For 6-year-old Dave Jr., a long line at Disneyland triggered a massive meltdown. His parents were concerned and a little embarrassed, but not surprised; Dave Jr. struggled to keep his emotions in check.

Hoping to help, Dave Jr.'s uncle, entrepreneur Craig Lund, joined forces with researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with a video game designer who had worked on Quick Hit and NBA 2K. Together, they set out to design something that could teach coping skills to kids like Dave Jr. who need to manage “big emotions,” as well as children suffering from anxiety, ADHD, and other behavior issues, which are on the rise.

Their collaboration resulted in a video game called Mightier and a startup called Neuromotion Labs—a 10-person team of psychologists, game designers, and engineers who embedded at IDEO Cambridge for a one-month sprint to improve the game and get ready for launch.

To play Neuromotion's game, kids are first taught simple, calming breathing exercises. During gameplay, kids wear heart-rate monitors on a wrist or arm that detect spikes caused by stress or anger; as their heart rates go up, the game's difficulty increases. Kids have opportunities to pause and try deep breathing to counter the ramped up challenge. As it turns out, "gamifying" restraint builds strong incentives for kids to take charge of their emotions—they have to if they want to win.

Already activated around boosting mental and emotional health, IDEO's design team worked side-by-side with Neuromotion to study how parents and children experience Mightier. From home visits to group interviews to a summer camp-style design session with kid players, live feedback fueled the next iteration of the gaming platform and better product-market fit.

IDEO helped Neuromotion hone the visual design and mechanics of Mightier and expand it's suite of games. The team observed that the Mightier program was more successful the more involved parents of players became, which revealed a need for additional resources for adults. So they created new supports, including a more detailed orientation and a personalized coaching service for parents staffed by trained therapists.

But can a video game actually help kids cope? Early peer-reviewed studies showed that playing Mightier reduced outbursts by 62 percent, oppositional behaviors by 40 percent, and parental stress by 19 percent. After 12 weeks of using Mightier, a survey of kids and parents showed that 96 percent of parents saw positive behavior changes in their children, while 92 percent of kids learned new coping skills.

Shortly after the design sprint, Neuromotion secured its next round of funding and officially launched Mightier’s array of “bioresponsive games.” The games have already been played more than a million times, and Neuromotion has measured more than a 100 million heartbeats. Mightier games are helping kids and families across the country.

What about Dave Jr.? Recently, his sister told Lund she "accidentally" bumped Dave Jr.’s bike off a pier and into the ocean. She was expecting an outburst of anger, but after eight months of playing Mightier, Dave Jr. stayed cool. His uncle couldn’t be prouder.

Many of us have let vegetables wither in the crisper drawer, or thrown out a child’s half-eaten restaurant meal, but the sheer scale of food waste around the globe is hard to grasp. According to the United Nations, about a third of the food the world produces every year—1.3 billion tons—is lost during production or tossed by consumers, with North Americans throwing out the most food per capita. The average American wastes enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days.

IDEO received a series of grants from The Rockefeller Foundation to find solutions, given the power of IDEO’s human-centered design approach to address systemic challenges. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

For IDEO’s first initiative, designers tapped into the enthusiasm of the broader creative community, in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, the City of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, the Closed Loop Foundation, ReFED, and other groups. In the summer of 2016, OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—launched the Food Waste Challenge, asking how people might curtail waste by rethinking our relationship with food. Between June and October, more than 20,000 people from 113 countries took part in the challenge, tracking their personal waste and brainstorming solutions.

Challenge participants submitted more than 450 ideas. A team of food industry experts helped select the 12 top proposals, which included software to help people buy food collectively from wholesalers and a service that delivers extra meals from corporate events to those in need. Ultimately, the Closed Loop Foundation chose to award Full Cycle Bioplastics a $50,000 grant to scale up its idea to convert inedible food and paper waste into a fully compostable alternative to oil-based plastic.

At the conclusion of the Food Waste Challenge, OpenIDEO launched the Food Waste Alliance, a platform for participants and experts to stay engaged with the most promising ideas and innovators. The alliance helped entrepreneurs share resources, prototype new concepts, secure funding, hire staff, and form partnerships. OpenIDEO invited hundreds to join the alliance, and 92 percent of members told IDEO they made progress in their work as a result. One member company, RISE, received funding from another participant who discovered RISE through the alliance. This investment let RISE prototype its concept for milling spent grain from beer brewing into flour for baked goods and ultimately join the prestigious Food-X accelerator.

