Looking to understand the role of instant noodles in middle-class Chinese life, the IDEO team conducted in-home research with consumers across a range of life stages and levels of attachment to noodle culture and convenience foods. The first finding was reassuring: Everyone kept instant noodles at home. The category still had a place in middle-class kitchens. But beneath that was a more complicated, emotional story—and an unmet need for convenience and quality to coexist in a single product.

The team discovered that instant noodles are more than just a quick, on-the-go meal; they are a nostalgic comfort food that evokes fond memories. But since their heyday, their role in daily life has evolved. Once a complete meal in itself, instant noodles now often function as a versatile flavor base or culinary accent in other dishes. Because they don’t align with the healthier, higher-quality, and more novel food choices that middle-class consumers aspire to, noodle shops, delivery noodles, or fresh-cooked instant options often win out. Yet, even these alternatives come with trade-offs. Delivered noodles lose texture during transport. Sit-down noodle shops preserve quality but offer limited flavors.  Cooking from scratch meets the bar for both texture and flavor, but requires a significant time investment. As one young mother said, “If I could get the texture of fresh-cooked noodles without turning on the stove, I’d buy that instant noodle for sure.”

The research inspired the creation of a new category, which the team termed “fresh-brewed noodles.” More than just a noodle or broth upgrade, Master Kong’s fresh-brewed noodles would offer the speed of instant noodles with the quality of freshly cooked options, plus flavors not found in traditional noodle shops. The strategic positioning was clear. Executing it by making fresh-brewed noodles mass-producible, affordable, and eventually profitable presented a category-innovation challenge. To get there, IDEO designed a series of dual-track co-creation workshops with the Master Kong team and consumers.

One track focused on prototyping the core product experience: noodles, broth, and toppings. IDEO and Master Kong’s R&D team began by studying the traditional craft of Chinese noodle-making, starting in Shanxi, a region renowned for its noodles. Through successive rounds of prototyping and consumer tasting, the team identified a critical insight: for “fresh-brewed noodles” to be convincing, the innovation had to be centered on the noodles themselves.

Texture alone was not enough. Consumers needed to see a meaningful difference before they tasted the product. IDEO translated this insight into a distinctive noodle profile: irregular, dimensional shapes designed to remain springy, hold sauce and broth, and mimic the resilience of freshly cooked noodles using only hot water. Because this visible shape represented the product’s core value proposition, it became a hero feature on the packaging. The graphic design made a bold visual statement about the noodle form, turning a technical R&D breakthrough into an immediately legible consumer promise: these are not ordinary instant noodles.

A parallel track explored the broader commercial experience: trend-forward and reimagined classic flavor profiles, light yet deeply satisfying broths, carefully selected toppings, and packaging that signals a new level of quality on store shelves. One key insight was that utensils carry meaning. Conventional instant noodles are often associated with disposable plastic forks, while higher-quality noodles are eaten with chopsticks. IDEO translated this cultural cue into the design of the bowl’s lid.

Instead of treating utensils as an afterthought, the team designed a solid, rounded, heat-retaining lid that embeds a pair of small wooden chopsticks. The gesture creates a small ritual of anticipation and reframes the product—not just a convenient instant meal, but a more considered noodle experience. Once opened, the product fulfills that promise with satisfyingly bouncy noodles, a rich liquid broth pouch that replaces the traditional oil-and-powder packet, and a vegetable packet reformulated with more premium whole ingredients.

The first batch of “Te Bie Te” Fresh-Brewed Noodles—Chinese wordplay that emphasizes “special”—launched in August 2025 with three trendy and tried-and-true flavors. Within just three days, sales exceeded 100,000 bowls. Within a week, “Te Bie Te” topped the instant noodle category sales ranking on Douyin, China’s domestic counterpart to TikTok. The outcome was bigger than a product launch—it served as proof that a mature, declining category could be fundamentally reinvented to meet consumers’ real needs. For Master Kong, the project became a North Star and a model for internal category innovation in beverages, ready-to-eat foods, and beyond.

Once a popular, affordable staple, the instant noodle category in China has been declining rapidly due to shifting demographics, rising food delivery options, and increasing customer demand for healthier, more nutritious meals.

‍

According to the World Instant Noodles Association, between 2020 and 2023, China’s instant noodle consumption fell by 4 billion packs.

100,000+

“Te Bie Te” bowls sold in the first 3 days on the market

#1

on Douyin’s instant noodle category ranking within one week of launch

Taylor’s legacy began in 1969 with the founding of Taylor’s College and soon expanded to include Taylor’s University, one of Southeast Asia’s top private universities, as well as many other institutions that serve 35,000 students per year. The family-owned group also operates Taylor’s International Schools, Garden International School, and Nexus International School for students ages 4 to 18. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city, annual tuition at premium private schools like these ranges from about $10,000 to $25,000 USD. Taylor’s wanted to do something different: provide the same level of academic rigor and immersive learning experiences at one-third the cost.

IDEO began by speaking with over three dozen students, parents, teachers, and experts across the capital to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and what was missing from such moderately priced international schools.

