Keeping diabetes in check isn’t easy. Between checking blood sugar multiple times a day, keeping a detailed activity record, and logging food intake, staying healthy can be daunting.

But a recent advance in smart diabetes management—Ascensia’s CONTOUR NEXT ONE blood glucose meter and the CONTOUR DIABETES app—can give patients more clarity and control.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE is the latest product to spring from a multi-year collaboration between IDEO and Ascensia Diabetes Care (formerly Bayer Diabetes Care). In 2009, Ascensia and IDEO developed the award-winning CONTOUR USB blood glucose meter—the first meter to plug directly into a computer, providing patients and their doctors with instant access to blood sugar data and personal trend reports.

Buoyed by the success of the first collaboration, Ascensia asked IDEO to help design a next-generation diabetes management system (and the company’s first internet-connected device).

To help reduce the stigma of checking blood sugar in public, IDEO designed the CONTOUR NEXT ONE to look and behave like today’s modern tech devices. The highly simplified, seamless system allows patients to upload blood glucose readings automatically to the app, which helps guide informed, real-time decisions. The meter’s red, green, or yellow smartLIGHT feature gives instant feedback about whether blood sugar levels are below, within, or above the target range.

Seeing contextual data, which includes physical activity logs and photos of meals, paired with recent and historic blood sugar levels, nudges patients toward healthier lifestyle choices and better control of their condition.

For doctors, the accuracy and quantity of the data combined with the app’s easy-to-read pattern views invites more comprehensive, actionable conversations with patients.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE hit shelves in Europe in 2016 and is now available in the U.S. Ascensia is poised to develop more products enabled by rich, personalized data to help people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives.

What if we could use the sky to provide alternative solutions to these problems, creating more space for living and transportation? What exciting future awaits us?

At JAXA’s Aeronautical Technology Directorate (ATD), researchers are conducting research and development on aviation science and technology for the future. They are working to affect positive impact through research like noise reduction of airframe and an integrated aircraft operation management system for disaster relief and crisis management.

Normally, JAXA begins their projects by examining the needs of the aircraft industry or comparing themselves against global technology standards. This approach often leads to ideas that are merely an extension of the current technology. JAXA needed a new approach in order to create radical ideas and real change.

The key question was: What solutions would emerge from prioritizing people’s needs over the most advanced technological possibility—taking a human-centered approach to tackling the most pressing societal challenges?

JAXA ATD voluntary partnered with IDEO to attempt to answer this question, identifying new research areas by envisioning people’s needs in the near future. Together, JAXA and IDEO developed four scenarios of future societies.

The scenarios do not necessarily focus on technologies. Rather, the focus is on telling stories that help readers put themselves in the shoes of the four personas. At the same time, the team worked with industrial designers to illustrate convincing demonstrations of the vehicles and machines of the future.

JAXA’s team embraces the belief that “technologies developed at JAXA should incorporate emotional aspects to blend seamlessly into people’s lives.” Driven by this philosophy, the visual design of the four scenarios used a friendly illustration style intended to be approachable and understandable for people of all ages.

In order to develop human-centered concepts from scratch, the IDEO and JAXA team first undertook research and inspiration-gathering. They skydived, observed cities from above, brainstormed with students from the department of architecture at Waseda University. They interviewed airline employees, a former Judo world champion, skyscraper lovers, a business producer who focuses on new working styles. Throughout the research phase, the team explored the possibilities of the sky as a “living space,” not just a place for transportation.

The team was surprised and excited when they learned from a former fighter pilot that old cockpit designs were inspired by the Japanese tea room, highlighting a historic precedent for taking inspiration from real life to inform new technology designs.

The team synthesized their research and developed several concepts, each informed by a different social issue or pressing concern. Each issue was brought to life through a fictional personal narrative.

How might we relieve city congestion and pollution using the sky, while still keeping it clean and blue? Floating public lights, a skyway that regulates air traffic, camouflaged planes that keep the sky blue—concepts introduced in this scenario were the closest to the technologies already being researched at JAXA ATD. They show us how the sky could become an infrastructure that supports our daily lives. Meet Ayame, a girl from Gunma prefecture, ready to begin her college life in Osaka.

