How do you lift up the middle class in a developing country?

That was the challenge facing Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who hired IDEO to build an entire network of schools powered by a progressive new learning model. IDEO’s mandate: to redesign Innova’s entire K–12 learning experience, from the curriculum to the teacher training to the school buildings, with an eye toward expansion and a goal to provide international-quality education at an affordable price—about $100 a month.

Innova Schools is a part of Intercorp, a family of 35 businesses that span everything from banks to retail stores and added schools to its portfolio. In 2010, the company had five existing schools but realized that its existing model could not grow. The shortage of well-trained, high-quality teachers in Peru, combined with rising land costs, meant the schools would need to radically change course to succeed.

To learn about scalable school models around the world, IDEO researchers visited inspirational schools and learning programs, and looked to analogous systems like retail, hospitality, and health care to understand their approaches to scale. Throughout the project, they collaborated with teachers, students, and the Innova Schools team in co-designing the work itself.

Together, Innova Schools and IDEO developed the curriculum, teaching strategies, buildings, operational plans, and underlying financial model to run the network of schools.

"I was blown away by Innova Schools," said Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. "It's inspiring to see such an affordable school deliver a quality of education that would rival schools in the richest countries."

The new Innova Schools combine teacher-led, project-based learning in small groups with self-directed time using digital learning tools. Teachers monitor students’ work online and offer personalized guidance. Parents can view their children’s progress online as well.

Dynamic learning environments include community spaces, media labs, rooftop study areas, amphitheaters, and cafés that are optimized for flexibility: furniture on wheels, movable walls, and efficient uses of space to allow for different modes of learning.

An online Teacher Resource Center includes a database of more than 18,000 custom lesson plans based on a progressive new teaching approach. The center helps teachers learn their craft and gives them a chance to connect across the network.

The business model of Innova Schools was developed at the same time as the school experience. Designers leveraged the economies of scale that come from building a network of schools and centralized tools, such as data systems that allow all the schools to learn together.

The project has allowed Innova to open more schools at an affordable cost to families, ultimately giving more of Peru’s youth the chance to compete in the global economy. This comprehensive approach to system design ranks as one of Latin America’s most ambitious privately funded educational projects, and is on track to become the largest private school network in the region. To date, Innova has opened 63 schools in Peru that are serving more than 50,000 students.

A good system design doesn’t end with strategy. The work on Innova Schools also had a huge influence on the company, according to Rodriguez-Pastor. Through the creation of new roles and an aligned set of values, Innova’s central office has become a much more nimble and creative organization. They’re constantly scanning the world for inspiration in how to best educate their students, while building out the new innovations. They realize that design thinking can become an integrated part of their daily management of this growing network of schools.

Western Digital, the leading provider of external digital-storage solutions and a pioneer in the field, and IDEO collaborated on a number of products that produced reliable, secure, high-performance hard drives for personal and professional use and have won numerous design awards.

The projects include:

• MyBook external hard drive: IDEO and Western collaborated to find a new design language for their external hard drive MyBook. In just six months, MyBook became the number-one hard drive in the Americas, and grew US market share by more than 50 percent.
• MyBook II: Looking to regain MyBook’s original number-one position in the hard drive market, IDEO and Western came together again to refresh the original design, finding ways to further differentiate the product and the brand, and winning a 2008 Spark Bronze Award.
• MyPassport: Western and IDEO designed the 320GB, ultra-portable USB-powered hard drive that appeals to the mobile user, which won both the 2008 IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, and the 2009 iF Award.
• MyBook and MyPassport 3.0: Again, IDEO and Western collaborated on bringing the popular MyBook external hard drive to the next level in the hardware, the software, and the packaging. IDEO also created in-store merchandising, the graphics and information featured on product packaging (and the “out-of-box experience”).

The city of San Francisco wanted to help its people become better prepared in case of emergency. While no one feels totally prepared for a natural disaster, people who are most connected within a local network fare better in an emergency.

