Since the early 1990s, Samsung and IDEO have shared a history of influential and award-winning collaboration. Together, the two companies have worked on more than 50 projects, the offerings created by this partnership spanning a broad spectrum, from a series of conceptual multimedia devices to industry-changing monitors, TVs, laptops, mobile phones and interfaces, computer peripherals, and mobile platform strategies. But beyond the design of products brought to their global market, the Samsung/IDEO partnership used the human-centered design approach to produce the innovation that ended up transforming the electronics giant’s entire business.

After years of being an industry fast-follower, Samsung approached IDEO with the idea of an immersive cultural exchange. Samsung designers, marketers, and strategists came to Palo Alto and set up a studio near IDEO to learn everything they could from the US consumer market and IDEO’s design approach. Together, the teams began to design groundbreaking electronics products, while using design thinking to look at the entire business through a new lens. By putting users at the center of the process, and beginning to understand their needs and emerging behaviors, Samsung found it could not only satisfy existing customers, but also begin to anticipate market shifts. This tipping point led Samsung to evolve into a market leader.

Samsung and IDEO created a design powerhouse, following a journey from designing products to services to experiences, interactions, and innovation that moved Samsung away from consumer electronics toward an even bigger market of back-end services and interactive and systems-based services.

Culturally, the partnership with IDEO has helped Samsung adopt new ways to integrate internal teams, a human-centered design approach and iterative prototyping, and the methodologies to merge technology and design to create a leading-edge consumer line and brand. As evidence of Samsung’s rise to being one of the world’s largest design-driven companies, the company has more than doubled its internal design teams since 2000, according to the article “Samsung Design” in BusinessWeek Online.

Some of the projects include:

LCD Computer monitors
Samsung and IDEO created the industry-standard 970P and 971P monitors, featuring clean surfaces, contrasting textures, and a simple design for a premium look and feel. Designed with IDEO founder Mike Nuttall, they won both the 2009 iF Award and a 2007 IDEA Gold award.

Brand awareness for Samsung Memory
Wanting to raise awareness about Samsung Memory’s products that enhance the performance of electronic devices, IDEO and Samsung designed a humorous campaign that highlighted consumers’ need for Samsung Memory.

SimpleMedia and TotalMedia home entertainment concepts
IDEO and Samsung designed two concepts: SimpleMedia combined a computer, television, DVD, fax, and telephone; TotalMedia featured an adjustable screen and LCD projector combination. Although neither was ever produced, they were honored with design awards from ID Magazine and BusinessWeek, respectively.

SyncMaster 400TFT Flat Panel Display
Samsung and IDEO designed the SyncMaster LCD flatscreen multimedia monitor to be thin and elegant, and it garnered several design awards in Korea, Germany, and the U.S. The British magazine T3 called it “the sexiest monitor we’ve ever seen.”

Nana Joes, a beloved San Francisco granola company, was born from an avid surfer’s desire to bring healthy breakfast back to the kitchen table. Embracing the philosophy that good food is about wholesome ingredients prepared with care, the startup took pride in carefully scraping each vanilla bean by hand and soon gained a devoted following at farmers markets around the Bay Area.

As Nana Joes’ reputation grew beyond the hills of San Francisco, the company asked IDEO to explore how to take a small company and scale the brand for national distribution, while keeping its heart and handcrafted ethos at its core.

A team of IDEO designers set out to position Nana Joes for growth by developing a brand identity and packaging system that would resonate with customers and reduce operational complexity. The entire team went on factory tours and met with packaging suppliers to identify solutions that would be easily manufactured en masse, but still retain the familiar handcrafted feel. With mock-up packaging in hand, they hit local farmers markets to conduct live in-market prototyping with both loyal and new customers and met with retail buyers to get their real-time reactions to how the brand and packaging stood out on shelves.

The final deliverables included new branding and packaging for the entire line of granola, granola bars, and cookie products, as well as a guide for Nana Joes to operationalize the rollout by 2016.

The legacy company that produced the first phone book in Australia more than 130 years ago—and the disruptive change it represented—became directories company Sensis. As Sensis made the transition from a print directory to a digital service in recent years, the company came to IDEO to foster a startup mindset.

Together, Sensis and IDEO identified four ways for Sensis to become more agile: Focus on the company’s core skills, revitalize the product development process, develop insights about Sensis’ global competitors, and strengthen connections to current and potential customers.

After prototyping more than 65 ideas, the team decided on an app, Skip, with which a customer connects remotely to her favorite café right from her phone, sends her order, and schedules a time to pick it up. Then she breezes past the line when she arrives at the café.