How might we make travel feel easy for people of all ages, no matter how far they need to go? While the researchers at JAXA ATD are working to improve the mobility of aircraft, like reducing air friction or increasing the engine efficiency of aircraft, this scenario explored how people could travel door-to-door through the sky with or without aircraft. A day-in-the-life of Naoto, a 72-year-old man who commutes twice a month from Tottori to Tokyo for medical checkups.

How might we leverage the sky as a resource for reusable energy and economic growth? One of the criteria of JAXA’s R&D activities is to improve the environment. While JAXA has been focusing on “protecting” the environment, this scenario focused on “creating” new environments. A day-in-the-life of Toshi, who runs a “sky-to-table” farming business.

How might we help people live with peace of mind, even during a disaster? JAXA’s disaster relief technologies have been extremely valuable in countries like Japan, which frequently suffers from natural disasters. In this scenario, we approached the problem from victims’ point of view while exploiting the potential of a network of aircrafts and other flying objects. Here's the story of Yuri, a victim of an earthquake in Tokyo who reunites with her family after evacuating to the sky.

The purpose of the project website is not to present answers, but to introduce new directions towards an exciting future. By presenting JAXA ATD’s vision through these four scenarios, the team invited people from all industries and of all ages to participate in co-creating the future.

Just like movies, cartoons, and novels from childhood stimulate the imagination, this project aims to spark new conversation and vision for a radically different, positive future.

By illustrating and communicating a more human-centered future to a wider audience, Japan’s top aeronautical technology development agency may already be changing the future of the sky for the better.

The speed and scale of change in our world are unprecedented. As more people relocate to cities, our lives are impacted by urbanization problems such as pollution, congestion, depopulation of rural areas, resource, and energy deficiencies.

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For factory operators, a smart valve is a game-changer. It gathers data on how smoothly the system is running and feeds it to an app, making it easier to troubleshoot from anywhere. And when things get overheated, it can automatically shut down the machinery, avoiding a meltdown.

Georg Fischer (GF), the Swiss-based, B2B industrial manufacturer collaborated with IDEO to design that valve, along with a system that adds value for generations of engineers to come.

And there were some surprises along the way. When the team set out to interview customers, they learned a lot about their real needs. “We showed a customer a sacrificial concept of a smart valve and asked, what do you think about this?” says Laura Barrabia, GF’s Head of Corporate Design Thinking. “The customer answered, we don’t want your valve to be smart, we want to be smart. If GF is providing a smart valve, where is my value?”

For GF Piping Systems, these insights helped shape initial prototypes and guided the direction of the design to something that would tie parts together into smart systems and more efficient industrial facilities—a competitive advantage.

Yves Serra, GF’s CEO, recognized early on that his company needed to strengthen its customer-centricity and digital capacity, so he approached IDEO to begin shifting GF’s culture from engineering-led and procedural to customer-focused, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and flexible. That kicked off a decade-long relationship that would help GF take a design-based approach.

Learn what it means to move from being technology-driven to being truly customer-centric.

To help GF identify clients’ pain points and address them with new digital offers, IDEO proposed three “lighthouse” projects, one for each of GF’s divisions: Piping Systems, Casting Solutions, and Machining Solutions. Lighthouse projects (also called “Beacons”) are proofs of concept that light the way for an organization and help it shift its way of working.

For example, GF Machining Solutions built a prototype for an application that uses real-time data to help customers identify and fix problems in the machines, laying the foundation for truly predictive maintenance. Making data streams more transparent for customers also simplified life for the GF service engineers, who keep the machines running.

Learn how Georg Fischer is moving from hardware offerings to digital solutions.

For GF Piping Systems, the design team developed the GF Digital Line, a set of products, apps, dashboards, and other services that help customers plan, install, and maintain water and chemical piping systems. GF teams went back to customers to test several prototypes and gather feedback on the Digital Line and make sure it addressed current and future needs. They also built internal capabilities to support product development, laying the groundwork for future innovation.

