate to improve the app's features and functionalities, creating a user experience that was both seamless and intuitive. In just 10 months, they went from a small digital team with an ambitious idea, to a 150+ people product organization and an MVP launched in one region. And thanks to a tight partnership, the teams were able to seamlessly integrate Spin Premia into Digital@FEMSA's existing systems, resulting in a scalable implementation nationwide just a few months later.

The introduction of Spin Premia was a milestone in FEMSA's digital transformation path. Following a true ship and iterate model, just a few months into the project, the company released a smaller, focused version of the app in just one city in Mexico to quickly learn from customer experience before expanding to new regions. Since then, the Spin Premia app has quickly gained popularity, offering a safe and user-friendly platform that millions of Mexican consumers have embraced. It has also allowed FEMSA to broaden its digital portfolio and extend its customer base throughout Mexico, elevating customer satisfaction and fueling business expansion.

13 million Mexicans visit FEMSA’s OXXO convenience stores every day. But the company had ambitions to leverage digital experiences to increase customer engagement.

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To get there, Digital@FEMSA needed to deliver exceptional digital products with the agility to serve an entire population.

4.7 stars

Spin Premia’s app store rating

22.8 million

active Spin Premia program users

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Midscale hotel brands are the fastest-growing hotel segment in the US, attractive to both travelers and hotel owners. But often, their messaging feels repetitive, and travelers have a tough time differentiating between them. With a warm, thoughtfully designed midscale brand, IHG had an enormous opportunity to distinguish itself in a crowded market. 

IHG’s goal was to deliver a guest experience that felt genuinely unique and resonant—and quickly. With costs on the rise, many owners were motivated to turn toward conversion brands, which allow them to refurbish hotels under a new brand rather than invest in construction, a way to grow their portfolio in a tight financing market. Meanwhile, IHG’s competitors were set to introduce new conversion brands of their own. The company was looking for a partner that could work swiftly and iteratively to deliver a distinct brand.

For the IDEO team, the answer lay in communicating the brand’s value, starting with a custom logo rendered by hand. Inspired by vintage sign painting and modernist typography, the team sketched different versions of the letterforms, reviewing them with IHG until they had a set that brought to life the generosity and sense of invitation associated with the hotel’s spaces. They also worked to ensure the wordmark was visually balanced and would translate well across a variety range of scales. From there, they built an expansive brand world, including bespoke navigation icons, a full interior and exterior signage system, and a video to support the Garner launch.

The result is a hotel brand that stands apart in its category for both travelers and owners: thoughtful and well-designed yet affordable. As competition in the midscale segment continues to increase, Garner has been central to IHG’s growth strategy. Launched in the fall of 2023, Garner opened 100 hotels worldwide in just 16 months, making it the fastest-ever IHG brand to scale globally. The brand’s increasing popularity among owners and developers is driven by the growing demand for conversion properties, which accounted for 52% of IHG’s room openings in 2025. Garner plans to continue its rapid expansion with nearly 80 additional hotels in 12 key markets, including the US, Mexico, Italy, and Japan.

Conversions account for 12% of the global hotel pipeline, enabling hotels to switch brands and refurbish, boosting revenue without expensive construction.
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The US midscale hotel segment, valued at $14B, is expected to reach $18B by 2030.

100 new Garner Hotels

in less than 3 years—the fastest-scaling brand in IHG's history

500 Garner Hotels

planned in the next 10 years; 1,000 over the next 20

Alzheimer’s and dementia are notoriously difficult to treat—and scientists estimate that some 50 percent of people who have dementia are undiagnosed. Recognition of symptoms and early intervention are key. Together and IDEO set out to conduct user research to inspire new products that would help patients with cognitive decline take charge of their brain health.

