Only 20 percent of American homes are protected by security systems, and most of these systems are installed after a break-in. ‍

Home security veteran SimpliSafe hoped to convince the other 80 percent of home-dwellers to invest in preventative technology so the break-in never happens. The company approached IDEO to refresh and simplify the look and feel of its connected products to reach this wider audience and help them feel safe.

Interviews with potential customers revealed insights that informed the new design. Families told the researchers that existing security systems are expensive, bulky, and hard to install and use. Instead, systems should be unobtrusive, but responsive to your needs. They should react appropriately in emergencies, while also protecting your privacy.

Responding to those requests, IDEO overhauled the design and interaction of more than a dozen SimpliSafe products, including a wireless, touch-to-wake keypad; easy to install sensors; and a smart home base that acts as the brains of the system. Additionally, IDEO designed SimpliSafe's first step outside of the home—a video doorbell that can be used in tandem with the namesake home security system or on its own. Making the system enjoyable and intuitive to use means families are more likely to use it consistently—and correctly.

The team developed a consistent design language across SimpliSafe’s physical products, user interface, and digital presence. That clear visual language lets you know what each component does right out of the box; for example, the glass break sensor looks like a human eardrum that might actually hear a window shattering. The design also reduced the size of entry sensors by four times, while improving their range and battery life. Tapered backs and swept-front surfaces for all of these sensors help them blend into your home. The new system’s clean, understated appearance instills confidence without stoking fear of what could happen.

SimpliSafe’s keypad and base station guide you through setting up the system with voice feedback, while gentle LED lights and sound cues let you know at a glance that the system is armed correctly and you’re in safe hands. The system is also equipped with multiple layers of backup, so you don’t have to worry if the power or Internet goes down.

And the system responds intelligently, tailoring the way it reacts to match different scenarios. For instance, it sends a gentle reminder if a window is left open but a police response if a window is broken in. The design team also incorporated a first-of-its-kind privacy shutter on the system’s security camera so families can opt out of being recorded at home.

SimpliSafe launched its redesigned security system in early 2018, replacing the company’s two previous generations of products at the same price point. Already, the revamped system has cut the number of support calls from new customers.

In June 2018, venture fund and private equity firm Hellman & Friedman acquired SimpliSafe in a deal that valued the company at about $1 billion.

With a record number of applicants, stiff competition for top students, and a desire to make classes more diverse, college admissions teams are feeling the strain. Bowdoin College in Maine, one of the top liberal arts schools in the U.S., received more applications for the class of 2022 than for any other in its 224-year history.

Whitney Soule, Bowdoin’s Dean of Admissions and Student Aid, saw her staff at risk of burning out. On the advice of Bowdoin’s president, Clayton Rose, she invited IDEO to embed at the college and help design a new way of working. The IDEO team studied Bowdoin’s workflow and zeroed in on the application process as an area ripe for redesign.

By observing how Bowdoin counselors read applications, IDEO learned what drove their decisions. Mindful of how their choices could impact young people’s lives, counselors prioritized a meticulous reading of each application. But this thorough approach meant they often engaged in redundant work or delayed making final decisions.

IDEO designers translated their insights into a book for staff, featuring watercolor portraits of the admissions team and a clear articulation of their values—from integrity to inclusion. The book was IDEO’s promise that introducing a new reading process wouldn’t mean sacrificing Bowdoin’s personal touch.

Then, the designers and counselors ran A/B tests using real applications from past years, unwinding long-held beliefs about how they “should” be read. Soule and her team experimented by adjusting timelines and other factors that determine when and how applications move from a first read to a second read to a committee discussion.

Soule gave her team explicit permission to toss their typical playbook. Seeing their own process with fresh eyes, counselors realized they could be more confident in their expertise and tweak their workflow to meet changing demands.

A/B testing proved that some variables had little effect on the team’s final admissions decisions. With that in mind, IDEO redesigned the reading process and included a system called “magic sort,” which helps parse groups of applications based on a new set of counselor assessments in order to route each to its next round of reviews more efficiently.

The IDEO-Bowdoin team put the revised technique to work right away, processing 300 new applications from the annual QuestBridge program for low-income students. Counselors found they were able to make equally valid decisions while cutting the amount of overlapping work they faced by 40 percent, compared to years past.