Lastly, IDEO helped GF Casting Solutions escape the “commodity trap” of competing with foreign automotive suppliers. To better understand the pressures car manufacturers face, the design team explored the development cycles of two car manufacturers. They learned how challenging it is to implement solutions to reduce vehicle weight—essential for cutting fuel consumption. As an expert in aluminum die casting, GF was well positioned to help manufacturers meet that challenge, not just with quality parts, but also with digital engineering to deliver cutting-edge lightweight casting solutions, which are harder to replicate.

By the end of these lighthouse projects, GF had rolled out a global design thinking training program that had touched more than 1000 employees. After the training, employees throughout the organization adopted a new way of working and became passionate ambassadors. The enthusiasm spread from the R&D department to HR to finance and many other departments.

Today, GF has permanent design thinking and digital teams to continue this work. All three divisions aim to launch the first releases of their lighthouse projects by early 2019. And with every project, GF’s business—and solutions—get smarter about how to meet the needs of a fast changing world.

IHG’s ambition is to grow in service of its guests around the world. IHG’s Atlanta-based team had identified a major opportunity for hotels in the midscale space—a market segment known for its inconsistency.

Alongside colleagues at London-based forpeople, IDEO was invited to help IHG shepherd that business opportunity into a human one, by asking how IHG might reimagine the everyday travel experience for people relying on this category of hotel. What kind of offer might resonate equally with guests and with the owner/operators who’d need to buy into a new brand and bring it to life?

IDEO began by talking to travelers to better understand their lives, values, and needs—travelers who spend one or two nights on the road a few times every year; travelers who regularly take short trips to small cities or away from city centers; and travelers who live on the road, moving from hotel to hotel. These included court stenographers, medical technicians, consultants, conference-goers, and more.

Early research insights evolved into two distinct concepts for a new hotel brand, which were built out into two full-scale physical prototypes at IHG’s design center in Atlanta. Over three weeks, IDEO and its IHG partners led potential guests and hotel owners through each model, gathering their feedback on new formats for breakfast offerings, service details, booking experiences, and overall tone.

The investment in prototyping paid off with surprising and actionable insights. Despite wide variation in occupation and income, these guests are sophisticated and self-reliant; they know what’s out there, and they know what’s reasonable to expect. In fact, many describe a syndrome IDEO dubbed “anticipation anxiety:” the sense of dread that comes from not knowing whether a lower-priced hotel is going to be clean or safe, or provide a bed that enables restful sleep. Many have so little confidence in the cleanliness of hotels in this price range that they travel with their own packs of wet wipes.

IDEO, along with the IHG team, recognized these behaviors as an unanswered cry in the market. The purpose of the new brand crystallized around extinguishing that anxiety and rewarding guests with something much better. avid hotels exceeds its competition by doubling down on quality in just a few select areas: an extraordinary mattress; rigorously high standards of cleanliness; a focused, high-quality, grab-and-go breakfast and coffee experience; and an overall tone of warmth and straightforwardness.

These guests made clear that for trips like this, they aren’t interested in bells and whistles, or communication that isn’t frank or to the point. That led to an insight that upends an industry truism: for these guests—and there are many of them—choosing a hotel is rarely only about the price of the room. avid guests can often afford to stay in a more expensive place for a honeymoon or a vacation or a trip with friends; they’ll spend more when they need more. But for functional stays of one or two nights, it just feels wasteful. It goes against their values and their principles.

IHG and IDEO heard a clear call for a sense of focus and affordability—but never at the expense of quality. Guests should be able to access a simple booking process, rooms designed for sound sleep, and a quality breakfast, all at a fair price. And hotel owners ought to be able to deliver that experience with confidence and consistency, at costs that build a compelling case for their own business.

That’s what avid hotels is designed to deliver, every single time. Early traveler reviews have been exceedingly positive and have noted specifically the unique differentiating offers avid brings to the market.

Within a year of partnering with IDEO, IHG had issued 150 avid hotels licenses to franchisees in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and announced a development deal for 15 avid hotel locations in Germany over the next five years—a scale of success that came at unprecedented speed for the industry. The collaborative, inclusive design process is now serving as a model for how to develop robust, guest-centered hospitality brands that deliver where it matters for people.