So the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (SF DEM) and IDEO teamed up to create SF72, a revolutionary platform that helps to reach people where they are. In times of emergency, the city will need citizens to be self-supporting for 72 hours (or longer) before local services or outside help kicks in. With that in mind, IDEO developed an accessible platform to help people prepare for those 72 hours in simple ways that fit into their daily lives.

The SF72 website helps people with five important tasks: Get connected, gather supplies, watch stories, make a plan, and have access to an updated Google map. SF72’s content is hyperlocal, but IDEO and SF DEM also created an open-source toolkit for cities worldwide. From San Jose to Denver, other locales are using the simple toolkit to create a City72 platform of their own. Most recently, the city of Oakland collaborated with Code for America to develop its own platform. The City72 Toolkit enables SF72’s ethos of social connection for resilience to scale and grow—city by city.

Team Rubicon, formed in 2010 as a response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti, is made up of former military veterans who swoop into help in times of disaster. The organization started with six vets in the US who were eager to transfer their battlefield readiness in to frontline relief efforts, and has grown to more than 28,000 volunteers across the world.

To explore its growing global effort and to shape the future of the organization’s venture, Team Rubicon approached IDEO for help. After an 11-week collaboration with government, military, and veteran groups, a vision for Team Rubicon Global emerged. Inspired by sources as diverse as TED and The Hell’s Angels, the three-tier model consisted of an anchor network to share best practices across the organization and two supporting platforms designed to help countries with varying capacity and needs.

Team Rubicon Global coordinated its first deployment in April 2015, when a quake struck Nepal, sending US and UK teams to double down on the rescue effort. According to Vince Moffit, Team Rubicon USA Incident Commander, that incident alone validated the network effect of IDEO’s work. “We couldn’t have done this without Team Rubicon UK,” he said.

And for the veterans who are part of Team Rubicon, the shared desire to serve—applying skills ideally suited for disaster response—creates a renewed sense of purpose, community, and leadership that helps reintegration to civilian life.

The daughter of British and Japanese mathematicians, Sputniko! has become both a fashion icon and feminist spokesperson in Japan for speculative designs like the Menstruation Machine (which imagines a future without menstruation, in which people simulate having periods as a nostalgia exercise) and The Red Silk Of Fate (in which genetically-engineered silkworms produce a thread impregnated with the love hormone oxytocin—the perfect material to weave into a seductive outfit). We wanted to know more about why she chose speculative design as a medium, so we caught up with her to ask a few questions.

COMMUNICATING IDEAS THROUGH POP VIDEOS IS A BOLD MOVE. WHAT LED YOU THERE?

I started as a pop musician. I was writing songs when I was at Imperial College in London, before going on to the Royal College of Art. So I was already making music videos. They seemed like a good way to challenge the "high art" culture. I liked pop art, like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Andy Warhol. Plus, at the time I was graduating in 2010, YouTube was becoming more significant. So I wanted to tap into that. Nowadays, the internet is so important for this kind of work. I thought that there needed to be more new speculative design work that was intentionally aligning with internet culture and viral culture.

HOW DO THE SCIENTISTS AT MIT FEEL ABOUT HAVING THEIR WORK PORTRAYED IN THIS WAY?

I work hard to be close to the scientists, and discuss with them how to best show their work. So far their reaction has been very positive. Some of the genetic engineers I've worked with have been getting more interest from investors because of the media interest. I think that a lot of scientists secretly want to be passionate and tell stories about their work. But they can't, because they need to be very precise. With us, and these stories, they can detach from that precision in a good way.

Crowbot Jenny by Sputniko!

WHERE DO YOUR IDEAS COME FROM?

I read a lot of science news blogs—I'm an information addict. I'll go through the news about AI, genetic engineering, and so on. What designers can do is imagine a consequence of these new technologies. If any of these imagined narratives ring a bell for me, then I'll do further research, in order to make the idea more concrete.

WHAT TECHNOLOGY IS CAPTURING YOUR ATTENTION RIGHT NOW?