Working with IDEO challenged us to change the way we work together—and we learned a new method of problem solving that we continue to use. We are better equipped to elicit creativity, then channel it into the practical implementation of new solutions. It’s been transformative!

WHITNEY SOULE, DEAN OF ADMISSIONS AND STUDENT AID, BOWDOIN COLLEGE

The new reading method let staff cope with a growing volume of applications, while balancing the need to evaluate individual students with the need to think holistically about the makeup of Bowdoin’s student body. Counselors adapted the technique to the rest of the year’s admissions cycle, including early-decision, regular decision, and transfer applications.

To extend what her team learned to other departments, Soule has led several design thinking workshops across campus. Her success as a leader has mirrored the growth of her team and the college; by empowering staff with new tools and the freedom to experiment, Soule and Bowdoin are leading by example in the evolving world of higher education.

For half a century, Swarovski has crafted iconic chandeliers dripping with the brand’s signature crystals. With the rise of new interface technology, the company came to IDEO for help to design the chandelier of the future.

IDEO designers set out to create beautiful, emotional experiences by layering technology onto Swarovski’s lighting offerings. Whether it’s setting the tone for a sophisticated retail experience, creating subtle ambiance at a romantic dinner for two, or providing true quality light to read a book, the team considered how a chandelier can enrich personal moments throughout the day.

Swarovski and IDEO assembled a multidisciplinary group, including industrial and UX designers, brand experts, and engineers to quickly vet, build, test, and refine their ideas.

Designers from IDEO and Swarovski worked together to completely reimagine the crystal chandelier.

Together, the team designed a new tech-infused chandelier and family of other light fixtures. At first glance, the chandelier resembles a simple, sleek metal disc. But when you turn it on and peer inside, an endless number of crystals swirl far into the distance—an Infinite Aura.

The Infinite Aura collection also includes pendant and wall lights. The team developed a mobile app that proactively modifies light settings based on the time of day, and also lets users customize their experience—including adjusting brightness and color to set a personal mood, or “Aura.”

Unlike most fixtures, Infinite Aura doesn’t just give off ambient light; families can also benefit from high-quality functional light, directed downward to help them focus on a task or diffused upward and downward to create a subtle ambiance. In a similar way, the chandelier can expertly illuminate a library, hotel lobby, or concert hall.

The new lighting line adds greater functionality and emotional resonance to today’s smart buildings, while retaining Swarovski’s timeless elegance. Infinite Aura debuted in Frankfurt, Germany in March and will be available internationally in fall 2018.

More than half of Americans don’t have the cash to cover a $400 emergency expense like a car repair or trip to the hospital. Taking that reality to heart, American Family Insurance, a Fortune 500 company that offers auto, home, business, and life insurance, was seeking a way to make an impact by helping people earn and protect—not just insure—the things they value.

American Family approached IDEO with an ambitious goal: to innovate in a way that would help working families—many of them existing American Family customers—who need a financial cushion in case of the unexpected. This new mission fell in line with American Family’s overall orientation toward increased social responsibility, including committing to a liveable wage for all employees, helping with student loans, and providing college scholarships and tuition reimbursement for employees’ children.

In early discussions, American Family thought people might need budgeting tools, but from the very first research interview, a different urgent need emerged: people needed a way to shore up their savings enough to protect against unforeseen needs. This same story came from numerous places. In Tennessee, the IDEO design team sat in the kitchen of a working single mom of four, who explained how her lifestyle was built around her extremely constrained budget. She couldn’t afford childcare, so she’d organized her home to allow her 11-year-old to watch the younger kids: partitioned snacks, timers on the TV, chore charts on the fridge. She managed her budget meticulously, it was clear, and she didn’t need new financial tools. What she really needed, she said, was extra income cushions so a surprise expense like a doctor’s visit or stretch investment like a kid’s basketball uniform wouldn't derail her plans. Like many of the people the team visited across the country, she didn't want to take on debt; she wanted extra work and the dignity and peace of mind that comes with it.

