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.

We’ve brought back thousands of photos and videos and hundreds of Post-its. As we stare at the sea of notes, I feel stuck and a little panicked. Are there answers in this data soup?

This messy moment in the design process is called “synthesis,” when designers start to distill all our research into tangible possibilities. Synthesis can feel ambiguous, stiff, and chaotic all at once; the secret is to keep moving forward any way you can.

My way of conquering the chaos is a method I call “sketch synthesis.”

Here's my sketching process for this project, which you can adapt for your own team.

Step 1: Pare it down

First, I put the notes from each research interview, observation, or experience onto separate poster boards. Then, I took a step back and distilled the information from each of these boards into just four or five sketched post-its.

These sketches are from our interview with an extreme commuter. The express his ideal travel experience: an environment that brings the outside in and serves as an extended coworking space.

Sketches can feature characters, icons, or graphs—anything that provides a helpful cue for you. You don’t need to be a great artist to sketch. The idea is to summarize what you’ve learned visually, even if those visuals are stick figures!

Step 2: Cluster it up

Next, I took another step back and turned my individual sketches from each poster board into a series of sketch clusters, grouped around emerging themes.

This cluster is focused on the theme of "place." It's a mind map of sorts, featuring images that represent a range of experiences, interviews, and secondary research we uncovered related to the theme.

Don’t be afraid to discard the ideas that aren’t standing out. The aim of this step is to sort and refine what you’ve learned, using sketching as a filter.

Step 3: Talk it through

I invited the rest of the team to review the sketch clusters with me. Working together, we turned the clusters into concrete design questions that could help us get tangible, fast.

The goal is to share your sense-making with others to figure out if you’ve captured the essence of the research, or need to go back to your original poster boards and find the missing thread that ties it all together.

These sketch clusters helped the team gather our thoughts and articulate the questions we hoped to explore with our client in the next phase of the project. They captured our research insights and pointed the way to new transportation innovations.

For me, sketch synthesis is a way of bringing clarity and momentum to tough moments in the design process. Plus, drawings are a natural starting point for design, which the team can build on and our clients can easily understand.

Sketching also creates a common language for designers to communicate. At IDEO, people come from all around the world. On this team, I worked alongside designers from Germany, South Korea, France, and the U.S.

While I’m drawn to sketching, you might have a natural inclination to express yourself through role play, writing, film, or data. There are no limits to the creative problem-solving skills that might help your team synthesize.

The secret is to keep moving toward the answers, even when things feel messy—and to have a little fun along the way.

This post was adapted from a talk I presented for Mixed Methods, hosted at Airbnb in San Francisco.

It’s Monday morning and our design team is back after three weeks on the road researching the future of shared vehicles. We've soaked up a ton of inspiration by talking to transport experts and observing commuters.

As someone whose profession is to design new experiences with technology, I find this thought-provoking. It’s a current and widely-experienced example of something that has always been true of new technology: It has as much potential to have negative impact as positive. Which way it goes has always been more about the path that we put the technology on than the technology itself.

When I was asked to speak at TEDxGlasgow this year, I took the opportunity to explain how design can help. There are straightforward things that we can do to make sure that our technology brings out the best in us. Watch my talk below.

David Webster speaks at TEDxGlasgow.

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We all have love-hate relationships with those buzzing bricks of aluminum in our pockets. On the one hand, they have the incredible power to connect us to people, information, and knowledge. But on the other, that constant access can become constant distraction, detaching us from real moments that matter.

As an org designer, my job is to use the tools of design to enhance organizational culture, boost collaboration and teamwork, improve structures and processes, enable learning and development, and create a sense of purpose and belonging. Then, I sleep.

6:30am: Morning run

If I’m going to help inspire other people, I need to start by getting inspired myself. For me, that comes from running in Prospect Park twice a week. Being near trees elevates my mood and restores me. It’s the only time during my day in urban New York City when I can actually smell plants and dirt.

8:30am: The Book-lyn Bridge

I take the subway from Brooklyn, where I live, to our New York City office. I don’t mind the commute because I can read two to three books a week. It’s often a chance for me to dive into new perspectives on culture, leadership, and collaboration. Reading Jake Knapp’s book Sprint sparked so many ideas, I asked him to speak with our clients—and he did!