The Rockefeller Foundation also supported IDEO’s work with City Harvest, a New York organization that collects 160,000 pounds of unused food each day and delivers it to soup kitchens and food pantries. City Harvest wanted to understand the habits of local families who visit food banks in an effort to ensure all the food the group distributes gets eaten. To get a peek into these families’ kitchens, in January 2017, IDEO researchers conducted observations and interviews across New York City’s five boroughs. Pantry customers cooked for the researchers, giving them an inside look at how the families engaged with the food they had available and what food meant to each of them: tradition, stability, even adventure. Based on insights from pantry visitors, IDEO made recommendations for City Harvest, including community-run cooking classes and a way for families to request specific foods or reserve pick-up times by text message. IDEO also created three video vignettes to help build even greater empathy between City Harvest and the people it serves.

In spring 2017, capping IDEO’s work with The Rockefeller Foundation, the organizations teamed up with World Wildlife Fund and Hyatt hotels in Florida, New York, and New Jersey to rethink all-you-can-eat buffets. IDEO studied diners and staff at Hyatt buffets and found that employees—from event planners to kitchen staff—each add a cushion of extra food to cover their bases, while guests overfill their plates to avoid missing out. In the end, diners eat just half the food organizers serve, while the rest goes to waste. This and other data-driven insights gleaned about diners’ habits led to subtle substitutions, including smaller plates of meats and cheeses that can be ordered from servers and individual pastries rather than whole cakes. These alternatives have not only built on Hyatt’s existing food waste management strategies, but have also helped reduce buffet costs at Hyatt Regency Orlando and continued to receive support from guests.

The problem of food waste is too enormous to ignore. Wasted food means squandered resources, lost money, and ultimately, hungry people—more than 15 million in the United States alone. Designers and innovators from coast to coast have helped find solutions to the crisis that fulfill a variety of needs, from preserving produce sent to food pantries to keeping plastic packaging out of the oceans. The Rockefeller Foundation and other IDEO partners are leveraging powerful design techniques to pave the way for a waste-free future.

In 2017, IDEO acquired longtime partner Datascope and integrated the company’s data scientists and engineers. Datascope team members aren’t just passionate data scientists; they’re human-centered designers who happen to work with data, as illustrated by successful collaborations like this one:

In today’s job market, there’s no such thing as being "done" with your education. This is particularly true in the fields of data science, machine learning, and AI, where significant advances are made on a monthly basis. To meet this need for more in-depth training, Metis—part of Kaplan—wanted to create a comprehensive data science program for students from all backgrounds. Metis asked Datascope to design the curriculum from scratch, drawing on the company’s deep expertise in the field.

Datascope spoke with practitioners across industries to identify the key skill sets that make them successful: a grasp of design; fluency with data management, coding, and algorithms; and effective communication with coworkers and the wider world. The team crafted a 12-week bootcamp that develops these specific abilities.

In order to prepare students for the work world, the bootcamp is structured less like a class and more like a company, where students are “hired” as data scientists—with projects to complete—starting on day one.

Students collaborate on group projects and presentations in a way that mirrors real workflows, and practice pair programming to learn from one another. Using techniques drawn from design, students are invited to refine their project briefs and continually reevaluate their approach.

Instead of a final exam, at the end of the course, students tackle five real-world, open-ended data science projects inspired by Datascope’s client work. One project involves using data from subway turnstiles to detect patterns in the volume of street traffic; another asks students to use data they scrape from the web to predict a movie’s box office profits using regression analysis.

After students complete the bootcamp, they receive an additional three months of career support, from mock interviews to site visits with potential employers. In addition to designing the curriculum, Datascope taught the first three student cohorts and helped Metis build its teaching team as it expanded the program from New York to San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. Metis now offers online courses, evening classes, and corporate trainings in data science.

If you’re going to take a data science bootcamp, it’s best to take one designed by data scientists.

You’re whizzing along on your bike, en route to a new restaurant for a client meeting. You reach an unfamiliar intersection; which way to go now?

