Have you ever had that gnawing feeling, just as you’re sitting down to your computer at work, that you’ve left the central heating on at home? You’re not alone. Rising concern about wasted energy and the financial cost of unregulated thermostats, as well as the convenience of a connected and cozy home, all point to the rise of the smart thermostat. Berg Insights projects it’ll grow 64.7 percent over the next five years.

Founded in Munich in 2011, tado° is Europe’s biggest maker of smart thermostats and air-conditioning controls. Looking to grow, tado° approached IDEO, a longtime collaborator, with a late-stage prototype for a new, wall-mounted gadget to connect any air-conditioning unit to the web so it could be controlled remotely through a smartphone app.

Dubbed tado° Cooling, the device recognizes when people leave their house and heats or cools the house upon their return. The brand tasked IDEO with a three-fold goal: gauge interest in the device, raise brand awareness, and work out product/market fit.

After stakeholder interviews, research, and prototyping, IDEO supported tado°’s team in refreshing the industrial design of the hardware and creating a distinctive yet unified user-interface language for the brand’s existing and future products.

To work out what potential customers thought of tado° Cooling, tado° turned to a novel research medium: Kickstarter. Its ultimate goal? Knowing whether people would part with their money for one. The IDEO team provided an overarching crowdfunding strategy, including funding goals, giving tiers, and marketing, and shot the brand’s Kickstarter campaign video.

As a result, the campaign burst through its $150,000 funding goal to $200,000, and scored coverage in a raft of tech media outlets including TechCrunch, GigaOm, TheNextWeb, Engadget, and PC Magazine. After hitting its “stretch goal,” tado° is adding non-A/C device controls, a Windows Phone app, and IFTTT and Jawbone Up integration.

In addition to media coverage, and showing the public’s appetite for the device, the Kickstarter community’s conversation unearthed further user insights that fed into product development, according to tado° head of design, Jens Pohl.

Buoyed by that success, tado° enlisted IDEO to translate user insights and a big-picture overview of the connected home sector into new services to enhance the device’s UX, and introduced new business models to strengthen its European brand strategy. Early visual concepts, learnings, and evidence from this exploration supported the brand’s investor pitch, securing a further round of $15 million venture capital.

Dr. Reddy’s, a 36-year-old global pharmaceutical company headquartered in India, was growing at a rapid pace. Over the years, the company’s main focus had been on producing affordable generic medication. But with more than 24,000 employees and seven distinct business units operating in 100 countries, there was an urgent need to identify a core, unifying purpose—one that would articulate a set of shared values and align leaders on key business decisions and goals.

G.V. Prasad, the company’s Co-Chairman and Managing Director, knew that the vision had to be simple and elegant–an emotional drive that every employee across the company could relate to and act upon.

Prasad partnered with IDEO to distill the focus that would align the company. Over the course of several months, Dr. Reddy’s team worked with IDEO to learn about the needs of everyone, from shop floor workers to scientists, external partners and investors. Together, they defined and distilled the essence of the company, paring it down to four simple words that center on the patient: Good health can’t wait.

The simplicity of these words belie their power. According to Prasad, the newly articulated purpose has resonated across the company, changing the whole culture of the organization. The idea of infusing a sense of urgency and nimbleness to their systems as a means of serving their customers has had a direct application in almost every corner of the business. Employees connect the message to their own experience, and each of the different business units are now moving towards a common goal.

A Shift Inside

“Good health can’t wait” has become a powerful recruitment tool and employee rallying cry. It makes clear that the company is in the business of serving patients, not just creating products, no matter how innovative or affordable. This has given a new sense of meaning to all personnel, from frontline sales representatives to senior leaders to scientists. Many key decision-makers, including new CEO Erez Israeli, share that the purpose statement inspired them to join the company.

Articulating Dr. Reddy’s purpose has empowered these employees to take risks, experiment, and work together. For example, the marketing department has refocused its efforts on finding solutions that improve patients’ consistent use of their medications. And motivated by the idea that patients can no longer wait for a cure, employees from different disciplines are coming together to find inventive ways of bringing new products to market in record time.

“The website medznat.ru required immense collaboration between various teams—medical, information technology, marketing, and analytics,” says Mvsma Raja, Head of Strategy and Marketing for Emerging Markets. “This served as a platform to bring the latest happenings in the area of pain management to doctors in Russia, who we learned are looking for the latest medical updates on the go.” Building on this cross-functional collaboration and momentum, Dr. Reddy’s established an internal design studio dedicated to using consumer insights and rapid prototyping to drive innovation.

New Offerings

“Our brand belief has inspired how we’ve thought about our future growth,” says CEO Erez Israeli. The new purpose unlocked a series of initiatives, including the aforementioned website for Russian physicians and innovative pill packaging that helps patients better understand their instructions.

