Sealy and IDEO first collaborated in 2008, to rethink the design of its Stearns & Foster line. For years, Sealy, the largest mattress manufacturer in the world, had taken the standard industry approach to selling mattresses and watched market share and sales flatten; it knew something had to change. Stearns & Foster evolved from a single product design into a keystone for transforming the organization.

IDEO helped Sealy use actionable consumer insights to develop a scalable design methodology and new brand principles, which it applied to product design, operational and manufacturing decision-making processes, and sales and marketing strategy. This “brand-to-product” framework was subsequently used for three separate and consecutive product launches—Stearns & Foster, Embody, and Posturepedic—resulting in an overhaul of 85 percent of Sealy’s mattress portfolio.

Tempur-Pedic was already working with IDEO on a new mattress design when it acquired Sealy in 2013. It was also interested in how design thinking and human-centered design could improve its business. Once solely focused on the technological elements of designing a mattress, together with IDEO, Tempur-Pedic redesigned the outer shells of its mattresses to reflect the quality on the inside. This design change led to the company to look at new ways to infuse design into their products.

“The initial project was to design the mattress,” said Thomas Overthun, associate partner and design director at IDEO. “But the second project was to create a whole design language from the mattress out to what it meant for any other product, from pillows to blankets and other accessories. It eventually became bigger than just the mattress.”

Working on the Tempur-Pedic/Sealy relationship has been gratifying, said IDEO partner and design director Michael Hendrix, because although home goods can be thought of as simply products, nothing could be further from the truth. IDEO and Tempur-Pedic/Sealy changed the course of the mattress company's business through the transformative power of designing where, and ultimately how, people sleep. And in the process, the organization itself changed as well, moving siloed departments to cross-functional teams, with the brand division central to their cooperation, which led to consistent and aligned decisions across the board.

Some of the projects include:

Stearns & Foster Luxury Mattress
Sealy teamed up with IDEO to develop a design language for Stearns & Foster mattresses that would reestablish what the brand stood for. Through redefining brand principles and rounds of prototypes that focused on evocative details, the new Stearns and Foster mattress was the highest rated in Sealy’s portfolio since it started keeping records, and initial retailer orders were three times what management projected.

Next-Generation Posturepedic
An icon in the mattress industry was brought into the 21st century by developing a new product that delivered on the long-running promise of the brand. Together, IDEO and Sealy designed a product that focused on holistic back health. In its earnings report, the company said US bedding sales for the quarter were up 10.6 percent, to $253.4 million, a figure driven by the new product line’s introduction. According to Sealy’s Q3 earnings report, the Posturepedic launch represented the largest and fastest rollout in the company’s history.

Embody by Sealy
The project began by defining the market opportunities for all-foam beds, and ended with the modern, streamlined Embody mattress as well as a simplified design language, free of industry jargon, to help retailers talk about the mattress to customers. “Sealy collaborated with IDEO to create an approachable and attractive mattress that delivers the simple, healthy rest consumers want with a selling story they can easily understand,” said Jodi Allen, Sealy’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Tempur-Pedic Sleep System
Best known for the revolutionary, NASA-proven Tempur material inside its mattresses, Tempur wanted to transform the exterior of its mattresses to match the caliber of innovation inside. Together with IDEO, Tempur created a new sleep system, including an easily removable and washable fabric mattress cover. “Tempur-Pedic was born of innovation, but we were never a design-driven company until we worked with IDEO,” said Patrice Varni, senior vice president of brand marketing, Tempur Sealy North America, LLC. “Seeing consumer need in a new way through IDEO’s eyes has transformed us. Our product design, our creative psyche, our brand are all fundamentally changed by this sharper focus. This collaboration has given us all a renewed sense of pride.”

The challenge of how we’ll feed the exploding world population in the future—in a sustainable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly way—is seeding an agricultural revolution in Europe.

In 2012, INFARM founders Erez, Guy Galonska, and Osnat Michaeli found that vertical farms could be a solution to urban self-sufficiency. These farms could allow people to grow vegetables and herbs in small spaces, with no soil and far less water.

An approach that’s captured the imagination of futurists for decades, vertical farming involves growing vegetables and herbs in stacked units or inclined surfaces, within which moisture, light, temperature, and nutrients are monitored, and controlled.