Could we, the team wondered, offer people who already have jobs the extra hours and income they need in a way that reduces, rather than exacerbates, the stress they already face? Would employers get on board?

The short answer was yes. Today’s businesses depend on on-demand work, including seasonal warehouse and retail shifts. Typically, companies look to temp agencies whose model is built on staffing with the goal of permanent placement. Moonrise enables companies to tap into a workforce that's already employed, allowing them the benefits of passive recruiting (reliability, consistency), but for short term work.

Knowing innovation was the path to growth, American Family took a chance by embracing a radically new brief: Create a service to help families living on the edge bridge the gap between the size of their paychecks and the size of their dreams. The result was a new business venture called Moonrise.

When customers told us that having an easy way to earn extra money could improve their lives, we were compelled to pursue a solution. Moonrise is a business with a human-centered mission. We’re proud it’s part of our American Family.

Jack Salzwedel, Chairman & CEO, American Family Insurance

The Moonrise platform lets workers sign up for shifts with partner organizations through a simple text message interface, and get paid as soon as their shifts are done. Employers who sign up to partner with Moonrise can list open shifts on the platform.

“Moonrisers” are W-2 employees of Moonrise, not contractors, so they don’t have to pay self-employment taxes. They also get personalized business and comment cards to take to job sites, making their interactions with employers feel more professional. In this way, Moonrise helps workers not only build a buffer against unexpected bills, but also explore new positions and fields—and perhaps even land new full-time work with Moonrise partners.

To test the program in real time, IDEO and American Family assembled 11 Moonrisers, six employers, and a team of designers and programmers to work out kinks in the platform. During a one-week live pilot in Wisconsin, Moonrisers finished a combined 28 work shifts, earning an average of $121 each, while IDEO designers worked behind the scenes to keep the process running smoothly.

Based on the success of the pilot, American Family created a new startup company called Moonrise, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of American Family. Moonrise launched to the public in the Chicago area in 2018, with plans for an eventual nationwide rollout. Moonrise signed Enterprise Rent-A-Car as its first employer and actively matches workers in Chicago with shifts, while continuing to build more corporate partnerships.

Since launching in 2018, over 7,000 people have applied to become Moonrisers, more than 7,000 shifts have been fulfilled, and over $500,000 has been put into the pockets of hardworking Moonrisers. Additionally, Moonrise will be expanding into 3 additional states in 2019.

IDEO and American Family Insurance interviewed customers of The General—a division of American Family—about how they budget to make ends meet. In this conversation, customer Chandra told designers how $62 could be the difference between breaking down and breaking even for her family.

It’s not always easy for established companies to innovate, especially outside their core business. But innovation is a high priority for American Family. Creating an employee -centered startup like Moonrise solves an urgent problem and distinguishes them from their competition. Together, American Family and IDEO identified a pressing human need and built a program from the ground up to meet it.

That time you built a spreadsheet for collecting data from your team and adjusted it based on their feedback? That was prototyping. When you ran your big presentation with a couple colleagues and swapped out a few slides because someone said it didn’t quite flow? Also prototyping.

At its simplest, we'd argue that prototyping is the intentional testing of ideas. The key is to do it quickly and thoughtfully. Need a little help figuring out where to begin? Here are four resources to get you started.

1. When you're at the very, very beginning

Kicking things off can be the hardest part. If you’re still trying to figure out exactly how prototyping will fit into your or your team’s creative process, try pulling some ideas from this story of one IDEO team’s experiment with early-stage prototyping.

READ: Why You Should Start Prototyping—Right Now

2. When your next project isn’t designing a thing, but designing a service

Many of our everyday transactions—everything from paying for coffee to selecting airline tickets—are highly designed processes. But where do you start when your project is creating a service, not an object? Dive in with these tips.

READ: 3 Tips to Help You Prototype A Service

3. When the constraints of your project feel like they’re testing you

Been there. If (and when) you’re feeling stuck, lean on the how might we questions in this piece about leveraging design constraints to get you moving.

READ: The Bright Side of Design Constraints: 3 Tips for Leveraging Limitations

4. When you need an example

Itching to see prototyping in action? Follow one of IDEO’s designers as he experiments with 360˚ video.