The first priority was to expand the reach of the Moving Together program, which combines group movement exercises with mindfulness techniques, led by a trained group instructor. The IDEO team conducted remote and in-person interviews in Florida, where one in five residents is age 65 and older, and rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia are among the highest in the country. One of the key insights the team discovered was that many older adults didn’t understand how behaviors like smoking, exercise, and diet can be risk factors for cognitive decline. Their input inspired a new design principle for the program: “No naked feedback.” Any time participants received health coaching advice about modifying their lifestyle, they would also be given resources on why and how to do it, so they would have a pathway to boosting their brain health. 

The IDEO team folded insights like this one into the design for four new product offerings, including personalized brain health education, new online community engagement tools, partnership programs, and health coaching services, as well as a new user interface to illustrate them. Along with Together they also developed an implementation roadmap of next steps to bring the new digital product offerings to market, such as hiring a brain health coach and creating a new course curriculum. Now, Together has enrolled 165 people in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial, which is looking at outcomes such as reduced risk of Alzheimer's and maintenance of cognitive function for the Brain Health Together program. With trial completion in Q3 2024 and product launch in early 2025, growing numbers of people with MCI will have access to this exciting program. Together incorporated almost all of the elements from the IDEO roadmap into the final curriculum, and the team often refers back to insights the team gathered as guiding design principles.

Fighting barriers to diagnosis

With its online program growing, Together wanted to take on an even bigger problem: dementia underdiagnosis. Co-founder Dr. Deborah Barnes had recently developed an algorithm that uses patients’ health records to calculate their risk of undiagnosed dementia, called the electronic health record Risk of Alzheimer's and Dementia Assessment Rule (eRADAR). Together was looking to find creative ways to equip and empower providers to use risk scores like eRADAR in primary care settings.

One piece of the puzzle? Many primary care doctors are unaware that better management of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia can have a positive impact on other chronic health issues—like diabetes, hypertension, and depression. So by encouraging providers to prioritize dementia care, they can help support the overall health of older adults with cognitive decline. The IDEO team recommended a curriculum for continuing education courses for doctors that make that link clear—another step toward increasing dementia diagnosis and improving overall health.

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Better help, sooner

To understand the patient experience, Together and IDEO decided to work directly with patients and caregivers to uncover what was stopping them from asking for dementia screening. The IDEO team quickly learned many patients were afraid of facing a diagnosis that signified a loss of agency and control, especially when they didn’t believe there were good treatment options. Often, they were unaware that there were things they could do to improve their brain health. They needed to know what steps to take after a diagnosis, and who could provide actionable advice. In response, the IDEO team designed a digital activity toolkit and physical booklet to guide patient families through the early stages of a dementia diagnosis, including recognizing the signs and symptoms, having better conversations with their doctor, and getting connected to support groups and programs like Moving Together.

Solving the problem of dementia underdiagnosis involves complex systems-level thinking and designing for the entire health ecosystem of patients, providers, and insurance payers, and solutions for Alzheimer’s and dementia care are still in their infancy. But already, this work is empowering patients and doctors to prioritize brain health and get screened sooner, and Together, which has since been acquired by Linus Health, is still working to move dementia care forward.

Approximately 12-18% of people aged 60 or older live with mild cognitive impairment, while memory loss, Alzheimer's and dementia affect more than 50 million people around the world.

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An estimated 50% of people living with dementia are undiagnosed.

165 enrolled

in the Boost Your Brain Health Clinical Trial

Many companies view culture-building initiatives as nice-to-haves. At Moderna, Mindsets are a business imperative, crucial to its plans to develop breakthrough products quickly.

For companies working on solutions as vital as a COVID-19 vaccine, delays and mistakes don’t just mean missing a product launch date—they’re life-or-death, and on a large scale. Moderna had to ensure that its employees knew how to make the right decisions, evaluate risk, and move quickly—even if they came from organizations with more bureaucracy and less risk tolerance. In 2021, IDEO sat down with longtime Moderna veterans to hear stories about moments that exemplify the company's culture, like the day a critical piece of equipment arrived but was too big to fit through the door. Taking it apart would have added days to their timeline. So employees took sledgehammers to a wall instead. Stories like this one fed into the crafting of the list of Mindsets, such as “Act with urgency: Action today compounds the lives saved tomorrow” and “We behave like owners: The solutions we’re building go beyond any job description.”

