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.

‍

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.

Those things drive us nuts too. But those tiny moments of frustration can become fodder for a totally new way of thinking. What if the card reader sung the ABCs? What if pen caps locked? What if water balloons tied themselves? (Luckily, someone has already put some time into solving that last one.)

At IDEO, we spend a lot of time rethinking everyday life, from tiny pen caps to the giant, bureaucratic process of applying for a visa. Like we said in 2017: This kind of thinking is our bread and butter. Back then, we asked the IDEO community what they were dying to redesign, and the answers were so provocative that we decided to do it again. Here are 24 more things we want to redesign, if only we had the chance.

Work
The timecard. With a little AI juice attached to email and calendar, there’s no reason that anyone should have to create a timecard: They just need to review it. —Joe Brown

Corporate training. Every organization needs the ability to grow new and adaptive capabilities. Those skills won’t be coming in from an external job board, and definitely not at scale. —Peter Hyer

I want to take a hack at reimagining the experience of identifying and applying for a job. At scale, it's currently a dry, massive vortex of duplicative job boards, cluttered search engine results, and mounting self-doubt and uncertainty. What if we had a universal tool that could help point a candidate to a strong-fit company, job family, industry, or job title based on a series of filters they could manipulate? Job security can prompt a domino effect with a host of other social issues, so let's put candidates back in the driver's seat and make the process of getting there more personal and human-centered. —Chloe Partelow

Networking. It's uncomfortable, awkward, daunting, and surface-level. No one wants to do it, but everyone feels like they need to. —Melissa Lobato

I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of the actual places where we work. I think the workplace should allow more flexibility and choice and generally be more global. I’d like to see deconstructed offices in neighborhoods where people live and like spending time. It will reduce commuting costs, improve productivity, lifestyle, geographical choice, create more diverse and dense neighborhoods, and allow for more creative collisions. —Kateryna Romanova

Education
College, especially a liberal arts education. Turn it into something much more relevant to close the skills gap in the marketplace, and make it much more about life-long learning. —Suzanne Gibbs Howard

Vocational school. I’m not sure that “everyone needs to (and can) go to college” is the right narrative. That’s the message I got growing up, and vocational schools or trades were either implicitly or explicitly judged. I think we are in a time when we need to take a good, hard look at alternative forms of education. —Meg Rice

The lower part of the k-12 education system. Why isn't it more globally aligned and translatable? Why does it assume that you live in one country for 12 years? —David Sjunnesson

Our approach to digital literacy. When our 70-plus year-old dads accidentally tweet a search query, we make fun of them instead of recognizing that behavior like that is indicative of large, looming societal problems between those who have tech know-how and those who don't. —Rachel Young

Cuddling
Cuddling. Seriously: what are you supposed to do with your bottom arm?!?! —Santiago Seira

Breakups
The breakup: Ow. It hurts. I don't know how to go about redesigning this, but I know there’s a lot of room for reflection and plenty of nuggets of truth to be gleaned from any moment that rips you apart. I have reflected on how to create a scaffolding for yourself that helps you walk out the other side with a sense of gratitude and growth—but still, ow! —Leah Jarrett

Breakups. And I’d start with an interesting provocation from Star Trek. —Lisa Tacoronte

Health
Electronic medical records (EMRs). Some doctors spend up to 50 percent of their days doing admin work, mostly in EMRs, and they are notoriously not user-friendly, not interoperable across companies, and even can cause medical errors. —Jessica Watterson

Single-Use Plastics
Unnecessarily one-time use and/or made of plastic: floss. Coffee cups. To-go containers. Toothbrushes. Plastic water bottles—or anything that holds water. Makeup packaging. Tampons. —Shuya Gong

Recycling How-Tos
Every single recycling/garbage/composting receptacle on the planet. I challenge you to find anyone who can understand and follow those rules. —Chioma Ume

Our Relationship With the Environment
How we make decisions that impact the environment. I'm inspired by seeing calories on food in restaurants, which helps me make informed choices. Why don't we have something similar for electronics, ordering on Amazon, food in the grocery store, to show the impact of a product on the environment? —Dean Malmgren