READ: How to Experiment With 360˚ Video

Say you're not necessarily a designer (raises hand), and you're a little intimidated by what you think of as the ultra-technical practice of prototyping (raises hand again). Here's the thing: You may not realize it, but you've prototyped before.

Listening effectively requires unlearning how we typically have a conversation. We have to reorient why we converse in the first place—away from the urge to validate ourselves and toward our curiosity about the other person. Krista Tippett, an entrepreneur who studies wisdom and compassion, calls this practice “generous listening.” To practice generous listening with others, Tippett says, is to release your assumptions about them, embrace ambiguity, and be willing to be surprised.

Sound radical? In this day and age, starting any dialogue assumption-free might feel like a challenge, but as designers, we often practice generous listening. Our process is powered by finding inspiration in people’s lived experience. In order to create something new, we have to be listening closely and openly enough to hear the unexpected.

We often see how transformative listening is for the people involved in our design research process. At the start of a project, we sit with people for hours, listening as they share their stories. It’s humbling when, on their doorstep later, they thank us. We know we’re grateful for the wealth of knowledge and ideas they have given us, but our presence as listeners must have been a gift too.

Whether it’s to aid one another’s understanding of ourselves or generate new ideas, these are my favorite exercises to practice, as Tippett calls it, generous listening.

1. "What's holding your attention?"

We all carry the baggage of our messy, human lives to our jobs. Starting your team’s day by answering this check-in question can help alleviate the tension people carry into the workplace, whether it’s lingering anxiety about an argument with a spouse or worry over a child’s first day at school.

Give everyone a minute to reflect on the question. Ask each person to share for two minutes. When someone else is sharing, listen, and if it feels appropriate, think of a follow-up question to ask them later.

Listening is not about silently waiting your turn to speak, but about asking more curious questions. Once each person is done, thank them for sharing.

2. Creative Tensions

In this exercise, people reveal how they feel about a nuanced issue by where they stand in the room. You can create tension to probe everything from company culture to the value of social connection.

To begin, pose a tension—an open-ended statement with two opposing responses—to the group. A good tension has a spectrum of answers between the two poles. For example: Working on a deadline makes me feel: Energized ↔ stressed. When preparing tensions, ask yourself: Is this a balanced tension? Am I being generous to each side? Writing tensions, just like asking insightful questions, is a skill. Revise yours until it feels balanced.

Now comes the physical part. Ask everyone to distribute themselves from one end of a room to the other based on where they stand on the tension. In this example, those on the far left feel energized by deadlines; those on the far right feel intense stress. Folks in the middle are or a mix of the two.

Once people have arranged themselves, invite those on the far ends to share why they stood there. Invite others to move if something someone else says changes their point of view. Repeat this process for people standing in the middle—why are they toeing the line?

Creative Tensions is a tool developed by IDEO and the Sundance Institute Theatre Program. You can learn more about running Creative Tensions here.

3. Hopes and fears

This activity is an opportunity for a team to share the hopes and fears that underlie certain behaviors, but often go unsaid. It’s a useful exercise for alleviating anxiety and rallying a team around common goals.

In a small group, have everyone write 1 to 3 hopes and 1 to 3 fears about the start of a project, a new initiative, or another discrete topic. A volunteer shares a fear first. People with similar responses share next to surface common themes. Repeat this style of sharing for people’s hopes (to end on an optimistic note).

4. “Tell me more about that.”

This is every curious person’s favorite conversation starter. Did someone just get wide-eyed and describe their weekend as “odd?" Or sigh describing their first job as a server as “wild?"

“Tell me more about that” is an open-ended, fail-proof phrase that gives people permission to talk about what they’re holding behind an unusual word or cryptic statement. It’s a powerful gesture that signals you are ready to follow wherever someone’s inner monologue is taking them.

The fruit of these exercises hinges on your commitment to listen differently. For The Civil Conversations Project, an organization Tippett founded to create compassionate civic discourse, becoming a generous listener is part of the individual “human change that makes meaningful social change possible.” The project begs the question: If listening is at the root of collective progress, what then is the cost of not hearing each other?

“What’s holding your attention?” is an exercise created by Alexis Gonzalez Black. Special thanks to Tracee Worley, Simo Stolzoff, and Jayme Brown for their contributions.