After creating their first vertical farming experiment in their apartment in Berlin, the founders brought together plant scientists and industrial designers to explore and develop vertical farming’s potential.

Since then, the startup has created custom growing systems for clients including Airbnb, Mercedes-Benz, and Weber. Most recently, INFARM installed a vertical farm growing herbs and vegetables at the Berlin branch of German supermarket chain Metro, the fourth-largest retail chain in the world, to sell to the public. It’s been profiled in Wired Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, and Zeit.

INFARM collaborated with IDEO to further explore their B2B offer, including concepts for the industrial design of the stackable, modular, climate-controlled units; the interaction design of an accompanying app to monitor and control the units, and its business model.

Urban farmers will sign up for “farming as a service,” comprising the units themselves, as well as a monthly subscription for seeds, cartridges filled with nutrients, and a pH regulator. Because they’re stackable, the modules can be scaled to suit anyone from a home grower to a restaurant chef or supermarket owner. And Erez claims a 1 square meter growing tray can yield four to six mature plants every day, 365 days a year, doubling that of state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouses.

As well as remotely regulating each unit’s climate, the app will educate growers about new vegetables and herbs, selling packs of complementary seeds, with suggested recipes for them, and cooking instructions. Aiming to promote biodiversity, the firm will sell rare-breed and heirloom seeds too.

The startup has funding from the EU’s European Pioneers fund, and is now looking to secure investment to accelerate software development and ramp up their hardware production capabilities. Quite literally, it's growing its business.

Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit educational group that revolutionized children’s television with the launch of the landmark Sesame Street program in 1969. The show, which has since become a household name, is now watched in more than 150 countries worldwide. The Workshop also creates educational content for new media platforms, and partnered with IDEO to design a line of Sesame Street–themed apps for Apple’s iPhone. The Elmo Calls app, which functions as a utility app for parents and as an entertaining behavioral-development app for kids, is now one of the Top 100 paid iPhone apps in the iTunes store.

The collaboration began with a mutual desire to bring the show’s beloved characters to the iPhone platform—and to do so using a human-centered design approach. Child-development experts, educators, toy and interaction designers, and even the Sesame Street puppeteers weighed in on the design decisions. The team also worked closely with families throughout the project—from initial concepts to early prototyping to the final development—in order to stay focused on how children actually use the iPhone for play. The games were designed accordingly. For example, the team omitted menus from the Sesame Street apps to keep the experiences simple, playful, and fun for a young child. And each game features exclusive new Sesame Street videos, allowing players to enjoy “lean back” moments along with interactive ones.

The resulting iPhone applications let children engage with the favorite Sesame Street characters in a whole new way. Kids touch, shake, swipe, and tilt their way through original games featuring Elmo, Grover, Bert, Rosita, and the Count.

The titles, all of which are available from iTunes, include:

• Elmo Calls: Engages 2- to 5-year-olds in listening-skills practice and active participation during everyday situations.
• Elmo’s Monster Maker: Allows kids to create unique monster friends that dance and play with Elmo.
• Sesame Street Video Maker: Lets kids star in their own music videos, mashing recordings of themselves with popular Sesame music videos and adding their own stamps and special effects.
• Sesame Street Makes Music: Helps kids explore an array of instruments as they contribute to new renditions of classic preschool tunes with their Sesame friends.

How do you know when you’re successful in your work? You can check off a list of technical skills and expertise you bring to the table. You can use a career development rubric to make sure you’re hitting the right goals. But often, it’s your behaviors—the intangibles that are the most difficult to articulate—that make the most impact. Things like your ability to stay optimistic or your willingness to adapt when there’s no roadmap.

Because of the nature of our work at IDEO, these intangibles are a big part of what defines the experience of working at the company. So in 2012, a global team of designers from our U.S., Europe, and Asia offices came together to codify these values and behaviors as part of a larger effort to evolve IDEO’s career development platform. More often than not, when IDEOers hit road bumps in their career, it was not about what they were doing, but how they were doing it.

The team agreed that, in addition to identifying the technical requirements needed to progress through one’s career, it was just as crucial to give IDEOers the tools they need to navigate the complex culture. So they captured the values they believed were foundational to the culture and most strongly shared across the IDEO community, and put them to paper in The Little Book of IDEO. The title is meant to reflect its purpose for readers—a handbook that’s compact, useful, and free of any corporate jargon.

