American businesses are on notice: To be competitive in today’s market, you must diversify your workforce.

One way to widen the talent pool is to pay closer attention to people who have acquired their skills through alternative routes. Millions of Americans learn on the job, in community colleges, at boot camps, or through life experience. According to Opportunity@Work, more than 70 million Americans are overlooked because of degree requirements. Despite their abilities, these “STARs” (those who are skilled through alternative routes) find themselves stuck in jobs for which they’re overqualified and underpaid.

Opportunity@Work, an innovative social enterprise, reached out to IDEO to help collaborate with companies, talent developers, and STARs seeking career growth. To make this overlooked talent pool more visible, we created a campaign and video to rally companies. We also designed a data dashboard to help regional employer networks identify qualified talent and potential partnerships with skill-building programs. And to provide STARs with direct support, we scaffolded the job-seeking experience, focusing on key moments like the interview process.

It’s time for businesses searching for talent to open their eyes, look to the STARs, and see what they’re missing.

83% of HR professionals said they had difficulty finding suitable candidates in the past 12 months.

62% of Black people, 55% of Hispanic people, and 50% of non-Hispanic white people have become skilled through alternative routes, such as community college, workforce training, boot camps, certification programs, military service, or job experience.

Over the past 40 years, inflation-adjusted wages have increased 8% for college graduates with a bachelor’s degree while decreasing by 15% for people with only a high school degree.

Thousands

of state jobs in Maryland no longer require a four-year college degree

skills-based

The White House is adjusting educational requirements for I.T. professionals in favor of a skills-based approach

For many organizations, frontline workers like grocery store clerks, nurses, hospitality workers, and transit employees are an essential part of doing business.

So much so that they continued to show up at the office throughout the COVID-19 pandemic even as everyone else went remote. As the point of contact with customers and key systems, these workers often know exactly when, where, and why things don’t work, and they come up with powerful hacks and workarounds to make things better. Yet these insights and innovations rarely make it to the corporate office. And that’s a problem: large organizations often hire design and innovation consulting firms while not taking advantage of a latent source of deep, in-house expertise. It’s equally discouraging to workers who would gladly share their ideas if they were only asked. No surprise, then, that frontline workers are quitting their jobs in droves.

What could companies learn by listening?

IDEO partnered with the Ford Foundation to create the Worker Voice Design Lab, where leaders from a port authority, an airline, and a health care provider worked alongside frontline workers. That led to the planting of a seed of innovation in each organization, with interventions designed with and by workers implemented operationally at the core of the business. In one case, a group of workers zeroed in on specific problems with such clarity that they were quickly able to develop a digital prototype for testing. No one was less surprised than the workers themselves, who simply said: Well, nobody ever asked us before. Sometimes the most innovative idea a leader can have is to listen, learn, and act on their employee’s smart ideas.

A large portion of the job churn since March 2020 has been concentrated in frontline services such as accommodation, food services, and retail.

Lack of career growth is the number one reason people leave their jobs according to more than 18,000 frontline workers across 150 companies.

2 pilot initiatives

being led by frontline workers in 2022

The climate era demands new offers and new ways of working.

Would you like to be able to plug your jigsaw into your truck? How about taking a fully reclined snooze after a long day of fishing? Questions like these led to quick prototypes that ended up in Ford’s new, electrified F-150 truck, which has more outlets than the average apartment and can power your entire home. This was no small update. The way Ford reimagined the truck experience from powertrain to power nap is emblematic of how much customer-centricity is now embedded in Ford’s culture.

For well over a decade, we’ve partnered with Ford in the U.S., the EU, and China to help the organization bring to life a shared vision of the future of mobility. Together we scaled new capabilities throughout the company by running proof-of-concept “beacon” projects and, to embed this new customer-centric mindset, built a human-centered-design hub called D-Ford. This organization within the organization has become a magnet for talent and is spread across six global locations: London, Shanghai, Melbourne, São Paulo, Palo Alto, and Detroit. Ford’s commitment to serving the needs of people and the planet is what propelled the rethink of the F-150, the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for over 40 years. It was a high-stakes move, and one that represents a major turning point for the automaker: For the first time, its primary profit source would be electric. The new Lightning is still built Ford tough, but also built for the future.‍

Passenger vehicles produced 41% of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in 2020.

One in every 20 passenger vehicles sold in the United States is a Ford F-150.

Before going electric, the Ford F-150 emitted about 100 tons of CO₂ over a 200,000-mile lifespan.

200,000

pre-orders of the electric F-150 truck, named one of Time's Best Inventions of 2021

Most Innovative Design Company of 2022

according to Fast Company

America’s leading retailers share a common goal—doing less harm to the planet.