A few themes quickly emerged. Families, students, and teachers were worried about the stability of these new private schools, which tended to have higher-than-normal teacher turnover rates and were plagued by financial instability, negatively impacting talent attraction and retention, as well as student learning. Parents appreciated that the schools offered holistic learning experiences, such as field trips to rural areas, including jungles, but wished they were more consistently part of the curriculum. And now, the looming challenge of AI—how to use it, how to teach it, and how to teach with it—was in the background, a persistent cause for concern. The big unmet need? Reassurance that Taylor’s was thinking long-term and systematically about developing the skills, knowledge, and mindsets that would prepare students for an ever-changing world. Parents wanted a school that measured growth in academic, social, and character terms over generations, not just school semesters.

With these insights in hand, IDEO began developing a design Playbook for Taylor’s new brand—Lexel International Schools. A combination of “lexicon” and “excellence,” Lexel’s mission is “building what lasts, learning for life.”

The schools are centered around three key differentiators: 

• Always Ahead: Lexel schools commit to staying current with the topics and subject matter they teach, as well as the tools they provide to students, parents, and teachers.s.  
  ‍
• Learning That Builds for Life: The schools ensure programmatic, systemic, and consistent learning experiences from Pre-K to Year 11. Interested students can even continue their post-secondary journey in partnership with Taylor’s University and other higher education institutions within the Taylor’s ecosystem.
  
  
• Educators for the Long Run: These schools commit to ongoing investments in professional growth opportunities for teachers and stable learning environments for students.

Four Lexel Literacies—AI, Digital, Financial, and Nutrition—integrated into the Cambridge Curriculum bring the school’s vision and mission to life.

By systematically integrating AI literacy into its spiral education framework, in particular, an approach where major topics are revisited multiple times through a curriculum to build fluency over time, Lexel ensures parents that the school is thinking a decade ahead from Day One, setting the school apart. In addition to enhancing AI fluency, Lexel offers unique end-of-term experiences called Jungles & Junctions.

Combining three important strands of learning—community engagement, nature-based personal and interpersonal development, and career and university exploration—Jungles & Junctions leverages Taylor’s extended educational network and Lexel’s strategic founding campus within the Gamuda Gardens development in Selangor. Surrounded by tropical rainforests, the township’s residential neighborhoods, theme park, and various sports facilities, including an Olympic-length swimming pool, are transformed into an extended Lexel campus, with a GenAI-driven planner to help teachers streamline the organization of class outings. “The Township is Your Campus” became the tagline for this approach.

In September 2025, just months after IDEO’s collaboration ended, Taylor’s began classes at its first Lexel International School. By mid-year, the new school had achieved 115% of its year-one student enrollment target, with significant inbound demand for Year 2 already demonstrating the school’s market resonance.

The modern campus features spacious classrooms, science and technology labs, a library, a multipurpose hall, and a canteen. Annual tuition ranges from about $2,800 USD for pre-K students to about $6,100 USD for secondary students.

Most importantly, by combining Taylor’s deep academic expertise, Gamuda Land’s development prowess, and IDEO’s innovative design Playbook, Lexel brings quality, affordable international education closer to home for Malaysian families. According to one parent, “My daughter looks forward to going to school every day … and has a lot of opportunities to express herself. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give [Lexel] an 11.” Based on the IDEO Playbook, a second flagship campus in the Southern Klang Valley, which is scheduled to open in September 2026, has already exceeded its year-one target enrollment expectations, with plans to continue extending the Lexel network to other parts of Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asian region in the near future.

Malaysia’s private international school sector has grown significantly as parents seek quality English-language education. However, high tuition fees and limited access to reputable schools are continual challenges for those in the emerging middle class.

115%

of Lexel’s student enrollment target reached during the launch year of its first campus
‍

Year 1 enrollment target exceeded

at Lexel's second campus several months ahead of classes commencing

‍

The American news industry has long been a competitive and saturated market. This has only intensified with the emergence of social media outlets and AI-generated news. Even so, SAN’s rigorously unbiased, fact-based reporting style and rich video storytelling had enabled the ambitious startup to rise above the media fray in just three short years.

With a strong foundation to build on, IDEO sought to further differentiate SAN’s cutting-edge news product and build deeper engagement with a wider audience through a new user experience.

‍Collaborating closely, IDEO and SAN began by delving deeply into media consumption habits. They met with early SAN superfans, news consumers who spent hours a day absorbing content from traditional outlets like Fox and USA Today, and those who looked to their Ring doorbell app or Reddit for news. The takeaways? People were tired of clickbait and clunky interfaces. They sought clear, factual news that was easily accessible, with additional context to help them interpret events and understand their significance. They craved more than one perspective on important topics, so stories felt balanced rather than polarized. They also valued having control over how they consumed news, so making it easy to switch between text, video, and audio formats was crucial.