For IDEO-ers, this red cloth-bound guide provides a shared lexicon around both the hard and soft skills we need to succeed. It describes things like why IDEO is so loosely structured, where it comes from, and where it’s headed.

Most importantly, the book identifies the organization’s seven core values. These are by design specific, actionable, and integral to the kind of work we do and the environment in which we do it, going beyond common sense and general ethical practice. The intention: to foster meaningful conversations within the community about life at IDEO, and how to achieve success along the way. With each succinct expression comes a deeper explanation of why it matters, and how it shapes our experience at IDEO.

Over the years, the book has been roundly embraced by the IDEO community as an honest articulation of who we are, as opposed to what we aspire to be, and what we appreciate most about working together. When IDEOers first got their hands on it, a movement took shape to create videos that bring each of the core values to life. To depict the value of "Embracing Ambiguity," for example, New York-based designers built a makeshift cardboard rowboat, and while simulating a storm, navigated their way through uncharted territory with teamwork and optimism. San Francisco produced a Jacques Cousteau inspired look at the lifestyle and behaviors of designers in their natural collaborative habitat.

Through the process of making the videos, IDEOers came together to reflect on each of the values, talking through what resonated and what didn’t. It gave them a sense of ownership, and a platform through which to share their interpretations.

A Global Conversation

IDEO has a global presence—offices in two countries in Europe, two countries in Asia, and multiple locations across the U.S. As an organization that embraces a human-centered culture, it felt important to learn if the values resonated with the IDEO community in all of these locations, especially in a country like China, whose working culture is so different from the west. We saw the authenticity and resonance of the values as essential for attracting, motivating, and retaining local talent.

So how did The Little Book of IDEO land in Shanghai? Exploring this question would illuminate insights into how our own clients are often challenged to keep their company culture resonant within the global landscape.

A team of IDEOers in our Shanghai office took on the challenge of exploring the meaning behind each of the values. They were surprised with what they discovered—that despite the firm’s Western origins, locals felt largely connected to the values. It even helped to further solidify their identity as a community, even if it may have been in tension with local working culture, because it was rooted in a set of shared beliefs.

In some instances, the Shanghai team built on the existing values in order to refine the meaning for the local context. For example, the core value "Be Optimistic" rings true, but could sound naive when translated directly to Chinese, implying "rose-tinted glasses.” So in the Mandarin edition, an extra phrase was added to convey the measuredness we mean when we talk about optimism at IDEO. The lesson here: The treatment of something as fundamental and nuanced as our values requires authenticity and emotional connection, and therefore more of a transcreation process than straight translation.

Lasting Power

As an organization, we are designed to be flexible. This means we’re always changing—even when it comes to how we are structured—so that we can respond to the kinds of challenges that clients come to us for. In the midst of our constant evolution, The Little Book of IDEO is as resonant today as it was when it was published.

Like most organizations, we’re reckoning with how COVID-19 will change how we do business. And as we do, we’re learning a lot from our community—our colleagues living and working under complex, difficult circumstances; our clients whose businesses depend on global transportation; and the people we design for and with on a daily basis.

"Constraints can breed a lot of innovation,” says Charles Hayes, a managing director of IDEO’s studios in Asia. “As designers, how do we design our way through this?"

Here are a few tips based on what we’re learning:

1. Create a virtual meeting survival kit

How many tabs do you have open right now? We equate multiple screens with fractured attention. But just because a meeting is being conducted virtually doesn’t mean it can’t be designed for presence. An IDEO team recently had to find an alternative way to run a 20-person workshop for a foundation in Seattle. They asked themselves: How might we still approximate the level of engagement of an in-person meeting? Better still: how might we make sure this virtual workshop delivers on our client’s needs—focus, alignment, and a set of actionable next steps—while keeping things interesting?

Before the meeting, the team mailed a virtual workshop survival kit, complete with “sleeping bags” for cell phones, mini-whiteboards for people to prototype ideas, and physical takeaways to help the presentation resonate off-screen.

Over the course of the meeting, participants excitedly unwrapped items one by one. It was a way for the IDEO team to show up in the room when they couldn’t actually show up in the room.

