There’s a lot of excitement in the education sector about the need to equip students with skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and communication, to prepare them for a global, innovation-driven economy. But that’s easier said than done. Major changes are needed to move from a decades-old model towards creating new ways to educate students. Schools and their leaders, particularly in low-income contexts, often lack the necessary resources and support.

But given the right tools, school leaders can be the key to bringing this much-needed change to their schools. Knowing this, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation partnered with IDEO and the Stanford d.school to create School Retool, a four-month-long professional development fellowship that trains principals to take a do-it-yourself approach to school change by conducting small, scrappy experiments called “hacks.”

The best part: They use the resources they already have available to address their schools’ needs now, without waiting for external funding or assistance. School Retool is available to principals at public schools where 60 percent or more of students qualify for free and reduced lunch, which is a common measure of poverty. The School Retool program provides research-based strategies for improving student outcomes, as well as training and one-on-one coaching on how to redesign school culture through easily achievable changes.

A Scaled Approach

School Retool addresses a common challenge in creating change across schools: Each school has its own people, culture, and needs, so programs need to be flexible. The fellowship helps school leaders define their aspirations, and provides them with inspiration through “Big Ideas” that have proven to be successful in different contexts in education. It then supports them to start small with hacks that help them learn how to implement these ideas in their own school. The program scales through regional cohorts of principals who learn from each other as they go through a process of setting goals, designing hacks, reflecting on the learning and progress, and making improvements to the next iteration.

Small Steps Toward Big Change

As School Retool has rolled out at schools across the country over the past two years, it’s becoming evident that small changes are adding up to major progress, and that the small hacks approach is helping leaders go from planning to doing. Take, for example, Marthaa Torres, the principal of a low-income San Francisco high school who started with a small experiment with one struggling student, trying to create a more personalized learning plan for him. “The hacking approach is a framework that will help me eventually get to the kind of school that I’m trying to create,” Torres said. To build on the learnings of her “hack,” she created and expanded a personalized coaching program for the student’s peer group of older Latino boys. Her goal is to roll out additional advisory support in the next school year. What started as a “hack” to give agency to a single student is beginning to affect the school-wide culture by incorporating student voice into decision making.

Creating a Movement

The School Retool fellowship launched in 2015 with a pilot for 16 principals from seven San Francisco Bay Area school districts, reaching more than 12,000 students. School Retool has since hosted cohorts for school leaders in Washington D.C., Detroit, Virginia, Idaho, and Colorado. By the end of 2016, 164 school leaders of over 114,000 students had participated in the fellowship program.

In addition to the in-depth work with school leaders, School Retool is creating a national dialogue around change in schools. Its first national effort drew more than 1,500 principals in the Shadow A Student Challenge, who spent a day walking in students’ shoes to build empathy and gain insight into their students’ school lives.

Learn more about how more school leaders are enacting change: bringing a sense of true belonging to a school’s culture; engaging students as active learners; hacking towards literacy; retooling for equity; and more.

WATCH: Marthaa Torres: Adopting a Hacking Mindset on Vimeo.

Remember your first View-Master? The sound and feel of that iconic camera-snapping motion, the excitement of seeing those vivid images in the form of your own personal slideshow? Introduced in 1939, this stereoscopic toy brought beautiful landscapes and famous attractions to the eyes of kids around the world.

Flash-forward more than 75 years, and the View-Master has been reincarnated to spark that same sense of wonder for the digital age. The redesigned model, the result of a project collaboration between IDEO and Mattel, is a modern case that bridges technology with play. The new View-Master preserves the classic features of the original toy, such as the original lever and wheel, but offers a much more immersive, 360-degree virtual experience.

Here’s how it works: Download the View-Master app and slide a smartphone into the sleek new red-and-white headset. From there, the phone’s camera will scan the QR codes on the reels to view a wide variety of images, such as wildlife, outer space, and a dinosaur landscape. Two slightly different images are displayed side by side on the device's screen. As each of your eyes looks at just the image directly in front of it and tries to reconcile it with what the other eye is seeing, a 3D effect is created. By moving your head around with the viewer over your eyes and taking advantage of the sensors within your phone to sense direction and position, you can travel through each of the scenes, exploring each of the different settings.

After working alongside Mattel to understand the heritage of the View-Master brand, researching the potential for VR and play, and exploring a variety of materials for the new device, designers created several prototypes that they tested with their core market: kids. As a result, the final design accounted for things like whether it could pass a drop-test or fit into kids’ hands.