Those things drive us nuts too. But those tiny moments of frustration can become fodder for a totally new way of thinking. What if the card reader sung the ABCs? What if pen caps locked? What if water balloons tied themselves? (Luckily, someone has already put some time into solving that last one.)

At IDEO, we spend a lot of time rethinking everyday life, from tiny pen caps to the giant, bureaucratic process of applying for a visa. Like we said in 2017: This kind of thinking is our bread and butter. Back then, we asked the IDEO community what they were dying to redesign, and the answers were so provocative that we decided to do it again. Here are 24 more things we want to redesign, if only we had the chance.

Work
The timecard. With a little AI juice attached to email and calendar, there’s no reason that anyone should have to create a timecard: They just need to review it. —Joe Brown

Corporate training. Every organization needs the ability to grow new and adaptive capabilities. Those skills won’t be coming in from an external job board, and definitely not at scale. —Peter Hyer

I want to take a hack at reimagining the experience of identifying and applying for a job. At scale, it's currently a dry, massive vortex of duplicative job boards, cluttered search engine results, and mounting self-doubt and uncertainty. What if we had a universal tool that could help point a candidate to a strong-fit company, job family, industry, or job title based on a series of filters they could manipulate? Job security can prompt a domino effect with a host of other social issues, so let's put candidates back in the driver's seat and make the process of getting there more personal and human-centered. —Chloe Partelow

Networking. It's uncomfortable, awkward, daunting, and surface-level. No one wants to do it, but everyone feels like they need to. —Melissa Lobato

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of the actual places where we work. I think the workplace should allow more flexibility and choice and generally be more global. I’d like to see deconstructed offices in neighborhoods where people live and like spending time. It will reduce commuting costs, improve productivity, lifestyle, geographical choice, create more diverse and dense neighborhoods, and allow for more creative collisions. —Kateryna Romanova

Education
College, especially a liberal arts education. Turn it into something much more relevant to close the skills gap in the marketplace, and make it much more about life-long learning. —Suzanne Gibbs Howard

Vocational school. I’m not sure that “everyone needs to (and can) go to college” is the right narrative. That’s the message I got growing up, and vocational schools or trades were either implicitly or explicitly judged. I think we are in a time when we need to take a good, hard look at alternative forms of education. —Meg Rice

The lower part of the k-12 education system. Why isn't it more globally aligned and translatable? Why does it assume that you live in one country for 12 years? —David Sjunnesson

Our approach to digital literacy. When our 70-plus year-old dads accidentally tweet a search query, we make fun of them instead of recognizing that behavior like that is indicative of large, looming societal problems between those who have tech know-how and those who don't. —Rachel Young

Cuddling
Cuddling. Seriously: what are you supposed to do with your bottom arm?!?! —Santiago Seira

Breakups
The breakup: Ow. It hurts. I don't know how to go about redesigning this, but I know there’s a lot of room for reflection and plenty of nuggets of truth to be gleaned from any moment that rips you apart. I have reflected on how to create a scaffolding for yourself that helps you walk out the other side with a sense of gratitude and growth—but still, ow! —Leah Jarrett

Breakups. And I’d start with an interesting provocation from Star Trek. —Lisa Tacoronte

Health
Electronic medical records (EMRs). Some doctors spend up to 50 percent of their days doing admin work, mostly in EMRs, and they are notoriously not user-friendly, not interoperable across companies, and even can cause medical errors. —Jessica Watterson

Single-Use Plastics
Unnecessarily one-time use and/or made of plastic: floss. Coffee cups. To-go containers. Toothbrushes. Plastic water bottles—or anything that holds water. Makeup packaging. Tampons. —Shuya Gong

Recycling How-Tos
Every single recycling/garbage/composting receptacle on the planet. I challenge you to find anyone who can understand and follow those rules. —Chioma Ume

Our Relationship With the Environment
How we make decisions that impact the environment. I'm inspired by seeing calories on food in restaurants, which helps me make informed choices. Why don't we have something similar for electronics, ordering on Amazon, food in the grocery store, to show the impact of a product on the environment? —Dean Malmgren

