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.

For listeners, the panoply of podcasts seems to grow daily; and for creators, there’s an exponentially growing audience, which means even the most obscure subject matter is bound to find eager ears.

In 2016, we posted 15 inspiring podcast recommendations from IDEO designers, and exactly two years later, we’ve built a whole new list. This time, we put the call out to all of IDEO, inviting recommendations for all types of programming—whatever our teammates are currently listening to and loving. Hopefully many on this list will be new to you, and will help freshen and diversify your own audio queues.

1. Ear Hustle

Ear Hustle takes an honest look into the lives of people within the confines of the American prison system, and it invokes both laughs and tears. Nigel Poor, a Bay Area-based artist, teams up with Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, both current prisoners at San Quentin, which is California’s oldest prison and houses the greatest number of death row inmates in the nation. The three hosts produce stories at the facility’s media lab, where they explore topics as light as how “cellies”—or roommates—are assigned, and as dark as the gut-wrenching effects of the three strikes law. Regardless of the topic, each episode is eye-opening and humanizing, allowing listeners to understand the realities of living behind bars. —Sue-Jean Sung

2. How I Built This

How I Built This takes listeners on a “behind the scenes” tour of how driven entrepreneurs turned innovative ideas into world-changing companies. The stories are full of passion, challenges, successes, and failure...how couldn't you get hooked on this podcast!? Most compelling is the overwhelming humanity that comes through in each founder’s story. Without question a feel-good podcast that will get your creative juices flowing! —Andrew Evans

3. Switched on Pop

I love Switched on Pop because I love music, and pop music tends to get a bad rap or get brushed off as sugary, over-simplified sound, which is just not the case. This podcast is run by a musicologist and a pop songwriter. They deconstruct songs sonically and lyrically to help give some insight into what the song is doing, and how it achieves its goals. The musicology perspective is fascinating to me and helps me deconstruct other songs that I hear. —Meg Rice

4. How to Be Amazing

How to Be Amazing is an in-depth interview show hosted by comedian, author and actor Michael Ian Black. I love this podcast because Michael Ian Black as a host is simultaneously witty, vulnerable and empathetic. Thus, the conversations move fluidly between banter and deep revelations. The guests are creative types: artists, authors, chefs, musicians. Black's focus is on how each guest manages to find creativity and persevere in his or her field. Every episode ends with an “Amazing 5” recommendation segment, in which the guests recommend a book, music, food, TV, and miscellaneous item. My favorite episodes: David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Maira Kalman, and Judd Apatow. —Mollie West Duffy

5. Love + Radio

I love Love + Radio! It has amazing non-fiction, long-form stories. Each one is unique and totally unexpected. Every time I listen to this podcast, I find myself transported to another world. It's truly magical. One episode in particular that stands out is a series of interviews with a man who is dating a life-sized doll, but [spoiler alert!] you don't realize his girlfriend is a doll until the very end. It’s incredible! You really learn how to feel empathy for people whose lives are worlds away from your own. There's also a three-part series about a woman in Colombia who realizes that the family she's just married into are drug lords. The series follows her story as she moves to the US and later is forced into hiding in the Witness Security Program, after providing information to the US government. Another story I loved was from a woman who had an out-of-body experience while undergoing surgery. —Ali Cottong

6. Containers

I got really into the Containers podcast. I never thought I would geek out so hard on this seemingly mundane part of the global supply chain. As a designer at IDEO, I work with a lot companies on their journeys to become “future fit.” One way companies are becoming future fit is by making the bold shift from a increasingly strained linear economy (take, make, waste) to a more prosperous, circular one (one that is regenerative and keeps materials and resources in flow at their highest use for as long as possible, creating new value along the way).

One huge part of redesigning a future economy is understanding how our economy today is designed. This podcast tells the story of containers, something so seemingly banal and ubiquitous. It colorfully illuminates how they came to be and the role they’ve had in transforming not only our economy but so many facets of our modern society in such a short amount of time.