Time Itself
Time travel. It’s just too difficult currently. —Sean Hewens

Getting Towed
It’s scary, financially exploitative, and just generally terrible. —Tara Safaie

The News
I would like to redesign our concept of what news is. I’ve tried many different sources, and have found none to offer adequate choice, curation, or quality. Most of what passes as news is superficial, salacious, irrelevant, and/or extremely upsetting. I find I’m constantly disappointed. The news needs a total overhaul. —Betsy Fields Smith

Childcare
The process of finding childcare. Every parent seems to reinvent it all over again. —Annette Diefenthaler

Access to Capital
Women entrepreneurs receive about 2% of all venture capital dollars as compared to men. There's a lot of opportunity to reimagine the funding process so that it's more inclusive of women, people of color, and non-US nationals. —Sam Schulman

Winning and Losing
The definition of success. —Ramon Marc

Online Ticketing
You have the ticket price and another $20 in service fees, and sometimes you're required to print out a physical ticket that arrives digitally. Huh? —Miles Holenstein

Life Transitions
Post-job changes, post-move changes, post-high school changes, post-college changes, postpartum changes, post-divorce changes, post-(insert life change here). There’s no blueprint. Help. —Sue-Jean Sung

Hot Dogs
I want them to be healthy. —Michael Hendrix

If your organization would like to work with us to solve one of these problems, you can reach us at octopus@ideo.com.

Illustrations by Jenice Kim

‍

When was the last time you were annoyed by something small? Like the mean, angry noise a chip reader makes when it’s done with your card? Or the mess a pen makes when the cap pops off in your back pocket? Or how deeply, achingly, frustratingly hard it is to tie a water balloon?

Beyond CSR’s spectacular rise, several other indicators signal a growing belief in the role of business and innovation in addressing societal problems: 88% of millennials say they will only work for values-aligned companies, and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink demanded publicly in 2018 that companies be driven by purpose. Fink calls for a new model of corporate governance:

Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.
_{Larry Fink, Blackrock}

That’s the CEO of a company managing $6.5 trillion in assets pushing for the same economic shift demanded by today’s youth: to ensure that innovation serves a social purpose. Mainstream box: check.

But experts are skeptical. In her opening presentation at last year’s Social Innovation Summit, Caroline Barlerin, former Global Head of Social Innovation at Eventbrite, asked, “Is the mainstreaming of social innovation something to celebrate? Is it enough?”

The answer is no. Not enough, not even close. While CSR reporting and growing social innovations are surely positive developments, they also reflect an insufficient response by the private sector, civil society, private philanthropy, and government to today’s global challenges.

Rather than count how many companies have begun to invest in CSR efforts, the real measure of progress is how we’re faring against the challenges of our time. Whether you focus on global climate change, the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, or the health and wellness of the fabric of our society, it’s clear that whatever “mainstream social innovation” is, it’s not enough.

As we enter 2020 and head toward momentous change in the US and the world, we also need to enter a new phase of social innovation. Three important changes will help us get there.

1. From innovations to ecosystems

Just as the complex biological system of a rainforest allows individual plants to flourish, so do complex entrepreneurial ecosystems work to help social innovators succeed. Healthy, diverse, and inclusive ecosystems allow talent, information, and resources to flow quickly. These networks can’t be bought, they have to be built. _{Andy Stoll, Kauffman Foundation}

Today’s societal challenges require vibrant systems of diverse innovators attacking societal problems from many angles. Investment needs not only to support scaling, but also to create the conditions that allow entire fields of innovators to advance. As Managing Director of OpenIDEO—IDEO’s participatory, decentralized innovation platform—I’m inspired every day by the thousands of innovators who we support, a reminder that there’s never been more human energy and creativity directed toward global challenges. After years of leveraging open innovation to create a pipeline of promising concepts and ventures, OpenIDEO now strengthens entrepreneurial ecosystems to address pressing societal challenges collaboratively.