Time Itself
Time travel. It’s just too difficult currently. —Sean Hewens

Getting Towed
It’s scary, financially exploitative, and just generally terrible. —Tara Safaie

The News
I would like to redesign our concept of what news is. I’ve tried many different sources, and have found none to offer adequate choice, curation, or quality. Most of what passes as news is superficial, salacious, irrelevant, and/or extremely upsetting. I find I’m constantly disappointed. The news needs a total overhaul. —Betsy Fields Smith

Childcare
The process of finding childcare. Every parent seems to reinvent it all over again. —Annette Diefenthaler

Access to Capital
Women entrepreneurs receive about 2% of all venture capital dollars as compared to men. There's a lot of opportunity to reimagine the funding process so that it's more inclusive of women, people of color, and non-US nationals. —Sam Schulman

Winning and Losing
The definition of success. —Ramon Marc

Online Ticketing
You have the ticket price and another $20 in service fees, and sometimes you're required to print out a physical ticket that arrives digitally. Huh? —Miles Holenstein

Life Transitions
Post-job changes, post-move changes, post-high school changes, post-college changes, postpartum changes, post-divorce changes, post-(insert life change here). There’s no blueprint. Help. —Sue-Jean Sung

Hot Dogs
I want them to be healthy. —Michael Hendrix

If your organization would like to work with us to solve one of these problems, you can reach us at octopus@ideo.com.

Illustrations by Jenice Kim

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When was the last time you were annoyed by something small? Like the mean, angry noise a chip reader makes when it’s done with your card? Or the mess a pen makes when the cap pops off in your back pocket? Or how deeply, achingly, frustratingly hard it is to tie a water balloon?

Beyond CSR’s spectacular rise, several other indicators signal a growing belief in the role of business and innovation in addressing societal problems: 88% of millennials say they will only work for values-aligned companies, and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink demanded publicly in 2018 that companies be driven by purpose. Fink calls for a new model of corporate governance:

Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.
_{Larry Fink, Blackrock}

That’s the CEO of a company managing $6.5 trillion in assets pushing for the same economic shift demanded by today’s youth: to ensure that innovation serves a social purpose. Mainstream box: check.

But experts are skeptical. In her opening presentation at last year’s Social Innovation Summit, Caroline Barlerin, former Global Head of Social Innovation at Eventbrite, asked, “Is the mainstreaming of social innovation something to celebrate? Is it enough?”

The answer is no. Not enough, not even close. While CSR reporting and growing social innovations are surely positive developments, they also reflect an insufficient response by the private sector, civil society, private philanthropy, and government to today’s global challenges.

Rather than count how many companies have begun to invest in CSR efforts, the real measure of progress is how we’re faring against the challenges of our time. Whether you focus on global climate change, the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, or the health and wellness of the fabric of our society, it’s clear that whatever “mainstream social innovation” is, it’s not enough.

As we enter 2020 and head toward momentous change in the US and the world, we also need to enter a new phase of social innovation. Three important changes will help us get there.

1. From innovations to ecosystems

Just as the complex biological system of a rainforest allows individual plants to flourish, so do complex entrepreneurial ecosystems work to help social innovators succeed. Healthy, diverse, and inclusive ecosystems allow talent, information, and resources to flow quickly. These networks can’t be bought, they have to be built. _{Andy Stoll, Kauffman Foundation}

Today’s societal challenges require vibrant systems of diverse innovators attacking societal problems from many angles. Investment needs not only to support scaling, but also to create the conditions that allow entire fields of innovators to advance. As Managing Director of OpenIDEO—IDEO’s participatory, decentralized innovation platform—I’m inspired every day by the thousands of innovators who we support, a reminder that there’s never been more human energy and creativity directed toward global challenges. After years of leveraging open innovation to create a pipeline of promising concepts and ventures, OpenIDEO now strengthens entrepreneurial ecosystems to address pressing societal challenges collaboratively.

