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.

“What's going on there?” asked my colleague Ed, in his usual bouncing demeanor, pointing at my phone propped in its handy, commonly-found, IKEA glassware receptacle.

I was in the last weeks of a project, building out a mobile-first website to showcase our final deliverables. I was going about my usual process, with a minimal set up: designing the UI in Sketch, mirroring the artboards on my phone.

“What? This?” I replied, adjusting the angle of my glass full of iPhone.

“Yeah. I've never seen anyone do that before,” he chimed back.

It dawned on me that this behavior in my design quiver—something I'd been doing since my very first mobile design moment—may not be that common.

Instead of having to stop and pick up my phone every time I need to check my work, I just plop it in a glass, adjust the angle, and check my design’s mobile readiness with a glance.

The adjustability and the “there's probably one lying around” factor of a drinking glass elevates it to a handy design tool that I’ve used throughout my career.

And once you’ve shipped the design, it also makes for a great vessel for a celebratory swally.

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

Creativity Challenge #3: Jumpstart an ideation session

Here’s one quick, simple exercise to get creative muscles warmed up. We learned it from David’s mentor, Bob McKim, back when David was a product design student. It’s called Thirty Circles, and you can do it on your own or in a group. The goal is to push people to test their creativity by turning circles into recognizable objects in a very short period of time.

Tool: Thirty Circles Exercise
Participants: Solo or groups of any size
Time: 3 minutes, plus discussion
Supplies: Pen and a piece of paper (per person) with 30 blank circles on it of approximately the same size. (We recommend printing it on an oversized sheet of paper. You can also just ask everyone to draw their own 30 circles on a blank piece of paper.)

Instructions

Step 1: Give each participant one 30 Circles sheet of paper and something to draw with.

Step 2: Turn as many of the blank circles as possible into recognizable objects in three minutes (think clock faces, billiard balls, etc.)

Step 3: Compare results. Look for the quantity or fluency of ideas. How many people filled in ten, fifteen, twenty or more circles? (Typically most people don’t finish.) Next, look for diversity or flexibility in ideas. See if the ideas are derivative (a basketball, a baseball, a volleyball) or distinct (a planet, a cookie, a happy face). Did anyone “break the rules” and combine circles (a snowman or a traffic light)? Were the rules explicit, or just assumed?

Tips from the field

Besides being a great warm-up exercise, Thirty Circles offers a quick lesson about ideation. When you generate ideas, you are balancing two goals: fluency (the speed and quantity of ideas) and flexibility (ideas that are truly different and distinct). We know from experience that it’s easier to have a great idea if you have many to choose from. But if you have a lot of ideas that are just variations on a theme, you might really only have one idea with twenty-nine other versions. When you combine fluency and flexibility, you can generate a rich array of concepts to choose from.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems.

Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

How could Fintona make their newbies feel comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out?” They began by experimenting on themselves. Their first idea was a goofy one: arm each newbie with a Bat Signal—a flashing red police light that newbies could trigger any time they were stumped to summon help from across the call center.

The first day of the experiment, it was clear that the lights weren't working. Newbies who were already uncomfortable saying, “I don't know,” were even more uncomfortable turning on a flashing emergency light that screamed to the whole floor, “I DON’T KNOW!” When other service agents saw the signal, they just assumed that someone else would jump in and help. The experiment failed.

The team needed to iterate. They thought that maybe each Bat Signal needed a Batmanager—a dedicated leader who could watch the lights and swoop in to save the day. So, the team moved the lights to the managers' offices and asked them to be on the lookout.

That didn't work either. Newbies still felt singled out, and the Batmanagers weren’t at their desks often enough to act as a reliable safety net. Realizing the team needed a private way to call for help, they created a private chat channel—the Bat Chat—where newbies could connect directly with experts from Fintona’s specialized departments.

But the experts didn’t answer any questions. In fact, the only answers that newbies got on the Bat Chat were from other newbies. That gave the team an idea: They would launch the Bat Chat across the entire call center. They figured that veteran agents must know the answer to 80 percent of newbies’ questions, and they might be a safer resource than some stranger in another department.

Finally, success. The Bat Chat took off like crazy. Surprisingly, it wasn’t newbies who first started using the chat, but veteran service agents asking each other questions. As more veteran voices spoke up (or typed up), the newbies started asking their own questions and getting immediate answers.

The Bat Chat was the perfect solution for this team. But, there was no special analysis that they could have done beforehand to figure that out. No market research or benchmarking data would have suggested it. They had to build, fail, iterate, and repeat to find the answer. And once they found it, it didn’t need careful change management to extend it to the rest of Customer Support. It spread by word of mouth, and became a source of pride because the team found their own solution.

Fintona learned some remarkably similar lessons to what Harvard professor Teresa Amabile found in her two-year study of the culture of helping at IDEO: Newbies don’t need to be singled out. They need to see that everyone—even their most successful colleagues—need help sometimes.

This post is an excerpt of a longer article I wrote for Harvard Business Review. Read the full story here.

This article is excerpted from a longer story in Harvard Business Review.

