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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As with any design challenge, we started by breaking the big question—what matters to us—into smaller questions. How could we bring the intimacy of our much smaller former office into this new space? How can we use our studio to bring diverse groups together, both within our office and in the broader community? And how do we celebrate our commitment to collaboration and making?

We created a list of priorities, and, together with our architects Feilden Fowles, found ways for our studio to reflect our values and support our work. Here’s a glimpse into what we focused on, and how it affected our design.

1. Focus on storytelling

The goal of the overall design was to create a natural flow through the new space that works as a design narrative, explaining how IDEO works and what it cares about—from that first view of the maker space to social gathering areas to projects and meeting rooms. The design is also open enough that it’s easy even for visitors to navigate without signs or a map.

“We wanted to showcase IDEO’s creative innovation on immediate arrival,” architect Fergus Feilden says. To that end, when visitors and employees walk in the door, they see a presentation wall with display niches that showcase the London studio’s work, as well as small meeting booths outfitted with pegboards for additional exhibitions. “We also brought forward the workshop into this area, and designed it to be as open as possible in order to immediately celebrate the making that takes place at the heart of IDEO’s design process,” he says.

2. Prioritize collaboration

Because our work is built on collaboration, it’s very important to us to provide teams with dedicated spaces they can make their own. We wanted these spaces to be open, flexible and inviting, and we purposely limited enclosed area to only those that are strictly necessary. Our work often entails not only helping to create a new product or venture, but building a team around it, so the spaces are meant to facilitate collaboration. “The layouts are fundamentally social, and even the divided rooms have glazed walls or windows to introduce natural light and maintain the ethos of transparency throughout,” Fergus says.

At the same time, because we often work on confidential client work, it’s important to be able to keep some projects private, so these spaces have been designed so that they can be closed off if necessary. Aside from the designated team spaces, there are also several break-out areas with soft furnishings or working tables for group meetings or individual workspace.

3. Talk less, do more

We wanted to make the workshop as accessible as any of the social spaces so that there are no barriers to making ideas tangible early. The idea is that you can walk directly from a meeting into the workshop and start building. It was designed to be neutral and understated—the life and color come over time from the projects and prototypes are teams are working on.

We’ve also limited meeting rooms to only two. When clients and partners come into our office, we don’t want them only to see the inside of a conference room. We want our teams to bring them into their work spaces instead. We also saw that many meeting rooms were actually mostly used for video calls with one or two people, so we put in phone booths that can fit up to four instead.

4. Embrace ambiguity

We know as well as anyone that a design that seems ideal today might not support the work we take on down the road. “A key part of the original brief was to allow a ‘loose-fit’ transition into the new space, and to provide a backdrop to IDEO’s creative process—not an over-designed space, and one that doesn’t shout,” Fergus says.

By keeping open space, making designed work areas extremely flexible, and making sure to maintain social spaces for everything from events to client dinners to casual coffee with coworkers, we’re keeping the doors open for all kinds of projects and functions. “In theory the whole studio is flexible to host different sorts of working including the coffee bar, dining and terrace spaces as well,” Fergus says.

Above all, though we wanted to create a space that our community could bring to life—the teams in our studio, the clients we work with, and members of our greater community. We’re a company founded on the idea of working with friends, and this space was built to enable that philosophy.

At IDEO, our values are the guideposts for everything that we do. And that commitment extends to our office spaces. As our London studio looked to create its new home, we envisioned an environment that embodies design and innovation, serves as a hub to welcome clients and visitors, and sets a tone for our employees to do their best work. And, as designers who work on projects that help shape the future, we also wanted to be sure that the design would be flexible enough to fit our needs and work for years to come.

Creativity Challenge # 4: Lessons from observing human behavior

A fundamental principle of innovation or creative thinking is to start with empathy. On the path from blank page to insight, sometimes people need a tool to help with what comes next: synthesis. You’ve gone into the field in search of knowledge, meeting people on their home turf, watching and listening intently. But synthesizing all that data can be a little daunting.

Take control of your field observations by organizing them with an “empathy map”—a tool inspired by IDEO and further developed at the Stanford d.school.

Tool: Empathy Maps
Participants: Solo or groups of 2-8 people
Time: 30 to 90 minutes
Supplies: Whiteboard or large flipchart, Post-its, and Sharpies

Instructions

Step 1: On a whiteboard or a large flipchart, draw a 4-quadrant map. Label the sections with “say,” “do,” “think,” and “feel,” respectively.

Step 2: Populate the left-hand quadrants with Post-its that capture each of your individual observations—using one Post-it per idea. Place observations of what people do in the lower-left quadrant, and place observations of what people say in the upper-left quadrant. Try color-coding positive things with green Post-its, yellow Post-its for neutral, and pink/red for frustrations, confusion, or pain points. The key is not to record everything, but instead to capture what stands out.

Step 3: When you run out of observations (or room) on the left side, begin to fill the right side with Post-its, inferring what people think in the upper-right quadrant and what they feel in the lower-right quadrant. Pay attention to people’s body language, tone, and choice of words.

Step 4: Take a step back and look at the map as a whole. Try to draw some insights or conclusions from you have just written down, shared, and talked about. These questions serve as a good prompt for a discussion of insights. What seems new or surprising? Are there contradictions or disconnects within or between quadrants? What unexpected patterns appear? What, if any, latent human needs emerge?