In 2016, OpenIDEO worked with a consortium of partners to introduce the Food Waste Challenge, a program that sought to address the 40% of food that goes to waste in the United States. Rather than selecting a small number of winners, we created the Food Waste Alliance, a virtual network of 80 organizations that proved pivotal to the development of several food waste startups still growing today. Realizing the potential for ecosystems to create greater impact over time, we designed OpenIDEO’s 2018 Early Childhood Innovation Prize to advance an entire sector of innovators in the early childhood development space. After 30 teams of entrepreneurs were selected and received a share of $1 million in grants, OpenIDEO and our partners at Gary Community Investments then launched a virtual accelerator and partner network, which brought together innovator teams and institutional partners to advance winning ideas.

The program eventually transitioned to two new accelerator networks fully dedicated to early childhood innovations, Promise Venture Studios and Futurebound—long-term, ecosystem-building initiatives sparked by the initial open innovation program.

To create breakthrough change, all of us must work together. That means platforms and tools like prizes or challenges that transparently support people to develop their best ideas and collaborate.
_{Steffanie Clothier, Gary Community Investments}

2. From delivery to co-creation

Increasingly, funders and innovators alike are recognizing the need for solutions to be truly rooted in the needs of those they’re trying to serve. In their recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article, The New Practice of Public Problem Solving, Tara McGuiness and Anne-Marie Slaughter note this as one of four major trends:

The relentless focus on what users need and how they experience services brings people into the process of providing feedback for services where they have not traditionally had a voice.
_{Tara McGuiness and Anne-Marie Slaughter}

While the growing interest in human-centered design is a positive step forward, the next chapter of social innovation will require another leap. Rather than just gathering user feedback on potential solutions, the people we design for will increasingly become part of design, implementation and evaluation. As technology makes it ever easier to be more inclusive, it will become unacceptable to exclude or overlook people affected by social innovations. True co-creation facilitates a greater sense of community ownership and more grassroots capacity building.

OpenIDEO has been learning about new ways to innovate alongside the communities we serve. Our 2019 BridgeBuilder Challenge—the third annual $1m social innovation prize offered in partnership with GHR Foundation—sought to better include a group that’s more often a recipient than an active participant of social innovations: displaced migrants and refugees.

We began by partnering with former BridgeBuilder Challenge winner NaTakallam to include people with relevant lived experience in creating the brief. Applicants were also expected to show evidence that the voice and perspective of a person currently or previously experiencing displacement was part of the ideation, process, and project. NaTakallam later helped us hire a group of mentors who have experienced displacement to provide feedback and mentorship for applicants, and to support the evaluation process.

3. From disengagement to connection

In 2016, a Gallup poll reported that employee engagement in the United States had returned to its highest level since 2000, when it began studying worker enthusiasm and interest. That high is disappointingly low: just 34% of our workforce feel engaged in their work. Meanwhile, according to research conducted by Opportunity Knocks in 2011, half of nonprofit workers reported either being burnt out or in danger of burn out. Taken together, these studies reflect a failure to create work that is both inspiring and reasonable. As today’s problems can only be solved by dedicating attention to them, this failure is tragic.

Social innovation can play a central role in better aligning talent to our needs by creating new jobs, helping employees become engaged in issues they care about, and fundamentally reshaping the culture of work. To make this true, a reasonable work-life balance is one obvious need. Less obvious, but perhaps just as important, is a sense of connection—both to purpose and to other people.

• Connection to Purpose: It’s important to remember that individual and organizational purpose are separate, and that understanding and supporting an individual’s purpose is as critical as encouraging focus on organizational purpose.
  
  
• Connection to People: Cultures of self-sacrifice, efficiency and competition often impede deep connection with potential allies within teams or sectors. It’s important to combat isolation and loneliness in order to maintain passion for the work.
  

Once or twice a year, the OpenIDEO team gets out of the office and away from our daily responsibilities for a team retreat. We use the time to look inward to better understand the aspirations bringing us all to work every day and how each of us is connected to a shared purpose.

