All moms want to give their babies the best start in life, and for many, that means nourishing their babies with breastmilk. However, breast pumping is often inconvenient and uncomfortable. Tethered to the wall, undressed, and surrounded by cords and dangling bottles, most mothers who pump are interacting with technology that hasn’t fundamentally changed in more than 25 years.

Passionate about solving this challenge, the startup Willow set out to completely re-imagine the breast pumping experience. The team at Willow envisioned a “dream pump” that would deliver what moms want most: mobility and discretion.

The Willow team approached IDEO to be a close partner in bringing their product to life. As a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, industrial designers, and mechanical engineers, IDEO, Willow, and Function Engineering worked together seamlessly to identify mothers’ unmet needs and resolve engineering complexities with a simple and elegant design.

The resulting product, Willow, is the first all-in-one, wearable breast pump that cuts the cords, ditches the mess of bottles, and fits easily inside a bra. Mobile, discreet, and hands-free, Willow allows women to achieve their breastfeeding goals without pressing pause on their own lives.

The final design of Willow was informed by research and in-person interviews with dozens of mothers, ranging from first-time to experienced pumpers. Insights about their personal routines, challenges, and workarounds guided the design team as they built more than 60 physical prototypes to understand how Willow could best fit into mothers’ lives. Learnings from those prototypes helped the team to define the size, shape, color, and materials of Willow, as well as each step in the pumping process.

One key design element that emerged from this iterative process was the simplicity of Willow’s architecture, which makes the pump easy to use, assemble, and clean. The pump contains just a few basic parts that snap together, and only two parts that need to be cleaned (both are dishwasher-safe).

Considering how personal the breast pumping experience is, the team aimed to help the pump feel less like a stark, mechanical device and more like a considered, modern, and personal accessory—a goal ultimately achieved through the pump’s colors, texture, and finish.

Because of Willow, mothers no longer need to plan their lives around pumping—it can happen anywhere, at anytime. Willow gives moms back their time and freedom and gives them choice; now moms can play with an older child, work, or enjoy precious relaxation time at home. With Willow, pumping breastmilk finally fits seamlessly into women’s active everyday lives.

More than 50 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, yet only half receive psychiatric treatment. When they do, it usually involves medication and one-on-one therapy to treat the most visible symptoms, including hallucinations and paranoia. But the disease can also cause debilitating symptoms that medication can’t easily treat, such as social anxiety and isolation, lack of motivation, and memory deficits.

For people living with these symptoms, what might seem like simple activities—socializing, spending time outdoors, exercising—can sometimes feel overwhelming. And if patients aren’t given effective care, they can become even more isolated, and their physical health and quality of life suffer. They’re far more likely to let the rest of their treatment regimen slip, skipping medication or therapy sessions.

To help address these challenges, a digital health research group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) approached IDEO with an idea to supplement the longstanding medication-and-therapy model with a tool to alleviate hard-to-treat symptoms, and more importantly, improve patients’ quality of life. It would require identifying unmet needs among patients and determining which kinds of interactions could have the greatest impact on young people with mental illness.

The outcome of that collaboration is PRIME, or Personalized Real-time Intervention for Motivational Enhancement, a digital platform that empowers young people with schizophrenia with the tools, motivation, and community of support they need to achieve their goals.

The simplicity of PRIME belies its deep functionality. The easy-to-use mobile app helps patients stay motivated to stick with behaviors that boost their health, social skills, and productivity, and it provides motivational coaching from trusted professionals and social connections with other patients.

How It Works

The PRIME app lets users set daily goals based on their particular needs. There are more than 500 small challenges to try—from inviting a friend to play basketball to spending time with a family member—and users can see their progress tracked through incremental successes over time.

Whenever users need help, trained motivational coaches are on hand to provide cognitive behavioral therapy coaching, encourage patients to achieve their goals (and to push beyond their comfort zones), and support their interactions with other users.

Tapping into its vibrant social network to help patients feel less isolated, PRIME prompts users to snap photos of happy moments, highlight important events in their lives, and share challenges they’re proud to have accomplished. Unlike Facebook, which can be overwhelming for some patients with schizophrenia, PRIME is a closed community where users can talk freely about their challenges with others who are just like them.

