We invited three Chicago luminaries—Chef Homaro Cantu, architect Carol Ross Barney, and Walgreens executive director of pharmacy and healthcare experience Nimesh Jhaveri—to talk to Fast Company about how they create an experience for diners, occupants and customers. They gave us images to illustrate how they design something more memorable than just a meal, a building, and a new pharmacy.
Homaro Cantu is known as one of the most innovative chefs working today. He has more than 150 patents and a high-tech laboratory in the kitchen of his restaurant, Moto. When he wanted to learn how to make a rare kind of Chinese noodle, he spent months watching grainy YouTube videos to master an ancient culinary technique not taught in American cooking schools.

Part of the dining experience at restaurants Moto and iNG includes delicious dishes that don’t look like food. Cantu’s team created a Cuban pork sandwich that looks like a Cuban cigar; he has also served diners menus printed on edible paper.

Here, one of Cantu’s more-than-meets-the-eye desserts. Cantu has been thinking a lot about sweets lately: He is currently writing a book about the West African miracle berry, a fruit that gives dieters sugar-free sweetness.

Carol Ross Barney, the founder and principal of Ross Barney Architects, has an international reputation, but Chicagoans may be most familiar with her design of the Chicago Riverwalk. Barney says she wanted visitors to feel as though they are experiencing the river as they are walking along it.

This is the University of Minnesota Duluth’s brand new civil engineering building, designed by Barney. The oversized scuppers (made from pickle barrel wood) aren’t merely an aesthetic flourish: They collect rainwater to prevent flooding, which is then reused by the students in lab experiments.

Last year Barney completed the design for a chiller plant for the University of Ohio. The glass fins on the building will change color as the sun moves, creating a sense of movement and energy.

Nimesh Jhaveri oversees the healthcare experience pilot program at Walgreens, which is already in practice in 17 Chicago-area stores. The pharmacy looks like none you’ve ever seen—and he’s aiming to change the way you think about prescriptions, retailing and healthcare.

A health guide greets customers in the new Walgreens pharmacies, navigating them through the healthcare experience. Other changes include kiosks for expedited prescriptions and screens that show wait times for consumers.

Jhaveri says that one of the biggest surprises for customers has been to see pharmacists out in the open, talking to consumers, rather than in the back of the pharmacy. Some customers have mistaken the pharmacists for receptionists—but Walgreens is trying to focus the experience on people rather than drugs.