For the socially-conscious, investing can be a tricky proposition. The same people who wish to vote with their wallets may find that their options for investment funds and 401K plans are rife with companies that violate causes they believe in. So far, there have been few options in the marketplace that give consumers the opportunity to put their money in financial products that not only cut out environmental and social offenders, but actually contribute to the well-being of the environment and society.

Dave Fanger, a financial professional, was determined to design a solution. He approached IDEO to help create a startup venture for socially-conscious investors. Pacific Life, a Fortune 500 financial services company and Fanger’s employer at the time, offered the resources to develop and launch the idea. The online impact investment platform gave consumers the opportunity to invest in high-growth industries that are addressing global, environmental, and social challenges. Swell rigorously screened companies for both impact and performance, so consumers could be confident that their investments were in line with their values.

A holistic approach

Embedded as core team members, IDEO designers worked alongside Swell’s founder to shape the company. In just one year, they went from an initial concept and prototype to an SEC-registered investment adviser with a fully developed business model, a digital platform with initial investors, and well-defined branding that set the look and feel of the values-driven company. The IDEO team helped to hire the initial team of employees, working to ensure that the fintech startup would have the creative talent it needed to operate post-launch, as well as a defined culture that would help it grow.

A new investment platform

From the outset, it was important for the team to build an innovative, digitally-fluent, and customer-centered platform to make it easy for investors to back causes they care about. Working in close collaboration with software development partner Carbon Five, Swell and IDEO committed to act nimbly, take risks, move fast, and ditch decks for prototypes. Understanding the motivations of the investor—their values and what drives their investment decisions—was key, so the team leveraged IDEO’s network to form a consumer council, which helped to quickly iterate and refine prototypes throughout the duration of the product development process. Having that core group involved every step of the way made it easy for the team to keep consumers at the center of the design and validate key decisions quickly.

Swell offered consumers portfolios of companies that work to solve some of today's biggest challenges. The six impact portfolios offered were: green tech, renewable energy, zero waste, clean water, healthy living, and disease eradication.

As of June 2019, Swell had attracted over 15,000 investors⁠—more than half under the age of 34⁠—and $35 million AUM. Nearly 40 percent of investors were making investments on a recurring basis.

Learning to code isn’t just about knowing symbols and syntax—it can help unlock kids’ imagination by inspiring them to build new things and interact with everyday objects through discovery and play.

With that in mind, Google Creative Lab came to IDEO to help with user experience and product design on their new coding tool for children. The result of the collaboration, Project Bloks, is a simple and interactive experience that teaches kids how to code using physical blocks. This establishes a new paradigm for learning computer science: it takes a language typically only understood through screens and keyboards, and makes it tangible.

Project Bloks was also designed as an open hardware platform, enabling developers and educators to build tangible programming applications that are innovative, educational and fun.

Kid-centered design

From the very beginning, how kids physically play and learn were at the center of the project. Designers quickly iterated using sketches, foam core, paper, Play-Doh, and 3D-printed models to see how slight changes informed children’s experiences. Understanding what deepened kids’ engagement, increased their curiosity and changed their behaviors drove the language, taxonomy, architecture, and physical form of Bloks.

Because play and physical building is an important way in which many kids develop skills, designers began with a set of blocks and sought to help them discover coding through tangible objects. Each block was given a specific function and shape, guiding kids to arrange, combine, and rearrange the blocks to create commands and control things like robots or speakers in the real world. Children could also create block patterns together by physically building on each other’s ideas.

An inside look at the design process. Video by Google.

Designing for early learners also forced the team to rethink how a new language could be taught. An early version of the blocks was based on how programmers typically code, from top to bottom. However, the team quickly realized that the orientation had to be driven by the child’s natural instincts. Given young children are just learning to read from left to right, designers observed that the switch in directions was too confusing and changed the arrangement of Bloks commands to go left-right in addition to top-bottom.

The final outcome of Project Bloks was an interactive coding kit comprised of three key parts - pucks, baseboards and a brainboard. The puck is a critical component that controls a command, whether it’s an on/off switch or the ability to move in a particular direction. It’s the piece that enables children to move from words to the world of graphics and play. The puck is easy to produce and can take an unlimited range of forms and functions, enabling the Bloks system to scale.