In 2016, OpenIDEO worked with a consortium of partners to introduce the Food Waste Challenge, a program that sought to address the 40% of food that goes to waste in the United States. Rather than selecting a small number of winners, we created the Food Waste Alliance, a virtual network of 80 organizations that proved pivotal to the development of several food waste startups still growing today. Realizing the potential for ecosystems to create greater impact over time, we designed OpenIDEO’s 2018 Early Childhood Innovation Prize to advance an entire sector of innovators in the early childhood development space. After 30 teams of entrepreneurs were selected and received a share of $1 million in grants, OpenIDEO and our partners at Gary Community Investments then launched a virtual accelerator and partner network, which brought together innovator teams and institutional partners to advance winning ideas.

The program eventually transitioned to two new accelerator networks fully dedicated to early childhood innovations, Promise Venture Studios and Futurebound—long-term, ecosystem-building initiatives sparked by the initial open innovation program.

To create breakthrough change, all of us must work together. That means platforms and tools like prizes or challenges that transparently support people to develop their best ideas and collaborate.
_{Steffanie Clothier, Gary Community Investments}

2. From delivery to co-creation

Increasingly, funders and innovators alike are recognizing the need for solutions to be truly rooted in the needs of those they’re trying to serve. In their recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, The New Practice of Public Problem Solving, Tara McGuiness and Anne-Marie Slaughter note this as one of four major trends:

The relentless focus on what users need and how they experience services brings people into the process of providing feedback for services where they have not traditionally had a voice.
_{Tara McGuiness and Anne-Marie Slaughter}

While the growing interest in human-centered design is a positive step forward, the next chapter of social innovation will require another leap. Rather than just gathering user feedback on potential solutions, the people we design for will increasingly become part of design, implementation and evaluation. As technology makes it ever easier to be more inclusive, it will become unacceptable to exclude or overlook people affected by social innovations. True co-creation facilitates a greater sense of community ownership and more grassroots capacity building.

OpenIDEO has been learning about new ways to innovate alongside the communities we serve. Our 2019 BridgeBuilder Challenge—the third annual $1m social innovation prize offered in partnership with GHR Foundation—sought to better include a group that’s more often a recipient than an active participant of social innovations: displaced migrants and refugees.

We began by partnering with former BridgeBuilder Challenge winner NaTakallam to include people with relevant lived experience in creating the brief. Applicants were also expected to show evidence that the voice and perspective of a person currently or previously experiencing displacement was part of the ideation, process, and project. NaTakallam later helped us hire a group of mentors who have experienced displacement to provide feedback and mentorship for applicants, and to support the evaluation process.

3. From disengagement to connection

In 2016, a Gallup poll reported that employee engagement in the United States had returned to its highest level since 2000, when it began studying worker enthusiasm and interest. That high is disappointingly low: just 34% of our workforce feel engaged in their work. Meanwhile, according to research conducted by Opportunity Knocks in 2011, half of nonprofit workers reported either being burnt out or in danger of burn out. Taken together, these studies reflect a failure to create work that is both inspiring and reasonable. As today’s problems can only be solved by dedicating attention to them, this failure is tragic.

Social innovation can play a central role in better aligning talent to our needs by creating new jobs, helping employees become engaged in issues they care about, and fundamentally reshaping the culture of work. To make this true, a reasonable work-life balance is one obvious need. Less obvious, but perhaps just as important, is a sense of connection—both to purpose and to other people.

• Connection to Purpose: It’s important to remember that individual and organizational purpose are separate, and that understanding and supporting an individual’s purpose is as critical as encouraging focus on organizational purpose.
  
  
• Connection to People: Cultures of self-sacrifice, efficiency and competition often impede deep connection with potential allies within teams or sectors. It’s important to combat isolation and loneliness in order to maintain passion for the work.
  

Once or twice a year, the OpenIDEO team gets out of the office and away from our daily responsibilities for a team retreat. We use the time to look inward to better understand the aspirations bringing us all to work every day and how each of us is connected to a shared purpose.