Together, IDEO and SAN created features across SAN’s website and app that put facts, trust, and transparency at the core of the product experience. Fact Cards distill key data points into clear, shareable units, while the Sources feature allows readers to trace information directly back to its original source. To make complex stories easier to grasp, Big Picture insights drill down into why events matter, surfacing underlying themes, historical parallels, differences in reporting, and common ground. The Why This Story Matters section provides readers with clear framing and sets the story within a broader context, while the Timeline illustrates how events unfold over days, months, or even years. An antidote to news polarization, See All Sides presents left, right, and center narratives for key topics side-by-side, and Media Landscape visualizations reveal how coverage varies across outlets. Finally, to ensure SAN fits seamlessly into readers’ daily lives, the redesigned Today Page is organized into three highly scannable sections: Latest News, Top Stories, and SAN Originals. The combined features create a balanced, clear, and non-polarizing news experience, making it easy for readers to delve deeper into the sources of their news.

SAN now delivers a news experience as modern, dynamic, and trustworthy as its journalism. A month after its debut, the SAN app’s page views increased 1,170 percent year over year compared to June 2024, while active users rose 700 percent. Readers also give the updated mobile experience a 4.8 rating on the Apple App Store. “Our team is delivering reporting that’s both deeply factual and accessible,” said Derek Mead, SAN’s Chief Content Officer. “This redesign is pivotal to the direction journalism needs to take and the leadership role Straight Arrow News is taking on as we help guide the news industry into a brighter future.”

SAN built a loyal readership and gained recognition for its unbiased reporting. To expand and stand out from legacy media, SAN  wanted a redesigned user experience that reflected its commitment to fact-based journalism.

1,170%

increase in app page views YoY 

700%

increase in active users

4.8 rating

on the Apple App Store

Sanofi was the first company to supply the polio vaccine worldwide. Because of the global fight against the disease, endemic wild poliovirus transmission is now limited to just two countries. However, attitudes toward vaccines and immunizations have shifted significantly. To ensure a smooth launch of Beyfortus in a time of increased vaccine hesitancy, Sanofi asked IDEO to conduct research across four important and very different healthcare markets: Germany, Spain, China, and the US.

IDEO worked with parents, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and healthcare administrators to identify potential barriers to vaccine adoption and understand the emotional needs of all stakeholders involved in the immunization process. Navigating cultural differences and diverse healthcare environments, the team uncovered a set of insights.

For healthcare professionals, the team discovered there was no one-size-fits-all approach to immunization training across Sanofi’s 20-plus global markets. While consistency of key information was important, trainings needed to be flexible and customizable. This way, regardless of whether the vaccine was administered by midwives, OB-GYNs, nurses, or doctors, they could  confidently discuss the pros and cons across cultural contexts and administer the drug correctly.
‍
For new parents, receiving information about a new immunization immediately after giving birth could be too stressful. But simply leaving pamphlets about Beyfortus in waiting rooms didn't address their real concerns, either. Caregivers needed to engage in conversations earlier in their pregnancies and continue them after leaving the hospital, when they might have additional questions.

IDEO translated these research insights into a highly accessible global communication toolkit that uses simple, straightforward language, metaphors, and illustrations to support informed conversations between healthcare providers and parents before, during, and after a child is born. IDEO then conducted a series of market-fit co-design workshops with representatives of Sanofi’s global immunization business to iterate on the print and digital tools, make them more resonant with regional customers, and ensure compliance with local regulations. IDEO handed the toolkits over for development to support the launch of Beyfortus in January 2024, just in time for RSV season.

Beyfortus saw enormous demand in its first year, demonstrating strong efficacy in real-world applications and achieving blockbuster status as a $1.8 billion therapy. Sanofi’s global launch team credits the patient-centric toolkit with increased requests for communication materials from its regional markets as well as from healthcare and government organizations that have typically been hard to reach, key goals of its global-local launch strategy.

Since its development, Beyfortus has received swift regulatory approval from the US, EU, China, and Japan, with patient demand causing Sanofi to triple its worldwide manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of the 2024-25 RSV season. Ahead of the larger global distribution of Beyfortus, IDEO and Sanofi partnered with equity expert consultants, Fearless Futures, to conduct a DEI review and worked with doctors and nurses who participated in the initial drug launch to make the materials even more accessible, relevant, and successful for 2025 and beyond. To date, six million babies—and counting—have been immunized with Beyfortus.

Worldwide, childhood vaccination hesitancy among parents fluctuates between 25-45%, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), a trend it considers one of the biggest global threats to public health.

85.9%

‍reduction in hospitalizations for infants who received Beyfortus compared to those who did not (2023–24 RSV season)

$1.8B

in first-year sales of Beyfortus

‍

When category-defining challenges like disruption, the accelerating pace of change, and the need to rethink how organizations work are on the table, looking back on the current year and fighting for the same budget won't work. That's why many of the leaders we partner with are massively rethinking their priorities and where to best focus their resources. 

It’s a lot to balance, but the process doesn’t have to feel like guesswork. For several years, we’ve been using a tool we call the Planning Canvas, which provides a clear, strategic, and uncomplicated way to reflect on what has changed, what you’ve learned, and what matters now before planning for the coming year. It’s a simple way to help you evaluate where you are, and what levers you might pull to get your organization where you want it to be.