To understand how this app might work in the real world, the team fanned out across Melbourne, talked directly with café owners and their customers, gathering data, and watching behavior, then launched the live app just 10 weeks after developing the first prototype.

Watch: Team members from Sensis and IDEO share their experiences.

Fueled by a mission to “help everyone love what they eat,” the Chicago-based food-tech startup Food Genius created a consumer-facing mobile app that used a complex algorithm to track more than 16 million restaurant menu items and classify consumers’ dining-out behaviors.

After the year-old startup became part of IDEO’s Startup in Residence program in Chicago, the company changed its focus from consumers to the food industry.

To build their food industry-focused platform, the designers collaborated on a number of business and technological development strategies, product road-mapping, and a prototype viral marketing experience called Curry Crawl to test the usability of the new API.

In April 2016, Food Genius was acquired by US Foods. "What was really striking about US Foods is that they take a very analytics-driven approach to their business," said Justin Massa, founder and former CEO of Food Genius. "They bought the technology knowing it's going to be able to do great stuff."

Name: Andrea Oh
Location: San Francisco
Role at IDEO: Front Desk Concierge, Experience team. Steward of magical work-life experiences. Gatekeeper of the guest Wi-Fi. (She guards it with a Gandalf staff made out of Twix chocolate).
Joined IDEO: August 2015
Instagram: @fermdaza
Titillating Fact: Matcha is my life! For someone who doesn’t drink coffee, a dose of matcha powder mixed in with water in the morning is my saving grace.

1. Isaiah Rashad: "The Sun’s Tirade" (2016)

There are a couple albums I’ve been gravitating towards in the past month, but the one that’s been in constant rotation—and I mean constant—is the debut release of Top Dawg Entertainment-signed rapper Isaiah Rashad, The Sun’s Tirade. His earnest, poetic musings on butter-smooth production make for perfect late-summer listening. Roll the windows down while you’re at it.

2. Drumming around with Pyle-Pro PTED01

I used to take drum lessons when I was younger and regrettably fell out of the habit of playing as I got older and distracted by high-school-Andrea things. I’ve had an itch to take it up again so I recently just purchased this electronic drum kit to practice exercises and learn new grooves and fills (YouTube tutorials are your friend). I don’t have the space to house a real set and classes in the city are steeper than I can afford, so this is a good alternative to keep that itch scratched.

3. Warsan Shire

I’ve been reaching a lot for Warsan Shire these days. She is a Somali-British writer, activist, educator—and one of my favorite female voices in contemporary poetry. She explores themes ranging from love, sexual violence, religion, war, displacement, and the immigrant experience. Her words are often sharp and unapologetic. I love that her writing is a celebration of womanhood and the female body, as well as a tribute to Somali culture and her ancestry.

Watch: Warsan Shire reads her poem “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)” from Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth.

Header image by Markus Spiske.

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In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Andrea Oh.

1. Free Writing

Creativity manuals like the Artist's Way talk about the power of the "Morning Pages"—a ritual in which you start writing just after waking up, and bang out some prose before your conscious, self-critical self has fully come online. Conveniently, there's an app for that. Flowstate is a word processor with a twist: You set a timer, then write until it dings. If you hesitate for more than a couple of seconds, the app will delete everything that you've put down so far. Although it sounds like torture, the app can actually help you let go of editing and enter a state of uncritical flow.

2. Phone Denial

Before going to bed, move your phone charger to another room. Then, put a pencil and paper in its place on your nightstand. Now, when you wake up, instead of looking at Google News or Facebook, write down some thoughts that are related to how you're feeling, what is important for you, and how you're going to make a creative impact today. If that feels too involved right after waking up, draw a picture of something instead. Either way, don't let yourself get distracted by your phone until you've engaged your creativity.

3. Disposable Poetry

When Kurt Vonnegut was 84, he received a letter from a high school student, asking him to visit his school. The writer refused, claiming that he was now so old that he now "resembled an iguana." Instead of visiting, he sent a letter that contained a creative exercise. "Write a six-line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can." Then, Vonnegut said, the poem was to be torn up and discarded. "You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow." As a tribute to the great Mr. Vonnegut, try his ritual every morning.