To gather feedback, the team shared the draft Mindsets with a diverse set of employees—new hires, veterans, folks already closely aligned with the culture, folks for whom it wasn’t the most natural fit, and a plethora of employee resource groups. CEO Stéphane Bancel and the leadership team took crafting and iterating on the Mindsets very seriously, wordsmithing and tweaking them with the team until they were ready to share them officially. Now, new hires learn about the company’s Mindsets in Moderna ONE, an onboarding process that IDEO helped revamp, while existing employees attend a workshop to ensure everyone at the company knows not only what to do but also how to do it effectively. In a matter of weeks, IDEO helped Moderna codify its culture for employees and set the company up for continued success. Moderna continues to embed these Mindsets across the entire employee lifecycle to systematically scale its culture.

For employees new and old, the clarity of the Mindsets has made it easier to understand expectations and to understand the company itself. Long-term veterans responded with comments like, "These really help explain why we're working this way,” while one newbie said, "It feels like a homecoming to hear the culture that we’re trying to bring through.” But more than just solving a cultural issue, the new Mindsets have fulfilled a business imperative: Holding on to the secret sauce that made Moderna successful to begin with, setting the stage for its next five years of breakthroughs.

When the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 health crisis a pandemic in March of 2020, Moderna had fewer than 1,000 employees. Four years later, it’s more than five times the size.

Ranked #1

BioSpace Best Place to Work, large company in 2024

Ranked #6

Boston Consulting Group’s 50 Most Innovative Report in 2023

Ranked #4

Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 List in 2023

That was the question that we woke up to from our colleague, EJ Baker, on IDEO’s #climate Slack channel in mid-September. For months, Anna Varnai, Jenny Gottstein, Mike Sakowski, and I had been evaluating potential providers and projects to offset IDEO’s carbon footprint in our journey to becoming Net Zero.

EJ’s inquiry brought us back to a question we had been debating for months: Is it better to invest in voluntary offsets or invest more deeply in reducing emissions? While there are legitimate arguments to be made for each path, we felt that emissions reductions weren’t enough. We urgently need to remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. And since we are driven to design the world we want to live in, we chose to meet in the middle—both reduce our emissions and offset what we are unable to reduce. Despite its limitations, offsetting offers a way to strengthen our climate commitments as we ramp up our emissions reduction efforts.

In principle, voluntary carbon offsets appear simple; in reality, they become complicated very quickly. We reached out to offset providers and offset purchasers to learn about their approach and experiences, but instead of walking away with clarity, we realized that no one had really figured it out yet. Even the experts were still grappling with questions like what types of offsets should be used and when, or whether offsetting is even a credible means of achieving Net Zero.

In search of answers, we set out on a quest—diving into academic literature, researching industry best practices, and following countless startups in the space. We learned about the permanence, additionality, and vintage of an offset and how each relates to the quality of an offset project. We learned about the potential social benefits—from community employment to energy access—that come from different projects. We learned about the entities that verify and certify offset efforts. And, we learned that the more we uncovered, the more questions we had.

Should IDEO invest in high-quality and expensive carbon sequestration solutions aligned with our ambitions for the future? Or should we invest in readily available and affordable nature-based solutions? How much geographical representation should we have? How do we know that our investments won’t go up in smoke? How should we think about the intersection between our offsets, climate justice, and IDEO’s DE&I commitments?

The considerations for what to invest in went on, and the dilemma was paralyzing. On the one hand, we wanted to do it all. On the other hand, we had a finite budget and the clock was ticking. What was the right way to get started?