Beyond the joy of pure play, the technology that powers the new View-Master also opens up a new world of possibilities for learning. Imagine turning a page in a textbook and seeing dinosaurs come to life. Or a virtual tour of an art museum through a set of View-Masters.

"We view this as just the beginning," said Doug Wadleigh, a Mattel executive, in an interview with CNET. "Obviously, we're getting in this space pretty early. The goal is to create the View-Master brand for the next 75 years."

Genentech is a biotech company that tackles difficult-to-treat medical conditions across the globe by creating innovative treatments. As a sponsor of the TED2012 conference, Genentech approached IDEO to partner in creating a “social space” for the TED exhibit hall that would captivate participants in an interactive brand experience and garner excitement around the future of personalized medicine.

To make leading-edge science more accessible to the masses, the team landed on an exciting new provocation: What if we could turn genes into music? IDEO worked closely with Genentech to develop an immersive genetic experiment that could incorporate traits of the TED community, using the company’s brand new technology for overnight gene analysis. A TED participant would choose a colorful trait pin packaged with a cheek swab kit and corresponding barcode, allowing them to leave a genetic sample one day and return the next day to discover that four SNPs of DNA had been analyzed overnight and translated into a unique musical track.

The IDEO team developed the concept, prototyped it with scientists, musicians, and sound engineers, and designed every element of the physical and digital experience—from the swab kit and packaging, to the built space and listening stations, iPad app, and other digital touchpoints. At the heart of the experience was music, including an algorithm that could generate 6500 unique musical combinations to reflect the genetic diversity of the TED participants.

Genentech’s “Infinite Variations” exhibit at TED2012 created the world’s first genetic symphony, an innovative and colorful blend of science and music. With the exhibit, Genentech sparked novel, approachable conversations about the role of genetics in medicine.

Of the 1850 attendees, over 1100 joined the genetic experiment in music and walked away with a new understanding of personalized science—and of their own genetic makeup.

What happens when you serve kids food made with cricket flour? And what do parents think? That’s what IDEO and Bitty Foods sought to learn during a collaboration to explore new kinds of lunchbox foods as a means to discover opportunities for alternative sources of protein.

We talked to Megan Miller, cofounder of Bitty, the Bay Area startup that makes delicious foods with cricket flour, about the collaboration.

Listen to the full audio story below, or go to Soundcloud.

I wanted to correct this discrepancy—to honor my friendships with the same sense of ceremony as a graduation. So, a few weeks before the big robes-and-tassels day, I created handmade portraits for each of them using my favorite art form: collage. Collage is more visceral than other traditional forms of art-making. Rather than relying on a pencil or paintbrush as an intermediary between hand and paper, it is 100 percent hands on.

Each collage I made was roughly 4x4 inches and took about 45 minutes.

My collage portrait process:

1. Gather materials. Pull old magazines from the recycling bin. Grab any scraps of paper you've collected. (A friend who also loves collaging brought a vintage Playboy for me to use. As she said, “It’s great for finding skin tones, obviously.”)
2. Comb through all the materials and rip out pieces until you have a few piles of various skin and hair tones and interesting textures.
3. Use a photo of your subject as a reference, draw a light sketch of their basic features onto paper.
4. Trim your pieces to size, use your favorite glue, and assemble the collage on top of your sketch.

In one instance, the portrait-making session blossomed into a full music-and-snacks event, where friends and I gathered to make collages of each other and exchange them. The party itself brought an unexpected moment of closure to our time in design school—to see everyone’s visual style, matured over four years together, coalesce in a scrappy portrait.

Giving—and receiving!—these portraits filled in a missing piece of what a graduation is supposed to feel like. And now, with college fresh behind me, I wondered how I could build the practice into a habit: How might I continue to use my favorite art form to show thanks to people who have been pivotal in my life?

After graduation, I moved from North Carolina to California to return to work at IDEO, where I'd been an intern the year before. And, in celebration of mentors and friends at IDEO whose support helped make all of this possible, I collaged a few portraits of coworkers:

I continue to search for more people and moments to memorialize in collage. It might be my new strategy for repurposing ticket stubs and brochures from travel adventures. Or a new, budget-friendly holiday gift tradition. Or a way for me to simply mark another year lived, making a self-portrait with materials collected over the past year. Collage has a poetic, “circle of life” quality to it, transforming human-made ephemera into a recycled treasure worthy of display.