Purple Pack is a new type of pill package that ensures that vital information like the expiration date is not torn off and thrown away. Born out of Dr. Reddy’s in-house design studio, Purple Pack allows the pharmacist or patient to mark their daily dosage and reminders on the packaging itself, as paper prescriptions are often misplaced.

A Business Boost

“Good health can’t wait” has not only attracted and unified talent and inspired new offerings, it’s boosted both sales and profit. For example, Dr. Reddy’s generic oral diabetes medication, Metsmall, has become the fourth largest brand in India based on the number of pills sold. The medication is distinct from competitors’ versions in that the pill is smaller and easier to swallow—a clear embodiment of product development oriented around the patient. With its signature Purple Pack convenience packaging, the medication has been one of the fast-growing Indian pharmaceutical brands over the last two years.

Looking ahead, both Prasad and Israeli hope to continue building a purpose-led culture that influences the business from the inside out, inspiring employees to be empathetic and responsive and realizing its mission to deliver good health to all.

In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation made what became a big bet about the future of education, shifting its attention away from the traditional school-based model of reform toward a more youth-centered approach.

By 2014, the bet was starting to pay off, but for it to really succeed, it needed an innovative path to scale and an entrepreneurial approach to sustainability. That’s when MacArthur came to IDEO for help in designing a new organization.

Together, IDEO and MacArthur set out to transform the foundation’s efforts into a self-sustaining enterprise that could balance the social responsibilities of a nonprofit with the lasting viability of a business—an opportunity that was as much about designing a new infrastructure as it was about creating a new culture.

Using a novel prototyping process, IDEO created three illustrated scenarios to tell different versions of LRNG’s possible future, each with an alternative portraiture of its purpose, vision, operating structure, product portfolio, and business model. Through a playful, modular storytelling structure, the stakeholders considered the potential trade-offs of the different approaches and how to prioritize their organizational goals with clear definitions of success.

These different future-forward scenarios helped funders and partners grasp a radical organizational vision, as well as a clear operational model that was go-to-market-ready.

In October 2015, the MacArthur Foundation launched Collective Shift, the organization behind LRNG, with $25 million in seed funding and 30 partners, including Arizona State University, Gap Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs, Electronic Arts, and musical artist John Legend.

Based on the scenarios created by IDEO, LRNG is dedicated to creating a “learning as a lifestyle” movement that will transform the learning landscape and close the equity and opportunity gap for young people.

Hundreds of millions of people, from excitable teens driving their first hatchback, to new parents going in for a minivan, have driven Fords off lots around the world since the first Ford Model A was produced in 1903. And cars have changed how we shop, travel, and work; they’ve reshaped our homes, towns, and the world’s infrastructure.

Today, Ford, along with the entire industry, is at an inflection point. As millions around the world move into gridlocked, polluted cities, the allure of owning a shiny new car has dulled. In some places, young people are driving less, and getting their licenses later or not at all. Lightening their load, city dwellers are relying on ride-sharing services and other alternatives to individual ownership.

Technology underpins that shift from ownership to usership. Smartphones, sensors, and open data have enabled new ways of getting from point A to B: from car-sharing services like Zipcar to taxi services like Uber or clever transport apps like Citymapper that help people skip effortlessly between the bus, a shared bike scheme, and renting a car.

While the owner of the very first commercially available Model A—Chicagoan dentist, Ernest Pfennig—couldn’t see more than a century ago how cars would change the world, Ford is squinting into its future by prototyping it now. Building on a longstanding relationship with IDEO, the carmaker approached us, along with a number of other partners, to undertake two of 25 experiments exploring a car company’s place in the changing world of mobility.

The first, Data-Driven Insurance, investigates a new pay-as-you-go insurance offer based on people’s driving behavior, as measured by a small adapter plugged into the car. The second, Infocycle, plots a snapshot of how bikes traverse the city and interact with cars and public transport by using Ford’s open source API, Open XC, to track cyclists around San Francisco.

Tackling the tangled ecosystems of bike sharing, private cars, and open city data proved an international effort. The two projects brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers, hardware and software developers, data scientists, and interaction, industrial, and business designers from IDEO’s San Francisco, Palo Alto, Chicago, and London studios.

Have we cracked the future of mobility? Probably not. And that’s okay, says Fields. Smart mobility is simply part of Ford’s journey of evolution. Along with global competitions, collaborations with universities, and opening up their hardware and software platform Open XC, these experiments help Ford meet the needs of a fast-changing mobile world. “As we drive innovation in every part of our business,” Fields said, “we are determined to learn, to take risks, to challenge custom and question tradition, and to change our business going forward.”

More information on Ford’s Smart Mobility projects can be found here.

As a Third Culture Kid, I took pictures to trace my changing worlds. These days, capturing and reflecting on images is how I feed my sense of wonder. This creativity challenge uses a dash of intention to keep your curiosity engaged throughout the day.