While the challenges facing social innovators are serious, we have reason to be hopeful: today there are unprecedented levels of energy and creativity going toward improving the state of the world. That energy is humanity’s greatest resource, but it’s too often depleted by underinvesting in the ecosystems entrepreneurs need to thrive, ignoring the creative potential of people with lived experience, and failing to help employees connect to purpose and each other. Building the next chapter of social innovation will require new thinking, practices and tools. It'll take bold action and a continuous commitment to pushing boundaries, not settling for a place in the mainstream.

In 2020, OpenIDEO will continue to explore how the social sector can be advanced and adapted to tackle tomorrow’s challenges. Follow along and join the conversation.

Illustration by Antonio Sortino

The once radical notion of leveraging business to address societal problems has become mainstream. As of 2017, 85% of Fortune 500 companies reported their environmental and social impact—an astonishing 65% increase since 2012. By this metric, the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is verging on ubiquitous.

As we wrap up the year, we’re reflecting on the power of creativity to inspire change in ourselves, our work, and the world around us. We've pulled together The Octopus’s top ten most read stories of 2019, each of which offers tips, tools, and mindsets to help you cultivate creativity as a tool to navigate the constant ambiguity facing us in these turbulent times.

And as always, a heartfelt thanks from The Octopus team for stopping by. We can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store.

1. 10 Exercises to Build Your Creative Confidence

Creativity is like a muscle—it can be strengthened with practice. Try these activities from David Kelley & Tom Kelley’s book Creative Confidence to get started.

2. Corporate Innovation Needs a Shakeup. Here’s a Blueprint.

Innovative ideas don’t happen by accident. Check out these tips for creating an environment that fosters innovation from the team behind IDEO’s newest digital tool, Shape.

3. The 3 Mindsets of Great Interaction Designers

Being a successful interaction designer is about more than mastering digital tools—it’s about the soft skills that help you push your designs to the next level.

4. The Best Managers Understand Their Employees’ Emotions—And Their Own

There’s no denying it: your relationship with your boss makes or breaks your experience at work. Here’s how the best bosses create positive emotional environments for their employees.

5. Practice Your Prototyping Skills with These 4 Resources

An old IDEO proverb states, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” These resources from IDEO designers will help you prototype efficiently, effectively, and creatively.

6. 3 Creative Exercises to Make Change Stick in 2019

We kicked off 2019 with intention, sharing three activities to help you actually reach your New Years’ goals. So, how’d you do?

7. Turns Out Emotions Do Belong in the Workplace—Here’s Why

The definition of professionalism is changing. Here’s why organizations should invest in their “emotional culture” and allow employees to express feelings at work.

8. An IDEO Recruiter’s 3 Strategies for Writing a Better Resume

Planning to start off the new year with a new gig? Use these three tips to help you create a resume that stands out in a sea of sameness.

9. AI Needs an Ethical Compass. This Tool Can Help.

Artificial intelligence is the product of those who create it—biases included. That’s why IDEO data scientists created a tool to help teams design ethical AI solutions.

10. Design an Organization’s Purpose Statement With This Tool

Why does your company exist beyond making profit? IDEO organization designers built a colorful tool to help you arrive at an answer.

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2019 was widely regarded as a year of tumult—politically, environmentally, societally. But in the face of it all, 2019 brought us unparalleled human advancement, from Greta Thunberg’s movement of youth-led climate activism to NASA’s first-ever image of a black hole. For better and worse, 2019 kept us on our toes.

Unsurprisingly, this trend didn’t last long. Car companies gave up the schtick and went back to traditional approaches to notification. But the story of talking cars in the 1980s speaks to a classic move in industry: Companies are often eager to find a way to use the hottest technology, even if it’s not a fit for their team, their business model, or the problem they're trying to solve. It's a classic case of FOMO.

As designers committed to a human centered approach to developing new products and services, we look at things a little differently. We start by uncovering a need—for example, helping tired drivers stay awake and alert while at the wheel—and then search for the right technology to solve the problem. We relish the opportunity to take a journey away from the "tech hype" landscape and explore what problems, challenges, or needs the desired tech may help address. It’s about focusing on the people behind the problem before finding the right technological approach.