We contemplated having employees vote and help us pick offset projects. While this approach empowered employees to directly shape our company investments, in an area as complex and opaque as the voluntary carbon market, it would be hard for all participants to have an informed perspective in voting.

We contemplated creating a committee that would select projects based on a set of established needs and values. While simple in practice, we weren’t confident an internal team could navigate the magnitude of the task in a manner that fully represented IDEO, and the inevitable scrutiny that comes from decisions like this.

We contemplated seeking advice from third-party experts, but found that many of them sold offsets themselves, raising all kinds of questions about their motives and whether there was a conflict of interest (even though they were extremely generous with their perspective—thank you!).

We needed to get reasonably smart about this space to make informed decisions.

Enter the Oxford Offsetting Principles, a series of guidelines put together by Eli Mitchell-Larson et al., that outline how offsetting should be approached to achieve Net Zero. Informed by these principles, we were drawn to two start-up offset providers, Lune and Patch. These providers stood apart for several reasons. First, they allowed us to select a broad portfolio of high-quality carbon offset projects. Second, their projects had an international reach. From the get go, we knew we wanted our carbon offsetting efforts to reflect IDEO’s global presence, impact, and responsibility. Both Lune and Patch offered a way for us to do so.

From there, having estimated our carbon footprint at around 4,950 t CO2e for 2021, we intentionally over-offset our emissions by purchasing 5,500 t CO2e.

Based on the Oxford Offsetting Principles, we spread those offsets across:

• Global renewable energy projects for Type I (22.5%)
• Forestry protection projects in Asia and Latin America for Type II (22.5%)
• Methane capture at landfills in the United States for Type III (5%)
• Reforestation projects in Africa and North America and regenerative agriculture projects in the US for Type IV (45%)
• Enhanced weathering projects in Europe for Type V (5%)

Overall, we spent a little over $20 per tonne of CO2e with about 92% of those fees going toward the projects themselves. (You can see a visual breakdown of our project bundles with Lune, here.)

Are we confident that our offset strategy is the gold standard? Not quite. But we do feel confident in our approach, and as the voluntary carbon market matures, we will continue to iterate alongside it. We’ve learned that climate action, like design, requires us to get started with curiosity and humility. It demands a learning mindset that seeks progress over perfection.

To those who have purchased or are considering purchasing offsets of your own, we’d love to hear about your approach and what you’re learning.

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

“Genuine question: are offsets a useful thing?”

When it comes to sustainability and the food system, looking ahead five or ten years and making eventual environmental commitments are not enough. There is a limited time to act if we want to head off the worst of what’s to come, from major supply chain disruptions to even higher levels of agriculture-related carbon emissions. That’s a challenging reality in the face of a climate crisis that can feel overwhelmingly abstract and a business environment that has long prioritized what is happening in the next quarter, not the next decade.

IDEO is a future-oriented firm, and over the last decade, we have been working with people, companies, governments, and organizations across the food industry who share our exploratory mindset and growing sense of urgency around addressing climate change. We have partnered with global nonprofits seeking to reduce food loss on farms, helped food brands launch products with better and healthier ingredients, are examining corporate procurement’s role in mainstreaming regenerative agriculture, and are working with food companies to help them achieve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments. It has left us sure of the food future we’re aiming for: one in which the extractive, linear model is replaced by a circular economy that regenerates the environment, builds thriving communities, and develops more nourishing food and beverage products that everyone can access. Design is a vital tool in getting us there.

Circular design recognizes that each individual, from farmers to food workers to consumers, factors into an interconnected and constantly changing system. It allows us to position the human perspective alongside technological and economic constraints and arrive at ways to make food truly equitable, regenerative, and nourishing for both people and the planet.

As we work toward that climate-positive future using the tools of design, here are three things that are on our mind and directing our actions:

The system has made headway in reducing food waste, but there’s more to be done

Globally, about one-third of food is lost or wasted each year. The loss and waste account for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions and are occurring at the same time that 1 in 9 people are undernourished. “Preventing food waste is ... the food sector’s single most important direct climate action,” is how Sodexo CEO Denis Machuel put it.