Download the Canvas

Our 2027 Planning Canvas walks you through three effective steps: 

1. Reflect on what’s changed
2. Imagine the impact you want to have in the near future
3. Decide what to double down on, reform, let go of or pursue as a new bet

We recommend using it for individual reflection ahead of annual planning, before team sessions and leadership decision meetings begin. It will help you arrive with a clear point of view on what has changed, what matters now, and the choices worth putting on the table. At the same time, don’t hesitate to adapt it to your needs. If facilitating a collaborative conversation across your team aligns better with your organization's culture, this tool can help with that, too.

The goal isn’t to predict the year ahead perfectly. It’s to enter planning conversations with a sharper point of view and the confidence to make impactful choices together. We hope you find it useful. 

Looking for more help with strategic challenges? Get in touch. We’d love to connect.

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At a time when uncertainty feels like a constant, leaders across categories can find it tough to make confident planning decisions for the year ahead.

Organizations are quite good at optimizing for today. They’re laser-focused on KPIs, governance, budgeting cycles, and incentives that reward delivering on a quarter’s results. But these systems aren’t well-designed for exploring uncertainty 10 to 20 years in the future. Most organizations don’t have the capacity to continuously sense, interpret, and act on future possibilities. This means they can easily lose their edge. 

As a futurist, I’ve been helping organizations do this work for years. Sometimes it begins with a foresight project, a unique product design, or the creation of provocative future scenarios. But often the ultimate goal is much more ambitious. Futurists help organizations build systems designed around the habits, capabilities, and leadership practices that make futures thinking part of everyday work, helping an organization develop the confidence to navigate uncertainty now and into the future.

I’ve written about why having a futurist-in-residence (FIR)—and the tools and craft they bring to an organization—is crucial. What most organizations don’t understand is that an FIR is not an organizational Magic 8 Ball. Instead of making predictions, they equip the organization to be more curious and ready for what might happen. Their goal is to broadly build and distribute futures thinking, a role that is focused on both foresight and organizational development.

When organizations hire an FIR, there is a temptation to centralize the foresight practice. Initially, this is actually a great idea. Even though an FIR’s remit is broad distribution of capabilities, it’s important to give them the space to create a clear, consistent strategy and put it into motion. This makes it possible to design necessary systems, teach and spread new mindsets, and build capabilities. But once the approach is clear and the integration of futures thinking is ready to go, foresight needs to be the work of the whole organization. You want product managers spotting signals, HR folks anticipating workforce shifts, finance teams modeling longer-horizon scenarios, and strategy people running future stress tests. Everyone in the organization can participate in making operations future-fit across the board. 

To do this successfully, the FIR needs to design and build a future-forward operating model. And that requires them to cycle through a specific set of roles. 

Stage 1: Futurist as explorer

In the first stage, the FIR is an explorer, honing and utilizing their craft to see around corners and spot what might be changing. They conduct research, scan for signals in the market and adjacent spaces, craft provocations, and author stories about the future. The goal in this stage is to broaden the organization’s perspective, challenge long-held assumptions, and introduce new questions that leaders haven’t been asking. The FIR might create:

• Dynamic signals repositories that continuously identify and track changes from the edge
• Cross-industry trend scans to identify changes that could reshape the market
• Future storytelling or artifact building to capture the attention and interest of the organization

What that might look like: An FIR at a healthcare organization might track signals across AI, longevity, beauty, consumer behavior, and the workforce, while looking to adjacent industries like hospitality or finance for emerging models that could reshape care. They might also explore broader shifts, such as changing trust in institutions, and use these insights to build an artifact—a news headline, job description, or story of the future—that engages a wider audience, challenges existing assumptions, and sparks new questions about what healthcare could become.

Now the stage is set to bring in the rest of the organization.

Stage 2: Futurist as translator

Once the initial exploration is underway, the FIR can serve as a translator, starting the process of connecting futures to strategy and operations. During this stage, their work begins to reshape leadership practices, strategic planning, portfolio decisions, talent development, innovation governance, and the organization’s approach to risk and investment. That might include:

• Establishing new practices that focus on curiosity and questioning assumptions with leaders
• Designing opportunities to explore multiple plausible futures with teams and business units
• Identifying critical capabilities like AI fluency and systems thinking with HR

What that might look like: An FIR in the financial services industry might take an emerging shift they identified during exploration, such as the growing use of prediction markets, and bring it into an upcoming strategy review. They could use this signal of change to stress-test the strategy, asking whether it is flexible enough to respond across multiple plausible futures. They might then work with innovation teams to reconsider priorities and with leadership to surface assumptions, investments, or strategic choices that may need to change.

Stage 3: Futurist as builder

In the next stage, the FIR serves as a builder. They create and test ways to make futures thinking a part of everyone’s role. They develop learning experiences, write and test out curriculum, facilitate workshops, and coach leaders to build futures literacy. They establish systems for large-scale signal scanning, incorporate future scenarios into strategic planning, and create knowledge-sharing approaches. They find opportunities to embed new rituals and practices into everyday work in ways that are repeatable and clear. That could mean:

• Every leadership meeting begins with a five-minute discussion of an emerging signal
• Every major investment proposal includes testing one future assumption 
• Every potential new concept or innovation is stress-tested against future scenarios

What that might look like: An FIR at a global retailer might establish a network of frontline employees across markets who regularly contribute signals of consumer behavior, technology, and culture to a shared platform. Those signals become part of weekly leadership conversations, while future scenarios inform decisions about new store concepts, services, and major investments. 