As my college graduation approached this past May, I realized something about the commencement ceremony. While it celebrates all things you—your hard-won GPA, your winding list of extracurriculars, that new foil-stamped degree—what gets lost is a celebration of the relationships that helped get you there. Where was the homage to friends and mentors who, honestly, probably shaped my success more than any test score or honor club?

The work was done in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Jeff Norris, one of the NASA crew, described how people react when they experience OnSight:

"When they first encounter this project," Norris says, people "have a feeling of, 'Wow, I've lived to see this.'"

That's precisely how I felt. Mic. Dropped. It left me wanting to know a lot more about Riccardo and his work. I'll let him take it from here:

In one sentence, who are you?

An Italian, beardy guy who likes to travel and observe people, learn about the world, and wonder how to make it a better place. (It turns out you can get paid to do that.)

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I’m leading the NEXT’s (New Experiences and Technologies) incubation team at Microsoft. We work on a number of new secret devices and experiences that have not been announced yet. Most recently, the Microsoft Hololens and Windows Mixed Reality. I learn by doing. In fact, I’m still learning how to do my job, and I expect to never stop.

I grew up in a small town in Italy, which was a great place to live, but there were not many opportunities. So I moved to London and started working as a developer there at Unit9 before moving back to design. I have a mixed background that reflects my many passions: I studied electronics and design and learned how to program on the side.

Since then, I have lived in Stockholm, New York, and now Seattle, always looking for new opportunities to learn and grow.

Chrome WebLab by Google

What are your three favorite possessions?

1. Old family photo albums.
2. All my books, now spread across two continents, which I dream of reuniting as one big library.
3. And of course BMO [a stuffed, plush video game console from Adventure Time] because it makes my niece laugh out loud when we play together.

What does a typical work session look like for you?

You could argue that what I really do daily is to press a lot of buttons, scribble on a whiteboard, and discuss with people. Sometimes I travel.

As a creative leader, I strive to build inclusive environments that foster creativity and enable every individual to learn, grow, and express their full potential. Every day is different. We research, brainstorm, sketch, build, discuss, and learn as much as we can to iterate and constantly improve.

What I personally do daily evolves pretty much every year, and I believe the role of designers and creative leaders will keep evolving with the rise of artificial intelligence. I would be surprised if my current job still exists in ten years.

How do you get over creative block?

Sometimes all it takes me is a shower, a nap, a walk, or a good dinner with friends. It helps me to read a lot of books, travel, meet new people, and be immersed in new realities that are far from my daily bubble. And it’s good to have a creative process, both as a reference to give you confidence when you feel lost, and as a framework to break away from when you are inspired.

Introducing Microsoft HoloLens: Transform your world with holograms

How do you see the world in 2078?

Um...let’s see. In 2078 I’ll be 94, maybe somewhere in the countryside in Tuscany surrounded by my grand kids, and hopefully I'll still be curious to travel, learn, and give back to the next generation. It might be a good idea to plan to be somewhere in the hills, just in case global warming makes my hometown a beach town.

It’s hard to make predictions, and too easy to fall into the trap of describing a dystopian future.

As designers, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to influence what future we want to live in. It doesn’t matter how small our contribution will be, it’s worth trying to push for a desirable future scenario.

My desirable future scenario looks like this:

• New generations will learn to live together, respecting our differences, understanding each other, fighting inequalities, and respecting nature and our planet in a deeper way.
• We will fulfill the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• Education will be highly respected as one of the most important values.
• Religion as we know it will transform or disappear in favor of a shared philosophy and values.
• Democracy will change, evolving to a better system (probably with a different name), immune to populism and propaganda.
• There will be no more borders that divide us, centralized governments will disappear, and so will human-vs-human military conflicts.
• Communities will be as small as a town, but globally represented and connected beyond their geographical position.
• Money as we know it will disappear, replaced by other ways to measure our impact and value to society.
• We will work much less (thank you, technology), spending most of our time studying, exploring, and enjoying life. We will look back at our generation wondering why we spent our lives working eight hours a day, five days a week. We will use that time to re-discover the pleasures of the simple things that nature gives us every day.
• Autonomous robots will take care of most activities (and jobs), freeing humankind from committing their lives to repetitive tasks.

We might have learned how to control our planet's energy, gravity, climate, and resources. Some of us will live (probably with machines) on other planets, in the ocean, or the thermosphere, working hard to give us all an alternative to extinction and overpopulation. We will find new ways to help animals stay alive. We will learn how to balance ecosystems, maybe even to re-introduce extinct species, or introduce new human-made species that will help us fight illnesses and colonize new planets, making them habitable.