Tips from the Field

The key to extracting value from observing human behavior is to come away with real insights. This can be challenging, but the exercise is worth the time and effort. As you build up confidence, ask yourself, “Is this a real insight?” Our advice is to look for takeaways that help you see your topic or subject from a new perspective. Try to come up with several that feel novel. As you spend more time with others exploring your topic or subject, patterns will emerge. Some insights will prove to be more pivotal than others.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems.

Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

It’s yet another summer at our seaside house, and my nonna is heading to the gardens to pick up some herbs for her pesce al forno. She says that freshly picked lemongrass adds a completely new flavor to her signature dish.

At 12 p.m., she walks down the rocky stairs and heads to the herb bush she carefully planted 33 years ago, the same year she bought the villa and restored it to host our ever growing family tree. As I watch her, I witness something unusual that I have never seen her doing before.

She is literally hanging from the muretto, or wall. Nonna is 94 and not really a geriatric athlete, so I run towards her. “Tutto bene, Luca!” she says as she bends back up. She tells me that this is ‘her new way’ of picking herbs in the garden.

With age, small actions become a big effort, so leaning down or bending started to become an obstacle to her recipes. The dwarf wall serves the purpose of protecting her back from injuries and keeping her from falling. As she nicely puts it, “I use gravity to my advantage. At my age, you have to find ways around things, to keep feeding your family the way they deserve.”

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

Drawing in VR is a whole new world—one that feels as challenging and daunting as drawing once felt. Luckily, having progressed through hard work in one artistic field, I now trust that the same steady pursuit can get me to a new level in VR.

I recently joined IDEO’s New York office, and part of my job is to keep current on emerging technologies. So I took advantage of our studio’s newly-mounted VR station and spent a week drawing in Tilt Brush, Google’s 3D painting VR app. Together with IDEO’s creative technologist, known as Fuzzy Wobble, I came up with a goal:  to draw a 3D portrait of IDEO’s David Kelley.

For anyone curious about making things in VR, this post will give you a sense of what to expect, the hurdles you may encounter, and the fun you can have.

Day 1: Getting started

Okay, it’s hard. And it’s almost nothing like drawing with a real brush (no matter what the ad says). The definitive difference is that there’s a whole dimension added to your brush strokes, so you are constantly falling into open space while trying to make what used to be a simple line on a paper. This poses a technical challenge, but as you figure it out, it opens the opportunity to instantly create lots of cool “dimensional” animations using different brushes.

Let’s review some of the fundamentals:

Uploading a reference image

My first step was to figure out how to put a photo of David Kelley into my VR bubble for use as a reference image. This can be done pretty easily within the Settings panel (gear icon) / Labs panel (flask icon) / Reference Images. That would be the first fundamental thing for bringing any graphical reference into your personal VR drawing lab.

Choosing a brush

After trying them all, I settled on a simple wire brush. I recommend it as a first step on the ladder of your immersive experience because in comparison to calligraphic and wide-angle brushes (not to mention special effect and animation brushes), it offers even sides and predictable behavior.

Using three-dimensional guides

As I mentioned before (and as you can see from the portrait progress so far), it’s quite unusual to think within the 3D space while drawing, so the first handy tool I discovered was guides. If you came from a graphic or web design background, as I did, you’ll instantly notice that nasty extra dimension added to them as well. A good way to start here would be to compose your portrait (or whatever you want to draw) as a set of shapes, similar to how you’d be taught in a classical art class, and then adjust them until it feels done.

Day 2: Getting better

The second day started with an attempt to combine multiple shapes (using guides) into what would resemble a human silhouette. I decided to get away from Kelley portraits for a moment and gain general confidence in drawing in VR by fooling around and building “robots.”

Simply put, you stack a couple of 3D guides on top of each other and paint over them, like I explained above. It was easier than I’d thought it would be, so after spending about an hour assembling those statues, I switched back to Kelley and here’s what I’ve got.

Day 3: Drawing without guides

Day 3 started with an attempt to break free from floating yellow bubbles and get a little bit more real. I browsed Google Poly Gallery for some inspiration and came back with the above. It still looked far from good, but I finally felt some progress in terms of confidence and drawing without guides. The next challenge was to learn how to properly fill my surfaces without creating a total mess.

I hope the following sequence of GIFs shows some progress:

Day 4: Finding new applications

Since there was only one day left before the conclusion of my little experiment, I decided to try out more brushes than just the “wired” one, and I must say, renderings of those were executed really well within Tilt Brush. My doodles instantly got more texture, depth, and light reflections without any additional settings on my side.

My takeaway

Disregarding the fact that my drawings didn’t get anywhere close to perfect in the first week, I’ve had lots of fun drawing in space—an experience that was practically unavailable to anyone without a spacious drawing studio and a Matisse-like drawing setup prior to VR headsets. To build on top of that, I can’t help but to mention that VR drawing quite effectively stripped the 3D creation experience from its clumsy and complex environment, switching its engineering component into a purely artistic one, and making an entry point that’s surprisingly easy for everyone. That may sound optimistic but that’s exactly the path that graphic design or photography made through the last century—from being an exclusive skill that only few could master to being something that everyone can try and start getting better at.

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I used to think drawing was hard. Maybe because I was bad at it. But it’s my personality to court challenge, so at some point I decided to commit to improving my skills. I attended drawing classes and worked with a personal tutor to develop a daily drawing habit, and while I wouldn't say I think drawing is easy now, I'm more comfortable with it than I was. So I've decided to reset my learning curve to zero and try mastering a new medium: drawing in virtual reality.

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.