New Yorkers experience policing differently depending on who they are and where they live. Some communities are patrolled; others are profiled. When your neighbors’ experiences are starkly different from your own, it can be almost impossible to understand their perspective.

The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), a state branch of the ACLU, hoped to spark a dialogue around race and police tactics in over-policed communities, and to engage voters on this divisive issue before New York City’s mayoral election. But the NYCLU also understood that traditional slogans and billboards weren’t enough to foster deep personal conversations and effective political action—the city needed real talk.

The organization engaged IDEO to help create a city-wide, nontraditional campaign. In talking with New Yorkers, the NYCLU advocates and IDEO designers honed in on two simple truths: Transformative conversations happen only when people feel safe enough to listen—and to speak. And people become more compassionate listeners once they themselves feel heard. In a time of entrenched interests and growing social conflict, listening can be a radical act.

Together, IDEO and the NYCLU designed Listening NYC, a grassroots campaign to promote interpersonal listening, meaningful discussion, and collective action around policing.

To get New Yorkers—famously brash and always bustling—to stop and listen to their neighbors, they created a pop-up installation called the Listening Room that travels through the city to catalyze one-on-one conversations. It’s a portable safe space, with tables, chairs, two walls that provide a degree of intimacy, and two sides left open for a feeling of psychological safety.

At the center of the experience is a deck of Conversation Cards that encourage New Yorkers to share their stories and hear those of others. Simple prompts like “I believe the role of police is to _____,” and questions like “A cop stops you in your neighborhood. What do you do?” empower people to find common ground. Through straightforward but structured activities like these, many New Yorkers who enter the Listening Room expecting to disagree instead find themselves sharing stories and opinions in ways they never imagined.

Beyond face-to-face dialogue, the Listening Room also features a radio loaded with stories from different neighborhoods across the city’s five boroughs. By turning the dial, visitors can learn about encounters with policing culture from fellow New Yorkers, including two NYPD officers.

To turn talk into action, visitors are invited to send a postcard to the mayor. People choose the policy proposals most important to them—from, “Police shouldn’t be disciplining kids in school” to, “If police want to read our emails, they should have to get a warrant”—and add them to a pre-stamped postcard dropped into a special “ballot box.” The NYCLU delivered more than 2,000 of these cards to Mayor Bill de Blasio upon his reelection in late 2017.

IDEO and the NYCLU also led an interactive campaign event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Residents, students, philanthropists, and police were led through an exercise called Creative Tensions, positioning themselves around the room according to their views on everything from surveillance technology to school safety. Experts helped guide the conversation including Sheriff Jerry Clayton, director Liesl Tommy, and NYCLU organizer Brandon Holmes. The process allowed participants to see how fluid people’s positions can be.

Listening NYC has now reached thousands of New Yorkers at more than 35 locations. Schools, from a public middle school to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, have requested visits from the Listening Room, and the installation’s modular design has inspired new incarnations on topics including student safety and discipline.

The NYCLU has sent Conversation Cards to celebrities, influencers, and every member of the New York City Council. Sending postcards to Mayor de Blasio and Conversation Cards to the city council led directly to passage of the Right to Know Act—legislation that incorporates some of the NYCLU’s proposals for police reform.

Today, the impact of Listening NYC has moved beyond city limits. The NYCLU’s Syracuse chapter is introducing the pop-up installation there, while in Boston, mayoral candidate Tito Jackson even promised a visit from the Listening Room if elected. To keep dialogue flowing, the ACLU plans to distribute Conversation Cards nationwide.

Fashion thrives on reinvention. Now, digital platforms and tools are reinventing fashion. E-commerce has reshaped the shopping experience and social media has democratized the once-exclusive industry.

Amidst this furious whirl of change, the fashion platform Zalando, founded in 2008, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech companies. Headcount has ballooned to 15,000 and revenues grew 23 percent year over year. More than €1 out of every €100 spent on clothing in Europe is spent at Zalando.

In 2014, Zalando’s co-founder and CEO Robert Gentz approached IDEO to help think about the organization’s future in the face of increasing competition. Gentz realized that building design thinking capabilities across the company would allow Zalando to make systemic business shifts, like building better experiences for customers, and balancing operational excellence and execution with innovation.

So, he invited a team of IDEO designers and Zalando employees to create an innovation lab in its Berlin headquarters. They called it The Studio, and in the three years since its launch, it has helped the company build new products, experiences, and modes of working that are powering a digital transformation across Zalando and in the broader fashion world.

Finding purpose

Gentz came to IDEO with a simple request: “I want my daughter to be proud of the company I created.” With that directive, the first order of business was to home in on the organization’s new strategy—to shift from an e-tailer to a full-blown fashion platform—and resurface purpose. After a series of interviews and workshops across the company, a unifying intent emerged:

Zalando exists to reimagine fashion, for the good of all.

To share that message, the team designed a five-day Festival of Purpose at the company’s Berlin headquarters and satellite locations, coupled with a long-term plan to help leaders and their teams weave that sense of purpose into everything they do.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando used purpose to mobilize its community

Building Innovation Capacity

With a shared purpose to rally around, Zalando started to design and build at a clip. The Studio experimented and prototyped, launching products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street style photos, and a digital tool called Collabary that connects online fashion influencers with brands. Projects are enabling cross-disciplinary teams to get into the practice of aligning around joint goals, making fast decisions, and building with agility.