Click above to hear our audio story, or listen on SoundCloud.

To measure the efficacy of PRIME, UCSF and IDEO combined traditional metrics, such as Patient Health Questionnaire scores and time spent in the app, with new metrics evaluating patients’ quality of life. For example, they studied the pictures of things that made users happy before and while using the app, and measured the frequency, depth, and quality of patients’ social interactions in the app based on word choice and punctuation.

Learnings from these human-centered metrics helped the team iterate further on PRIME’s design, so that the platform would generate even higher levels of engagement and stronger improvements in patients’ motivation and social functioning. In this 2016 peer-reviewed, clinical study, 80 percent of patients with schizophrenia achieved their daily goals, and users logged into the app an average of 4.5 times a week, far more than the expected rate of once a week.

PRIME has also made an impact on patients and their families on a personal level. The mother of one research participant was thrilled with the results. She told IDEO, “I wish you could have witnessed my daughter’s first response to seeing the faces and profiles on her phone. She looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Everyone looks normal. Everyone looks like people you see every day.’ It was as if she looked into a mirror that reflected possibility and hope.”

Human-Centered Design

The PRIME platform is an example of how the human-centered design process can lead to first-of-its-kind innovations in the field of mental health care. PRIME designers conducted comprehensive interviews that led to a deep understanding of patients as whole people, not just conditions or sets of symptoms.

For Dr. Danielle Schlosser, lead researcher on the PRIME project at UCSF, collaborating with IDEO and applying design thinking to her research on mental health was illuminating. "[It] showed us that in order to engage our users, we needed to provide a safe and supportive community that directly catered to their needs. The insights we gained enabled us to create an experience that inspires patients to improve their quality of life by emphasizing their strengths. Working with IDEO helped us make powerful, creative leaps in our process, and build a digital health platform that’s already deeply impacting patients’ lives.”

The success of PRIME in treating schizophrenia has led to additional federal research funding, and the platform is now being expanded to treat a wider range of mental health conditions.

For example, in this recent, peer-reviewed study, PRIME helped patients with moderately severe depression experience a 50 percent reduction in symptoms, with a noticeable difference in just two weeks—far faster than the average of four to six weeks it takes for traditional medication and therapy to yield improvements. By the end of the depression study, 90 percent of participants said they had achieved their treatment goals, such as to “become happier” or to “feel less lonely.”

Numerous patients with schizophrenia and depression have already benefitted from PRIME’s unique offering, and the team is exploring ways to commercialize and scale PRIME to reach more people with mental health conditions.

New Yorkers are a tough lot, but damaging coastal storms will continue to test their resilience. More than 400,000 people live within the city’s floodplain and are at physical and economic risk. In the face of both natural and manmade challenges—from superstorms to confusing insurance regulations—many New Yorkers are not aware of their flood risk, or even that they should be thinking about it at all.

The Center for NYC Neighborhoods‚ a nonprofit that champions affordable homeownership for middle- and working-class families and communities, engaged IDEO to create a resource that could help New Yorkers keep their homes and finances safe. Launched in September 2016 with funding from New York State's Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, FloodHelpNY is an expansive platform that dismantles the complexity surrounding flood insurance and gives homeowners clear and simple guidance for assessing their flood risk and taking action toward resiliency.

Facing the complexities of insurance policy, shifting flood regulations, climate change, and citizen engagement, the design team began by engaging two vastly different groups of New Yorkers—those who had been battered by past storms and those not yet affected. Homeowners in the first camp were angry and frustrated by a system that had let them down after Superstorm Sandy. Homeowners in the second camp were simply unaware of their risk and had little idea of what might happen. The right design solution needed to encourage both groups to take action and learn about flood risk and insurance regulations, while also addressing divergent levels of need and preparedness.