The baseboard reads the puck’s instruction and is activated when a puck is placed on top. The brainboard provides the power and connectivity. When hooked up to a baseboard or a chain of baseboards, the brainboard sends the instructions—turn left, jump, get louder—to a connected object, like a rocket or a speaker.

The boards can be rearranged, sequenced, and packaged however kids like, opening up a vast realm of possibilities. Children can code anything from a toy robot drawing a shape on a piece of paper, to a sensor turning on a fan when the temperature gets too high.

Enabling innovation for education

Beyond a tangible coding kit, what makes Bloks unique is that it’s an open platform. Educators, developers, and designers can build on it to accelerate new ways of teaching and exploring tangible programming. The platform can fit into various curriculums around the world. The pucks can take on different shapes and graphics. The material used can be fabricated by 3D printing.

The Bloks platform is a new vernacular that allows kids to interact with the language of code in a way that’s less prescriptive and more open-form, like a sandbox. And the more kids play with Bloks, the more opportunities they discover for what they can create with a little bit of code.

For students who are the first in their families to pursue higher education, navigating college can often feel like navigating a foreign country. Challenges like not having enough money or poor access to support services can make graduating an insurmountable hurdle. In fact, only 55% of these students in the United States end up completing their degrees.

To help change this statistic, IDEO partnered with Beyond 12, an organization that provides personalized, virtual coaching to first-generation college students to help them learn how to register for classes, apply for financial aid, and much more. The challenge was to scale Beyond 12’s successful coaching model using technology in order to benefit as many students as possible.

In 2014, IDEO designed the MyCoach app, with the goal of helping students take ownership of their education and feel in control of their future. After the early version of the app was named as a finalist in the prestigious Robin Hood Foundation College Success Prize, Beyond 12 piloted the product with 3,500 college students across the US. Following the pilot, Beyond 12 and IDEO went back to work, using the resulting insights and data to design the next evolution of MyCoach.

First and foremost, IDEO sought to develop a more flexible model for Beyond 12 to enable scalability of the offering. As some students need more support than others, a blended business model was envisioned to recognize the spectrum of students’ needs. Engaging in-app content forms a supportive layer that helps students get organized, stay on track, and learn the skills they need to stay in college, while students who need more hands-on assistance can connect directly with coaches. An invisible data layer works behind the scenes to assess student risk and dynamically tailor student support throughout the school year.

Once the app’s model was solidified, creating a user experience that compels students to use it became essential to its efficacy. Growing up with technology has reshaped how many students engage with the world, and tools like Snapchat have set a new dynamic for participation. Youth today are the masters of their own digital worlds, fluidly jumping between conversations, engaging with stimulating content and contributing their own perspectives. As a result, MyCoach needed to speak students’ language and to create content that was authentically youthful and effective in order to be effective. By drawing inspiration from popular social sites, digital experiences and games, the team designed a user experience that keeps pace with a digitally native state of mind.

IDEO Designer, Isabela Sá explains the approach that led to MyCoach’s design and content strategy, “We created an app that makes no distinction between content and utility. We borrowed the content-first approach of social apps like Snapchat and Instagram and used it to teach students the skills and strategies they need to graduate. With that, the digital experience became more human. The intricate system that we had designed to power the whole thing was hidden below the surface. For students, the app was just the means to learn how to help themselves and get in touch with a coach when they needed one.”

Development is underway for the next version of MyCoach, which will allow Beyond 12 to scale its offering to reach exponentially more students in need.

Coca-Cola is one of the world's most iconic brands. More than 5,000 people work at its global headquarters in Atlanta.

Back in 2010, Coca-Cola found itself at a major crossroads. As the company grew, it became clear that in order to stay competitive, any kind of campus renovation would have to take into account a vision of the future of how people work at Coca-Cola. Before the company hired architects, they came to IDEO to help design this important part of their 2020 vision strategy; ultimately the redesign would change the way the company works, plays, and profits.