1. Morning Capture

In the morning, take a picture of something or someone around you.

Make a mental note of why you photographed the subject. What caught your attention? Then, examine the image. Identify one element or aspect of that image that strikes you. It can be anything—an object in the frame, a color, a texture, a mood. What sparks your curiosity? This is the kernel of inspiration for the next picture you’ll take in this short series.

Write down and complete this sentence: In my next picture, I’m curious about exploring ______.

2. Midday Capture

In the afternoon, take a picture inspired by the kernel of inspiration you wrote down earlier and reflect on what you appreciate about this new capture. Then, look at the image, studying it to identify a new kernel for the next picture you’ll take.

Write down and complete this sentence: In my next picture, I’m curious about exploring ______.

3. Evening Capture

In the evening, take a picture inspired by the kernel of inspiration you jotted down in the afternoon.

Then, look back at the first and last images you captured. Compare them. What’s their relationship to one another? What do you make of their juxtaposition?

Did your curiosity take you far from where you started? Did you circle around a single idea? What does that say about you in this moment of your life? Even if the setting didn’t change much, noticing details in your everyday environment can be a worthwhile exercise—especially in an era of selfies.

I hope this challenge was an easy way to observe what's around you. It can also be compelling if done over a week or month. Instead of taking multiple pictures in one day, take one picture per day and identify a kernel of inspiration to steer your focus for the photo you snap the next day, and repeat. Compare your first image with your very last, and reflect on the journey.

One last provocation: Pass this creative challenge to someone you know. Just copy and paste the instructions and, in the spirit of generosity, give them your last image to help inspire the first image they might take—like a visual chain letter.

Creativity isn’t a state of being—it’s a practice. So Fast Company created a 14-day challenge, tapping some of the most intriguing and productive minds in their community to provide exercises to help their readers reach their creative potential. One of their contributors is our own Roshi Givechi, partner and executive design director at IDEO New York. Here’s her recipe for discovering inspiration in the every day.

I came up with the concept years ago, when I realized that I had grown up so dependent on Google maps in London that I could barely recognize a street two blocks from my house. I’ve always liked to do mental exercises, pinpointing different places in the world I wanted to visit, or figuring out which direction I would need to go to get home.

IDEO projects rely on a brief and constraints. But I decided this project would be boundless. I wasn't going to rely on it financially, so I could take risks and experiment without worrying about money. It would also put me in the shoes of the very people for whom I often design. We work with startups a lot, so building my own to learn the struggles and nuances of a project like this would give me insight into what founders go through.

Over the last couple of years, our team has had many failures and successes. We’ve learned that it’s tough to keep a team motivated to work on a side project. We managed to build the prototype and the campaign in a very short time, but when the harder, darker part of the development began, momentum slowed and problems took longer to solve, causing delays.

Today, we are four weeks away from shipping the first units, and have around 2,000 people waiting for Haize to arrive, so I answer a ton of questions by email every day. No matter how good your intentions, there will be both positive and negative feedback.

Here’s what I have learned—and relearned—from this startup phase:

1. It is all about the team, and users are part of that team. Make sure to consider them as you make decisions for your company and your product.
2. Coming up with an idea is fun, but actually figuring out how to make it work is longer, harder, and darker. Get ready for it.
3. Show your face. Revealing the people behind the work gives the project and services a deeper dimension.
4. Storytelling can be as important as the product itself. It keeps the team excited, leading to better and more efficient work. It also helps users feel more personally involved in the process and the product.
5. Mike Tyson said, "Everyone has a strategy until they get punched in the nose." Many of your strategies will probably fail. It’s a very humbling experience. But it helps you grow and learn.

Above all, though, this project has let me do something that is really important to me as an interaction designer: empower people with technology without substituting their own skills. Haize doesn’t tell people where to go—it just helps them find their way. To me, it’s a great metaphor for the work designers do everyday.

What have you learned from your side project or startup? Reach out to IDEO on Twitter.

‍

When I learned that I would have to wait for a visa before starting my job as an interaction designer at IDEO, it felt like the perfect moment to do something I’d always wanted to do: develop a product from initial concept to final production and delivery. I went after an idea I’d had for a long time: A smart compass for bikes that points you to your destination, without giving you full-on directions. I named it Haize.

To get him on board with what we need to do next, I turn all of our actions into play. When I want to leave the house quickly, I play "who can get a toy to take with us faster" game. When I want to put him to bed, I start “gotta sleep otherwise a monster will come and get you" play. It doesn’t always work like I want it to, but it’s still much easier to convince my son to move on to the next action of play, rather than asking him to follow my instructions.

Children develop skills through play. They repeat things when they’re fun, which helps them master things, and gives them the confidence to attempt the next challenge. This is the way we all grew up. But we tend to abandon that as adults.

