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.

Name: Ben Syverson
Location: Chicago
Role at IDEO: As a senior software designer, I apply an interaction design lens to software development (or vice versa?) to take our prototypes further faster. Our development needs are as diverse as our projects. Lately, I've been helping our team prototype concepts for the operating room using VR.
Joined IDEO: 2014
Instagram: @bensyverson
Titillating Fact: I've always been into typography, and after I joined IDEO, I started drawing letters after work. It's very meditative! Before I knew it, I had designed two large type families. Unbeknownst to my fellow IDEOers, I've been able to sneak those typefaces into every one of my IDEO projects, in some form or another—from wireframes and prototypes to client presentations.

1. Unison

Unison is a textile design company that I really admire. They often collaborate with local artists and designers, and I just love their taste and sense of style. Unison has a great little store here in Chicago, and a beautifully shot catalog that my wife and I absolutely pore over.

2. Rotring Rapid Pro

My Rotring Rapid Pro lead holder is my security blanket. I take it everywhere. It's mostly brass and steel, giving it the satisfying weight and premium feel of a classic Leica. The 2mm lead can give you fine marks or subtle shading, and can stand up to more pressure than thin leads. I bought two Rapid Pros, in chrome and matte black, because YOLO.

3. John Sheppard

I recently learned that my friend John Sheppard quit his job as an art director at the Wall Street Journal to fully focus on his gorgeous ceramic work, and I couldn't be happier for him. He has this amazing way of subverting the clean minimalism of his geometry with organic cutouts, intricate textures, and unexpected surfaces.

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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: Ben Syverson.

I’ve been a fan of my friend and colleague Nick Dupey, a member of Young Monster, for years. He and I once collaborated on a poster for Moogfest, and the first night we got together, he pulled out a stack of multi-colored construction paper and began cutting out shapes. That moment stuck with me—it brought back memories of elementary school art class, a time without computers and inhibitions.

So as my holiday break began, I committed to return to that headspace. For over a decade I had kept file drawers of old clip art, temporary parking passes, owners manuals, security envelopes, and other ephemera that caught my eye. I guess it’s a kind of graphic designer kleptomania, pocketing found type and imagery to display or repurpose. I fumbled through the stacks, tore apart some junk mail and magazines, and began reassembling.

There was nothing precious about it. In fact, it was so quick that it felt like whiplash. My intent was simply to reassemble the mass of trash on my tabletop. It was an intuitive, thoughtless act that allowed my fingers to be free to make new movements. My sense of touch was back. I could hear the pink noise of tearing paper. I could smell the tape and glue. I had escaped the box.

Every day during the holiday I made a collage in an empty notebook I had long forgotten. I would slip away into my home studio during a lull and assemble another combination of type, images, and textures. I got lost in it. My creative freedom awakened. The feeling of creative wonder from my childhood was rediscovered.

I’ve kept it up since then. Early in the morning before I fill my mind with calendar to-dos, email, and other grown-up activities, I make something. It’s 10-20 minutes that sit somewhere between meditation and puzzle solving. My visual skills are sharper. My fingers are smarter. My ability to find resolution from chaos is faster. And even though I still don’t love my laptop any more than when this obsession began, I no longer feel trapped by it.

So how can you escape the box? Here are a few suggestions to help you rediscover your 8-year old self:

• Reframe junk mail as an endless stream of new mediums. Security envelopes from credit card bills, retail catalogs, and poorly designed postcards get me excited about checking the postbox when I get home.
• Begin with only a few elements—faces are the easiest starting point. Put three items together to get yourself going. The more you do, the easier it is to build complex creations.
• Don’t start with intention or a desire for meaning. Meaning will reveal itself as you create. The majority of what I’ve collaged is meaningless. It’s an exercise in associating form, color, and lines. But there’s the occasional moment when a story comes through.
• Always be willing to call your session a failure. I do these quickly and sometimes I just throw them away because they don’t resolve well. This isn’t an exercise in making something precious—it is a process that happens to have an occasionally stunning result.
• Save your scraps. I have drawers of them now and they often are the starter for my next image.
• Travel with a glue stick. Every hotel room has a stack of lifestyle magazines with luxury perfume ads. Tear them up in your downtime, then reassemble. Impress your friends on Instagram with your artwork instead of what you ate for dinner.