Instead of dismounting and digging for a phone, you brush your hand along your jacket sleeve for directions, then double-tap the denim to re-start your music. Without taking your eyes off the road, you’ve taken care of the problem.

This intuitive interface for connected apparel began with Levi's, makers of durable workwear for 140 years, and Google, creators of forward-looking technology, which joined forces to fashion the first item of clothing with touch-sensitive, copper-core threads woven directly into the fabric. Once it was established that the first connected garment from the partnership would be a jacket within Levi’s Commuter line, with interaction on the sleeve, Google worked with IDEO, leaders in designing for human needs, to develop the gesture language of the jacket and industrial design of the technology within.

This is the first connected garment that helps us break free from devices. It seamlessly incorporates Jacquard by Google technology to perform digital tasks, such as navigation, communication, and music playing with a few swipes or taps on the sleeve.

Jacquard by Google—a platform that makes it possible to integrate touch and gesture interactivity into fabrics using conductive yarn and standard, industrial looms—was inspired by a curious twist of history. The Jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804, used punch cards to automate the process of weaving complex patterns into fabric. In the 1940s and ’50s, engineers employed a similar punch-card technique to program the first computers.

IDEO spent time on the project early on, collaborating with Google engineers and Levi’s clothiers on the jacket’s development, helping craft an experience that would make the intelligent threads intuitive to wearers.

Working alongside Google and Levi’s, IDEO’s work included:

• The industrial design of the electronics integrated into the snap tag and connector (the tag snaps onto the jacket’s cuff and connects to your phone via Bluetooth)
• A vocabulary of gestures on the cuff of the jacket that lets you interact with the jacket’s technology
• Early exploration of the basic design philosophy and conceptual design for the interaction model of a corresponding smartphone app that ties it all together (works with both iOS and Android phones)

The IDEO team’s first task was to validate what commuters of all stripes wanted from the garment, in addition to the work Levi’s did in researching with its consumers. In interviews, group exercises, and wear tests with urban cyclists and other workers on the go, the team learned that cyclists needed a way to stay connected, while still living in the moment. That meant being able to answer calls, hear text messages, get the next direction, and control their music without using a screen.

Levi’s, Google, and IDEO developed a language of movement for Jacquard-enabled fabric that feels familiar and human and builds on the ways people would naturally interact with a garment (a whole-hand brush along the sleeve, as opposed to a one-finger tap on a touch screen, for instance).

Then came the design and engineering of the snap tag on the jacket’s cuff, which gently notifies you of calls, texts, and other jacket interactions with light and vibration feedback. The flexible, lightweight strap incorporates the look and feel of a Levi’s jean button, while housing advanced electronics that capture touch data. The tag is removable, charges via USB connection, and works in conjunction with a mobile app that lets you configure settings for the garment, set notifications, and customize gestures and interactions.

The Levi’s Commuter Jacket with Jacquard by Google changes the game because it’s simply that—a jacket—with technology that adds new utility and value, allowing us to wear our everyday interactions on our sleeves.

The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google hit stores in October 2017.

IDEO and Google have a long history of collaboration. Learn more about our work on Google Bloks here.

As a Third Culture Kid, I took pictures to trace my changing worlds. These days, capturing and reflecting on images is how I feed my sense of wonder. This creativity challenge uses a dash of intention to keep your curiosity engaged throughout the day.

1. Morning Capture

In the morning, take a picture of something or someone around you.

Make a mental note of why you photographed the subject. What caught your attention? Then, examine the image. Identify one element or aspect of that image that strikes you. It can be anything—an object in the frame, a color, a texture, a mood. What sparks your curiosity? This is the kernel of inspiration for the next picture you’ll take in this short series.

Write down and complete this sentence: In my next picture, I’m curious about exploring ______.

2. Midday Capture

In the afternoon, take a picture inspired by the kernel of inspiration you wrote down earlier and reflect on what you appreciate about this new capture. Then, look at the image, studying it to identify a new kernel for the next picture you’ll take.

Write down and complete this sentence: In my next picture, I’m curious about exploring ______.

3. Evening Capture

In the evening, take a picture inspired by the kernel of inspiration you jotted down in the afternoon.

Then, look back at the first and last images you captured. Compare them. What’s their relationship to one another? What do you make of their juxtaposition?