The systemic challenges standing in the way require a bold new approach, and no single company can solve them alone. So Closed Loop Partners convened a group consisting of founding partners CVS Health, Target, and Walmart, along with 12 other leading retailers. As the innovation partner, IDEO helped launch a global search for breakthrough sustainable ideas that yielded more than 450 submissions from startups and entrepreneurs to reinvent the single-use plastic retail bag, with nine finalists entering a six-month accelerator.

New alternatives ranged from biodegradable solutions to systems that kept reusable bags in rotation. IDEO teams not only facilitated collaboration between startups and sustainability leads from partner retailers, but also provided a boost of additional expertise from industrial, data, and business designers. In a matter of months, teams were able to launch prototypes in select CVS Health, Target, and Walmart stores in California and New Jersey.

Everyone involved in the consortium knew that replacing single-use plastic retail bags is a problem that won’t be solved quickly or easily. But the Beyond the Bag challenge helped them learn that designing for the policy and infrastructure of tomorrow requires tangible steps, taken together, today.

A hundred billion plastic bags are used in the US every year, and less than 10% of them are recycled.

Every year, plastic retail bags are among the top ten items found on beaches and waterways worldwide.

9

stores tested solutions across Northern California

Millions of dollars

raised by two startups

2

startups acknowledged by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards

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IDEO: Tell us about your drawings

Dave Russell: A few months ago I committed myself to drawing a comic a day for one month. I’ve never consciously drawn comics before, but I’ve always admired the narrative skill of artists like Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine, so I thought it would be fun to experiment with the format. While both these artists employ a semi-realistic style to tell human stories, I’m equally inspired by the strange and absurd worlds created by the likes of David OReilly and Pendleton Ward.

When do you find the time?

For me, drawing can be a way of escaping the everyday and exploring imagined worlds. Doodling is like my meditation—it clears my mind and helps me to focus. I try to keep these scribblings to a minimum in face-to-face meetings, but when I’m on the phone my drawing hand has a mind of its own. I’m often surprised by what ends up on the page.

What are your favorite tools?

My go-to, everyday weapon is the Muji Gel Pen. It’s versatile—thin enough to write with and a great weight for small sketches. It’s got to be black and it’s got to be 0.5mm. No exceptions. I recently started using a Pentel Sign Pen to draw with, too. It’s super smooth and the nib feels quite dynamic. It also bleeds less than Sharpies, the ubiquitous IDEO design tool.

Welcome to the What's in My Moleskine series, a periodic peek inside the notebook of an IDEO designer. Fast Company recently did the same with IDEO's Joe Brown, who had a lot to say about the all-powerful Muji thread-bound A6 notebook.

In this installment we hear from Dave Russell, a communications designer based in our London studio.

I have to find out if I can pull off a successful translation.

I found my most recent skeuomorphic inspiration in Tokyo’s Nezu museum, one of the best traditional Japanese art museums in the country. Nezu was hosting an exhibit on sensu fans. Originally invented in China, sensu fans were popularized in Japan by artists and calligraphers, who used them as a medium for their work.

Taking in the fans, I immediately appreciated the fantastic woodblock artwork and beautiful brush strokes, but what really struck me was their construction and mechanics: the hand-held fans open with the flick of a wrist. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. How did they open and close so efficiently? How did the bamboo supports slide smoothly over one another? Did the creators consciously build them to open with a simple hand gesture? And what was the point of making them retractable in the first place?

I began to realize that the only way to satiate my curiosity was to make a digital re-creation of the sensu fan. Translating the fan’s physical systems to the digital world would test my skills as a designer and help me to understand its essential systems.

Observable systems

In any skeuomorphic project, the question I usually start with is: What elements capture the essence of the subject? Is it its purpose? Or is it characterized by its design, its construction, its movement, or its interaction? To find the answer, I need to look beyond the face of the object and break it down into the shapes, motions, and systems that define it.

The first app I ever created was a tribute to an electric razor from the late 70s designed by Dieter Rams. I can remember watching my father run that razor over his face every morning. Though I didn't know it at the time, it was the first well-designed product I ever came in contact with. I can still hear the click of the slide-up power button and the sound of the vibration that it made as it glided over my dad’s stubble. When I built an app version of the razor, I realized that the sound and the micro-movements were the two key aspects of the design that I had to translate to make a satisfying digital interpretation.

I used a combination of animation, vibration, and sound (tilting the phone toward your face makes the phone play a beard-cutting sound) to bring the razor to life. The result was a super-tangible app that made the device feel so much like a real razor that you could almost forget it was a phone. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t quite get it—they claimed it was “too useless” for the app store—but for me, it was a ticket back to my childhood.

Considering design

Far from useless, skeumorphic explorations make me a better designer. The challenge of breaking down a real-world object into a set of Photoshop layer styles is my idea of time well spent. I strive for efficiency: Whether it’s lines of code or the number of layer effects, minimization is the key to honing my design skills.