But just as important as identifying growth opportunities for the company has been The Studio’s role as a hub. Zalando employees from across business units cycled into the Studio, teaching IDEOers about their business and the company’s culture, while IDEOers helped them master the design thinking process so they could lead future projects.

Studio graduates ensure that anything prototyped there is implemented, and integrate what they’ve learned into their day jobs. Their experience makes them design ambassadors who spread the practice of experimentation, prototyping, and storytelling across the organization.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando pioneered a new innovation studio

Teaching Leaders How to Scale Change

It’s one thing to start working differently in a small innovation lab, but how do you scale change across an organization and determine how it will affect each major business unit—product, technology, commercial, and logistics? IDEO interviewed Zalando employees to better understand how to embed what we called new Ways of Working (WoW), a method that combines design thinking with lean and agile approaches. WoW was then deployed by a centralized team that ran workshops and coaching sessions to help leaders adopt it, measure its impact through OKRs, KPIs, and NPSs, and help their teams understand the new processes.

Today, the Ways of Working method is being rolled out across the entire organization, reaching all 15,000 employees.

Together, the relationship between IDEO and Zalando and their multi-year project of change is spurring double-digit growth, and making good on the company’s vision of reimagining fashion, for the good of all.

WATCH: Learn how Zalando scaled new ways of working across their organization

IDEO helped position Shinho’s ingrained respect for food, family, and good health as a guiding principle for how the organization interacts with its employees and the wider world. The IDEO team integrated a new motto—“treat the world as family”—into every part of Shinho’s work, from sourcing and hiring to new ventures to the care employees take in handling each bottle of sauce destined for someone’s table.

To help transform Shinho’s internal culture, the IDEO team also crafted a narrative to communicate the company’s beliefs to new staff and outside partners. The team expressed Shinho’s foundational story through a published brand book and film, reimagined logo, and codified employee values.

“My proudest moment was when we brought the brand identity IDEO developed to life, and interpreted Shinho’s mission and vision through that lens in front of 2,000 employees at our annual meeting,” said Hanzhong Dong, Shinho's Head of Product, “It made me feel that even though we’re a group of ordinary people, we’re working on a great and meaningful thing."

Shinho’s heightened confidence and focus on supporting families has empowered the company to expand beyond soy sauce and snacks and explore new offers, from culinary training to sustainable farming to food experiences.

In July 2017, Shinho stepped onto the international stage as a tastemaker by participating in an event called Food Forward, hosted by the Michelin Guide and IDEO. Michelin-starred restaurants are synonymous with superb ingredients and service. Shinho crafts safe, organic, high-quality products that are staples for Chinese chefs, and the company shares the Michelin Guide’s aim to celebrate and expand the role of fine dining in China. IDEO brought all parties together with the shared goals of elevating China's culinary craft and culture, inspiring people around the future of food in China, and encouraging fruitful connections and partnerships.

IDEO and the Michelin Guide organized the day-long event, which included guest speakers, panel discussions, and tastings with four international, Michelin-starred restaurant chefs. Speakers and panelists discussed culinary education, inclusion, and the interplay between tradition and innovation in food. More than 200 people attended from across the food ecosystem: chefs, restaurateurs, journalists, investors, and educators. The event’s livestream garnered 30 million global views and 800,000 engagements.

Shinho’s products now reach 30 million families in 232 cities around the globe, driven by a cohesive mission and brand message. This kind of values-driven growth and hunger for new partnerships is setting the course for the future of food in China and throughout the region.

Despite the rapid growth of China's economy and increased access to a wider variety of food since the opening up, the market is saturated with unhealthy, processed snack foods. Consumers are increasingly seeking better-quality options, highlighting a significant gap in the food system.

30M families

purchase Shinho’s products

60 countries

around the globe offer Shinho products

Narvar, a software-as-a-service startup that provides a post-purchase engagement platform for retail clients, was scaling fast. The company had grown from 20 to 90 employees, and was well on its way to reaching 300 over the next two years. As the company grew, its leaders wanted to make sure it could sustain its vibrant, innovative culture. Narvar came to IDEO for help identifying and defining its values in a way that would would scale with the organization.

For the IDEO team, that meant articulating a system of values that supported existing behavior, reflected the company’s aspirations, and aided in evaluating new talent and development. The team started by interviewing key “culture carriers,” from the CEO to new hires, to learn what makes Narvar special. Based on this research, the team crafted a working set of values, then invited the entire company to share their feedback. In doing this work, IDEO was also able to surface organizational issues and tensions within the company for Narvar leaders to address.

Now, Narvar lives its values every day. Team members use them during candidate interviews, employees see them daily on company walls, and managers reinforce them during performance reviews. Every quarter, leadership gives out a Narvar values award to reinforce their importance. Through this project, Narvar was able to not only capture its core values, but also use them as an active ingredient in the company’s growth.

“We engaged IDEO to really understand the challenges we faced as an organization, and IDEO helped us define and articulate our culture and values. I can honestly say that all the growth and success we’ve achieved in the past two years—we couldn’t have done that without the foundation from IDEO,” said Narvar CEO and founder Amit Sharma.

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.