Stage 4: Futurist as catalyst

In the final stage, the FIR is the catalyst for organizational transformation. Their goal is to make futures thinking a repeatable organizational habit—something embedded across business units, integrated into strategy, and reinforced through leadership development, HR, innovation, and planning processes. The systems built in earlier stages are now self-sustaining. Leaders no longer rely on the futurist to introduce new or provocative thinking. Teams are empowered to do it on their own. This could mean:

• Innovation teams build future scenarios as a standard part of concept development
• Leadership teams adopt regular signals reviews alongside operational metrics reviews
• Cross-functional communities of practice emerge, with individuals contributing signals and interpreting change
• Performance reviews reward curiosity, experimentation, systems thinking, and learning

What that might look like: At a global technology company, major investment proposals might routinely identify the future assumptions they depend on be stress-tested against multiple plausible scenarios before funding decisions are made. Innovation teams evaluate new concepts against both current consumer needs and future conditions, while leaders use scenarios-based reviews to make portfolio choices. At this stage, the FIR is no longer directing these activities; the futures infrastructure is in place and working.

Every organization has systems for finance, HR, legal, and operations, but very few have a system for understanding the future. A futures ecosystem isn't a single tool or annual planning exercise. It’s a new way of working that identifies the rituals, language, and decision-making practices to help an organization continuously sense change and adapt. This includes everything from signal scanning and scenario building to leadership routines, governance, knowledge sharing, and strategic decision-making.

The FIR serves as the architect of an enduring futures structure for any transformative organization by developing futures thinking into a strategic, differentiated capability. A great FIR should eventually work themselves out of a job as futures thinking becomes an integral part of how the organization operates—and how it prepares to thrive across multiple, plausible futures. 
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If you haven't yet read it, please check out the first story in this series,
"Why every company needs a futurist-in-residence.”  Need help setting up futures systems at your organization? Get in touch.

“A great futurist-in-residence should eventually work themselves out of a job as futures thinking becomes an integral part of how the organization operates—and how it prepares to thrive across multiple, plausible futures.”

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What will it mean when an algorithm can handle 90 percent of your job? What will working with dozens of agents be like?  When anyone can build enterprise tools—instantaneously? 

That future has already arrived at the major AI labs—and faster than almost everyone expected, even Anthropic. Founded in 2021 by a group of researchers who set out to build AI that is safe and useful, it’s now used by millions and was valued at $965 billion in its most recent funding round.

The company operates on the assumption that AI capabilities will keep improving quickly—and that its own internal ways of working have to keep pace. That means fomenting and accepting exponential change. Speaking to Joel Lewenstein, Anthropic’s refreshingly honest head of product design, provides a visceral sense of what the future we’re all heading toward feels like—both exhilarating and, occasionally, overwhelming. 

I spoke with Lewenstein about why protecting our thinking matters more than ever, why his team members don’t feel AI is atrophying their craft skills, and why enterprise collaboration is the next frontier for research and product.

Ed White (EW): Do you remember a moment when you first realized AI’s true potential?

Joel Lewenstein (JL):  My wife is an appellate lawyer. It was around 2023, and she was trying to explain this extremely dense legal case to me. After three tries, I still didn’t understand it. So one night, while she was asleep, I pulled out my phone and asked a gen AI to explain the case. It got two-thirds right, but then it started hallucinating, providing incorrect but insistently confident information. I remember having this conspiracy theorist-like out-of-body experience. I felt so alive because I’m learning this deep thing, and I felt so scared and confused because I’m being lied to, but it was insistent. I remember thinking that there’s so much good here, along with confusion and complexity that would be interesting to work on. 

The second moment was hearing Dario [Amodei, CEO of Anthropic] on the Dwarkesh Podcast. This was also in 2023. Dwarkesh asked him: “If we reach AGI [artificial general intelligence] and it cures cancer, should it be governed by a company, the US government, or the international government?” I thought it was a crazy premise. But Dario launched into a deep reflection on governance, ethics, and international order. I realized these people fully believed in the goodness of AI. That made me very excited.  

EW: What’s your role at Anthropic?

JL: I lead the product design, user research, and content design teams. There are about 30 folks, and we basically put a product designer, a user researcher, and a content designer on our platform API business (Claude Code, Cowork), our consumer apps, and our enterprise and growth areas. Our designers are deeply embedded and trying to figure out what the hell this role is in 2026. 

EW: Having come from more classic product design roles at organizations like Airtable and Quora, how is this experience different?

JL: The most interesting dimension here is speed. You hear this constantly, right? But the weird part is the time compression. There’s a measure-twice-cut-once quality to the work. You do a lot more preparation, thinking, and consideration before you build because the time to build is so short. The question is: How do we keep up in an environment where everyone’s shipping all the time?  