While the challenges facing social innovators are serious, we have reason to be hopeful: today there are unprecedented levels of energy and creativity going toward improving the state of the world. That energy is humanity’s greatest resource, but it’s too often depleted by underinvesting in the ecosystems entrepreneurs need to thrive, ignoring the creative potential of people with lived experience, and failing to help employees connect to purpose and each other. Building the next chapter of social innovation will require new thinking, practices and tools. It'll take bold action and a continuous commitment to pushing boundaries, not settling for a place in the mainstream.

In 2020, OpenIDEO will continue to explore how the social sector can be advanced and adapted to tackle tomorrow’s challenges. Follow along and join the conversation.

Illustration by Antonio Sortino

The once radical notion of leveraging business to address societal problems has become mainstream. As of 2017, 85% of Fortune 500 companies reported their environmental and social impact—an astonishing 65% increase since 2012. By this metric, the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is verging on ubiquitous.

As we wrap up the year, we’re reflecting on the power of creativity to inspire change in ourselves, our work, and the world around us. We've pulled together The Octopus’s top ten most read stories of 2019, each of which offers tips, tools, and mindsets to help you cultivate creativity as a tool to navigate the constant ambiguity facing us in these turbulent times.

And as always, a heartfelt thanks from The Octopus team for stopping by. We can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store.

1. 10 Exercises to Build Your Creative Confidence

Creativity is like a muscle—it can be strengthened with practice. Try these activities from David Kelley & Tom Kelley’s book Creative Confidence to get started.

2. Corporate Innovation Needs a Shakeup. Here’s a Blueprint.

Innovative ideas don’t happen by accident. Check out these tips for creating an environment that fosters innovation from the team behind IDEO’s newest digital tool, Shape.

3. The 3 Mindsets of Great Interaction Designers

Being a successful interaction designer is about more than mastering digital tools—it’s about the soft skills that help you push your designs to the next level.

4. The Best Managers Understand Their Employees’ Emotions—And Their Own

There’s no denying it: your relationship with your boss makes or breaks your experience at work. Here’s how the best bosses create positive emotional environments for their employees.

5. Practice Your Prototyping Skills with These 4 Resources

An old IDEO proverb states, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.” These resources from IDEO designers will help you prototype efficiently, effectively, and creatively.

6. 3 Creative Exercises to Make Change Stick in 2019

We kicked off 2019 with intention, sharing three activities to help you actually reach your New Years’ goals. So, how’d you do?

7. Turns Out Emotions Do Belong in the Workplace—Here’s Why

The definition of professionalism is changing. Here’s why organizations should invest in their “emotional culture” and allow employees to express feelings at work.

8. An IDEO Recruiter’s 3 Strategies for Writing a Better Resume

Planning to start off the new year with a new gig? Use these three tips to help you create a resume that stands out in a sea of sameness.

9. AI Needs an Ethical Compass. This Tool Can Help.

Artificial intelligence is the product of those who create it—biases included. That’s why IDEO data scientists created a tool to help teams design ethical AI solutions.

10. Design an Organization’s Purpose Statement With This Tool

Why does your company exist beyond making profit? IDEO organization designers built a colorful tool to help you arrive at an answer.

‍

2019 was widely regarded as a year of tumult—politically, environmentally, societally. But in the face of it all, 2019 brought us unparalleled human advancement, from Greta Thunberg’s movement of youth-led climate activism to NASA’s first-ever image of a black hole. For better and worse, 2019 kept us on our toes.

Unsurprisingly, this trend didn’t last long. Car companies gave up the schtick and went back to traditional approaches to notification. But the story of talking cars in the 1980s speaks to a classic move in industry: Companies are often eager to find a way to use the hottest technology, even if it’s not a fit for their team, their business model, or the problem they're trying to solve. It's a classic case of FOMO.

As designers committed to a human centered approach to developing new products and services, we look at things a little differently. We start by uncovering a need—for example, helping tired drivers stay awake and alert while at the wheel—and then search for the right technology to solve the problem. We relish the opportunity to take a journey away from the "tech hype" landscape and explore what problems, challenges, or needs the desired tech may help address. It’s about focusing on the people behind the problem before finding the right technological approach.