As we design and prototype new tools, platforms, products, services and ventures in the circular economy, Containers inspired me to see the transformative power that a single, simple, and elegant innovation can have when it allows people to do something they couldn’t do before, at a tremendous scale. —Rhys Thom

7. Death of 1000 Cuts

I’m listening to Season 1 of Death of 1000 Cuts. It’s actually an 8-week writing course given by a poet, Tim Clare. The 15-minute podcast gives advice and a structured 10-minute writing exercise every day for 8 weeks. It helps with stagnant writer’s block, writing confidence, writing fatigue and helps exercise the writing muscles for people to feel empowered to write and to dedicate the time to creativity. I love it because while I’m an (IDEO) lawyer by day, it means I get to do the creative flex thing by night. —Rebecca Wint

8. My Favorite Murder

My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast—not a combination you'd expect, but the hosts, Karen and Georgia, make it go down like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s not at all about glorifying the crimes, but rather, looking into the darkest parts of the human experience and finding a way to laugh. MFM (as fans call it) has also inspired a feminist movement with a massive fan base. There's even an IDEO Slack channel devoted to the podcast. —Jennifer Maer

9. NPR's Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain features amazing storytelling on why we do and think the ways that we do (backed with experts in the field!). Why are people in multi-cultural relationships more creative? Why did a competitive luxury brand gift Snookie a rival Gucci handbag? Why does wearing bright red sneakers make other people feel you're more influential? Why should marriages be more like Pinot than Cabernet? All these questions answered (and more) through the Hidden Brain. —Mike Peng

10. Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention is about climate change, how it's a feminist problem, and has a feminist solution. It's hosted by Maeve Higgins, an awesome comedian and storyteller; and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland (!). It's the first thing I've listened to on climate change that has made me feel something like hope. —Ashley Holtgraver

11. Cocaine and Rhinestones

Cocaine & Rhinestones is an in-depth look at some of the wildest stories of 20th century country music. I suppose I love it because I love old country music and was raised in an environment where Hank Williams was God. But these stories go much deeper than fading memories of hearing steel guitar over a busted truck radio. It's so well researched I might compare it to a Ken Burns documentary. Yes, it's dark, and that's why you'll love it. Murder...check. Alcoholism and adultery...check. People behaving in intolerable ways...check. But all of the negativity and carnage are balanced by unflinching tributes to a truly unique American musical creation. It's incredibly respectful of those who wrote and performed the music. Irony is uncool now anyway. This feels real. —Zach Hobbs

12. The Longest Shortest Time

The Longest Shortest Time is a parenting show. I like to think about someday becoming a parent, but even as someone without children, the way they talk developmental theory makes the whole concept of parenting feel more diverse and accessible. I don't have kids yet, so I listen in to see what my future could look like, and to learn more about youth today. —Stuart Getty

13. Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

I love Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness because, well, Queer Eye is my new obsession, and he just absolutely delights me. He's so smart and yet somewhat hides it to remain more "curious," and he really explores every topic under the sun, from Saudi Arabia to abstinence in addiction therapy. —Madeline Armstrong

14. Change Agent from The New York Times

I've been surprised by how much the stories told on Change Agent stick with me, and how powerful analogous inspiration can be in helping us change our behavior. —Em Havens

15. Racist Sandwich

Racist Sandwich is a podcast about food, race, gender, and class. It's a refreshing, honest, and deeply human look at what happens at that intersection. I really like the podcast because they tell different stories from points of view that are rarely highlighted by traditional media channels. I am a latecomer to the show, but I found their episodes "Tasting Something other than Shame" and "Detroiters are Fighters" to be particularly inspiring. —Sandeep Pahuja

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Now that we consume most of our information through screens, audio programming is a breath of fresh air. Podcasts enable us to get up and out, liberating us from the tether of phones and computers.

That’s a shame, because research shows that feeling joy at work not only increases our wellbeing, but also our performance across the spectrum. Joy increases our working memory and cognitive flexibility, which in turn leads to better problem-solving. Take doctors, for example: Those who have been primed to feel joyful make a correct diagnosis earlier than those in a neutral mindset. Joyful businesspeople consider a wider range of scenarios and make more accurate decisions. Joyful negotiators are more likely to achieve win-win agreements. And it turns out it’s infectious: Joyful leaders spread positivity to their teams, increasing rates of effort and cooperation; and when salespeople exhibit joy, customers respond by spending more time in a store, giving higher satisfaction ratings, and expressing a greater likelihood to return.