Imagery courtesy of Coca-Cola, Gensler, and IDEO

IDEO: Tell us about your drawings

Dave Russell: A few months ago I committed myself to drawing a comic a day for one month. I’ve never consciously drawn comics before, but I’ve always admired the narrative skill of artists like Chris Ware and Adrian Tomine, so I thought it would be fun to experiment with the format. While both these artists employ a semi-realistic style to tell human stories, I’m equally inspired by the strange and absurd worlds created by the likes of David OReilly and Pendleton Ward.

When do you find the time?

For me, drawing can be a way of escaping the everyday and exploring imagined worlds. Doodling is like my meditation—it clears my mind and helps me to focus. I try to keep these scribblings to a minimum in face-to-face meetings, but when I’m on the phone my drawing hand has a mind of its own. I’m often surprised by what ends up on the page.

What are your favorite tools?

My go-to, everyday weapon is the Muji Gel Pen. It’s versatile—thin enough to write with and a great weight for small sketches. It’s got to be black and it’s got to be 0.5mm. No exceptions. I recently started using a Pentel Sign Pen to draw with, too. It’s super smooth and the nib feels quite dynamic. It also bleeds less than Sharpies, the ubiquitous IDEO design tool.

Welcome to the What's in My Moleskine series, a periodic peek inside the notebook of an IDEO designer. Fast Company recently did the same with IDEO's Joe Brown, who had a lot to say about the all-powerful Muji thread-bound A6 notebook.

In this installment we hear from Dave Russell, a communications designer based in our London studio.

I have to find out if I can pull off a successful translation.

I found my most recent skeuomorphic inspiration in Tokyo’s Nezu museum, one of the best traditional Japanese art museums in the country. Nezu was hosting an exhibit on sensu fans. Originally invented in China, sensu fans were popularized in Japan by artists and calligraphers, who used them as a medium for their work.

Taking in the fans, I immediately appreciated the fantastic woodblock artwork and beautiful brush strokes, but what really struck me was their construction and mechanics: the hand-held fans open with the flick of a wrist. I couldn’t get them out of my mind. How did they open and close so efficiently? How did the bamboo supports slide smoothly over one another? Did the creators consciously build them to open with a simple hand gesture? And what was the point of making them retractable in the first place?

I began to realize that the only way to satiate my curiosity was to make a digital re-creation of the sensu fan. Translating the fan’s physical systems to the digital world would test my skills as a designer and help me to understand its essential systems.

Observable systems

In any skeuomorphic project, the question I usually start with is: What elements capture the essence of the subject? Is it its purpose? Or is it characterized by its design, its construction, its movement, or its interaction? To find the answer, I need to look beyond the face of the object and break it down into the shapes, motions, and systems that define it.

The first app I ever created was a tribute to an electric razor from the late 70s designed by Dieter Rams. I can remember watching my father run that razor over his face every morning. Though I didn't know it at the time, it was the first well-designed product I ever came in contact with. I can still hear the click of the slide-up power button and the sound of the vibration that it made as it glided over my dad’s stubble. When I built an app version of the razor, I realized that the sound and the micro-movements were the two key aspects of the design that I had to translate to make a satisfying digital interpretation.

I used a combination of animation, vibration, and sound (tilting the phone toward your face makes the phone play a beard-cutting sound) to bring the razor to life. The result was a super-tangible app that made the device feel so much like a real razor that you could almost forget it was a phone. Unfortunately, Apple didn’t quite get it—they claimed it was “too useless” for the app store—but for me, it was a ticket back to my childhood.

Considering design

Far from useless, skeumorphic explorations make me a better designer. The challenge of breaking down a real-world object into a set of Photoshop layer styles is my idea of time well spent. I strive for efficiency: Whether it’s lines of code or the number of layer effects, minimization is the key to honing my design skills.

When I did a translation of my Braun AW-20 watch, I managed to perfectly capture the essence of the watch in 27 layers with one to three styles each. I plan on returning to it one day to bring it life in code.

Bringing it to life

When I began my skeumorphic translation of the sensu fan, I felt it was critical to capture the physics of the opening and closing motion. This meant that I wasn’t working with Photoshop layers, but with code. At IDEO, I tend to design with code as much as I do with Photoshop or Sketch. Having a good grasp on code allows me to think deeper about physical-to-digital translations, and real-world systems are better expressed and executed in certain programming languages than others. My first attempts at recreating the fan were standalone applications in openFrameworks—a set of C++ libraries packaged together for creative programming. I started playing with the Box2D add-on for openFrameworks, which was put together by my colleague Todd Vanderlin from our Cambridge office. While the add-on worked perfectly, the digital replication of the fan’s real-world physics just didn’t capture the magic of the construction and movement.