2. Design rituals around tools

There are thousands of tools to facilitate remote collaboration—video conferencing! brainstorming tools! task-management software!—but perhaps more important than the specific tool are the processes teams put in place around them. After all, a tool is only as good as its ability to deliver on what the team needs.

Take video conferencing, for example. A reliable video chat box can be a Swiss Army knife to combat the woes of remote collaboration. But spending an entire day jumping from one serious video chat to another is a recipe for bleary eyes. IDEO teams around the world have been running experiments in how video conferencing can be a tool to build culture and connectedness in addition to getting work done.

For one, teams have been continuously changing their virtual video backgrounds—everything from a football game to a family vacation photo—to spark discussion and keep meetings fresh. Regular rituals like daily meditation or morning coffee chats have been ported over to video. And teams are using creative warmups—like a 10-second dance break or a quick show-and-tell of an artifact from the home office—to kick-off meetings.

3. Empower local communities

When travel is off the table, IDEOers have had to find alternative ways to learn from the communities for whom they’re designing. One approach that has become particularly relevant in the wake of COVID-19 is Equity Centered Community Design (ECCD). ECCD is a process of designing with—as opposed to designing for—a community.

For example, IDEO recently worked on a project to design a new lifelong learning program for the city of South Bend, Indiana. Rather than rely on traveling to South Bend to conduct research, the IDEO team hired local “community connectors” and a researcher in South Bend to conduct interviews, share prototypes, and co-design with the IDEO team remotely. Now that many cities are sheltering in place, even local communities will have to work remotely. That makes it all the more important to enlist those with hyperlocal context and lines of sight, ensuring there is sensitivity and flexibility around immediate needs. By designing themselves out of the room, the IDEO team received a level of honest feedback they may not have been privy to if they’d been physically present. This method isn’t new, but as movement becomes constrained, it’s even more important to engage local networks to be the eyes and ears on the ground.

4. When you can't do, learn

How long have you been putting off learning that skill? Cleaning up that code base? Building that website? When one door closes, listen for the creak of another opening. Travel constraints can be an opportunity to take a deep breath, hunker down, and try something new. Across IDEO, designers have been using these extenuating circumstances as an opportunity to gather digitally and learn. “We have experimented with a number of things,” says Brian Chien, a director in our Shanghai studio. “Some worked well, and some definitely didn’t.”

Whether it’s prototyping a remote brainstorm, trying out a new tool, or building something by hand, the disruption of your normal routine can be an opportunity to learn something. And if you already have the skills, teach! Designers in our Tokyo office are webcasting tutorials for young design students, sharing skills with those who aren’t able to attend an in-person workshop. What if, when it’s inadvisable to move from place to place, organizations took what they’re saving in travel expenses and invested it into L&D?

At IDEO, we will always believe in the alchemy of creative minds bouncing off one another in a shared space. But COVID-19 has pushed us to get even more comfortable with digital. And while we know necessity is the mother of invention, we still have much to learn—especially from other companies who have been at the forefront of remote collaboration for years.

Of this we’re certain, says Arlin Tao, a senior director in our Shanghai studio: virus aside, remote collaboration is the way of the future. “I think the only thing that most people agree on is when things go back to normal, it's not going to be the normal that we were used to before.”

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It's not uncommon for IDEOers to make house calls. Friendly, in-person conversations are one of our most cherished tools—that kind of design research helps us learn what people collect and eat and carry in their backpacks. Social interactions fuel the insights we use to do our design work. What happens, then, when social interaction is not good for us?

While we tied, she shared the story of leaving her corporate career in design to pursue a year diving deep into the world of knots, teaching herself a new knot every single day. With explorations traversing the historical and functional—from gathering inspiration from sailor’s knots to the future-forward and abstract—her knots have become massive installations, offering an alternative translation for structures like the circuit board and New York City subway system. I left her session deeply inspired by the simple power of dedicating ourselves to daily acts of making and craft—let’s all try it.

In one sentence, who are you?

I make sculpture and installations that elevate the vernacular and inspire awe and understanding; in the context of knots, I work at the intersection of function, design, history, and aesthetics to illuminate what’s most fascinating about knots: the journey of the line.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I developed fluency in the language of knots—and found my artist voice in the process—by learning one new knot every day of the calendar year in 2016 (which was 366 total knots because of the leap year).

How do you get over creative block?