Fintona Financial (not the company’s real name) was growing fast—so fast that their Customer Support call center had tripled in size. They couldn’t recruit fast enough. Many new service agents were pulled out of their two-month training program in as little as two weeks. Eager to look good in front of their bosses, these newbies struggled to answer tricky questions—all too often, they would give a right-sounding answer instead of saying, “I don’t know,” and asking someone for help. This not only triggered inceased call volumes but also began to erode Fintona’s customer satisfaction scores.

I first began creating cartoons as a way of communicating with Marta, my wife, when we started dating. I hate texts, so instead, I would draw a cartoon, take a picture, and send it to her. We are both New Yorker readers, and at some point she said that mine were better than most of the the magazine’s. She is not biased. Neither is my mom, also a fan of mine, so I thought it was worth the shot.

I submitted for the first time in the summer of 2016. A former coworker is married to David Sipress, a classic New Yorker cartoonist, and one of my favorites. David kindly offered to take a look at my cartoons. He said that they were totally publishable, and encouraged me to submit to the magazine. He also shared a few pro tips, like that The New Yorker very rarely publishes puns, and when it does, it’s almost always ironically (almost a quarter of the cartoons I sent him were puns).

Almost every week, the New Yorker cartoon editor meets with artists and reviews their work. This meeting is open to anybody. You just show up, sign up, and present your cartoons. So, one hot day in June, I printed my cartoons and showed up at the offices at One World Trade Center, ready to make an impression (good or bad).

The great thing about the cartoon meeting is that you sit with the editor and he gives you feedback, right there. Back then, Bob Mankoff was still the cartoon editor. The opportunity to have a private critique session with somebody like Bob was fantastic. On our first meeting he said that he liked my cartoons, that the drawings were very good, and the jokes were “not bad,” which is quite a compliment coming from him. He picked four of my cartoons and I was thrilled. I thought that I had it made and I was going to start selling cartoons right away.

Not quite. It turns out, the meeting is just the first filter. The editor has a subsequent meeting with David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor, where he shows him his selection of cartoons for the week. David decides which to keep, but before the magazine buys anything, they will peruse their archives—and cartoons from other major publications—and check that they have not published anything similar first. It’s quite the process. They didn’t buy a cartoon that time. Nor the following week. Nor the next one.

In my meetings with Bob, he was quite blunt, but always funny, and he often built on my cartoons, coming up with new iterations or different ideas for the same joke. The main criticism I received was that my captions were not sharp or punchy enough. That makes sense because English is my second language. In Spanish, I am hilarious.

After many rejections, you might think I’d have gotten discouraged and stopped trying, but I have fun making cartoons. Rejection is just a part of the process that every cartoonist has to endure. It took David Sipress 25 years of submissions until The New Yorker published his work. Bob Mankoff himself sent more than 2,000 cartoons before he sold his first one. However, there are geniuses like Ed Steed who sell after their first submission. He is my favorite. I hate him with every fiber of my soul.

I’m also a bit of a masochist, perhaps as a side effect from attending a Catholic school for 13 years. I am an atheist now, but I still think that the only way to reach salvation is through suffering. I come up with projects that require a high level of commitment, take a painstaking amount of work, and provide low returns. I am very smart.

You can say that there is some sense of pride in a perfect record of 100% cartoon failure—otherwise I wouldn’t put them up with a big red REJECTED stamp on them. But the thing that I am most proud of is that Bob Mankoff said of one of my cartoons that it was the worst he had seen in his entire life. Hell, that’s something to brag about. I said, “Don’t worry, I can do worse,” and he burst out laughing.

However, I am not going to lie. Sometimes it hurts, especially after a few rounds of rejections. But that’s just my ego itching. Who wants to be published in The New Yorker after all? What a bunch of snobs.

That being said, I plan to go back to The New Yorker very soon to meet the new cartoon editor. I might get luckier with her. Getting into the rhythm of drawing ten cartoons every couple of weeks helped me hone my drawing skills, and I’ve missed it since I stopped. The style of the drawings I make for our projects, which often end up in front of clients, is the direct result of those dozens of hours of making cartoons. It’s like illustration gym.

And it’s interesting, the more cartoons you create, the more ideas you generate. At first I was afraid of running dry, but I was surprised when the opposite happened. I have a little red book where I write down ideas for cartoons, and the list keeps growing.

But, most importantly, I just enjoy making cartoons. Sometimes you can see me sitting by myself in a cafe, laughing out loud at my own drawings, which is quite a pitiful scene if you think about it. We are all going to end up as human compost, so we might as well laugh a little on the way to our graves.

Thanks to Lawrence Abrahamson, Michael Hendrix, and Lindsey Rodabaugh for encouragement and help with the exhibit.

IDEO communication designer Juan Astasio knows a thing or two about rejection. His great ambition is to publish a cartoon in The New Yorker. In the last three years, he’s submitted more than 100 cartoons and met with an editor to discuss his work ten times. Still, nada. But instead of being discouraged, Juan has embraced his failure, sharing his jokes with the New York studio on the walls of one of its phone booths. Here’s what he’s picked up in the process, why it’s worth it for him to keep going, and what, exactly, he’s learned from failure.

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.