Have I convinced you yet? Ok, then. Here are six ways you can transform your work environment to increase joy, and bring out your most productive, collaborative, and creative self.

1. Add a pop of color and light

Research with nearly a thousand office workers across four continents shows that people in more colorful workspaces are more joyful and alert than those in drab spaces. They’re also more confident and friendly. Bright colors reflect more light, which acts like a stimulant, a shot of caffeine for the eyes. If you can’t paint your whole office, try adding an item with a strong pop of color to your desk, like a vibrant piece of art or a yellow mug, to brighten up your space—and your spirits!

For even more joyful energy at work, go toward the light. There’s a reason most people prefer a desk near a sunny window. Light helps regulate our Circadian rhythms, leading to higher energy levels and mood. Research shows that workers who get more light exposure in their offices are more physically active during the day and sleep better at night. Among nurses working on acute care wards, more sunlight exposure correlates to an increase in spontaneous laughter. If you are slow to get going in the morning, see if you can find a spot near a window. Or fight the afternoon slump by taking your meetings outside.

2. Buy a plant

When you’re working in a high pressure situation, make sure to introduce some greenery to your workspace. Exposure to nature helps restore our attention and can mitigate the effects of stress on our bodies and minds—making it less likely that we’ll snap at our teammates. Psychologists believe that looking at nature refreshes our ability to concentrate because it is passive, but also stimulating. In many offices, nature views are a perk reserved for management. But the good news is that studies show even a few plants can improve attention, reduce blood pressure, and even prompt more generous behavior toward others.

3. Keep it cute

One of my most memorable days at IDEO was when one of my coworkers surprised us by arranging for fifteen puppies to visit our office. As people moved from one meeting to another, they couldn’t resist spending a few minutes sitting on the floor cooing and cuddling. It might sound like a distraction, but researchers in Japan have found that looking at pictures of cute things, such as baby animals, may actually help increase concentration. One theory is that cuteness elicits a nurturing impulse that requires focus and care, priming the mind to zoom in and tune out distractions. So, go ahead, share the latest otter video on Slack, peep the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed on your lunch break, and keep those photos of your adorable nieces and nephews on your wall. These joyful bursts of cuteness might just help you when you’re doing work that requires careful thought and attention to detail.

4. Get some air

When you need to zoom out and get perspective on a work challenge, seek out the joy of elevation. Our emotions often seem to lie along a vertical axis: we’re in high spirits or light-hearted when happy, we feel low or heavy-hearted when sad. By moving ourselves physically upward in space—ascending to a roof deck or even just climbing a set of stairs, we not only find a joyful lightness, but also a shift to more big-picture thinking. Psychologists have tested this by intercepting people who have just walked up or down a flight of stairs and asking them to think about people’s behavior. When participants are told that someone is painting a room, those who have just walked down a flight of stairs are more likely to think about the specific actions involved (“applying brush strokes,”) while those who have just walked up the stairs are more likely to think about the broader purpose behind the actions (“making the room look fresh”). Ever have a flash of insight on an airplane? When we need to make big decisions or solve intractable problems, elevation can help us literally “see the forest for the trees” and avoid getting caught in the weeds.

5. Keep the ball rolling

To cultivate a creative mindset, keep a ball or frisbee at your desk. Research shows the kinds of fluid, curving motions we make when we play can help unlock a more flexible thought pattern, which in turn heightens creativity. In one study, participants who made curving motions with their arms came up with more ideas for uses of a newspaper than those who made angular motions. And the ideas they came up with were more original. This might explain why you often find ping pong tables at startups, and suggests that taking time to play might be the perfect warmup for creative work.

6. Turn up the tunes

When you want to help your team find its groove, give them an actual groove. That can produce a phenomenon that scientists call synchrony—when we sing or move in the same rhythm with others. When people experience synchrony, either by tapping out a beat or a rocking in chairs at the same tempo, they display greater generosity and perform better on a cooperative task. Some researchers have speculated that this may have originated when humans first began to coordinate their efforts to achieve complex goals. By noticing the rhythms created through repetitive manual tasks, people could better synchronize their efforts, and perhaps this led to an unconscious sense of unity. If it’s not too distracting, one way to harness this effect may be to play music with a strong beat in your workspace. People will naturally begin to tap or nod along with the music, creating a synchronicity that helps you find your flow.