Within the US, some 40% of food waste is tied to businesses that serve consumers, like hotels and restaurants. That point was driven home when we partnered with The Rockefeller Foundation and Hyatt Hotels to develop novel ways to tackle food waste at the hotel buffet. We found nearly half of the food put out for guests wasn’t eaten, and at most only 15% of that could be donated or repurposed.

The fear of shortage was a driver, with the hotel kitchen overproducing to ensure they would have ample food for guests, and guests overloading plates so as not to miss out. Knowing that allowed us to introduce simple but effective solutions like displaying small sample plates of meat and cheeses that guests can order, rather than laying out extensive platters.

But a third of global food waste occurs upstream, at the agricultural harvest and production stage. Our work with Japanese growers while developing the fudoloop app highlighted one reason why: a disconnect between supply and demand. Agricultural wholesalers were generally in the dark about coming crop volumes and details, which made it harder to negotiate with buyers—resulting in food waste—while the labor-intensive nature of the harvest left farmers without the time and energy to pursue a solution. The app gets crop information from farmers to wholesalers one day in advance to allow for much more effective coordination.

Similarly, when the World Wildlife Foundation asked us to help minimize food loss on farms in the United States, labor availability emerged as one of the main reasons crops are not fully harvested and packed. Together we prototyped a model that connects farms and local people in need of part-time paid work to harvest surplus produce otherwise left in the fields, and tested the concept on a California tomato farm. Under this model, the harvested fruits and vegetables would then be made accessible to those who need them through a virtual platform that matches a grower’s surplus with a food bank’s demand.

Downstream, food banks and pantries serve as a way to mitigate both food waste and hunger, but challenges abound there too. According to the USDA's Household Food Insecurity in the United States in 2020 report, 61% of food insecure Americans do not use them.

In some cases, schedules and transportation are deterrents, which inspired our work with the Northern Illinois Food Bank. We helped them launch a first-of-its-kind digital pantry that allows individuals to order groceries and select a pick-up time and location in advance. The approach gives food bank users agency and choice, eliminating food waste that can occur when individuals are given foods they dislike or that don’t align with their dietary restrictions. It also allows the food bank to track data—a key element to understanding waste—in order to have better supply and demand signaling.

Food companies need to reimagine their product portfolios with biodiversity in mind

For more than a decade IDEO has worked with CPG clients to create food that is healthier. Biodiversity is the next step in the journey, and it’s a particularly exciting one because of the dual impacts to the planet and human health. In a little more than a century the planet has lost 75% of the genetic plant diversity in agriculture, and per a 2020 report, some 20% of countries risk seeing their ecosystems collapse due to the decline in biodiversity.

The linear economy got us here. Prioritizing efficiency and profit brought us to a place where 75% of the global food supply is sourced from just 12 plant and five animal species. Rice, maize, and wheat account for almost 60% of calories all of humanity gets from plants, curtailing consumption of vital nutrients. The monoculture farming responsible for that shortlist of crops makes the food supply more vulnerable. Monocultures are less able to withstand climate extremes and pests. Diversifying these farms is a way of building resilience.

Transforming dietary diversity at scale requires efforts on production, procurement, manufacturing, product design, and consumption levels. In a recent WBCSD & One Planet Business for Biodiversity report, product design is the most commonly cited area of opportunity when it comes to “staple crop diversification along the value chain.” As designers we believe that individual product design decisions about formulation, sourcing, packaging, and branding collectively shape the food system—and have the ability to send positive ripple effects across it.

We have helped CPG clients advance on their path towards using more biodiverse ingredients through product launches that emphasize healthier and alternative ingredients. That has included working with Betterer Foods to design their RightRice brand, based on an ingredient they developed that tastes and looks like rice but is made from rice and vegetables and has more than twice the protein of regular rice; partnering with Green Onyx, an Israeli company that developed an in-home growing method to produce a tiny aquatic vegetable called khai nam; and working with Bitty Foods to find new product innovation for products made with their high-protein cricket flour.

