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.

The role of an engineer on a product team may not exactly involve saving the world, but the scene has some origin in reality: Engineers and other team members often have to come together creatively to solve a problem, and they each have their own language and jargon for describing solutions. As teams practice leaner and leaner development cycles, the process of defining and agreeing on requirements, challenges, and solutions needs to be an ongoing conversation, where everyone comes away with a shared understanding and a feeling that their role’s needs have been met.

So how do you start that conversation, and keep it going successfully throughout the life of a product? Here’s a roadmap to get you started.

Start by developing a common language

Do some level-setting at the beginning of the project to agree on general terminology that everyone can understand. Sometimes, this piece can even be as small as defining your individual product’s features in a way that allows you to speak clearly about your product roadmap.

Early in a recent project, when we were going over wireframes, people were throwing around a lot of terms that referred to the same thing: Was a “folder” the same as a “collection”? What differentiated an “item” from an “object?” By coming together in the product’s infancy and agreeing upon these terms, we were able to define our system architecture and have meaningful database model names that we still use.

Share your vision for the product

Build in time to ask your team members how they feel about the product, and share your vision as well. Try to think outside the smaller details of what everyone’s currently working on, and find opportunities to share thoughts and feelings about the product at large. You might be surprised to hear that an engineer is anxious because they’re worried that the latest feature build is getting way more complicated than they originally planned, or that a designer is excited because users have been clamoring for the feature you’re working on. These small, casual interactions build a sense of trust and shared knowledge about the larger vision that each functional team has for the product as a whole.

Leverage disagreement to come together

It can often feel like product managers, designers, and engineers are at odds with each other. Between wanting to meet deadlines and stakeholder needs, pushing for a joyful and user-centric interface, and working toward robust and uncomplicated code, things can get tricky. The key is to take this source of potential conflict and turn it into a shared learning opportunity. Make sure that every side is not just arguing for a solution, but actually communicating the “why” of a solution. If an engineer understands the user research and decision-making that went into a proposed feature, it will help them communicate all the possible solutions that can meet that particular user need, and then the team can prioritize and make better decisions.

Find opportunities to translate for each other

This opportunity often presents itself when you’re integrating new members onto the team. For example, new engineers with fresh eyes often want to jump in and optimize and uncomplicate things. While that can be a good thing, there may be situations where the more experienced team member needs to explain the design decisions that led to certain features being a certain way—and suddenly the engineer is empowered to speak for the UX designer because they understand the shared vision.

Once you find your conversational rhythm, you’ll find that team members begin to understand each other’s roles better. Because the designer now understands why the engineer pushed back on a certain complicated feature, and the engineer understands why users have been wanting a different feature, both roles on the team are now better equipped to advocate for each other and push toward a common goal—whether that’s defusing the bomb on the bus, or building a successful product.

Illustrations by Cassandra Fountaine

We’ve all seen the action movie trope where our hero needs to defeat a ridiculously complicated doomsday device, and the plucky engineer has to explain how to reverse the polarity or engage the spatio-temporal hyperlink. The hero inevitably responds, “In English, please?”

Work friends are very important, and different types of work friends can fill different needs. We’ll cover three: the confidante, the inspiration, and the frenemy. Understanding how and why you relate to these people will help you commit appropriate mental resources to developing workplace relationships that can bolster your motivation (and maybe even help get you out of bed on that Friday morning).

1. The confidante

This is the work friend who will commiserate when you’ve had a rough conversation with your boss, rush you to the bathroom when you’re about to cry, and give you honest feedback when you need it most. Confidantes make us feel like we can conquer the world—or at least ace a presentation and finally ask for that raise.

But these days, it can be tough to find a confidante at work. Because we tend to switch jobs more frequently, it can be hard to invest as heavily in workplace relationships. To counter that and find your confidente, start by building trust and sharing stories with a coworker you gravitate toward. Or initiate a get-together: People who provide social support to others—by organizing an office event or inviting colleagues to lunch—are ten times as likely to feel engaged at work than people who keep to themselves, says Shawn Achor, author of Before Happiness.

2. The inspiration

The inspiration is your platonic work crush: you don’t want to be with them, you simply want to be them.

This person can either be a colleague you deeply admire or a formal mentor. You probably could've guessed this, but mentors can help improve job satisfaction, teach us how to be effective leaders, and steer us towards the right career moves.

“They’ll bring a field to life for you. They’ll teach you how to find quality material in that field,” advises economist and author Tyler Cowen.

Pro tip: The best way to find a mentor isn't to ask, “Will you be my mentor?” but to start by asking someone for specific advice, then slowly work toward building a relationship.

3. The frenemy

We tend to choose friends who are similar to us, especially at work. But the more we have in common with someone, the more likely we are to compare ourselves to them. The frenemy is both our friend and our benchmark within the organization.

Another pro tip: Don’t feel guilty about experiencing the occasional twinge of envy! Frenemies account for almost half of all important members of our networks.

While frenemy relationships are linked to greater stress, they also motivate us to work harder. In a survey of consultants, those who had a frenemy made more of an effort to succeed and network. Leverage the positives of a tricky relationship by partnering on an important project; you’ll try harder to prove yourself and might end up with a real friendship.