4. Creative Collaging

Collect any old magazines or catalogues lying around your house. Leaf through them and cut out any interesting pictures or headlines. Assemble these into a collage. Take a photo of the collage and post it to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever social media site you use. Doesn't that feel better than posting a picture of yourself playing with your dog, or the avocado toast that you had for breakfast? Of course it does. You just stepped away from the ordinary world for a moment and created something original. For bonus points, download the Boomerang Gmail extension, and you can email your pictures to your future self—in a month or even a year. Think of it as a way to remind future you to stay creative.

5. Walking and Observing

Everyone from Beethoven to Steve Jobs relied on the inspirational powers of a walk. Neuroscience backs up their belief: A walk will remove you from the distractions of conversations and technology, freeing the mind to explore new associations between the ideas already in your head. Why not skip breakfast altogether and walk to work? Look around as you do so, and see if you notice anything unusual or surprising in the environment. Take a gander at other people too. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and imagine what they're thinking or feeling. Remind yourself that everybody sees the world differently, and that this kaleidoscope of human perceptions and viewpoints is a wonderful thing. Remember that inspiration is all around you—you just have to stop occasionally to breathe it in.

Illustrations by Megan Crabtree.

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Benjamin Franklin used to spend his mornings naked. Sigmund Freud would trim his beard. Marcel Proust smoked opium. There are many ways to start the day in a creative frame of mind. If you want an alternative to being nude, beardy, or high, here are some of our favorites.

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This post is a source of parody and is for entertainment, education and commentary purposes only.

You may have heard: Designers like fonts. They dream in Helvetica. Letterforms may play as central a role in a designer's life as their favorite bands. Knowing this, our Tokyo studio threw an event called "PLAY - Creativity at The Intersection of Design + Music." We needed posters to promote it, and asked ourselves: How might we bring music and design together? The exercise quickly devolved into a competition for who could come up with the worst font-band pun. There's a slim overlap in the venn diagram of people who appreciate both Frank Zappa and Zapf Dingbats, but that is exactly who we were aiming for. Got your own #ideobandfont? Do share.

What was the spark?

I’m the type of person who always has a plan B. For my entire working life, I’ve had a side hustle. It made perfect sense to me, then, that in 2006, while I was working as the Chicago editor of Flavorpill, I’d accept the challenge to be a local producer for Mortified, a grassroots comedy show started by Dave Nadelberg in Los Angeles five years earlier. Even though, at that time, I was more comfortable behind a laptop than on stage, the show’s premise — everyday people reading their childhood diaries in front of a live audience — had everything I liked in comedy and storytelling: It was awkward, cathartic, redemptive, and totally relatable to anyone who was once a kid. It turned regular people into comedy stars. I jumped at the chance.

Most memorable Mortified moment? (Say that five times fast...)

For this year's Valentine Schmalentine show, we surprised one of our favorite performers, Kerstyne Kromer, by inviting her childhood celebrity crush Eden Riegel to Skype in and read the part Kerstyne had created for her in one of her childhood soap operas. In the early 2000s, Eden played Bianca Montgomery, the first openly lesbian character on All My Children. Watching Bianca's struggles on daytime TV helped Kerstyne eventually come out to her family and friends. Kerstyne almost passed out from happiness.

For a decade, my friends and I have been "sharing the shame" in Chicago.

What keeps you going?

We just celebrated Mortified Chicago’s 10th anniversary, which is astounding to me. I never thought we’d be around this long, or that I’d still be co-producing six Mortified shows a year at big venues like Lincoln Hall and The Promontory while working at IDEO. (Or that Mortified, which is now 15, would expand into books, a podcast, a TV series, a film, etc.) What energizes and inspires me is meeting new people and helping them unearth long-lost stories from their childhood. It’s an incredible privilege to have total strangers open up to you and tell you amazing and sometimes painful stories from their past. The night of the show, I love to sit in the A/V booth, hear the waves of laughter, and watch as the audience falls in love with our performers. It’s immensely gratifying to know I had a hand in making that moment possible.

What lessons from your after-hours project do you bring into your day job?

Three things immediately come to mind: I’m a better listener, I’m more empathic, and I’m a stronger storyteller. Human-centered design is all about having empathy for the end user in order to design a more desirable product, service, or fill in the blank. I also draw on many of the same techniques I use on our performers to help our designers prep for big client meetings and public speaking opportunities. Although, in the case of IDEOers, I hope nothing about their experience will be mortifying.

Annette Ferrara has been publicly embarrassing people for a decade. As a producer of Mortified, a live comedy show, she spends nights and weekends coaching people on how to get up on stage and read from their deeply personal, purple-prosed, and yes, mortifying childhood diaries. We asked her about the side project, and how it has influenced her work.

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.