You know, I never have creative block. I have a list as long as my arm of investigations I’m dying to explore and large installation concepts that are awaiting a home.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

I’m currently hiring, so today I'm posting a listing for a studio manager position, ordering custom-made cordage for a hotel project in the Maldives, and later on, I'm heading to Gensler San Francisco for the opening reception for a show I’m having there.

What’s your dream installation site?

An airport. I’m obsessed with the notion of the journey of the line, which is evident in my work. The rich metaphors that arise from journeying and traveling are particularly well suited to airports.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I really want to see my work in an airport... and then a TED Talk.

What’s the weirdest or coolest knot you’ve learned? Why?

The five-strand star knot. During my Year of Knots, I tried for over an hour to learn it, only to end up frustrated and in tears. It's complex and the old-timely sailors knotting books were cryptic. But then I mastered it, and now it is my favorite knot to make.

What are you most curious about right now?

People often call me a "fiber artist," but I don’t restrict myself in that way. I’m interested in the journey of the line. So while it’s wonderful to render a line in rope, because rope allows for creating shapes in space without weight, almost anything can be a line. I’m curious about exploring other materials—glass, tubing, metal, and more. I’m still looking for the project that will want me to tie knots out of ethernet cable.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Always and forever: artist Janet Echelman, who makes sculpture on the scale of city blocks that respond to wind, weather, and light. I met and befriended her last year and we spent a day in Paris looking at art. Janet is lovely and her art absolutely takes my breath away. She has a permanent installation in Terminal 2 at the San Francisco Airport that is so beautiful, when I have a flight to catch, I will go to the airport early just to gaze at it. Endless respect to Janet Echelman.

Learn more about Windy's craft in her book, The Year of Knots.

I was feeling a bit sleepy at a design conference this past spring when, upon entering the auditorium for the next talk, I was handed a simple length of rope. My ears perked up with anticipation and curiosity. Enter Windy Chien: ingenious fiber artist who would coach the entire room of conference-goers in learning how to tie a donut knot (it’s adorable and makes for an amazing necklace).

By looking to the neighborhood pub down the block, it was easy to see that if they wanted to keep customers around longer, they needed to have a similarly linger-worthy offering. It seemed to be working.

In an age when boundaries between sectors are blurring, traditional businesses need fresh approaches that keep them relevant, even as the tech titans add capabilities that could eclipse the old guard. When leaders are willing to look beyond their own industry for inspiration and ideas, they often gain a competitive advantage.

The financial services industry is a perfect candidate for this kind of approach. Money is changing in radical ways, and along with shifting regulatory environments at home and abroad, we increasingly find new players entering the financial space. It often seems like the future of financial services is being designed outside the domain of the industry giants, which begs the question: Are traditional financial firms equipped, at present, to satisfy customer needs? People want convenience and access, security, privacy, social features, comfort, experiences, and a range of incentives—many of which are more readily supplied by a digital platform than a stately bank. But some traditional players are taking a new tack.

When the first Capital One Café opened in late 2015, the bank was attempting to address these very concerns. Millennials, having come of age around the 2008 financial crisis, harbored a well-documented distrust of traditional banking and felt turned off by the branch experience, so Capital One attempted to reinvent the bank branch in the image of a coffee shop and coworking space—again, looking outside their industry for inspiration. “Customers are over the corporate thing,” a bank representative said. It’s hard to imagine someone would choose to enjoy their coffee inside a bank if other café options are available, yet by most measures Capital One’s experiment has been a success, offering a more welcoming and attractive experience than speaking to a teller through bulletproof glass. By innovating on the experience, Capital One has entered retail banking in a novel way.

The late Harvard academic Clayton Christensen developed the concept of “jobs to be done,” arguing that customers have a need to get a job done, rather than a need to acquire a specific product or service. It’s a slight but important turn of the dial from the traditional way of thinking. Here’s how legendary economist Theodore Levitt described the idea back in 1969: “Last year 1 million quarter-inch drills were sold, not because people wanted quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes. People don’t buy products; they buy the expectation of benefits.” To advance the argument a step, perhaps what the customer needs isn’t a one-inch hole but the ability to hang a picture. Maybe an adhesive hook would do the job better than a drill.