AI and self-driving cars. And of course genetic engineering. But right now, my hottest interest is blockchain. This new system for handling money and identity is increasingly being adopted. Many people are thinking about it in terms of security. But creatives can think of other consequent narratives that could come from Blockchain. For example, how could it change lifestyles?

YOU'VE BEEN AT THE MEDIA LAB SINCE 2013. HOW DID YOU END UP THERE?

I first came to the Media Lab as a TV reporter when I was 27. I had my own TV show in Japan about design, and I came to interview Nicholas Negroponte. I told him how interesting I found the Media Lab, and he responding by telling me that they were looking for a new assistant professor in the arts category, and that I should apply. I was like, what? Me? I don't have a PhD! But I applied, they liked my work, and they invited me to start a new group.

Red String of Fate by Sputniko!

WHAT'S THE ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE LIKE FOR YOU?

I love being in this environment. The only thing that is a challenge is that academia is very paper-based. I don't publish papers, nor do my students. We are more about exhibitions and storytelling. It's not so much in the academic format.

WHY ARE YOU CALLED SPUTNIKO!?

It was my high school nickname. I attended an American school in Japan. I was tall and pale and I liked science and space. So the other students thought I must be half-Russian rather than half-British, and they started calling me Sputnik. Japanese girls' names often end in "ko", so Sputnik became Sputniko. Then, when I started doing music gigs as a student in London, I added the exclamation mark, because I liked the German band Neu!. It was completely not serious—just a band name. I never expected to be making and showing work, let alone teaching at MIT with this name. In Japan, when I go to symposiums and conferences, government ministers call me Sputniko-san. It's so surreal. My name reminds me of my weird career path.

YOUR WORK IS VERY CROSS-CULTURAL. WAS THAT A PRODUCT OF YOUR UPBRINGING?

Partly it was having a British mother and a Japanese father. And also growing up in Tokyo, where western culture and eastern culture are present at the same time. I grew up in Shinjuku. It's where all the skyscrapers are, but also yakuza bars and the red light district. My parents are both mathematicians, so I was surrounded by math. But I also liked art and music. For example, take the way I read books. I usually read about ten books at once, on a kindle. I usually just read five pages at a time. And then I move to the next book. The way I consume information is very parallel. For me, associations and connections are the seeds of my creativity.

DO YOU OVER WORRY ABOUT BEING OVERLOADED WITH INFORMATION?

Overload is not so much a problem for me. For example, I get my eyelash extensions done every three weeks. While that happens, I have to close my eyes for an hour. Which means that I can't look at my smartphone. I used to hate doing eyelash extensions so much. But then I found an eyelash specialist who was a beauty technology expert. She's like a Google for me. When I close my eyes I always ask her, what's a new technology that you've found? That's an example of how information-addicted I am.

The designer and artist Sputniko! may sound like she's from outer space, and that's not far from the truth. An associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, her work feels like a Large Hadron collision of design, fashion, technology, and pop music—all filtered through the multiple personas she presents on YouTube.

A few years ago, I traveled to Amsterdam in the wintertime. Amsterdam is famous for having rivers flow through its streets, but this winter, the rivers were frozen and they became new roads. Simultaneously, people took advantage of the sudden change and switched to an alternative form of transportation (ice skating!). One person’s thoughtless act can attract other people and become a sort of movement when other people start to join.

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.

Snow in NYC!

I decided to frame my questions into City Play Project—100 days to observe, create, and capture playful moments in the city. Sometimes I found playfulness in the street cats of Istanbul, or a serendipitous moment of two strangers dancing in the West Village, or even a painted mural in East London.

Once I started my 100-day project, lots of friends—even friends of friends—started making and sending me images of playful interventions from all over the world—Florence, Istanbul, Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, and San Francisco. The most wonderful part about it was seeing how each person defined playfulness. Comparing all the differences helped me find some universal truths. Here are six things I learned from the project.