We also build a ton of internal tools. Our content design team created a GitHub agent that monitors strings sent to production. It checks for adherence to our content guidelines and opens PRs [pull requests] for any that don’t comply. That’s crazy because this used to be 50 percent of the job. Now it’s just 5 percent, allowing us to focus on other things. All of our designers are writing code.  

EW: Where does the design or craft bit fit in, then?

JL: With design, there are three steps to the process. Step one: determining what we should build, why we’re building it, and what problem we’re solving. Step two: creating user flows and ensuring the basic components are in place. Step three: crafting the last mile of delight, those little details that many people may not notice, but subtly make a difference. Step two is now gone. We just prompt Claude, and it just does it. Step one—deciding whether we should build something, why we should do it, and where it leads—is still a very human and messy process. As for the last step of getting all of those little interactions and visual details right, our designers are still better than the models. Maybe that won’t be the case forever, but for now, it is.  

EW: Tim Brown, IDEO’s former CEO, co-authored an article about this recently titled “The AI dividend.” Now that AI has reduced a task that used to take 50 percent of your time to 5 percent, what do you feel it’s allowing you to do?  

JL: I would love to tell you that all the boring tasks have been automated, allowing the designers to sit at whiteboards thinking bigger, more ambitious thoughts. But our Slack and GitHub are flooded with PRs from dozens of engineers. We’re juggling 17 different Claude Code instances, and each one is pinging, “I’m done! Can you review this?” It’s a cacophony of tiny projects. It’s similar to the attention-economy notification overload we experienced in our personal and social media lives. Now, it feels the same way in our work life. We’re fighting harder than ever for half a day or a day to just think, dream, and explore.  

EW: Do you think the pendulum will eventually swing back? 

JL: It has to because the human condition will require it. I think two things will happen. First, we haven’t invented an interface for managing hundreds or thousands of Claude instances.  There’s still an unsolved UX problem. The best analogy is the American presidency. There are hundreds, thousands, or even millions of staffers running around making big and small decisions, producing piles of status updates. A human chief of staff manages all that. Eventually, we’ll need a digital equivalent who will serve up a concise summary from a few of your SVPs [senior vice presidents] on Monday morning—agents who have dealt with 10,000 individual contributors—so that you don’t have to think about each task.

EW: How else are you seeing designers’ roles change?  

JL: Being close to the code and adopting a code-first, prototype-first mindset is really central. We’re not too precious about our work. If something has a decent UX, we put it out there in a beta and collect feedback. 

As someone who has always worked in the digital space, I think about how creative professionals in the past, like musicians, operated: once an album was finished and the record was pressed, that was it. I could never have worked that way creatively. Back when I started, in the Ruby on Rails era, we could simply deploy again next week and fix any issues. But for AI native folks, if something goes wrong on a Tuesday night, they just submit a PR on Wednesday morning to fix it. Everything is malleable and adaptable all the time.

This lack of preciousness, the idea that “done and shipped” is better than “perfect,” is crucial. Of course, there are challenges. Sometimes the coded output doesn’t look great, but we accept we’re going to learn from this vibe-coded thing and get on with it. We refer to this approach as “intentional craft,” meaning that if we need to make this outstanding, we still have the chops to do it, but we also need the discipline and the judgment to recognize when it’s appropriate to let a rough version go out.

User expectations are changing fast. During the heart of the mobile app era, people had incredibly high bars for their experience. We’re no longer in that era. When we put out these vibe-coded, early experimental things, we get feedback like, “Guys, this broke three times, and this button is called three different things.” But they also say, “I love it. Please make it better, and I'll keep using it.” We’re in a part of the S-curve where users have a lot of tolerance for jank. Eventually, this field will mature.  

EW: How do you maintain your craft in a world where models can perform many design tasks?

JL: Collaboration with these models is not a replacement story. You get better as a writer, editor, and thinker with a creative partner who pushes you, asks questions, and explores alternative theories. There’s a nice sparring partner quality to collaborating with AI that I appreciate.  

The models aren’t doing anything better than a thoughtful designer can with enough time. In a head-to-head competition between Claude and an outstanding designer, the designer still wins most of the time. I don’t hear our designers being concerned about skill atrophy. They’re worried about not having the time and mental space to practice the skills they already have and care about.   

EW: That’s very heartening to hear, to be honest. With so many options of what to build and many more people who can do many more things, how do you find a sense of direction? Do you and Mike [Krieger, co-lead of Anthropic Labs] share an ethos on product development?

JL: We’re letting the model lead the way. For example, in the pre-AI era, a product like Claude Design would have emerged through a TAM [total addressable market] analysis: evaluating our position as market leaders in coding, identifying adjacent spaces, interviewing stakeholders, spinning up a team, and committing to a 6- to 18-month timeline. 

In reality, the complete opposite unfolded. People using Claude Code were organically making UIs [user interfaces]. One of our designers noticed that these URIs [uniform resource identifiers] were pretty good and wrote a skill to coax the models into producing even better front-end designs, specifically using our design system. He realized it was useful and spoke with our researchers, who confirmed it wasn’t a fluke. He then refined the skill into a standalone app. That’s the genesis of Claude Design. We felt comfortable launching it at a research preview because we believe the models will continue to advance. 