10:00am: Get the gears turning

Once I’ve settled into our studio in the West Village, I lead a quick morning standup in our project space with my teammates before our clients join us. We often work side-by-side with our org change clients, either by hosting them in our project space or by going to their offices (or both!).

11:00am: Disrupt your wallet

In this project, we’re helping our client organization launch an internal user-centricity team. This team will help train employees to better understand the way their customers feel about and use their products. Today we are kicking off a workshop with a new group of employees. To teach them about human-centered design, we’re doing an exercise where they split up into pairs and redesign each other's wallets. If you want to improve an object that people carry with them all day every day, you’ve got to listen closely to their needs and idiosyncrasies.

12:30pm: Lunchtime making

Every Thursday at lunch, the entire studio comes together for a craft project to engage our senses and inspire us. We call it “Maketime.” Today, our clients are joining us to do blind contour drawings. My colleague Loren is leading the session. We sit at tables facing another person. Loren asks each of us to draw the person across from us without looking down at our paper and without lifting up our pen. Then we share our drawings, laughing at the results. This technique helps build hand/eye communication.

2:30pm: Remote synthesis

So much of org design is about communication. But many companies have teams that work remotely. This client's core team is based in the tri-state area, but the extended team is farther away. So, this afternoon, my teammate Nili and I are leading a session with our extended client team to synthesize the research we’ve done together. We’ve designed a series of concepts and tested them out with employees in the organization. Based on that feedback, we’re positioning the concepts on a 2x2, where one axis shows how desirable the concept was for employees, and one axis shows how feasible the concept was to implement.

3:30pm: Meet them where they are

We head out to the client’s office to meet with the core team. In order to make sure we’re practicing the collaboration that we preach, we make sure to spend part of the week in the client’s offices, instead of always asking them to come to us. We request a reserved workspace so we can all sit together. We’re discussing how we’ll set up this new user-centricity team: who will be on the team, what roles and responsibilities will they have, how will they work together, and whom will they need to hire.

4:30pm: Getting physical

If you haven’t noticed yet, much of my day revolves around communication and inspiration. I love that organizational design involves getting deeply curious about how a company works (informally and formally) both by listening to teams as they collaborate and by watching for the intangible behaviors that come out in meetings and hallway conversations.

One of my favorite activities to do with clients is Creative Tensions. We put a slide on the screen that prompts them to make a choice. For example:

“Purposefulness: When it comes to meaningful change that leadership and employees want to make in the world…”

There’s lack of clarity or disagreement <------------> There is alignment

We ask people to move with their bodies to one side of the room or the other to articulate their answer. All of a sudden you can physically see all the spectrum of ideas and philosophies in the room. Then, we ask a few people to share why they are standing where they are standing.

5:30pm: Write it out

After a full day of collaborating, observing, and facilitating, I’m back at the office to write an article with my colleague Hailey. Since organizational design is a new field and can feel like a black box (even to other designers at IDEO), we are always thinking about ways to share how we work. We're working on an article about using metaphors to uncover organizational dynamics (a colleague snapped this photo for the cover of the emo rock band we’ll start one day).

6:30pm: Signing off

One more check in with the clients over Slack, and I’m headed home. Eat, Sleep, run, org design. Repeat.

When people ask me about what I do for a living, I say that I help people and teams do their best work. But that’s a little vague, so here’s the nitty gritty...

I didn’t start out working at an enlightened company—I started out working in the art world, in upscale art galleries, private art clubs, and various museums. My surroundings were beautiful, but I was miserable. The politics and sexism were intense. I never felt like I could speak my mind.

Luckily, I eventually landed at IDEO. For the past 10-plus years, I’ve helped create events, experiences, and rituals that keep our studio culture healthy and our designers happy. Now, I’m Co-Director of the experience team in Chicago. Our mission: Design for belonging.

My team and I use tools like our studio space, food, events, experiences, and rituals to help make everyone who comes through our doors feel welcome, supported, and empowered to do the best work of their lives. We do things like throw spur-of-the moment pop-ups that break up the afternoon, and plan group lunches so people will eat together—like a family—instead of having sad lunches alone at their desks. We even plan crafting sessions and inspirational field trips.

Not convinced that thoughtful extras like spa water and storytelling events can actually help fuel the ideas that drive revenue? Consider the case of Uber.