Through our work, we’ve learned that sustainability is often not the driver when it comes to food choices—yet flavor often is. Biodiversity expands the palate for a food R&D team to think about flavors, textures, and ingredients. It also has the potential to make us healthier. The 2020 WHO report on biodiversity noted one risk factor associated with the loss of biodiversity is “increased consumption of ultra-processed foods high in energy, saturated and trans fats, sugars and salts.” Biodiversity won’t inherently make us healthier if we diversify ingredients but continue to put them into highly processed foods. It's important that R&D teams still consider nutrition as they explore a wider variety of ingredients for their products.

Product design alone isn’t enough. Companies must transform their supply chains

A 2019 study of the 50 largest food and beverage companies in the US found that, of those who disclose the data, scope 3 emissions constituted on average 89% of total reported company emissions. Failure to monitor, disclose, and transform operations to lessen these emissions poses “substantial material risk” for the industry—risk that will only increase. The IPCC Report on Climate Change and Land found that without intervention, emissions from agriculture are likely to increase 30% to 40% by 2050.

We understand the heaviness of this challenge for food companies: How do they design an entirely new system while still operating their businesses in the current system? How can they encourage regenerative farming among different stakeholders along the supply chain to reduce their carbon footprint overall?

With the Circular Economy of Food CoLab, we have been able to use collaboration and rapid prototyping to make those questions less daunting and quickly surface potential solutions. The Food CoLab is anchored by member companies Danone, Kroger, and Electrolux and builds on a network of farmers, food companies, startups, NGOs, and experts.

Since 2018, the Food CoLab has built over 30 prototypes that promote a circular food system: where waste becomes a resource, natural systems and farming communities are uplifted, and all materials realize their highest value. A major focus is reimagining how retailers and food and beverage companies source ingredients and products. Today’s commodity-centric model leads to overproduction on farms, reinforces intensive farming approaches, and shifts the risk of diversifying operations to growers. Yet supporting regenerative production and choosing lower impact, upcycled, and biodiverse ingredients has the potential to realize significant emissions reduction and greater profitability for farmers.

Together we are prototyping new procurement models that support regenerative agriculture, with input from farmers and experts in soil health, ecosystem services measurement, and agriculture innovation. We’re exploring ways that design can help food and beverage companies partner with growers to build soil health and biodiversity, equitably collect and share data, and collaborate across industries and supply chains.

While there are new business models and technologies that might help achieve goals around nature-positive food production, it’s important to acknowledge that regenerative farming is not new. The quest for efficiency and the consolidation of power in global supply chains undermines resilient farming models in the United States and many other places around the world. Many people and communities who hold this agricultural expertise have been denied access to land, capital, research, and other support—and now they face the brunt of food insecurity and climate change impacts. It's imperative to help right these wrongs as we seek to design a more climate-positive food system.

**

Addressing these food- and climate-related challenges requires we consider and involve all the players. The cost of reducing food waste, restoring biodiversity, and transforming the supply chain may impact one segment of the food value chain while another segment reaps the benefit. Indeed, one of the biggest challenges to overcome is to realign who makes decisions and who bears the cost. Figuring out how to share both the risk and the reward requires collaboration. Design is a powerful and effective tool to leverage. Human-centered design surfaces the role each player has individually, how they relate to each other, and the amount of influence and power that each has.

The design process enables us to zoom in and out between a potential solution to the challenge at hand and the larger system. It highlights the leverage points, the places where a successful intervention could touch several aspects of the problem, and allows us to quickly start prototyping. We iterate, we learn, we refine the question.

Design is relentlessly optimistic, but it’s also grounded in reality. The climate crisis has gotten where it is because we’ve taken from the earth with little concern for any consequence beyond profit. That’s by design, which means we can also fix it. The redesign can’t wait.