Innovation is often driven by the urgent need to solve a problem. In 1922, a group of army officers observed that returning soldiers, who hadn’t driven cars while on active duty, had a hard time getting auto insurance. The officers formed the United Services Automobile Association to provide insurance to military members and their close family. Later USAA expanded to offer a wider range of services including banking, investment, and other types of insurance. Since their members were often scattered geographically—sometimes on the other side of the globe—USAA pioneered mobile banking, initially by phone and mail and later online. Even today, with almost 13 million members, USAA has only one full-service bank branch, located in San Antonio.

This company, which was founded to offer auto insurance to service members, is now regarded as a shining example in the banking world of loyalty and customer satisfaction. Several of my clients who work at major retail banks have admitted to me in private that they still do their personal banking at USAA because they so admire the firm’s customer service. From that original need in 1922, USAA created a new service model that has lasted nearly a century.

Many of today’s most inspiring models for innovation are scattered globally. The European Union’s Open Banking efforts have created fertile conditions for EU mobile-first banks such as N26, Starling Bank, and Monzo. These firms score off the charts in customer satisfaction rankings, above even USAA’s benchmark. In the EU, mobile-first banks have grown through a mix of purpose and convenience, the human-centered design of their interactions and offers, and a supportive regulatory environment.

Alipay in China—which has a staggering 900 million users—is a smartphone wallet app that has revolutionized mobile payments, including the development of “Smile and Pay,” facial recognition technology that allows consumers to pay for goods without even carrying their mobile device. Alibaba has aggressive plans for global expansion of Alipay, all but guaranteeing that domestic US firms will come into direct competition with the Chinese juggernaut.

In many African countries, citizens have so little faith in their nations’ financial stability and fiat currency that a new kind of money has emerged: prepaid mobile phone minutes. People pay for a broad range of goods and services—from procuring groceries to settling their electric bills—by transferring mobile phone minutes. Kenya’s most ubiquitous service, with more than 30 million users, is m-pesa, launched by the country’s top mobile phone companies, Vodafone and Safaricom. Who would have thought that mobile phone companies would emerge as the central disruptors in Africa’s financial services sector, disintermediating the banks?

The financial world has been slower to innovate than, say, the technology world, for a few key reasons. First, financial firms haven’t been forced to innovate at the same pace; second, regulation has disincentivized competition; third, most radical thinkers are no longer drawn to the financial services, as the center of action has moved to Silicon Valley.

Millennials comprise the largest population in our workforce, and three-quarters of them say they’d prefer a financial offering from a large technology company over one from a traditional financial services firm. And the tech world is responding. The Apple Card recently launched in an effort to redesign the credit card and disrupt the status quo. PayPal and Venmo, beyond their use as payment services, essentially function as savings accounts for many customers who store money in the app. And millennials aren’t the only focus of this evolution: A handful of new firms, such as EverSafe, have introduced new products that help the elderly population manage their bills and protect against financial exploitation.

Money is always changing—the way it moves, the shape of it, and how we store it. Financial services firms need not only to keep pace, they need to be leaders of innovation. New solutions could come from unexpected places, so it’s critical to take a global perspective, benchmark beyond industry peers, and consider the experience of the people providing and receiving services. Building the next 100-year financial services firm will depend on doing all of these.

Illustration by Emil Wikström

The bike shop in my neighborhood recently started serving beer. They keep a keg on ice in the back room, and customers can sip pints as they browse the bicycles, gear, and hardware. I was curious what was behind the move, so I asked the owners. They told me they’d been trying to figure out how to get customers to spend more time in the store, and hopefully to make a purchase, so they decided to take a page from another industry’s book.

We asked IDEOers across a diverse range of locations, teams, and roles—even ones that aren’t typically thought of as creative—to share the best creative advice they’ve ever received and how it’s impacted their work. We hope you find their responses as inspiring as we do.

Trust your unique perspective

Coming to IDEO as someone who wasn't from a "creative" background (large emphasis on the quotes there), I had a ton of concern about how I would show up on teams with people who were so fluent in the things that seemed to be what IDEO was "really about"—the creative stuff.

Early in my time here, I was on a walk with another organizational designer, mid-existential crisis when she said to me, "Your job is to be thinking about what no one else in the room is thinking about." She helped me see that I didn't have to immediately have every answer or every iota of expertise; I just needed to be using my lens on the world to make our collective design richer.