When I did a translation of my Braun AW-20 watch, I managed to perfectly capture the essence of the watch in 27 layers with one to three styles each. I plan on returning to it one day to bring it life in code.

Bringing it to life

When I began my skeumorphic translation of the sensu fan, I felt it was critical to capture the physics of the opening and closing motion. This meant that I wasn’t working with Photoshop layers, but with code. At IDEO, I tend to design with code as much as I do with Photoshop or Sketch. Having a good grasp on code allows me to think deeper about physical-to-digital translations, and real-world systems are better expressed and executed in certain programming languages than others. My first attempts at recreating the fan were standalone applications in openFrameworks—a set of C++ libraries packaged together for creative programming. I started playing with the Box2D add-on for openFrameworks, which was put together by my colleague Todd Vanderlin from our Cambridge office. While the add-on worked perfectly, the digital replication of the fan’s real-world physics just didn’t capture the magic of the construction and movement.

Because the stand-alone nature of openFrameworks limited the reach of the project, I moved on to exploring more accessible web technologies like CSS3 and JavaScript. I had to compromise slightly on the real-world look of the fan, but the final expression really embodies the movement and interaction that fascinated me when I encountered the Sensu fans at the museum. What’s more, users can manipulate jQuery parameters to change the fan's size, color, and decoration—a digital version of what traditional Japanese artists have done with the fans throughout history.

By creating these translations and exploring the life of the subject, I end up discovering something deeper about the object's design and meaning in the world. Likewise, by creating these challenges, I end up discovering something about myself and my skills as well.

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A few times a year, I’ll come across something—maybe an object or system; maybe just an idea—and I’m overwhelmed with a burning urge to translate it into code and design. It’s a practice usually referred to as skeuomorphism, and once a project captures my imagination, there's no going back.

But when IDEO worked with the USGBC to come up with a new LEED certification plaque, it became clear that software design would be a fundamental part of LEED’s future: The idea was to replace the static plaque with a continually updated digital display. Initially, LEED only looked at a building’s performance at the time of certification. The USGBC has long been working on ways to evaluate what happens after certification, and a recertification program has been in place since 2004. The new plaque was conceived to go even further, monitoring a building’s sustainability in real time on a dynamic digital graph.

That sounds (and looks) pretty simple and intuitive, but to make it work, we had to bust down some interesting technical walls, in a way that nicely encompassed the breadth of IDEO's capabilities, from design research, business development, industrial design, shop building, and interaction design to the software I helped create with an incredible team.

I came on board after the actual visual design had been finished. A small IDEO team had already completed a concept video, unveiled at the 2013 Greenbuild conference, for a plaque that calculates a building’s ongoing performance in five categories: energy, waste, water, transportation, and human experience. For each of the five ratings, there is a curving pathway that gets longer as the score improves.

The team came up with this “racetrack” design to show real sustainability data in a way that encourages positive behavior change. Familiar graphics like charts and graphs tend to make people focus on the negative, whereas we wanted people to focus on progress. No matter how long the strip on the racetrack is, you can see that you’re on your way, even if you still have a ways to go. We weren’t sure we could achieve the requisite combination of elegance and functionality in the time allotted. But it was a good challenge, and that in itself was compelling.

The animation has a big purpose: Showing the building’s use of energy, waste, and water makes people more aware and more conscientious of their own use. I think that’s really positive. The plaque also shows how occupants travel to and from the building, as well as how comfortable and happy they feel when they’re inside, which are new ideas for what it means for a building to be “green.” I wouldn’t have thought, when LEED was introduced in 2000, that a software developer could have a meaningful impact on sustainable architecture, but the fact that I could really speaks to the opportunities that will be open to us in the future.

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Many folks helped to contribute to this post. Huge thanks to Scot Horst, Gretchen Sweeney, Jennifer Easton, Kim Cullen, Gerry Harris, Steve Bishop, Beau Trincia, Mark Harrison, John Stoddard, Alastair Warren, and Building Robotics.

I've always had a layman's interest in architecture and in LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification program for sustainable buildings. I’m a software developer, so designing buildings is well outside my area of expertise.

Nature Cards are a collection of cards featuring strategies from the natural world that inspire us with a new mindset as we approach design challenges. Use them to frame your design challenge, evolve your business strategy, brainstorm, teach, or simply to think creatively and holistically with nature in mind.

As human-centered designers and innovators, our work has always been inspired by observing people’s natural behavior in its physical, social, and cultural context. As we address increasingly complex and systemic challenges, recently some of us at IDEO have been exploring how human-centered design might broaden its lens to include observation of the natural world in which humans are an integral part. With the help of experts in biology and the life sciences, we are learning about the principles of successful strategies in living systems. This knowledge is inspiring new thinking about how and what we can create for a thriving future.

Download the complete set of Nature Cards here.

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.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.