As we get older, play starts to feel improper. We’re not supposed to be curious about things that are considered normal or ordinary in the world of adults. Sometimes, even something as simple as going to the movies can start to feel lazy; you have to start to push yourself to do things that are fun and without practical purpose.

In Japan, where I live, the pressure of the adult world is particularly strong, and people who are interested in things that no one else is interested in are often labeled as “Kuuki ga yomenai hito.” The exact translation is “people who can’t read the air.” It is widely used in the office environment when someone disagrees with others, or in casual conversation, if, say, you and your friends go to a restaurant and you are the only one who orders something different.

Because of this strong social pressure, we stop doing things just because we like them, and agree with others as much as possible to avoid standing out. Another Japanese proverb offers a similar sentiment: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered in.” In this kind of cultural environment, we start looking for the logical reasons for everything we do, and stop following our intuition.

Thanks to my son—and probably my job as a designer—I'm aware of that pressure and try not to be swayed by it. I’m a curious person. I would rather make time for playing or plotting small pranks—like putting googly eyes on street signs, playing connect the dots with a pen and the moles on my skin, or creating random D.I.Y. bento events with friends.

To keep my childlike impulses intact, I’ve made three rules for myself to stick to:

1. Purposely do things without purpose. We are trained to make goals, meet deadlines, and get things done. Doing something with no end goal helps you listen to your instincts.
2. It is OK to not understand. There are so many unknowns in this world, and you will not be able to understand everything, even when you are old and wise. Sometimes the way you feel is better than a definitive answer.
3. Let yourself be a curious animal. We all are interested in different things—that is what makes the world interesting. No matter how weird or useless or off the wall your interest, embrace it.

Follow these basic creative principles and it will supercharge your imagination, allowing you to see the world in a more playful, childlike way. I know of no better way to set the stage for creativity, design, and inventing something new.

‍

Since I started my life with my son, the way I plan my day has totally changed. He’s an imaginative child who talks to invisible friends and turns the bathtub into a racetrack. He loves to play, and he does not like to stop, even when I am in rush to get to a meeting or it’s already way past his bedtime.

Her dream was to scale RepresentEd, an organization she started to support non-traditional students in securing opportunities for meaningful work. She was prototyping her idea at the University of California Berkeley with a unique cohort of students. A few had transferred to the university and some were raising children or supporting siblings, she said. A few were formerly incarcerated. My father went to prison, and I saw how difficult it was to re-enter society when his sentence was up, so I was immediately taken with her idea. We exchanged contact information, danced a bit more, and then said our goodbyes.

A few weeks after our Lyft ride, Rashida and I met to talk about a program she was designing for RepresentEd. She wanted students to learn human-centered design because it’s a skill that employers look for in the San Francisco Bay Area. I told her about Anne-Laure Fayard, a professor at New York University who is teaching human-centered design by having her students participate in OpenIDEO Challenges, 4-month global efforts that allow people to act on societal challenges together. The theory is that they’ll learn more by participating in the design process than they will from hearing a lecture.

The timing of my meeting with Rashida was perfect—my team was about to launch an OpenIDEO Challenge in which we asked, “How might we prepare all learners for the needs of tomorrow by reimagining higher education?” Rashida brought this idea back to her students, who were excited to work on a topic that was so relevant to their lives.

A few weeks later, I traveled to the UC Berkeley campus to meet the students in Rashida’s program for the first time. Rashida asked me to lead a workshop on human-centered design and introduce them to the Future of Higher Education Challenge. The students were fired up, smart, creative, and eager to work with one another.

One of the ideas that came out of that workshop was MAPP, an interactive roadmap that supports students through college and beyond. The students spent the next few weeks building the idea out. They conducted interviews with other students, parents, teachers, and staff. They worked with Mike Atherton, a local interaction designer and OpenIDEO community member who volunteered to build prototypes that they tested with non-traditional students, faculty, and experts in the field. The students submitted MAPP to OpenIDEO and it was selected as one of the five most promising ideas to come from the Future of Higher Ed Challenge. Two of the students were flown to Boston to present MAPP at a leadership summit. They also pitched MAPP at education conferences hosted by our partners Georgia Tech and Arizona State University.

All of this innovation sprang from a Lyft ride many months ago. It’s a great reminder that when you’re open and implicitly trust others, you can build bridges and expand the reach of your work in the world.

“Opportunities are everywhere, if you’re always open,” Rashida told me. It’s the same thing she tells her students.

I was on my way to a conference in San Rafael, California. I don't have a car, so I called Lyft. I met Rashida on the ride over; she was my driver, and we instantly connected while rocking out to Missy Elliot. When the song ended, we started to chat. As a former journalist, I’ve always been curious about what motivates people, so I asked her, “What are your hopes for the future?”

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.