In 2015, we helped IKEA envision the kitchen of 2025. Thinking that far into the future was a visionary move on IKEA’s part. Now, that kind of perspective and action are a requisite.

We quickly realized the complexity of the challenge. There are hundreds of people across IDEO, and each of them make purchases on behalf of the firm in the running of our business—from video conference subscriptions to user research project expenses. With at least 80-90% of any organization’s carbon footprint coming from Scope 3 emissions (including upstream suppliers), calculating one’s carbon footprint is a significantly distributed issue.

But we knew we had to get started. We began by exploring a wide variety of emissions accounting solutions, from countless start-ups in the space to corporations like Salesforce repurposing their internal tools for emissions accounting. In our view, the ideal carbon accounting solution possessed several qualities. It would be accessible and intuitive enough for IDEOers to understand the tradeoffs they are making during everyday purchases. It would be shareable with our clients who are increasingly invested in our sustainability efforts. It would be reasonably priced for a small-to-medium sized business that intends to spend in the low six figures on carbon offsets and hopes to reduce its emissions by 7-8% per year. Most importantly, it would track emissions down to the company level to make it possible for us to vote with our dollars when considering prospective suppliers.

Unfortunately, most of the existing carbon accounting solutions haven’t met our particular set of needs. They often involve cumbersome, manual data entry. The carbon footprint is often estimated at an industry, not company, level. And when you’re hoping to use such a tool to save 7-8% of low six figures per year off your carbon offset budget, emissions accounting solutions can be disproportionately expensive. These are early days for the greenhouse gas accounting industry and, as momentum builds, so will the quality of accounting options available.

After exploring the many solutions in the market, we ultimately embraced a carbon accounting technique shared by Jane Yang, former Head of Data & Senior Policy Analyst at Basecamp, who used academic literature to convert dollars spent in a particular category into the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions. This method gave us a framework to pull data from our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and estimate the carbon footprint of emissions-intensive categories like energy consumption, travel, and food. While this technique is not perfect, it was a critical step in better understanding which areas of our business contribute most to our global carbon footprint.

Of these areas, airline travel was having the most detrimental environmental impact. As a consulting firm with offices, clients, and research across the world, we will need to be very thoughtful in how we balance the benefits, and environmental costs, of travel. More on this in a subsequent post.

Estimating IDEO’s carbon footprint also revealed another dilemma: our ERP systems had no data on the downstream impact of our work with our clients. In speaking with experts, we received mixed messages on how to properly account for emissions outcomes from consulting firms like IDEO. On the one hand, our deliverables are often digital assets that have a negligible carbon footprint. But on the other hand, these deliverables represent strategic recommendations or new products and services that could have significant environmental implications. It’s complicated. While we have a clear ethical responsibility to set our clients and the planet up for success, we have chosen not to include the downstream impact of our client work at this time. This is a decision that we will continue to assess going forward.

With that, we turned our attention to the data on hand. Our team’s background in scientific research gave us enough familiarity with the academic literature to find relevant conversion factors for the emissions per dollar spent on different categories of expenses like travel, for example. Using this methodology, we estimated IDEO’s carbon footprint at around ~14,500 t CO2e in 2019, ~6,400 t CO2e in 2020, and ~4,950 t CO2e in 2021. The good news is that these numbers are trending in the right direction, although these improvements were largely side effects of the pandemic (as with many companies). As we plan ahead, we intend to take another look at third-party products to see if any have started to gain an edge, and we’d enjoy the opportunity to learn alongside others that are going through a similar process. Any takers?

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

For IDEO to commit to Net Zero or to prioritize emissions reductions initiatives, we first needed to understand the magnitude of our global carbon footprint and which factors were the greatest contributors.