To co-design solutions with homeowners, IDEO set up pop-up stations at neighborhood meetings in Canarsie, Red Hook, and Gerritsen Beach, and had flood-affected residents create paper prototypes of the resources they wanted in place the next time a storm hit. The team learned how residents contextualized their individual risk, which information they prioritized, and how their frustration could inform a better outcome. In Lower Manhattan, where residents are less aware of flood risk, the team set up a pop-up station with virtual reality viewers that simulated water rushing into the surrounding streets, a visceral wake up call that got them talking about flood recovery.

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Less than a month after launch, FEMA began promoting FloodHelpNY as a key resource for building flood resilience. The platform helps all New Yorkers learn what flood zone they’re in, or will be in, how that affects their insurance rates, and what steps they can take to mitigate their risk. It features a first-of-its-kind flood insurance rate calculator that can help homeowners get a rough idea of the costs they could face as insurance prices go up. It is also the main conduit to apply for the Home Resiliency Audit, a New York State-funded program that equips at-risk homeowners with vital documentation valued at over $800 that confirms their actual elevation and insurance costs—all with the personalized assistance of an engineer and housing counselor team. In the coming months, FloodHelpNY will expand further to offer homeowners free backflow valves that reduce the chance of sewers backing up during flooding, as well as access to more existing benefits for resiliency.

The New York City floodplain, which is expected to grow as tides continue to rise, threatens neighborhoods that are among New York’s oldest and most historic. The people who live there make the city work: teachers, police officers, subway operators. Many of these homeowners will watch their flood insurance premiums surge, year over year. It’s a troubling future, but one that FloodHelpNY is designed to help New Yorkers face, by guiding them toward greater resilience and assuring them that they aren’t alone.

Athletes looking to score big on game day could hit the gym, but they’d probably be better off hitting the sheets instead, according to Rise Science, a sleep analytics startup. Harnessing the latest sleep science, Rise helps players significantly improve reaction time and decrease false starts, lapses, and injuries, among other benefits.

While attending Northwestern University, the co-founders of Rise Science created a simple sleep app and light-touch coaching service, which they prototyped on the school’s Big Ten football team with positive results. They came to IDEO to optimize their customer experience and scale the business, and joined IDEO’s Startup in Residence program.

While observing coaches and players using Rise, IDEO saw the opportunity to better integrate the digital and hardware experiences and design a more robust, intuitive, and service-heavy on-boarding experience during the first few weeks using the system, when breaking old habits and incorporating new ones are most challenging.

At the end of the residence program, Rise left IDEO with a rebranded and optimized sleep training system. Here’s how it works: Players and coaches receive a short, in-person introduction to sleep coaching by a Rise employee. Players who opt in to the service receive a sleep-training kit that includes the Rise Coaching App; adaptive sleep plans tailored to their chronotype, age, game schedule, and training load; a part-human, part-machine sleep coach that continuously supports each player, monitors progress, and gives timely feedback; in-context education that provides daily and weekly sleep insights; and products like UV glasses, sleep mask, and bed sensor. In just a week of using Rise’s full sleep program, 97 percent of players report getting 54 more restorative minutes of sleep per night.

Recently, Rise Science added the Chicago Bulls, Miami Dolphins, and the University of West Virginia to their sleep-training roster, enhancing their performance, one good night’s sleep at a time.

“Coming into IDEO, we knew our service was letting customers down. When we left, we had the blueprint for the next version of Rise. We were able to solve and optimize sleep at a much larger scale,” said Jeff Kahn, co-founder and CEO of Rise Science.

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

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

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

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

READ: Why You Should Start Prototyping—Right Now

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

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

READ: 3 Tips to Help You Prototype A Service

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

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

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

4. When you need an example

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

READ: How to Experiment With 360˚ Video

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

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

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

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

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

1. "What's holding your attention?"

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

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

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

2. Creative Tensions

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

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

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

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

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

3. Hopes and fears

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

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

4. “Tell me more about that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The “just enough” strategy

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

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

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

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

A nimble plan for scaling

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

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

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

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

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

Taking a “regional” approach

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

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

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

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

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

Illustrations by Ryan Johnson

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

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

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

Assemble a dream team

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

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

Adopt a beginner’s mindset

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

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

Build, test, fail… repeat!

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

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

Get out of your head

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

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

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

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

Enjoy sweet, sweet victory

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

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

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

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.