The meaning of being human might change in our lifetime. We might be super humans by then, and we will have to be very careful, as there is a huge risk of creating new inequalities based on who can afford what extension. There might be incredible innovations in brain-computer interactions, connecting us to technology and each other via a collective mind.

There might also be supermachines, hopefully like R2-D2 and C-3PO, to assist us and help us be better humans.

Who are you crushing on lately?

I really like Bret Victor’s way of thinking.

Ivan Poupyrev's work is excellent and always surprising. Ishac Bertran and Claudio Guglieri are good friends, great designers, and some of my favorite people.

I feel very lucky to work with some incredibly interesting people from all over the world to help imagine the future. We are always facing new challenges—sometime solving problems for the very first time and defining experiences that have never existed before.

A lifelong space nerd, I was blown away when I heard about OnSight, a Microsoft HoloLens experience that allows NASA scientists to navigate the surface of Mars using imagery captured from the Curiosity Rover. I met a creative leader of HoloLens, Riccardo Giraldi, at a conference in Milan, and was so impressed by the work he and his team at Microsoft presented.

We decided to transform our drab and sterile office kitchenette (not the main one where the rest of the office eats) into a space that could be both a chef’s and a designer’s paradise—a space that actually asks you to play with your food.

The food industry is evolving like never before, and even at-home chefs are becoming more experimental. So, if you work in food or are outgrowing your home kitchen, here are a few ideas you might want to take to-go.

Our Top 4 Kitchen Design Rules:

1. Keep it versatile

A kitchen should be beautiful, but it should also feel like a blank canvas upon which wild ideas can be cooked up.

Our first priority was to create a clean, open space where different project teams could come in and set up how they see fit.

Since we only had a small space to work with, keeping the floor plan bright, open, and versatile was crucial to avoid feeling like we're cooking in a dark closet.

The main wall above the sink is made from plywood panels cut with a CNC machine to look more like pegboard. The design, which uses movable dowels, makes it easy to add or adjust shelves to meet the needs of the cooks.

2. Design for conversation and collaboration

Making the IDEO community feel connected to what we’re doing is just as important as being able to showcase our work.

While much of what we do is prototyping food on a near-scientific scale, we wanted our space to feel less like a lab and more like a home, with a warm, inviting color palette and wooden stools at the counter to sit and have a chat.

Even though it’s not technically a kitchen island, that counter was added with the same intent: to create smaller, more intimate spaces for the chef, but also allow them to face out to the space and chat with people sitting on stools on the other side. This always seems to be the gathering place in everyone’s kitchen.

3. Don’t try to do it all

The problem with redesigning a kitchen is that you never know how you’re going to use the space until you start using it.

We could have spent months iterating and reiterating on the floor plan, making sure every last knob was perfectly placed. Instead, we kept it simple, moved fast, and left room for modifications that we’ll inevitably need as the food industry continues to evolve.

This helped us save on upfront costs, and allowed us to finish the renovation much sooner.

4. Let the food speak for itself

Above all, we wanted the space to reflect how we feel about food, rather than distract from it. Sleek, minimalist design and large, neutral counter tops allow the inherent beauty of food to shine through.

I intentionally kept as many of the built elements—like the bookshelves—as low as possible. This makes the space feel more open and larger than it is. This is key when dealing with small spaces. Your eye goes to the long horizontal surfaces, elongating the space, as opposed to being confronted with tall cabinets or shelves that break your line of sight.

Everything we do revolves around food, so why not build a kitchen that allows food to be the star of the show?

Next time you remodel, keep these ideas in mind and apply some design thinking to your dinner.

Build to think. That mantra is imprinted on our brains from the moment we walk through the doors at IDEO. In our Design for Food Studio, we build by cooking. And just as our shop guys need to be able to make noise and be surrounded by their tools, we need a kitchen that inspires us creatively, adapts to our needs, and demonstrates to clients how we prototype in a tangible way.

I took this picture in the neighborhood where I grew up in Istanbul. The streets of Istanbul are very dynamic places, full of commerce, conversations, fights, love, drama. But they’re not always designed to facilitate all the different activities that take place there. So people regularly find ways to design the interventions they need.

In this picture you can see a table built around a tree to create more space for people to hang outside. An awesome way of working around nature and creating space for social encounters—tactical urbanism perhaps?

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

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.