1. Playing in the city makes you notice things in a completely different way

Once you start looking for playfulness, you see things differently. It’s almost like adopting a traveler’s mindset. A type of pavement or a trash can suddenly look more interesting. You realize that you can be more playful with everything—even your own shadow.

2. It’s contagious

When you play in streets, others play with you. One moment can inspire a movement—just like the sticky notes in the New York subway. Sometimes, you just need to find a way to give others permission to join you in changing the city around you.

Taking over the subway with post-it notes!

3. Playing alone is harder than playing with others

People are terrified by empty spaces, public humiliation, and interacting with strangers in the street. Being silly alone is hard, and being silly with strangers is even harder. Often, we need encouragement from friends to start playing. The person who goes first makes it easier for the rest to be more playful.

4. It brings intimacy, trust, and love

Playfulness brings people closer. If you are brave enough to play with strangers, you can build trust in an instant, unspoken way. People who have never met before can play together. It helps you see the child in others and initiate creative collisions. It creates intimacy, and all that magic leads—or might lead—to love.

Play with city signs and spread the love.

5. Playfulness builds confidence

Allowing yourself to be more playful when you are walking down the street brings more confidence. You become more comfortable with your surroundings, and in how you interact with people, even—strangers. You stop asking for permission to do things, you just do them. A playful mindset allows you to try things, step up, express your thoughts in a physical way without being shy about it.

6. A framework can help encourage it

Constraints may seem like the last thing we should think about when we play, but they can actually spark playfulness. Constraints aren’t always restrictive—especially at an urban scale. The limitations of a cul-de-sac or the weather can push people to unique ways of playing. Sometimes it’s the boundaries that makes us embrace playfulness.

Want to join me in observing playfulness in cities? I challenge you to do the same! Tag your photos with @cityplayproject.

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I’ve always been intrigued by what makes city life so charming. Having spent most of my life as an urbanite, I’ve come to realize that what captivates me most is the playfulness I see around me. Just as we can find inspiration by writing or reading about what interests us, I decided to find inspiration through observation. I wondered “How does play affect how we behave in cities? What are the social and physical effects of play in urban design? If we played more in cities, would we be happier? Fall in love more often?”

Spirit is a simulated AI, a provocation created by IDEO’s London Studio in response to a commission from the Design Museum. It asked designers and their teams—including Yves Behar of fuseproject and furniture designer Konstantin Grcic—to contribute to a project on the future of aging as a sequel to an exhibit of the same topic that they hosted 30 years earlier. The museum asked IDEO to explore what community might look like in the year 2047.

For our project, we aimed to start a dialogue about the role emerging technologies might play in the way people connect as a community. In the future, we may no longer need to drive our children to school, speak with anybody to go grocery shopping, or visit a human doctor. Technology often makes us more independent, and less reliant on human contact and support. To counter the social isolation that may arise, we developed the concept of a free and open-source social AI, a system built to foster strong and healthy communities by strengthening social bonds and keeping people active and mentally stimulated.

Creating the Exhibit

We designed the interactive part of the exhibition for three reasons: We wanted to give visitors a glimpse of what it would be like to interact with an artificial entity; we wanted to see how people would feel about the interaction; and, obviously, we like playful experimentation and prototyping.

Current AI technology is in its infancy when it comes to having a real dialogue with a human being. But just as autonomous cars learn with every mile they drive, these technologies will learn the more they interact with people. Current popular AI products (Siri, Alexa, etc.) listen to user commands and respond. We found it interesting to reverse that by having our Spirit actively ask visitors questions, and rather intimate ones, including: What makes you happiest? What would you be scared of forgetting? Would you trust an artificial intelligence to choose your friends? If you lived to 120, how many partners would you want to have?

The exhibit had two states: An idle state where visitors were encouraged to talk to Spirit and it displayed selected quotes from previous visitors and visualized the data it gathered through a generative visual design, and an interactive state.