To learn more about Ingrid’s research on how to design for joy, check out her new book Joyful.

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As a designer who studies joy for a living, one of the questions I am asked most frequently is: How can I find more joy at work? We spend at least a third of our waking hours at the office, and some of us much more than that. Yet most workspaces, with their beige carpets and rows of cubicles, aren’t exactly designed to delight.

Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

Creativity Challenge # 2: Increase your creative output

Anyone who studies dreams will tell you that if you want to remember your dreams, you need a dream journal right beside the bed. The moment you wake up—whether it’s the middle of the night or in the morning—you should capture those dreams before they fade away. The same holds true with your waking “dreams,” your partially or fully formed ideas, your glimpses of possible futures. If you want to maximize your creative output, don’t rely on short-term memory.

Even if you never get to experience Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, you’re likely to have your own moments of brilliance once in a while. When that happens, make an effort to capture those ideas right away, because your short-team memory only holds a thought for fifteen to thirty seconds. One simple way to have more ideas in your arsenal is to start keeping track of them as they occur.

Tool: 15 Seconds of Brilliance
Participants: This is a solo activity
Time: 10 minutes per day
Supplies: Paper and pen, or a digital means of keeping notes

Instructions

When you have an idea or observe something intriguing, take note of it. The actual means of capturing the idea doesn’t matter as much as having it with you at all times. Choose a method or a technology that fits with your lifestyle and your personality:

• Digital tools are great, but paper still works exceptionally well. I always have a pen and a simple folded piece of paper in my back pocket. I also keeps a small pad of paper on my bedside table, with a lighted pen that I can use to jot down an idea while reading or in the middle of the night without fear of waking up my wife.
• My brother David has a whiteboard marker in his shower, so he can write a passing idea before it disappears.
• IDEO partner Brendan Boyle has experimented with various forms of “idea wallets” designed specifically to record his thoughts.
• Mobile voice assistants will let you dictate a quick mental note.
• Your laptop or tablet has all kinds of notepad applications. But we think you’ll get more functionality out of purpose-built programs like Evernote, specifically designed to store such ideas.

So increase your odds in the war against lost ideas. You’ll be amazed at how many good ideas you end up with when you make an effort to jot down those sudden moments of insight. Our brains are constantly making connections and associations with other people, things, and ideas we come in contact with. Don’t let those serendipitous insights go to waste.

This post is the second in a series of exercises taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems. Read part one here.

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Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential.

How do you prevent a handoff from becoming a drop-off? I recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Review that explores this very question. The following is an excerpt of that article.

How should you create a smoother handoff between teams? In short, you can avoid a drop-off by tailoring each handoff to the teams involved. In many companies, innovation teams tend to fall into three buckets: Explorers, Scalers, and Optimizers (with credit to Bud Caddell and Simon Wardley).

There are four basic models for the handoff, and dozens of hybrids. The right one for each part of your innovation portfolio will depend on how integrated your projects need to be with your core business.

1. The Owner’s Manual

After months—sometimes years—of work, an innovation team extensively documents their work in hundreds of pages of slides, spreadsheets, and other files, and then hands all of that over to a new team to execute. When was the last time you read an Owner’s Manual? Exactly. The new team then risks moving on without absorbing the learning of their predecessors.

2. The Architect

The best way to avoid a drop-off is to eliminate the handoff. In this model, the future owner of the work embeds in the Explorer and Scaler teams. That person then acts as a connector, knowing all of the avenues already explored and all of the learning gained.

3. The Ambassadors

Similar to the previous model, in this model, members of the Explorer, Scaler, and Optimizer teams remain embedded in each phase of the project to ensure that no learning is lost and that each phase of work is designed to feed smoothly into the next. In addition, this model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most.

4. The Hive

The difference here is that team members don't roll off the project—it remains a blended team from idea to implementation. This model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most.

Want to dive deeper on innovation handoffs? Read my article in Harvard Business Review.

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If innovation projects are going to succeed, they’ll need to survive a handoff from an innovation team to an execution team. And every time you create a handoff, you risk dropping the baton.

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.