Remember Travis Kalanick, the former CEO?

The deposed chief executive set the tone for the company’s culture. Under him, Uber flouted local laws and criticized competitors in its quest for success. Thanks to the company’s pervasive “bro” culture, sexual harassment and discrimination were rampant. Employees were pitted against one another, and management turned a blind eye to infractions from top performers.

Contrast Kalanick’s approach to leadership and culture to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who took the company’s reins in 2014. He inherited a company lacking innovation—and relevance. Microsoft’s stock performance was flat. His goal was to shift the culture from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all.” “Microsoft’s culture had been rigid,” he wrote in his book, Hit Refresh. “Each employee had to prove that he or she was the smartest person in the room. The culture change I wanted was centered on exercising a growth mindset every day.”

Three years later, not only are employees happier, more innovative, and empathic, but the company has generated more than $250 billion in market value—more than Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify, Snapchat, and WeWork—combined.

As an experience director, I’m laser-focused on making sure employees feel safe to fail and explore, that they feel connected to others, and that they have what they need to solve problems and come up with innovative solutions. My job is to set the conditions for great work.

So how do you actually do that? Here are five ways to jump-start your company culture.

1. Define and build on your company’s cultural values

Values are the compass that an organization uses to select staff members, reward current employees, and make business decisions. If you’re just starting a company and need to define your values from scratch, Greenhouse, the company that designed the recruiting software IDEO uses, has a helpful culture mapping exercise to help get you started. Need further inspiration? Check out Google’s values: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” “Fast is better than slow.” “Great just isn’t good enough.”

2. Leverage naturally-occurring behaviors

Put on your anthropologist hat. What interesting or unusual things are people already doing around the office that you could build on? (It’s faster and easier to build on existing behaviors than to encourage new ones.) At one company, I noticed people were wary of talking to strangers. Unfortunately, since it was a co-working space, almost everyone was a stranger. I also observed that people would use the kitchen as a shortcut to the bathroom, and that it was a neutral zone—no one group owned it. High foot traffic + no ownership = opportunity to spark casual conversation and community! You can do what I did—look for unused spaces in your own workplace and use questions on Post-it Notes to spur random conversations—or move shared resources like printers or snacks to the middle of the space instead of tucking them away in a corner.

3. Identify and empower cultural mavens

As an experience director, I’m always look for new collaborators. Though some cultural experiences can come from the top down, others work better when they come from the bottom up. They feel more authentic. I’m always trying to identify new cultural mavens within our organization, and I empower them by giving them some time, money, or resources to bring their ideas to life. For example, at IDEO, we noticed a few of our designers were natural teachers and always went out of their way to show others how to learn a new skill. This aligned perfectly with two of our company values—“Learn from Failure” and “Make Others Successful”—so we gave those designers a budget and set them free to build on their ideas. Now we regularly have Nerd Nights where people learn to code, and Shop Class where we make things like concrete planters and leather wallets.

4. Prioritize face-to-face interactions

Digital tools are efficient, sure, but the only way to build authentic, human relationships is face-to-face. Period. When you find yourself using a digital tool to communicate with an individual or a group, think: Could this be done in person instead? Am I hiding behind this tool, this emoji? Encourage others to get out from behind their screens, too. One easy way? Get people to eat their meals together.

5. Design meaningful rituals

We participate in rituals in institutions, politics, and religion all the time. But they’re not commonly talked about in the world of business, even though they’re a simple way to make cultural values tangible. At IDEO, I was part of a team that started IDEO Stories, a Moth-like live storytelling event designed to help teach our designers how to tell better project stories. After the first event, it became clear it wasn’t just a good way to learn a new skill—it was a way to celebrate an individual’s unique backstory and unite the community.

For the last seven years in Chicago, we’ve also held an Annual Studio Awards party, an Oscars-inspired evening where the community votes on award-worthy project work from the past year. Categories are tweaked each year to incentivize emerging behaviors that are beneficial to our business.

Have ideas for rituals of your own? Share them with us on Twitter, so we can inspire each other.

Often, people want to write culture off as a slew of perks you might find at tech companies. But really, culture is about creating an environment that makes it possible for people to work together to come up with innovative products and ideas—the same products and ideas that drive revenue.

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.