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Listening spurs personal transformation. You might’ve guessed that’s true for the listener—hearing new ideas can create sparks of inspiration or revelations about one’s own beliefs. But being listened to can also be transformative. Research has found being heard can shape a speaker’s emotions, help them grapple with complexity, and even temper extreme perspectives.

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But in organizations wired for efficiency, it can be difficult to quickly adapt—a potentially fatal shortcoming in a world where disruption and technological change are constant. We often see these organizations unravel and reassemble abruptly, resulting in jarring employee experiences and decreased productivity; or change course entirely, building something new that causes more damage than value. As a result, companies are dying more quickly than ever: Today, the average age of an S&P 500 company is less than 20 years old; in the 1950s, it was nearly 60.

Given all the factors threatening the vitality of companies, what factors can instead contribute to their longevity? One source of inspiration comes from cities—and the planning and development that underpin their resilience. While the best cities do seem to function like fine-tuned machines, their systems are in fact much more adaptable, flexible, and resilient—more like a living organism than a machine. In his book Scale, theoretical physicist Geoffrey West asks, “if cities are indeed some sort of superorganism, then why do almost none of them ever die?“

The reason is that they learn to evolve in response to changing conditions—a quality that is equally critical to companies. Every business leader stands to glean some adaptive tools by taking a page from urban leaders who’ve deployed adaptive responses to their local challenges.

The “just enough” strategy

After the massive 2010 earthquake destroyed 80 percent of buildings in Iquique, Chile, architect Alejandro Aravena was tasked with developing a new city plan for Iquique. His solution was unexpected: he designed a replicable house that would be half-complete when handed over to the inhabitants. On one side, the home would be move-in ready, sufficient to meet the legal requirements for low-income housing; on the other side, a vacant frame would give residents agency in determining how their own home would ultimately be. Concrete foundations, plumbing, insulation, and electricity were all provided for inhabitants, who could expand on the basic design by taking workshops and buying building materials through the city. This design gave residents a starting point to design their future, rather than a mandate. In the end, they each owned their homes.

This kind of “just enough” strategy could help businesses adapt, too. In times of change, organizations tend to set new visions in multi-year timeframes — forecasting three, five, or even 10 years ahead. Leaders develop detailed road maps explaining how every part of the organization must change in order to reach these goals. But these macro-level and long-term mandates often don’t feel tangible or attainable to employees, especially when they’re asked to report on progress every three months. This results in a lack of momentum, support, and internal innovation.

Instead, organizations can think about creating a “minimum viable organization” (MVO)—the basic foundation and tools needed in order for talent to step in to help create and shape the company’s future innovation and growth.

Zalando, Europe’s largest fashion retailer, is one of the companies that has successfully employed this approach. To more quickly adapt to industry changes, and carry out their new vision to reimagine fashion for the good of all, IDEO designers and Zalando employees established a dedicated product innovation team and lab. Rather than devoting months to strategizing or establishing an entirely new innovation department, the lab offered the MVO conditions to yield faster, more tangible progress on a long-term vision that the company could internally rally around and take to the market. In the three years since its launch, the lab has built and sent to market multiple new products like Seen At, a mobile app that allows members to upload street-style photos; and Collabary, a digital tool that connects online fashion influencers with brands.

A nimble plan for scaling

Curitiba, Brazil, is considered one of the best examples of urban planning in the world. When the city’s population exploded in the 1960s, residents worried that overcrowding and traffic congestion would threaten the city’s history and character. To address the issue, architect Jaime Lerner rolled out the Curitiba Master Plan. The plan introduced a public bus system, and required all new development to be concentrated along the bus routes to maximize use. He also introduced the Trinary Road System, which features dedicated bus lanes at the center of the thoroughfare, with parallel streets on either side for private vehicle traffic.

Rather than primarily investing in new infrastructures, Lerner focused on innovating within existing conditions, focusing on roads, public spaces, and downtown areas. As a result, he designed a system that facilitated the city’s scale while still preserving its culture.

