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.

1. Create agreements, not rules

For our weekly bits&bites meeting about the intersection of digital and creative technology, we decided to carve out five minutes from an existing office-wide gathering—our weekly Monday lunch—and offer the mic to anyone who wanted to talk about a piece of digital wizardry that's really rocking their world.

For the open mic share to catch on, we created a set of agreements that was structured enough to describe to people what and how to share, yet loose enough to encourage them to take risks.

• Whatever excites you, excites us. Pick a topic that combines digital with another craft, discipline, concept, or anything else that you’re passionate about.
• Keep it real. Talk about something that you either use, or would have loved to design.
• Keep it short. Remember, you only have five minutes! Keep it simple—don't overthink it.
• Take initiative. Interested in presenting? Add your name to the calendar!
• Take ownership. Once you’re up, you’re up. If you can’t make it, find someone to take your spot.

2. Design and brand it

Create a distinctive identity. In this world, even meetings need a brand to maintain their appeal. To make bits&bites really stick, we came up with a name, a look, and a jingle, and turned to our community for a design boost. Writer Jason Baker took inspiration from the bite-sized format and lunchtime milieu to come up with the moniker. Communication designer Peter Antonelli lent his talents to a simple, eye-catching visual identity. And design researcher with musical talents Alex Gallafent composed a catchy theme song, seemingly extracted from a 1980s science show. Taken together, the attention paid to designing this meeting has made bits&bites an exciting familiar moment every week (we often catch people absent-mindedly humming the jingle around the office).

3. Make it interdisciplinary and inclusive

Invite people from across disciplines. Our intent for bits&bites was to shift our thinking from digital as a craft to digital as a medium or mindset. This lens prompted people to share work that explored questions like, what does digital mean when it overlaps with the idea of delight? Or protest? Or the sense of touch? How can we explore digital in the context of analog experiences? What lies at the nexus of digital and fright? The interdisciplinary approach not only made the bits&bites meeting more robust, it turned what could have been a closed door session with a few into an inclusive event.

We’re now entering our 9th month of this inspiration part of our regular lunch meeting. We’ve accumulated some of our favorites here, including Selma Durand’s “Digital Magic”, which celebrates digital illusions within industrial design, and “Hello World Wide Web” from Fuzzy Wobble, which looks at the rich history of firsts since the Internet began. Check out this slideshow.

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“Oh god, not another meeting.”

Yes, we know, communication is important. But most meetings end up feeling more like black holes in your calendar—rote check-ins that suck up more energy than they create. And just as with black holes, we who design meetings may not observe how bad they are directly, and only observe their effects—frequent phone checking, a battle to sound like the smartest person in the room, zero follow-through. So, how do you reinvent a workplace ritual so that it truly inspires? Here are 3 tips:

People squint at "Adwoa" and tell me how creative my parents are. But my name is not that unusual in Ghana, where my parents are from. It just means that I’m a girl who was born on a Monday. My mother is also an Adwoa: We are legion. It was hard to explain that growing up, and even harder to fit in with my many cousins when I went back to Ghana for all too brief visits. I had the name, but not the language, culture, or history I’d need to belong.

I spent a lot of my school years apologizing for that name; it felt like an albatross around my neck. I used nicknames, and prefaced my response with, “it’s a long one!” whenever anyone asked me to spell it out. And then I got to high school.

Over the years I’d become keenly aware of the long pause that ensued on the first day of school, as the teacher taking attendance nervously approached the end of the Gs. So I was shocked to find that when she did pause, it wasn’t just on my name. Oluwakemi Adegoke. Shuchi Dwivedi. Chloe Jhangiani. Fungai Machirori.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the only one weird one. Who was this magical tribe? It turned out they were all, like me, first generation Americans. They got it. Here were my people.

My life was upended by the realization that there were more of us than I’d ever thought possible. We held America within us, but we also had one foot on other shores. And the water between all of our feet was alive with shared experience.

East Asian friends and I laughed ourselves sore about our parents’ hyperzealous focus on education. (Overheard in my household: “Unless you are at death’s doorstep, you are going to school today.”) At the end of the year, we shared knowing glances when perfect attendance awards were given out.

Indian friends and I lamented our low tolerance for spice; Filipino friends teased me about our mutually lengthy names. I am still in disagreement with Nigerians about whose jollof rice is better (Ghanaian, obviously). As an undergraduate, my experience in the U.S. left me uniquely prepared to be a stranger while studying abroad in Italy and Portugal—I already knew all about shapeshifting to accommodate people’s expectations.

