The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with IDEO to explore how to harness the potential of technology to support teachers in delivering high-quality education at scale.

By talking to the people on the front lines—teachers, students, entrepreneurs, and technologists—IDEO discovered a dual challenge: Teachers need a broader array of quality tools to use in the classroom, and the ed tech entrepreneurs need a window into the classroom to create the most effective technology products.

With this insight in hand, IDEO worked with the Gates Foundation to design, build, and launch Teachers Know Best, a digital platform aimed at connecting those creating new tools and technologies with the people who ultimately use them. Powered by the results of a large-scale survey of 3,000 educators and 1,200 students, the interactive resource acts as the bridge to connect entrepreneurs to classrooms. The site provides invaluable insight to help startups focus, refine, and scale their work, and provides essential information on how schools find and select products to use in the classroom, as well as a forum for teachers and students to rate and respond to more than 500 existing resources.

The resulting platform is a boon for tech entrepreneurs, educators, and students alike—giving entrepreneurs a clearer understanding of what's needed, and giving teachers and students a voice. Teachers Know Best launched in May, 2015 for entrepreneurs and educators at the New School Ventures Fund Summit.

What’s the future of libraries? As information goes digital and reading rooms become a thing of the past, what’s the best use and function of libraries going forward?

Chicago Public Library and Denmark’s Aarhus Public Libraries, together with IDEO, wanted to find out. With a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, they created the Design Thinking Toolkit for Libraries: reading and workshop materials that can be used by any front-line library staffer to adapt to library users’ changing needs.

Using the Toolkit, library staffers engaged with patrons to test out brave new ideas that change our perception of the typical library: an anything-but-quiet teen expression lab with music- and art-making tools, a “tech spa” for users looking for how-to information, and a series of narrative storytelling workshops for kids that use play as a springboard for learning. In Chicago, these experiments spurred the implementation of a new play space in the children’s library section of the Albany Park branch, and the creation of new roles for librarians that focus specifically on teens’ needs.

You can download the toolkit, and find more resources, at designthinkingforlibraries.com.

Major League Soccer champions the Chicago Fire wanted to convince new fans to come to its stadium, but knew that competition for fans’ attention—and wallets—in Chicago was fierce. The Fire partnered with IDEO to create memorable marketing campaigns and fan experiences to get more Chicagoans fired up and filling its seats.

Inspired by Section 8 fans and fervent Club supporters, IDEO homed in on six defining brand personality traits: human, gritty, irreverent, indie, Chicago pride, and globally curious, then used them to design game-day experiences to match. In addition, knowing the Fire’s marketing pockets weren’t as deep as its competitors, IDEO zagged and took a different approach to messaging: Eye-catching billboards featured headlines lifted directly from Section 8 fan chants, edgy posters showed soccer players as superheroes, and anything-but-traditional scarves and t-shirts sported bold wording and graphics of players’ faces.

While reconstructive spinal surgeries can be life-changing, even minimally invasive spinal procedures can require hours under anesthesia for patients, and be physically demanding for surgeons and staff. Over time, the repetitive physical strain can limit the ability of highly skilled orthopedic surgeons to perform these surgeries.

Spinal-surgery company Medtronic partnered with IDEO to design, engineer, and build POWEREASE, a next-generation surgical instrument system that revolutionizes the techniques used to perform spinal surgeries. The result is a system of powered medical tools created specifically to meet the needs of surgeons during reconstructive procedures.

By integrating cutting-edge industrial design, human-centered research findings, and boundary-pushing engineering work, the team was able to solve some highly technical challenges, like efficiently breaking off set screws while imparting minimal torque on the surgical construct in the patient, and seamlessly integrating nerve monitoring and image navigation capabilities into the instruments.

Medtronic’s initial tests show that when compared to manual instruments, the new powered instrument system significantly reduces the time and improves the accuracy of reconstructive spinal surgery procedures.

On a recent trip to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, I spotted a baby kangaroo (or wallaby; it was tough to tell) fast asleep in a unique pouch.

Young marsupials, including kangaroos, wallabies, and koalas, spend the first part of their lives inside their mother’s pouches, but baby joeys raised away from their mothers—babies that are orphaned, for example—need substitutes.

When three wallaby joeys arrived at the Safari Park in April, keepers put them into little cloth sacks. But this joey was lounging inside a woman’s fleece sweater, with the bottom sewn up and the arms tucked in to prevent a sideways escape. Keepers had cut a hole in the front and hung the sweater at just the right height for the joey to hop in and out.

Sweet dreams, little one!

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.

IDEO designers surround themselves with creative people for exactly this reason—when you’re stuck in a rut, sometimes the best way to dig yourself out is to steep in other people’s genius for a while. Here are 6 people whose work inspires our own.

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1. If your podcast library is overflowing…

Graphic designer, musician, podcaster: Hrishikesh Hirway is a creative jack of all trades. In this interview, Hrishikesh goes deep on how this versatility helps and hinders his creative process.

READ: Get to Know the Creator of Song Exploder

2. If coding is your form of art…

Matt Fargo is on a quest to make Japanese culture more fun for everyone. Learn how he draws from the coder’s toolkit to build unexpected weirdness into his digital projects.

READ: Code-Based Eye Candy from a Tokyo Renaissance Man

3. If Mother Nature is your muse…

When New Yorker art director Rina Kushnir's not designing layouts, she can be found painting leaves she collects in her Brooklyn neighborhood. Find out how this meticulous project helps her meditate and stay creative.

READ: How an Art Director at the New Yorker Unwinds

4. If you’re an art enthusiast…

Illustrator Cindy Derby creates imaginary worlds for children’s books, but her unique characters and experimental style capture the imagination of adults just as easily. Get to know Cindy and her made-up worlds in this interview with the artist.