The interactive dialogue state took place inside an audio booth. The system greeted visitors with an audiovisual message and a stylized speech-bubble that mediated the conversation. The system then asked different questions, engaging in deeper conversation over time. For example, Spirit might ask, "What makes you happiest," and the answers could vary from "rich relationships" to "when it stops raining," "playing football," or "creating new things and solving problems." Each answer created a new pebble in the visualization, the color, size, and shape of which were determined by an analysis of the length and the emotion of the response. When the visitor finished answering, the pebble merged into a sea of pebbles representing all of the interactions collected so far.

Visual interface design and data visualization by Studio Waltz Binaire

Building Spirit

The technical challenge of the exhibit was to have the system running for five weeks, seven days a week, eight hours per day. There were a lot of pieces talking to each other, and we needed to be able to track the feedback from thousands of visitors.

Spirit used a bespoke script to follow the conversations, and when the answers veered too far from what it had anticipated, it would send the answer to a chatbot API to find an appropriate answer. Unfortunately, the voice to text turned out to be not very reliable in the museum environment, so we focused on the scripted questions.

The technical setup consisted of two components: the audio booth and the large display facing it. To let Spirit know when somebody was present in the booth, we installed an Arduino with an ultrasonic sensor that communicated with an iPhone 6 via Bluetooth. The iPhone was connected to a directional microphone and a speaker.

Here is where the magic happened. On the phone, we ran a custom app. The app turned the voice into text using the Apple Speech Framework, and then analyzed the emotions in the answer using IBM Watson, an iconic AI developed by IBM, while also checking if the answer is in the pre-written script. If it wasn’t, it used another API to get an answer from the chatbot. The information about the answer and emotions was stored and sent to a custom program written in vvvv that communicated with the iPhone app via OSC.

Ambient noise was our biggest worry. It could have prevented the system from understanding visitors’ answers. Also, the position of the microphone was fixed, so reaching different visitor heights and voice volumes was a challenge. This actually proved to be a problem, as there were several interactions in which the voice was unintelligible.

The Data

One good perk of the interactive system is that we had real-time access to the data, so we could follow how well the installation and exhibition were performing, and what the audience was saying. After the exhibition ended, we found a bit more time to use Python and Pandas in the analysis, and Excel to plot the results.

We had a total of 8996 individual sessions with Spirit during the exhibition, about 10 percent of the visitors to the Design Museum.

The emotion recognition system that we used, IBM Watson, is not yet totally reliable (as an example, “yes” was considered a 100% J=joyful answer). But with the amount of data we gathered, the system was still able to give some hints about visitor moods. And the variations in mood could be correlated to external events. For example, we saw a peak in feelings of joy on the 24th, when London hit its highest temperature after a cold January.

When we looked at the answers, we discovered that they seemed more spontaneous and playful than others given via written questionnaires. They were also more honest, suggesting that for some people, sharing intimately with an AI might be less intimidating than talking to a human interviewer. Others, though, were critical and disconcerted. It became clear that it is important to start a dialogue about how we want to interact with AI in our daily lives.

Though the experiment obviously didn’t culminate in a fully-formed product to help the elderly, the interaction model helped us create the kind of AI we would need to build community and increase social interaction, and allowed us to test people’s reactions to emotional and intimate questions from an AI. The experiment also directly related to the work we do with design research. We frequently send design researchers out into the field to talk to people to learn more about their needs and habits, and how we can design solutions to fit their lives. Our work with Spirit begs the question—could even a design researcher be replaced by an artificial researcher at some point? For now, we don’t have a lot of answers, but this experiment helped us push our understanding forward, and we’re excited about the AI-driven insights that will come in the future.

In the top floor of London’s Design Museum, as dozens of visitors walk by and the rain hits the windows, a woman speaks with an AI bot called Spirit. It asks her how many partners she would like to have if she can live until she is 150. She giggles and answers. “Just one—and that is because my husband is next to me.” According to Spirit’s analytics, her answer is 33% sad and 12% joyful.

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.