We were at a conference that IDEO was hosting in the Bay Area. We’d just been jamming on the approach Allbirds was taking to carbon labeling its products and he was chastising me for IDEO’s lack of visible progress in addressing the climate crisis.

His feedback stung. But isn’t that what friends are for—to call you on your BS?

I went home and dug into IDEO’s growing portfolio of work in the climate space. We had written a guide to circular design with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, hosted open innovation challenges to redesign single-use cups and plastic bags with Closed Loop Partners, explored potential scenarios around the future of regenerative food systems, and had begun coaching many of our clients towards work that directly tackled climate change and sustainability. But in poring over our work, I realized that what we were doing so well for our clients, we were failing to do for ourselves. How could we expect our clients to partner with us on such important challenges when our own house wasn’t in order?

Luckily, I wasn’t alone in my desire to catalyze IDEO’s efforts around addressing climate change. Many of my colleagues were grappling with the same questions, including IDEO Partner, Dean Malmgren. As we dug into where we could and should take action, we began to grapple with the impact of Scope 3 emissions.

What are Scope 3 emissions? Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are categorized into three “scopes” according to the world’s most widely used accounting standard, the GHG Corporate Protocol. Scope 1 emissions cover direct emissions from sources an organization owns or controls. Scope 2 emissions include indirect emissions associated with the purchase of electricity, heat, steam, or cooling. Scope 3 emissions, or “value chain emissions,” are the result of activities from assets not owned or controlled by an organization. These indirect emissions occur outside of an organization’s operations—think business travel, commuting, or purchased goods.

Interestingly, 80-90% of an organization's carbon footprint comes from Scope 3 emissions—or from their upstream and downstream suppliers. So in order to reduce IDEO’s carbon footprint, we would need to carefully consider the suppliers with which we work and the impact of the work IDEO delivers.

At the same time, we’ve seen many of our clients wrestling with this challenge. While comforting to see, it also gave us a second, much needed, wake up call.

If our clients—many of whom have made public Net Zero commitments—were working on the same problem, they’d quickly arrive at a similar conclusion and start considering the climate impact of their business partners to manage-down their own footprint. We immediately saw the future: IDEO was going to increasingly be put under the microscope to understand whether we were the right partner for their business.

As we socialized this realization, we quickly learned that we’d already seen a steady uptick in clients and procurement partners requesting details about IDEO’s sustainability programs (and rightly so!). Not only are climate initiatives a moral imperative, but there was also a clear case for business risk associated with languishing. We were staring that business risk straight in the face.

And so Dean, I, and many others across IDEO made the decision to “just get started.” Because it’s the right thing to do for the planet. And because it’s the necessary thing to do for our business and for our clients’ businesses.

We made a commitment for IDEO to reduce our emissions in line with the Paris Agreement and to be Net Zero effective Jan 1, 2021. We estimated our carbon footprint. We purchased voluntary carbon offsets for our 2021 emissions. We switched to renewable energy across all of our locations globally. We experimented with addressing emissions offsets in our project plans and contracts. We offered more responsible investments in our 401(k). We have been regularly meeting with our sibling firms across kyu and the broader design consulting industry to share learnings and best practices for evolving our business model for the climate era. And many of IDEO’s locations have taken on a smorgasbord of initiatives to make their operations more climate-friendly as well, from switching to LED lighting, to serving local food and composting whatever we can.

We have made progress, but we are far from perfect. There’s much more work to do. And unfortunately, we are unlikely to be perfect any time soon. That’s where you, dear readers, come into play. Over the next few weeks, we’ll share some of the work we have done and the dilemmas that we have run into along the way. We’re hoping that this is the start of many conversations, ones that not only help us consider different perspectives and approaches, but also help others get started too.

To progress, together!

This article is part of a series detailing IDEO’s journey to becoming Net Zero, the lessons we’ve learned, and our continued commitments to addressing climate change.

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Those were the words that Tim Brown, co-founder and co-CEO of Allbirds, uttered to me just before the pandemic began.

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.