READ: Why This Illustrator Makes Her Own Tools

5. If you’d rather be at a museum right now…

As curator of Architecture + Design for SFMOMA, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher puts the world of design on display. Find out how she stays inspired by constantly considering the now, questioning the promise of future technology, and looking back on the designs that made history.

READ: Meet the Woman Who Spots Great Design for a Living

6. If you’re a film buff…

Nomadic filmmaker Brandon Li uses film to express the beautiful madness of urban life. See how his creative process adapts to whichever city he’s in.

READ: These Eye-Popping Videos Capture the Madness of Cities

Let’s keep the inspiration flowing! Tell us who’s inspiring you right now using the hashtag #CreativeCrushes on Twitter.

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Creativity begets creativity. When you witness or consume brilliant work by someone you admire, it’s almost impossible to resist the urge to dive head-first into your own creative pursuits.

Back in May, I saw an exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo that delivered unexpected brilliance from start to finish. Hearing other visitors remark, “I really wasn’t expecting this!” as they walked through the gallery space, I knew I wasn’t the only one.

How do you go about creating something unexpectedly brilliant? What triggers that kind of experience? Here are some learnings I had from visiting the show:

1. Disarm your audience with familiarity

This installation was created between renowned textile designer, Reiko Sudo; exhibition designer, Adrien Gardère; and Seiichi Saito from Rhizomatiks. The creators are famous, but the exhibition title, Koinobori Now!, communicated something common and familiar, with a hint of pop. Koinobori is the Japanese word for the carp streamers that appear as part of Children’s Day celebrations in Japan every spring. Nau is the Twitter-bred Japenglish word used for anything happening ‘now.’ The title Koinobori Now! is so direct it almost sounds like a children’s exhibition; everyone thought they knew what to expect. It was also a rare instance where NACT hosted a show for free, welcoming an exceptionally diverse audience.

2. Reference conventions with disruptive edge

In reality, the show was much more than just a seasonal parade of modern carp streamers. Rather, the streamers served as inspiration and as a medium for presenting the textiles designed by Sudo and her company, Nuno. Gardère mentioned in an interview that as with any textile exhibition, the challenge was to showcase the works in a way that brought them to life in the absence of the human body. He looked for inspiration in the ways in which textiles lived and breathed in Japanese traditions—on this occasion, carp streamers. But instead of following the structure and styling traditionally used in koinobori, he reinterpreted it to be more structured. From the flat fish shape, he removed the fins, tails, eyes, and scales, and added backbones and rib cages so the carp would hold their shape. The resulting koinobori was something that looked familiar yet novel.

3. Give your audience the freedom to engage

This was the first time that the NACT took down all its partitions to create one large space for the installation. Everything was kept open between the work and audience.

A school of white carp streamers floated by the entrance like phantoms beckoning people into the exhibition. Following them in, the room opened up to reveal over 300 textile carp swimming through the air in a sweeping gradation of colors. The mesmerized audience was free to wander, take photos through the carp streamers, and lay down on Muji bean bags to absorb the show at their own pace.

4. Let your theme go beyond objects to permeate the space

A lot of thought also went into the less noticeable parts of the exhibition. Saito from Rhizomatiks contributed to the environmental design by leveraging air flow and light sources. Small fans were set up on the ceiling, with shifting spotlights positioned alongside to create shimmers and ripples on the translucent fabrics The lights also cast shadows of the carp streamers onto the wall and floor.

It was a subtle gesture that made the audience register a dynamic flow throughout the room, and gave the carp streamers a current to swim in. Together with the ambient soundscape by Softpad, the exhibit came to life.

5. Interlace sensory experience with informational storytelling to trigger curiosity and imagination

The exhibition could have easily ended here, but a small space at the back revealed the backstory behind the show. Video monitors played interviews of the three main collaborators as well as Nuno’s beautiful production videos. A make-your-own-carp workstation held fragments of patterned paper for people to craft their own streamers. And a long rack of textile samples lined the walls.

Here, all 300-something textiles designed by Sudo for the installation could be seen up close, touched, and read about in detail. Each textile had a background story. Here were two of my favorites:

I learned through reading these stories that Sudo is famous for reusing and repurposing unconventional materials to create textiles that challenge the existing conventions.

Once you uncover these stories and return to the larger exhibit space to make an exit, the same installation begins to take on different dimensions.

6. Work in collaboration with others

One final learning from this exhibition—what made it so unexpectedly brilliant—was the way the collaboration between the creators materialized as a sort of alchemy, elevating each individual contribution into a magical whole. Sudo’s textiles, Gardère’s exhibit design, Saito’s space design, and NACT’s curation reacted to and considered one another, orchestrating a holistic experience beyond single objects, addressing themes beyond individual expertise, and creating something relevant and surprising for everyone.

*Exhibition flyer taken from Studio Adrien Gardère. All other photos taken by the author with permission from NACT.

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What separates a great cultural experience from a truly memorable one? An element of surprise. Unexpected brilliance sticks in your mind, and the memory becomes something you can return to for inspiration.

It doesn't look like much, but this spoon/bowl combo was a satisfying dining experience. Not long ago, I visited a college cafeteria that had several different stations, each with a different kind of plastic cutlery. Someone suggested that I use a plastic spoon from one station with a bowl from another, because they had observed over time that the inside radius fillet of this bowl perfectly matched the outside radius curve of the spoon. This way, your spoon always scraped the corner of the bowl clean. They had gone so far as to make sure there was always a supply of spoons at the the other counter, to make sure they could use them with the mis-matching bowl.

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.

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.