IDEO touts its cross-functional team structure, and I am a true believer in that element of our work. Unlocking my creative process has been so much about believing in the value of what I bring to the table and understanding its unique contribution to what we are all building together.

– Natalie Osterweil, Senior Organizational Designer, Cambridge

Schedule time for creativity

Martin Bone (an IDEO design director circa 2008) once told me about how he organized his schedule to carve out large blocks of time for doing deep design work of his own. Each week, he would make a long calendar appointment (often an entire day) to be his design time, and would decline any meetings or calls during it. This allowed him to get to a deeper level of work that only a non-distracted state could achieve.

Paul Graham calls this contrast in methods of working maker's schedule vs. manager's schedule. He points out that even a short meeting scheduled in the middle of the day is enough to disrupt or demotivate deep craft or thinking work. In order to maintain my own personal craft alongside other work responsibilities, I've found it effective to put similar calendar blocks on my calendar and to completely disconnect from email, phone, and Slack during these times. This focus also takes discipline beyond a calendar event, but with practice, it can really lead to better work and growth as a craft-oriented designer, even as management responsibilities increase.

– Gian Pangaro, Creative Director, IDEO CoLab, Cambridge

Disconnect from your ego

I’m an executor. I like to get shit done and make an impact. That’s how I think many of my friends, family, and colleagues would categorize me—and I agree! When I came into IDEO, creativity wasn’t a value of mine, nor did I see myself as a creative person. When it came to brainstorming ideas, to me it was all about having the best idea, and having the best idea meant it was feasible, viable, and could have an impact right away.

I learned quickly I was wrong. Virginia Martinez, our Talent Director in San Francisco, helped me when I was having a hard time engaging with IDEO’s brainstorming process. Instead of trying to show my competency through my ideas, she told me, "To get to great ideas, you need to have lots of ideas as a group. And the best idea is not always the most realistic or easy to implement. The fun and crazy ideas can be just as good to drive teams to think more creatively."

Something so simple never occurred to me! I realized that I was attaching my ego to my ideas, that my ideas and my input reflected my competency—but no one else was looking at it with that lens. I realized the diversity of ideas that led to so many possibilities was creativity—something I never saw as an important part of our Learning and Development work, which I'm focused on. That also helped me feel more excited and comfortable in brainstorms because I was walking in with an open mind rather than ready to prove my point.

It has changed my approach to the work, my approach to how I design programs, and my approach to collaboration.

– Jen Casimiro, Talent Lead, San Francisco

Stop and smell the roses

My mom has always told me to take the time to smell the roses. It wasn't until a few years ago that I realized how lucky I was to have a parent who taught me at a young age that it wasn't always about getting to the end of the race first. Enjoying the journey was just as important.

"Smelling the roses" has taught me to pause and take in my surroundings, being inspired by the seemingly mundane artifacts that I might otherwise have missed—curiously shaped gum stuck on the sidewalk, fine wood grain patterns in furniture, and the intriguing strangers I pass on the street. Each elicits ideas for new stories, inventions, or adventures. If I ever feel stuck or need inspiration, I know I just have to pause and take a look around me.

– Michelle Lee, Play Lab Portfolio Director, Palo Alto

Make your work visual

The best creative advice I ever received came from Mike Stringer at the beginning of my first project at IDEO. This was when IDEO's data science discipline was still young; I was navigating the challenge of working with designers of other disciplines.

Mike came to my project space and told me to "put stuff on boards and share." While this might be something natural for any other designer, some data scientists are very attached to their laptop, scripts, and simulations. In more traditional data science positions, I normally wouldn’t put data science on boards (the most I shared in my previous job was a decision tree on a whiteboard).

Mike suggested I make my work visible to the rest of the team to make data science more transparent, spark curiosity in my team, and start new conversations. I created a variety of hand-sketched data visuals and made them a prominent part of the project space to serve as a catalyst for brainstorming and discussion. Sharing my sketches with a variety of designers from a broad spectrum of disciplines (interaction, research, software, business, and more) made my work more transparent and helped establish a common language, allowing data science to grow organically within the team. I now make that approach part of my work style, and I share it with other data scientists whenever I see the opportunity.