Did your curiosity take you far from where you started? Did you circle around a single idea? What does that say about you in this moment of your life? Even if the setting didn’t change much, noticing details in your everyday environment can be a worthwhile exercise—especially in an era of selfies.

I hope this challenge was an easy way to observe what's around you. It can also be compelling if done over a week or month. Instead of taking multiple pictures in one day, take one picture per day and identify a kernel of inspiration to steer your focus for the photo you snap the next day, and repeat. Compare your first image with your very last, and reflect on the journey.

One last provocation: Pass this creative challenge to someone you know. Just copy and paste the instructions and, in the spirit of generosity, give them your last image to help inspire the first image they might take—like a visual chain letter.

Creativity isn’t a state of being—it’s a practice. So Fast Company created a 14-day challenge, tapping some of the most intriguing and productive minds in their community to provide exercises to help their readers reach their creative potential. One of their contributors is our own Roshi Givechi, partner and executive design director at IDEO New York. Here’s her recipe for discovering inspiration in the every day.

I came up with the concept years ago, when I realized that I had grown up so dependent on Google maps in London that I could barely recognize a street two blocks from my house. I’ve always liked to do mental exercises, pinpointing different places in the world I wanted to visit, or figuring out which direction I would need to go to get home.

IDEO projects rely on a brief and constraints. But I decided this project would be boundless. I wasn't going to rely on it financially, so I could take risks and experiment without worrying about money. It would also put me in the shoes of the very people for whom I often design. We work with startups a lot, so building my own to learn the struggles and nuances of a project like this would give me insight into what founders go through.

Over the last couple of years, our team has had many failures and successes. We’ve learned that it’s tough to keep a team motivated to work on a side project. We managed to build the prototype and the campaign in a very short time, but when the harder, darker part of the development began, momentum slowed and problems took longer to solve, causing delays.

Today, we are four weeks away from shipping the first units, and have around 2,000 people waiting for Haize to arrive, so I answer a ton of questions by email every day. No matter how good your intentions, there will be both positive and negative feedback.

Here’s what I have learned—and relearned—from this startup phase:

1. It is all about the team, and users are part of that team. Make sure to consider them as you make decisions for your company and your product.
2. Coming up with an idea is fun, but actually figuring out how to make it work is longer, harder, and darker. Get ready for it.
3. Show your face. Revealing the people behind the work gives the project and services a deeper dimension.
4. Storytelling can be as important as the product itself. It keeps the team excited, leading to better and more efficient work. It also helps users feel more personally involved in the process and the product.
5. Mike Tyson said, "Everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the nose." Many of your strategies will probably fail. It’s a very humbling experience. But it helps you grow and learn.

Above all, though, this project has let me do something that is really important to me as an interaction designer: empower people with technology without substituting their own skills. Haize doesn’t tell people where to go—it just helps them find their way. To me, it’s a great metaphor for the work designers do everyday.

What have you learned from your side project or startup? Reach out to IDEO on Twitter.

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When I learned that I would have to wait for a visa before starting my job as an interaction designer at IDEO, it felt like the perfect moment to do something I’d always wanted to do: develop a product from initial concept to final production and delivery. I went after an idea I’d had for a long time: A smart compass for bikes that points you to your destination, without giving you full-on directions. I named it Haize.

To get him on board with what we need to do next, I turn all of our actions into play. When I want to leave the house quickly, I play "who can get a toy to take with us faster" game. When I want to put him to bed, I start “gotta sleep otherwise a monster will come and get you" play. It doesn’t always work like I want it to, but it’s still much easier to convince my son to move on to the next action of play, rather than asking him to follow my instructions.

Children develop skills through play. They repeat things when they’re fun, which helps them master things, and gives them the confidence to attempt the next challenge. This is the way we all grew up. But we tend to abandon that as adults.

As we get older, play starts to feel improper. We’re not supposed to be curious about things that are considered normal or ordinary in the world of adults. Sometimes, even something as simple as going to the movies can start to feel lazy; you have to start to push yourself to do things that are fun and without practical purpose.

In Japan, where I live, the pressure of the adult world is particularly strong, and people who are interested in things that no one else is interested in are often labeled as “Kuuki ga yomenai hito.” The exact translation is “people who can’t read the air.” It is widely used in the office environment when someone disagrees with others, or in casual conversation, if, say, you and your friends go to a restaurant and you are the only one who orders something different.