How, exactly, do we get ourselves in that mindset? We tapped our design research colleagues in our Cambridge and Chicago studios for their best tips on cutting through the tech hype. Here are three distinct strategies for a technology detox at the start of a project.

1. Start by taking the tech apart and exploring the value proposition, then make decisions

Design researcher Hannah Rosenfeld worked on a project where she had to dive into a potentially-disruptive, blockchain-based technology that could have serious applications in the fintech space. For some products, it was the perfect fit. She needed to figure out, though, if it was the right fit for what she was working on.

Throwing an existing, well-formed product that uses the tech in front of her team might have shifted the customer focus away from the big picture toward feedback about functionality and usability, questions that matter on the latter end of product development. Instead, she and her team unpacked the functional and emotional benefits of the technology—what blockchain could unlock for customers or allow them to do that they couldn’t before—and used these as the basis for their exploration. From there, she was able to develop early stage prototypes she could put in front of customers to test the resonance of potential benefits rather than the appeal of an ill-understood technology.

In doing so, Hannah was able to highlight for her clients the potential impact and inherent limits of the current technology as well as make recommendations for how they could evolve their offer to align with real world challenges.

2. Try on a few different options to find the right fit before committing

When a team from the Cambridge studio was working on a project to create an immersive, digital experience for a new flagship retail store, they needed to dive into the role tech would play.

To explore this question, Gabe adopted a Goldilocks approach, taking the team on an inspiration trip to three museums, each with contrasting approaches to using technology: a cautious museum that sticks to straightforward displays of content in the museum and online; a lavish techno-fantasy museum with touch screens in every corner; and museum with a more careful balance where physical artifacts are brought to life with additional layers of digital content.

From the museum with the more cautious approach, the team learned about its core values, and how it carefully leveraged digital technology by offering online access to its archives for audiences that might not otherwise come to the museum. At the tech-heavy museum, we saw best-in-class interfaces that were great at engaging one visitor at a time, but missed out on opportunities to connect people in shared activities. And at the museum that created a balanced approach to digital and analog displays, we saw how stories projected onto artifacts added a layer of depth to what we learned.

By taking the Goldilocks approach, Gabe and the team generated a shared set of design principles that articulated the role digital technology should play in their store and how it would be used strategically to tell the story of the brand.

3. Think of fantastical means to address concrete needs

When former IDEO design researcher Ovetta Sampson was working on a project about technology-enabled cabinets, her first question was, what human need would this technology serve? She could have started by having her team prototype a few different kinds of tech-enabled cabinets, but she needed to answer the question above first.

Short on time, Ovetta framed a brainstorming session around literature from cognitive scientific research and fantasy novels. She used the Max-Neef Fundamental Human Needs Scale, a human development matrix, to ground the team. Starting with a human need like freedom or identity, she asked team members to add a magical action to real-life objects to help focus on how it could meet a human need or motivation.

The team was inspired by fantasy novels where characters have magic objects that help them accomplish tasks (think Dorothy’s red slippers sending her home in The Wizard of Oz). By pairing research about real needs with a fantastical vision for how to address those needs, Ovetta and her team gave themselves the flexibility to dream up big technological solutions while staying grounded in the reality of human needs and motivations.

Businesses will always feel the pressure to maintain a competitive edge, and the allure of new technology will often present itself as the solution to staying ahead of the curve. Sharpening our skills as advocates and practitioners of human-centered design—and making sure we put user needs first—is critical. Whether you’re partnering with a client, or taking on a project of your own, resist the FOMO of new, shiny technology. Start with user needs, then search for the right solution. Shift the conversation from tech-first to humans-first.

Special thanks to IDEO alumna Ovetta Sampson, who contributed to this article. Illustrations by Katie Kirk.

Believe it or not, KITT the talking car on Knight Rider had some real-life counterparts in the 1980s. They may not have had grappling hooks or turbo boosters, but for a short time, talking cars were trendy. Almost out of gas? Don't look at the fuel gauge; the car can tell you you’re low on fuel. Forget to buckle up? No need for that annoying dinging sound—the car just asks you politely to buckle your seat belt.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.