– Fra Valsecchi, Data Science Design Lead, Chicago

Pull a card

I regularly seek advice from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies card deck. They compiled it in the early 1970's to help overcome creative block in the studio. When you feel stuck, you draw a card and do whatever it says. For example, "Ask people to work against their better judgment," or "Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them," or "What would your closest friend do?" Often the advice is a bit unclear, but the vagueness prompts new ideas.

– Michael Hendrix, Global Director of Design, Cambridge

Embrace the Sharknado

A bad movie is better than an unfinished movie. As a filmmaker, there's this temptation to keep working on something or tweak it infinitely. However, there's a power in seeing something fully through, and then starting something else new that you can build and learn from. Also, it's so rare that your finished product is truly "bad." What would that even look like? Worst case scenario, you miss your mark but you learn something. Best case scenario, Sharknado.

– Sephora Woldu, Senior Leadership Coordinator, San Francisco

Accept your failures and iterate, iterate, iterate

The best creative advice I ever received was a good walloping. I was 28 and had landed an assignment from Alex Heard at the New York Times Magazine, an editor known for his unsparing red pen. I was to write a short piece about an alternative film festival. I interviewed the founders, thought up a clever lead, and submitted a draft. This is good, I thought. Funny.

The next day, Alex called and read the article back to me, word for word. "Are you kidding me?" he said. He was indignant. It was like I'd made him drink toilet water. When the call was over, I cursed myself and cried. I’d failed, and he’d dropped a grenade in my lap so I’d suffer no illusions that my work needed anything less than a good and brutal pulverizing. I called an editor friend, enlisting him to give me honest feedback. Then I sat down and rewrote the piece 103 times. When I finally ginned up the courage to send it in again, Alex called me immediately. "You did it,” he said. ”I'm proud of you. I’ll run it this Sunday."

Find someone who’ll give it to you straight, then iterate, iterate, iterate. Keep at it until your hand falls off. That's how I learned to write.

– Shoshana Berger, Senior Editorial Director, San Francisco

Remember ideas aren’t worth a single penny

"Ideas aren't worth a single penny." These are the words of wisdom that a colleague at my previous job gave me a couple of years back. He was the type of creative director that I only expected to find in fiction: almost always late to work, usually hungover, wore a Dumbledore style beard, and always ready to mutter out the most unexpected and astonishing ideas. When brainstorming, he would always kick-start the session with the most hilarious, intoxicating fantasy concept. He was known in the industry as the ultimate idea man.

That was why his advice struck me as a surprise. He told me that he would willingly give away any of his ideas for free, because that’s not what we’re being paid for as professionals—it’s the execution of the idea.

I look back to this whenever I find myself too attached to an idea, or when the team is stuck in a rabbit hole of conceptual debates, picking ideas apart one by one. Anyone can come up with the same idea sooner or later; our job is to not just come up with the idea, but to bring it to life, and that is what we should be proud of. That is where true impact lies.

– Daisuke “Dice” Yukita, Senior Interaction Designer, Tokyo

Focus on the story

The advice that still rings true to me today and on the path to become a designer is never lose focus of the story you want to tell. Every single experience, physical thing, or digital product you create is based on a sequence of decisions you make during the design process. It’s essential that every decision has a purpose—that’s how you get the most potential out of your design. A memorable, human story is the groundwork to purposeful design.

– Susanne Duswald, Industrial Designer, Munich

Invite others to the party

Several years ago, I ran into film director Frances Ford Coppola. Because we were both speakers at the same event, I managed to spend a few minutes alone with Coppola backstage, and one of the things he said that day has stuck with me ever since: "When you are working with creative people, you don't tell them what to do. You invite them to the party."

I have used his advice many times, including right now at D4V (Design for Ventures), IDEO's Tokyo-based venture capital firm. We invest in promising Japanese start-ups and then invite the design team here to "join the party," using creative tools to help the young companies thrive.

– Tom Kelley, IDEO Partner

Creativity often isn't the work of a single, solitary genius. In fact, it's usually when a set of diverse perspectives come together that we're able to see new possibilities for solving problems. That's why creative collaboration is crucial—and it's also why creative mentorship is so important. Sure, you can (and dare we say should) work through these 10 exercises from Creative Confidence to hone your individual chops, but creative mentorship is what allows us to push ourselves and our work forward. This got us thinking: What else could we learn about creativity from the people we work with every day? What have they learned from their mentors?

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.