It was an Iranian-American professor who gave me back my name, shaking aside the abbreviations and waking me up to the fact that it should never have been a source of shame. My undergraduate thesis was about Sex and the City, which always makes people laugh. But it had a deep meaning for me. I used the show as text to unpack the way we construct our identities in urban spaces. When you come from somewhere else, as most New Yorkers do, people can only know you by what you show them. In arriving, you can transform into whoever you’d like to be.

Art that speaks directly to the labor of rebuilding home—El Anatsui’s paintings, the music of Alsarah and the Nubatones—is especially good at conjuring up the longing and resilience of those new beginnings that require us to reconfigure our very selves: our ways of expression, and of being in the world. Moving between two worlds is perhaps the ultimate design act.

Everyone has felt that they were different at some point in their lives; all of us have taken steps into the unknown. If we’re lucky, we’ve found our people there. At a time when the planet holds 65 million displaced people—the highest number in history—seeking out the shifting stories of those who aren’t like us is more important than ever. We may realize, along the way, that we’re all each other’s people.

Illustrations by Lisa Hsia.

In the first week of kindergarten in rural Ohio, I learned to write my name. The teacher probably thought it would be an easy lesson. My classmates had names like Amy Lewis, Leslie Williams, Jennifer Green. I imagine her blithely scanning the attendance sheet, then getting to my name and thinking something along the lines of “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” That was how I first learned I was different: eking out cursive letters long after the others had moved on.

In this picture you see one of my colleagues on her morning trip from our studio kitchen to her desk. She's carrying her morning coffee, purse, and phone in the usual way—so her hands are full. But to save a second trip, she's cleverly stashed her breakfast supplies in the back-pockets of her jeans. A spoon, yes, but would you think it possible to carry a tub of yogurt in your back pocket? This tub has a molded split—intended to keep the yogurt and fruit in separate compartments—but that split creates a perfectly-sized and balanced hook. It's an unanticipated benefit that turned out to be very handy.

Thoughtless acts are fascinating to me simply because I enjoy discovering the details in the everyday interactions around me. They also help me remember that, as designers of products and systems, we will never anticipate everything that people do. It's best if we strive to humbly provide simple, understandable, responsive and reliable things that allow natural human creativity to thrive.

For my latest project, I worked with a Japanese insurance company to explore the mindset of "digital natives." Who are they, and what do they care about? After doing ethnographic research, we made a film to communicate what we learned. Juggling the roles of producer, creative director, and design researcher, I worked alongside Sean, a videographer, to bring the story to life. We looped back with one of our research participants in Tokyo and tagged along with her for a day, asking some targeted questions.

9:30 AM: Arriving at IDEO's Tokyo studio to start the day.

10:30 AM: From the studio we set out to meet our subject, Yoko*, and begin filming.

The purpose of the film was to bring the client closer to the people they want to serve, to help them understand the texture of their lives and what matters to them. We chose film as a medium because of its intimacy—allowing the viewer to feel as if they are hanging out in Yoko’s world for a day.

We had a translator with us to be sure we understood the nuance and intent of what Yoko told us. We tried to get to the heart of things. When people truly feel as though you're listening, they start to reveal themselves. That’s the magic that happens in design research. You are there to listen, not to respond.

1:00 PM: Taking a break to enjoy some authentic local cuisine.

You can learn a lot about a culture's rituals and values through food!

2:30 PM: Capturing B-roll to round out the story.

Doing the research is one thing, but how do we capture and share it in a way that incites action? If we’ve created nothing more than an esoteric emotional piece, we’ve failed. We set out to inspire change in our client organizations.

4:00 PM: Precious cargo.

As a nursing mother, I have to juggle a whole new set of responsibilities on business trips. The ice cooler is the new messenger bag.

5:13 PM: Jet lag is no joke! Catching a pre-dinner cat nap.

Traveling to cool places around the world can sometimes seem more glamorous than it is. But still, I always find myself filled with so much inspiration. I run on adrenaline, and then at some point I crash.

8:00 PM: A happy team moment at the end of a long day.

Want to get to know your team quickly? Travel together! The shared experience of exploring new places while working hard is a great way to bond.

Learning about different cultures and customs is one of my favorite parts of design research. We get to understand so much about people by looking in on the day to day of their lives, their habits and routines. Cultures can vary, but regardless of where we are in the world, human needs are so similar. Uncovering these needs and helping to design for them can feel incredibly fulfilling.

*We've changed the name of our interview subject out of respect for her privacy.

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When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I try to understand why people do the things they do.” What inspires them to act? What motivates them to make certain decisions? What really makes them tick, or what makes them feel understood? Design research is like being a reporter or anthropologist or therapist—you’re given access to people’s lives that feels like a great privilege, and with that privilege comes great responsibility.

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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.