Because of this strong social pressure, we stop doing things just because we like them, and agree with others as much as possible to avoid standing out. Another Japanese proverb offers a similar sentiment: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered in.” In this kind of cultural environment, we start looking for the logical reasons for everything we do, and stop following our intuition.

Thanks to my son—and probably my job as a designer—I'm aware of that pressure and try not to be swayed by it. I’m a curious person. I would rather make time for playing or plotting small pranks—like putting googly eyes on street signs, playing connect the dots with a pen and the moles on my skin, or creating random D.I.Y. bento events with friends.

To keep my childlike impulses intact, I’ve made three rules for myself to stick to:

1. Purposely do things without purpose. We are trained to make goals, meet deadlines, and get things done. Doing something with no end goal helps you listen to your instincts.
2. It is OK to not understand. There are so many unknowns in this world, and you will not be able to understand everything, even when you are old and wise. Sometimes the way you feel is better than a definitive answer.
3. Let yourself be a curious animal. We all are interested in different things—that is what makes the world interesting. No matter how weird or useless or off the wall your interest, embrace it.

Follow these basic creative principles and it will supercharge your imagination, allowing you to see the world in a more playful, childlike way. I know of no better way to set the stage for creativity, design, and inventing something new.

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Since I started my life with my son, the way I plan my day has totally changed. He’s an imaginative child who talks to invisible friends and turns the bathtub into a racetrack. He loves to play, and he does not like to stop, even when I am in rush to get to a meeting or it’s already way past his bedtime.

Her dream was to scale RepresentEd, an organization she started to support non-traditional students in securing opportunities for meaningful work. She was prototyping her idea at the University of California Berkeley with a unique cohort of students. A few had transferred to the university and some were raising children or supporting siblings, she said. A few were formerly incarcerated. My father went to prison, and I saw how difficult it was to re-enter society when his sentence was up, so I was immediately taken with her idea. We exchanged contact information, danced a bit more, and then said our goodbyes.

A few weeks after our Lyft ride, Rashida and I met to talk about a program she was designing for RepresentEd. She wanted students to learn human-centered design because it’s a skill that employers look for in the San Francisco Bay Area. I told her about Anne-Laure Fayard, a professor at New York University who is teaching human-centered design by having her students participate in OpenIDEO Challenges, 4-month global efforts that allow people to act on societal challenges together. The theory is that they’ll learn more by participating in the design process than they will from hearing a lecture.

The timing of my meeting with Rashida was perfect—my team was about to launch an OpenIDEO Challenge in which we asked, “How might we prepare all learners for the needs of tomorrow by reimagining higher education?” Rashida brought this idea back to her students, who were excited to work on a topic that was so relevant to their lives.

A few weeks later, I traveled to the UC Berkeley campus to meet the students in Rashida’s program for the first time. Rashida asked me to lead a workshop on human-centered design and introduce them to the Future of Higher Education Challenge. The students were fired up, smart, creative, and eager to work with one another.

One of the ideas that came out of that workshop was MAPP, an interactive roadmap that supports students through college and beyond. The students spent the next few weeks building the idea out. They conducted interviews with other students, parents, teachers, and staff. They worked with Mike Atherton, a local interaction designer and OpenIDEO community member who volunteered to build prototypes that they tested with non-traditional students, faculty, and experts in the field. The students submitted MAPP to OpenIDEO and it was selected as one of the five most promising ideas to come from the Future of Higher Ed Challenge. Two of the students were flown to Boston to present MAPP at a leadership summit. They also pitched MAPP at education conferences hosted by our partners Georgia Tech and Arizona State University.

All of this innovation sprang from a Lyft ride many months ago. It’s a great reminder that when you’re open and implicitly trust others, you can build bridges and expand the reach of your work in the world.

“Opportunities are everywhere, if you’re always open,” Rashida told me. It’s the same thing she tells her students.

I was on my way to a conference in San Rafael, California. I don't have a car, so I called Lyft. I met Rashida on the ride over; she was my driver, and we instantly connected while rocking out to Missy Elliot. When the song ended, we started to chat. As a former journalist, I’ve always been curious about what motivates people, so I asked her, “What are your hopes for the future?”

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.