What can businesses learn from Lerner’s approach? When organizations scale, many companies rely on structural reorganization to address challenges with stakeholders, process, and other complexities. But while that approach adjusts the high-level org chart and shifts reporting lines, it does not change informal human dynamics, relationships, and emotions, which largely influence workplace culture, engagement, and productivity.

In his TED talk, designer Alastair Parvin tells the story of an architecture firm that was working with a school to help address narrow hallways in light of a growing student population. In between classes, the corridors became congested, resulting in difficulty monitoring student behavior and bullying. But rather than expanding the hallways or building a new space for the school, the firm redesigned the school bell system. “Instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places at different times, and distribute the traffic through the corridors,” says Parvin. “It solves the same problem.”

Like Curitiba, organizations can shift the way they operate while maintaining existing structures, rather than creating entirely new ones, which often disrupt workplace culture.

Taking a “regional” approach

Cities also offer guidance for how to work with partners—and even competitors—to achieve a big, important goal. As a part of the Helsinki City Planning Department’s 2009 Strategic Spatial Plan, the city decided to think about serving the needs of the whole region, rather than those only within the city’s boundaries. This meant that Helsinki had to redefine its existing economic, social, and environmental relationships, changing who it served. The city also formed new principles and policies for key issues like business activities, housing, and the city landscape, enabling development beyond Helsinki’s boundaries.

Most companies intentionally define clear boundaries and relationships between themselves and the outside world. To a certain extent, this is expected: Nearly every business school student is introduced to Porter’s Five Forces, a popular model used to inform corporate strategy. As part of the framework, future managers learn that by reducing the number of competitors in the market, a business can ensure long-term dominance. But as a result of adopting traditional business frameworks like Porter’s Five Forces, organizations naturally view their relationship to other industry players as competitive or transactional. This creates boundaries between a company and those outside its walls.

Like Helsinki, organizations are rethinking the boundaries of their responsibility by working to address big issues like climate change. Despite being considered industry competitors, leaders from Danone, Rabobank, Nature’s Path, McDonald’s, and Starbucks recently joined forces through CoLab, IDEO’s platform for collaborative impact. During a week-long design sprint, they worked side-by-side to develop solutions, emerging with one concept that helped food companies access better ingredients; and another that used a circular model to offer food delivery to apartment dwellers.

These companies recognize that there’s an opportunity to both stay ahead of the market and generate broader impact by looking beyond their organization’s own walls and intellectual property. This requires companies to form new collaborative relationships to push industries forward together.

While companies can still benefit from using Porter’s Five Forces—and even sometimes from structural reorgs—fresh, innovative thinking is required to address the complex challenges businesses face today. To that end, cities can serve as inspiration for organizations navigating change, helping them to rethink the efficiency-driven approaches that once enabled success, and orient instead toward nimble, flexible, human solutions.

Illustrations by Ryan Johnson

Organizations have long been engineered like fine-tuned machines: They allocate processes and resources (sometimes human) into specializations, each churning and passing their output to the next group. This efficiency has allowed companies to scale, prevent competitors from entering the market, and dominate their industries.

In the hacking world, capture the flag (CTF) describes a competition that requires participants to complete challenges that vary in topic (hardware, software, social engineering, cryptography, etc.) and complexity to—you guessed it—capture digital flags. Not only does winning these competitions mean bragging rights and great prizes, it’s also a great way to learn and teach new skills while working with others in the community.

To prepare for the competition, we doubled down on the design thinking process we rely on in our work: We built a multidisciplinary team so we had a wealth of resources on our side, and we relied on rapid prototyping to create tools that helped us solve puzzles. Here are our best tips for getting through a challenge like this one, borrowed and modified from the best practices and processes of design thinking.

Assemble a dream team

CTF challenges are usually designed to push the bounds of competitors’ knowledge and abilities, and this one was no different. When we were preparing, we knew we’d need a team that could handle embedded systems and hardware as well as web and networking. Luckily, between the two of us, we have those covered, but we also teamed up with friends at the conference with specialties in cryptography, wireless hacking, and other skills to round out our abilities.

As we thought about the types of challenges we might face, we broke down the kinds of skills we'd need and assigned them among the team. Once the challenge kicked off, we huddled to share ideas and make sure that none of the teammates got stumped on their pieces of the challenge. Even though assigning roles to work efficiently is really important, you can’t get through a challenge without leaning on one another.

