The Latest

Keep people at the center of your work. Ask them how to help, see what they do, and learn from the facts you gather. IDEO has become a leader in design and innovation by keeping people at the center of the design process. These cards show some of the methods we use to inspire great design. Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it. This app isn’t a “how to” guide. It’s a design tool meant to help you explore new approaches and develop your own. Use the deck of 51 cards to take a new view and inspire creativity. The Method Card app is released as a free download with 8 cards for you to experience on your iPhone or iTouch. You can purchase the full deck of 51 cards for $4.99 within the application, eliminating the step of having to leave the app to upgrade your experience.

Design Thinker is a simulation game created ExperiencePoint in collaboration with IDEO that provides a meaningful experience with design thinking. Users compete to solve a realistic and complex challenge using design thinking, while engaging with the terms, techniques and thought patterns of successful innovators. Built for designers and non-designers alike, Design Thinker creates an energizing, practical and relevant learning experience that supports tangible business objectives using leading edge technology. The game can be easily integrated into leadership and management development programs, and its innovation content is readily linked to other key business learning modules and applied to action-learning projects.

To learn more about Design Thinker, visit experiencepoint.com/sims/DesignThinker

What if a doorbell could trigger the connection between scent and memory? How might traditional Chinese craftsmanship be paired with modern audio technology to demonstrate that “Made in China” isn’t always equated with “cheaply produced”? Could one person’s love of a material—specifically, cork—be exaggerated to elicit emotional response in others?

Chronicle Books and IDEO put together a 240-page glossy tome to answer these and other thought-provoking questions about what inspires designers to design. The authors, award-winning IDEO design director Martin Bone and IDEO materials expert Kara Johnson, complement each other’s thinking beautifully, approaching each design brief from the outside in and the inside out, respectively.

Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business.

IDEO Eyes Open is a series of photo-filled experiential city guides written by IDEO's Fred Dust. Culled from the experiences and observations of IDEO's designers, cultural anthropologists, and architects, the first two volumes delve into the social, architectural, and epicurean scenes of London and New York.

Everyday Engineering is a photographic primer for looking at the world through the eyes of an engineer. From Andrew Burroughs and IDEO, it's an insightful meditation on how ordinary objects and environments behave over time, and invites us all to open our eyes to the daily wonders of the built world.

"Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't."

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Designing Interactions captures the stories and viewpoints of 40+ industry insiders—including author and IDEO founder Bill Moggridge—in a book, DVD, and website.

Filled with engaging stories of how companies such as Kraft and Procter & Gamble have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, The Ten Faces of Innovation is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation.

Thoughtless Acts? is a book by Jane Fulton Suri and IDEO that invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them.

IDEO Method Cards show 51 of the methods we use to inspire great design and keep people at the center of our design process. Each card describes one method and includes a brief story about how and when to use it.

Buy the cards

Mike Ashby and IDEO's Kara Johnson have written the definitive text on materials and manufacturing processes for the designer, which includes over one hundred profiles of materials and the ways in which they are shaped, joined, and finished.

Buy the book here.

Read a one-page PDF on Materials and Design

In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley, general manager of IDEO, takes readers behind the scenes of this wildly imaginative and energized company to reveal the strategies and secrets it uses to turn out hit after hit.

This book documents the history, culture, and work product of the world's most successful design consultancy. With over 200 color photographs and illustrations, and essays, interviews, and case studies, IDEO: Masters of Innovation tells the story and shows the work of the most talked-about design firm ever.