EW: That’s interesting because organizations don’t generally use what I’m going to call “academic research” as a way of thinking about how products come about. 

JL: It’s crazy because at any other place that I worked, nothing changes on a product unless you assign an engineering team to change it. If your product engineers all went on vacation, no features would launch. But at Anthropic, if our product team went on vacation, the models would just keep improving.

EW: What’s it like working alongside agents daily, and how does it impact the organization?

JL: Everyone at Anthropic has dozens of Claude Code agents running in the background. We recently worked on a navigation IA [information architecture] refresh. Anyone who’s done a navigation redesign knows there are a million questions in the kickoff meeting: Are people really using this tab? Are the users of this tab and this tab the same, etc. In my old-school, pre-AI brain, I’m like, “We’ll need a week to explore, a follow-up meeting, and then we’ll come back with all these questions.” But in the meeting, the designers are just tap, tap, tapping on their Claude Code agents, asking, “Will you look at our internal documents, Slack, and our data to figure out how many people click on this tab?” And 45 seconds later, someone chimes in, “Hey, it turns out that tab is still used a lot.” It’s like everybody has a team of research assistants behind them, finding answers for them in real time. 

EW: What’s inspiring you right now? 

JL: I’m curious what the next three to five years hold for the unit of computing. We learned how to use websites, then apps, and now chatbots. What will be the next unit, and will it be vibe-coded or developed by individuals, corporations, or models that generate it in real time?

EW: Looking ahead, what’s most exciting to you and your team?

JL: We’re thinking a lot about teams and team productivity. Claude is amazing in single-player mode. But while we’ve become more productive individually, the collaborative aspect of work hasn’t changed dramatically. Right now, we have a World Cup collection of individual superstars producing amazing things, but their collective chemistry remains unmediated by AI. But then again, you and I are speaking right now completely unmediated by AI, and that’s also beautiful.  

EW: What advice would you give designers? What should they be doing and thinking about?  

JL: When users have a problem, our instinct as designers is to create a new feature—design the rectangles and the flows—and let AI build it. We’ve started to invert that approach. If users have a problem, we ask, “Can Claude solve it on its own with prompting?” Then, if it can’t or needs additional structure, we add a feature or product architecture. 

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“Design in the Age of AI” is a series of conversations with designers and makers from across industries and disciplines, building the future with AI today.

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“Being close to the code and adopting a code-first, prototype-first mindset is really central.”

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Travel is fundamentally a human experience, and personalization has always been the ideal: the concierge who remembers your name, the host who anticipates your needs, the perfect room tailored to your preferences. 

But true personalization has traditionally been a luxury, reserved for those with wealth and elite status. Even as technology has enabled mass travel and big data and CRM systems have laid the foundation for personalization, brands have struggled to scale hyperpersonalization to everyone. Loyalty programs have become the industry’s best attempt at bridging this gap: Points and tiers quantify who deserves what, with status serving as a proxy for real relationships and customer understanding. 

Until now. With the introduction of AI agents, hyperpersonalization can scale from the segment level to the individual traveler. Done right, it has the potential to democratize what was once a luxury good: the experience of being recognized. 

Of course, serendipity and delight remain a huge part of the travel experience: unsolicited dinner recommendations from local shopkeepers, wrong turns that lead to hidden gems, and conversations with strangers that become core memories. Our research shows that, especially for Gen Z customers, agency and spontaneity play a big part in shaping their tastes and identities. The opportunity is for AI to know travelers well enough to make their experience feel personal—but also to know when to get out of their way.

Capturing this opportunity means redesigning loyalty so that rewards are legible to agents, personalization scales to the individual, and the system delivers an ecosystem of value matched to what each traveler actually cares about. In doing so, brands can finally deliver the kind of personalization that has always been the industry’s ideal.

The dual audiences challenge

Every travel brand is now designing for two distinct audiences. The first is the person who is comfortably waking up in their hotel bed, enjoying the aroma of morning coffee from the lobby brunch, or grabbing a beer with their new Scottish best friend by Fenway Park. The other is an AI agent that’s handling the searching, comparing, and booking tasks on that person’s behalf. 

These two audiences have different priorities, attention spans, and methods for evaluating information. Hyper-optimize a webpage for one audience, and you may inadvertently block traffic coming from the other.

It’s tempting to treat these dual audiences as a marketing problem—a matter of making pages readable to agents without alienating people. And that is part of it. Stripe has already built a wallet for agents, and AI coworkers are beginning to handle multi-step bookings. But the consumer trust gap is wider than the technology gap. The travel industry has not gathered enough data to determine whether travelers will allow an agent to optimize their preferences about brand, travel occasion, or loyalty points.

As brands strive to cater to both audiences, agents in the funnel are revealing three outdated assumptions baked into the way most travel and hospitality loyalty programs operate. First: transactions are the best measure of loyalty. Second: personalization doesn’t scale. Third: points are the primary reward. Once these assumptions are challenged, a different kind of reward emerges: the reward of travel itself. In the age of AI, loyalty programs should be designed with enough emotional intelligence to preserve the romance of travel while harnessing the superpowers of machine intelligence. 