Adopt a beginner’s mindset

When you go into a challenge like this, you often face things you’ve never seen before, like long strings of garbled text that make absolutely no sense at first glance; hardware that is completely new to you; antiquated and obscure software that you need to exploit somehow.

It’s daunting, but it’s not so different from taking on a design challenge. When you rely on the methods and processes of design thinking to find an unknown solution to a complex problem, you don’t know what you’re trying to build until you figure it out. CTFs work much the same way. And to succeed at them, we rely on the same methods we use to create a new product or service, or solve an engineering problem: we adopt a beginner’s mindset. When we start a project, we take significant time researching the client, the industry, and of course, the users. When we sign up for a challenge, we start working to learn as much as we can in advance, thinking about the creators and what kind of challenge they might be looking to hand us. Having little to no idea about what we’ll encounter once the challenge starts, we do our best to prepare.

Build, test, fail… repeat!

Seldom do we participate in a CTF without having to develop custom tools on the fly, like software scripts for cracking cryptography or custom hardware for probing and manipulating physical challenges. Given our time constraints, we have to slap these tools together, focusing on scrappy versions that will last just long enough to help us solve the challenge and find the flag. CTFs tend to last only a couple of days, so time is a valuable resource. It usually doesn’t matter how well a tool is designed, as long as it can be made quickly and help get us closer to the flag.

It’s a strategy straight out of the design thinking playbook. When designers are coming up with a new solution to a problem, we don’t always have time to take one idea from concept to completion. We work on many solutions in tandem, figure out which ideas are going to fail fast, then advance the others forward (or come up with totally new concepts). The tools we develop during hacking CTFs are no different. It’s a cycle of quick development, testing, and processing the feedback in order to inch closer to a solution.

Get out of your head

These challenges are called challenges for a reason. At this point, the two of us have been around the CTF block before—and yet we still get stuck and fail spectacularly.

This time, for example, we ran into an issue with listening to an audio clip that played from our ID badges. We couldn’t make out what was coming out of the tiny speaker, so we started thinking about ways to rip the firmware off the badge and download the file it was playing. That was going to take hours (if not longer), but Rob suggested we just needed a better speaker. We were thinking way too technically—we didn’t need to rip the file, we just needed to hear it better.

By articulating the simplest problem and searching for the simplest solution, we were able to move forward much faster than if we had tried to solve the problem in a much more “correct” way. It’s about knowing when to take a step back and allowing yourself to be curious about other possibilities.

Just like with our other work, failure is part of the process. Sometimes your seemingly perfect solution fails in testing, or your prototype isn’t what a client wanted. You get sent back to sketch out new ideas and start again. After our momentary fiasco with the ID badge speaker, we got the message from the audio file, moved forward to the next challenge, on and on, until we won!

Enjoy sweet, sweet victory

By pulling from our IDEO skills, and with support from some new friends, we ended up winning our first hacking CTF at this competition. We’ve since gone on to compete in other hacking competitions around the country, including winning DarkNet at the notorious DEFCON, thanks to our experience in things like breaking out of handcuffs and having a basic proficiency in Vulcan. (Yes, knowing the fictional language from Stark Trek was an actual part of the competition). Part of the challenge even involved cracking codes to gain access to a secret party—super cool.

If you can’t tell, we’re huge fans of the way CTFs push us to think quickly, pivot fast, and challenge our expectations. And Rob is such a fan that he’ll be heading back to Thotcon this year as an organizer. That's handy for the rest of us, because even though he won’t be sharing any hints as to what’s coming, we already know the way he thinks. We're ready to hit step number two, thinking about the kinds of challenges he might be all too excited to throw at us.

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You’ve infiltrated the other team’s base, found the hidden flag, and are anxiously navigating back to safety in order to score. For many people, this might bring back adolescent memories of playing capture the flag with their neighbors; for the two of us, this was what it felt like to compete in Thotcon, a two-day hacking conference. Instead of running around in someone's backyard, we were gunning for flags over wireless connections, hacking into devices, and deciphering puzzles.

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.