How, exactly, do we get ourselves in that mindset? We tapped our design research colleagues in our Cambridge and Chicago studios for their best tips on cutting through the tech hype. Here are three distinct strategies for a technology detox at the start of a project.

1. Start by taking the tech apart and exploring the value proposition, then make decisions

Design researcher Hannah Rosenfeld worked on a project where she had to dive into a potentially-disruptive, blockchain-based technology that could have serious applications in the fintech space. For some products, it was the perfect fit. She needed to figure out, though, if it was the right fit for what she was working on.

Throwing an existing, well-formed product that uses the tech in front of her team might have shifted the customer focus away from the big picture toward feedback about functionality and usability, questions that matter on the latter end of product development. Instead, she and her team unpacked the functional and emotional benefits of the technology—what blockchain could unlock for customers or allow them to do that they couldn’t before—and used these as the basis for their exploration. From there, she was able to develop early stage prototypes she could put in front of customers to test the resonance of potential benefits rather than the appeal of an ill-understood technology.

In doing so, Hannah was able to highlight for her clients the potential impact and inherent limits of the current technology as well as make recommendations for how they could evolve their offer to align with real world challenges.

2. Try on a few different options to find the right fit before committing

When a team from the Cambridge studio was working on a project to create an immersive, digital experience for a new flagship retail store, they needed to dive into the role tech would play.

To explore this question, Gabe adopted a Goldilocks approach, taking the team on an inspiration trip to three museums, each with contrasting approaches to using technology: a cautious museum that sticks to straightforward displays of content in the museum and online; a lavish techno-fantasy museum with touch screens in every corner; and museum with a more careful balance where physical artifacts are brought to life with additional layers of digital content.

From the museum with the more cautious approach, the team learned about its core values, and how it carefully leveraged digital technology by offering online access to its archives for audiences that might not otherwise come to the museum. At the tech-heavy museum, we saw best-in-class interfaces that were great at engaging one visitor at a time, but missed out on opportunities to connect people in shared activities. And at the museum that created a balanced approach to digital and analog displays, we saw how stories projected onto artifacts added a layer of depth to what we learned.

By taking the Goldilocks approach, Gabe and the team generated a shared set of design principles that articulated the role digital technology should play in their store and how it would be used strategically to tell the story of the brand.

3. Think of fantastical means to address concrete needs

When former IDEO design researcher Ovetta Sampson was working on a project about technology-enabled cabinets, her first question was, what human need would this technology serve? She could have started by having her team prototype a few different kinds of tech-enabled cabinets, but she needed to answer the question above first.

Short on time, Ovetta framed a brainstorming session around literature from cognitive scientific research and fantasy novels. She used the Max-Neef Fundamental Human Needs Scale, a human development matrix, to ground the team. Starting with a human need like freedom or identity, she asked team members to add a magical action to real-life objects to help focus on how it could meet a human need or motivation.

The team was inspired by fantasy novels where characters have magic objects that help them accomplish tasks (think Dorothy’s red slippers sending her home in The Wizard of Oz). By pairing research about real needs with a fantastical vision for how to address those needs, Ovetta and her team gave themselves the flexibility to dream up big technological solutions while staying grounded in the reality of human needs and motivations.

Businesses will always feel the pressure to maintain a competitive edge, and the allure of new technology will often present itself as the solution to staying ahead of the curve. Sharpening our skills as advocates and practitioners of human-centered design—and making sure we put user needs first—is critical. Whether you’re partnering with a client, or taking on a project of your own, resist the FOMO of new, shiny technology. Start with user needs, then search for the right solution. Shift the conversation from tech-first to humans-first.

Special thanks to IDEO alumna Ovetta Sampson, who contributed to this article. Illustrations by Katie Kirk.

Believe it or not, KITT the talking car on Knight Rider had some real-life counterparts in the 1980s. They may not have had grappling hooks or turbo boosters, but for a short time, talking cars were trendy. Almost out of gas? Don't look at the fuel gauge; the car can tell you you’re low on fuel. Forget to buckle up? No need for that annoying dinging sound—the car just asks you politely to buckle your seat belt.

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.