False assumption 1: Transactions are the best measure of loyalty

When American Airlines launched its AAdvantage program in 1981, it introduced the first large-scale frequent-flyer program by mining its reservation system for recurring phone numbers. This marked the first time the airline could identify returning customers and begin building direct relationships with them rather than with their travel agents. The airline built the program on the data it had at the time: transactions. Forty-five years later, most loyalty programs still follow a similar structure—offering points for spending, tiers for hotel nights, and miles for distance traveled. 

This transactional dynamic is increasingly ineffective. The average American belongs to 17.4 loyalty programs, but actively engages in fewer than half. Many brands claim loyalty membership sizes that rival the entire adult population of the United States. These transactions may look like loyalty, but are they really?

The next generation of travelers will have an agent doing the work that only the most dedicated points gurus do today: discerning what each traveler finds valuable and surfacing the options that match. Imagine a Gold-tier member with a brutal travel schedule who is looking for a hotel close to tourist attractions. In a regular search, they filter by price, reviews, and location. An agent can do that, plus spot the perks that actually matter at six in the morning after a red-eye: early check-in and a quiet room away from the elevators. 

Now, the measure of loyalty broadens beyond the transactional into the experiential and emotional utility of being seen and cared for. Agents simultaneously reveal which programs offer real value and match them to what each traveler values for each and every trip. 

False assumption 2: Personalization doesn't scale

Top loyalty programs like Amazon Prime offer around 30 distinct benefits. They range from free next-day shipping to cash-back options and streaming media subscriptions. Brands surface long lists of these perks because they can’t possibly know which one will land with a given member. The list is often a coping mechanism for the brand’s inability to fully personalize and the consumer’s inability to remember everything the brand offers.

Marketers often use robust quantitative surveys, such as conjoint analyses, to gain insight into consumer preferences. Run enough permutations with enough travelers, and you can statistically estimate which combination of benefits they value most. Marketing teams still debate granular tactics, like the order of perks to list in an email. But those debates are entirely unnecessary when agents can just choose based on the traveler’s preferences.

Consider the scale this can reach. Expedia Group alone encompasses more than 3.5 million lodging and vacation rental properties. One can imagine that in the near future, by analyzing a traveler’s bookings and reviews across this vast selection, an agent can ensure that a guest’s preferences are prioritized for every booking, regardless of who operates the property.

Personalization scales when agents do the matching. The new design challenge is enabling agents to interpret hundreds of personal preference variations and reward ecosystems, making offerings sufficiently readable for an agent to match and communicate well on the consumer’s behalf.

False assumption 3: The points are the reward

Ask anyone who has been a road warrior what real loyalty feels like, and the answer is rarely the points. It’s often Shirley at the front desk, who remembers you like a higher floor, a firm pillow, and a bigger room rather than a view. The recognition itself was the reward, a relationship rather than a transaction. But for too long, it was too expensive to offer to anyone beyond elite travelers. 

Now, the behaviors that used to earn that recognition are fading just as technology is emerging to recognize customers without them. Today’s consumers are less loyal and less inclined to align themselves with a specific loyalty program or brand because they value choice, flexibility, simplicity, and convenience. The number of people who used to go on mileage status runs in December just to hit status is decreasing. Instead, they’re seeking something more, and brands are increasingly able to provide it, thanks to advancements in AI.

Expedia’s recent partnership with CLEAR offers a glimpse into the future of travel loyalty: It is evolving from individual brand perks to an integrated ecosystem of complementary benefits that enhance each step of the journey (think: Apple ecosystem logic, but applied to travel). For example, CLEAR offers Expedia members discounted memberships to CLEAR+ lanes and access to its Concierge services, providing VIP treatment as they head to their next destination. What stitches the ecosystem together is the underlying agent layer. It reads each traveler’s  preferences across the partner brands and surfaces the right benefit at the right moment, without the traveler having to coordinate it themselves. No longer just a perk for road warriors, recognition becomes an experience any traveler can enjoy at every stage of their journey.

The opportunity to make travel more human

People often talk about compound interest when it comes to money. You invest a small amount, it grows over time—that’s the magic of compound interest. But we believe the memories, stories, and friendships formed through travel compound even harder. Years later, a distinctive smell, a friend, a menu item—whatever—can magically transport you back to that travel moment. 

Loyalty has never really been about earning points. It’s about the memories of being cared for while away from home, discovering something new and unexpected, and feeling seen and recognized. It’s about the desire to return because those memories capture the joy of travel.

Nights, miles, and dollars are the receipts for a trip. They are not what the trip leaves behind, which is more sensorial and more personal than anything a tier structure has ever captured. The next era of travel loyalty will be about making travel more human, powered by the combined strengths of machine intelligence and emotional intelligence.

“In the age of AI, loyalty programs should be designed with enough emotional intelligence to preserve the romance of travel while harnessing the superpowers of machine intelligence."

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.