Because the stand-alone nature of openFrameworks limited the reach of the project, I moved on to exploring more accessible web technologies like CSS3 and JavaScript. I had to compromise slightly on the real-world look of the fan, but the final expression really embodies the movement and interaction that fascinated me when I encountered the Sensu fans at the museum. What’s more, users can manipulate jQuery parameters to change the fan's size, color, and decoration—a digital version of what traditional Japanese artists have done with the fans throughout history.

By creating these translations and exploring the life of the subject, I end up discovering something deeper about the object's design and meaning in the world. Likewise, by creating these challenges, I end up discovering something about myself and my skills as well.

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A few times a year, I’ll come across something—maybe an object or system; maybe just an idea—and I’m overwhelmed with a burning urge to translate it into code and design. It’s a practice usually referred to as skeuomorphism, and once a project captures my imagination, there's no going back.

But when IDEO worked with the USGBC to come up with a new LEED certification plaque, it became clear that software design would be a fundamental part of LEED’s future: The idea was to replace the static plaque with a continually updated digital display. Initially, LEED only looked at a building’s performance at the time of certification. The USGBC has long been working on ways to evaluate what happens after certification, and a recertification program has been in place since 2004. The new plaque was conceived to go even further, monitoring a building’s sustainability in real time on a dynamic digital graph.

That sounds (and looks) pretty simple and intuitive, but to make it work, we had to bust down some interesting technical walls, in a way that nicely encompassed the breadth of IDEO's capabilities, from design research, business development, industrial design, shop building, and interaction design to the software I helped create with an incredible team.

I came on board after the actual visual design had been finished. A small IDEO team had already completed a concept video, unveiled at the 2013 Greenbuild conference, for a plaque that calculates a building’s ongoing performance in five categories: energy, waste, water, transportation, and human experience. For each of the five ratings, there is a curving pathway that gets longer as the score improves.

The team came up with this “racetrack” design to show real sustainability data in a way that encourages positive behavior change. Familiar graphics like charts and graphs tend to make people focus on the negative, whereas we wanted people to focus on progress. No matter how long the strip on the racetrack is, you can see that you’re on your way, even if you still have a ways to go. We weren’t sure we could achieve the requisite combination of elegance and functionality in the time allotted. But it was a good challenge, and that in itself was compelling.

The animation has a big purpose: Showing the building’s use of energy, waste, and water makes people more aware and more conscientious of their own use. I think that’s really positive. The plaque also shows how occupants travel to and from the building, as well as how comfortable and happy they feel when they’re inside, which are new ideas for what it means for a building to be “green.” I wouldn’t have thought, when LEED was introduced in 2000, that a software developer could have a meaningful impact on sustainable architecture, but the fact that I could really speaks to the opportunities that will be open to us in the future.

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Many folks helped to contribute to this post. Huge thanks to Scot Horst, Gretchen Sweeney, Jennifer Easton, Kim Cullen, Gerry Harris, Steve Bishop, Beau Trincia, Mark Harrison, John Stoddard, Alastair Warren, and Building Robotics.

I've always had a layman's interest in architecture and in LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification program for sustainable buildings. I’m a software developer, so designing buildings is well outside my area of expertise.

Nature Cards are a collection of cards featuring strategies from the natural world that inspire us with a new mindset as we approach design challenges. Use them to frame your design challenge, evolve your business strategy, brainstorm, teach, or simply to think creatively and holistically with nature in mind.

As human-centered designers and innovators, our work has always been inspired by observing people’s natural behavior in its physical, social, and cultural context. As we address increasingly complex and systemic challenges, recently some of us at IDEO have been exploring how human-centered design might broaden its lens to include observation of the natural world in which humans are an integral part. With the help of experts in biology and the life sciences, we are learning about the principles of successful strategies in living systems. This knowledge is inspiring new thinking about how and what we can create for a thriving future.

Download the complete set of Nature Cards here.

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.