But even the best work friendships have a dark side. Sometimes being close with our colleagues can leave us emotionally exhausted. Managing relationships we care deeply about while giving critical feedback or rushing to meet deadlines takes effort. Talk to anyone who has worked at a startup where coworkers describe themselves as a family, and you’ll inevitably hear how tiring it can be.

And for every friendship, there is also someone outside the friendship. The closer the relationship between two colleagues, the more others might feel left out, even if the friends aren’t actively excluding anyone.

Here are some concrete ways that you can engage with people at work to reap the rewards of having solid work-friends:

• Go for quality instead of quantity. High-quality connections don’t necessarily require deep or vulnerable relationships. Small moments of connection full of trust and engagement can be the beginning of something larger.
• Prevent silos from forming. IDEO structures all of its teams to include designers from different disciplines so each team is cross-functional. Our San Francisco office also has a ritual called tea time, in which people are invited to take a break from their work and mingle with people they don’t work with directly.
• Don’t rely on social events. Studies show that work parties aren’t always effective at helping people make friends. “People don’t mix much at mixers, and at company parties, they mostly bond with similar colleagues,” says Adam Grant.
• Spend casual time together. Google and Facebook plan times for employees to play games and eat meals together. At LinkedIn, the whole family can get in on the fun during Bring Your Parents to work day.

This post was adapted from Mollie and Liz's book No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work.

Choice, meaning, and opportunities for learning all make work more enjoyable. But on rainy Friday mornings when we’re low on sleep and irritated with our managers, research suggests our real motivation isn’t a what—it’s a who. People with friends at work find their jobs more satisfying, and are less affected by stress.

It's my first few hours in Bangkok, and by looking around the train, I can tell it's rainy season. Thin raincoats cover suits, and young mothers juggle both sunglasses and umbrellas.

As I exit the train, I look up, count to three and speed through a very thick rainstorm toward my Airbnb. After a much-needed nap, I open my eyes to a completely different climate. I peek through the shutters of my room and see an indigo sky, birds flying, and I am feeling the heat.

I pick up my fanny pack and leave the Airbnb immediately to explore the neighborhood. On a quiet side road, beside the fence of a wood craftsman shop, a thick black piece of tarp covers a corrugated fence. It’s held in place by a clever set of weights—filled plastic water bottles.

It strikes me that such an old trick can be found everywhere across the world. I start to wonder how can these four small bottles make it through such heavy, rainy days.

I stop to stare at a man approaching me. The woodchips on his shirt make it seem like he must be heading out from the shop nearby. He whispers something, unties a couple of bottles, and brings them to the shop's outdoor sink. These short bursts of sunlight heat must dry the water in them pretty quickly, I thought to myself. Regardless of the one million square meters of water falling over Bangkok each September, nothing beats the strength of a tropical sun, and the dedication of an old craftsman to keep his work tools dry.

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.

After steaming smooth, straight pieces of wood, Katie sculpts them into loose knots, braids, and squiggles, inherently fluid shapes that defy the medium’s natural rigidity.

To me, Katie’s work represents open-mindedness, possibility, and the means to evolve beyond appearance, expectation, or past. Her sculpture that sits in our living room—a wooden braid that bends upwards in an elegant arc, like a ballerina’s arm extending over the bar—reminds me to be unafraid to challenge the seemingly accepted, even when it comes to myself.

Katie sat down with me to share more about her craft, plus her fondness for classic 80s movies and finding freedom in chaos.

In one sentence, who are you?

I am many things: an artist, mother, wife, designer, and powerhouse.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I’m an artist specializing in wood. I bend wood by steaming it, which is a unique and pioneering technique that challenges classic woodworking practices. I learned the craft from a young age. Growing up, my grandfather and father were both carpenters and taught me how to work with wood.

3 favorite possessions?

1. My father's Old Timer pocket knife. 2. My wedding rings and grandmother’s jewelry. 3. My adventure hat.

What does a typical work session look like?

I like to have a lot of projects going at once, so there are typically a couple things in the works at any one time. I tend to work a bit on each project all at once. Sometimes it can be a bit hectic, but there’s something in this chaos that allows me to move freely from project to project.

How do you get over creative block?

I try to take a step back. I change my surroundings and not think about the project. I find that once I zoom out, I find the solution I was searching for.

What was the last item on your to do list?

Getting a pedicure. Sometimes making time for myself can be tricky.

How do you see the world in 2078?

Hopefully I'll still be around then. Let’s see... I hope to be telling my grandchildren about growing up in the 80s, and blowing their minds by showing them ET and The Goonies. I hope that the world still holds on to the classics, like going for road trips, camping in cars, or reading books snuggled under a blanket while its raining outside. I hope that the world is similar to today and yesterday. Mostly, I just hope it’s not uninhabitable because of global warming or something crazy like a nuclear explosion.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I’d like to have a solo exhibition in Japan.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

My number one creative crush is always Aleksandra Zee. She's my creative sister. Windy Chein’s ombre knots are killing me, and Meryl Pataky is truly pushing the boundaries of neon art.

With a dose of hot moisture and a little imagination, San Francisco-based woodworker Katie Gong makes the seemingly stiff become supple. Kind of like my attitude after a bath.

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.