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Two years ago, I began to fall out of love with the computer. It had become a claustrophobic box that dictated how I communicated and how I created. I felt like I was losing my design sensibilities, and treading a well-worn trail through the same digital menus, with my fingers commanding the same virtual assets.

We wanted to change that, and in the process, to help our community learn how to do it better by paying close attention to how great writers wield language. So we invited our colleagues to take a close look at powerful opening sentences, all drawn from novels.

We called it The Sentence Gallery. Inspired by writer, editor, and friend-of-IDEO, Allan Reeder, the project takes to heart a quote by journalist William Zinsser that Reeder shared on his blog: "Writing is learned by imitation. I learned to write mainly by reading writers who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and by trying to figure out how they did it."

To bring The Sentence Gallery to life, communications designers Jason Baker and Sera Koo built a wall out of foamcore and mounted it in our main community space. Over a few weeks, they showcased a series of sentences, writ large. They also laser-cut thought bubbles from Post-it pads and invited people to reflect on what made each sentence effective. The sharp point of the bubble operated as a marker that allowed passers-by to draw attention to whatever effect they’d noticed, placing their comment at a specific moment in the sentence.

What’s the effect of this word followed by that one? How does the rhythm and pacing of a sentence make the reader feel? Those were the kinds of question we wanted the Gallery to provoke.

At IDEO, great writing emerges from an admixture of instinct, craft, inspiration, learning, and unlearning. That’s likely true for most any design artifact worth our attention.

As designers, we treat sentences like any other prototype. We get them out quickly, and then we get to work on them, refining our writing until it takes us where we need to go.

Writing sharpens our thinking. And as human-centered designers, we rely on it to communicate unspoken human needs. But the craft of writing is itself somewhat hidden; it can seem like a secret art, all furtive fingertapping behind the screen of an open laptop.

Conversational UI is getting a lot of buzz out in the world, and for good reason. SMS is going through a renaissance, and its immediacy and accessibility make it an ideal channel for building services at a time when apps are no longer the medium for digital experiences.

Beyond the buzz, conversational UI shows us that everything in design should be considered a conversation. All elements in an experience are exchanges between people, brands, businesses, services, and, increasingly, machine-powered intelligence. Conversation is the primary design material for designers — and its general purpose is to impact people’s behaviors and emotions.

Designing Conversations

The ambiguous design process.

These days there’s a strong focus on chatbots and conversations as end products, but in our IDEO New York studio, we’ve been using conversations as a prototyping tool to test assumptions, learn, and inspire design. Chatbots are exciting, but we’re also excited about what they unlock for us as a learning medium, not just because they’re the next big thing.

Here's one of our experiences using chatbots as a design tool.

Walkbot: Prototyping Content and Engagement

In 2014, together with a Japanese electronics manufacturer, IDEO designed a device and smartphone app that captures a woman’s activities in order to generate thoughtful, actionable insights about her fitness choices.

At the time, wearable devices were heavily marketed towards men. The women we were addressing wanted meaningful content, and were far more focused on competing with themselves than with others. It also turned out that our product was too data-heavy.

"I like that it’s there if I need it. It’s kind of like a little friend." [anonymous user]

Walking alongside our participants during field research.

The dashboard created to communicate with users and track responses.

To uncover what meaningful content looks like for these women, we went to the women themselves.

A software designer on our team built a custom tool leveraging Twilio’s SMS API, and created an SMS platform that a team of people could use to manage and direct messages. We recruited a panel of women, and during their workouts, a team member would send messages like “great workout, keep going” or “you’ve walked ___ steps today, add a 5 minute walk to reach 10,000.”

Lisa: “Ugh, he wants me to pick up my intensity and burn more calories.”

IDEO: “How do you know it’s a man?”

Lisa: “Because I’m mad at it right now."

An example of our real-time SMS prototyping — a team member would secretly text messages to our participant during her workout.

The responses were surprising. For one thing, women who participated in the design research would project gender and personality on to our bot. In moments of frustration, the bot was referred to as a “he,” when, in fact, the messages were coming from our female colleague. For another, not only did the women want to share their activities, they also wanted to share their failures. For them, fitness wasn’t purely about achieving a goal, but also the process it took to get there.

What we learned:

• The best way to understand what a conversation needs to be is by starting it. Figure out tone of voice, pacing, and interactions  as it unfolds.
• It’s possible to make conversations feel more personal with only a few data points. Be intentional and creative.
• Every participant will project an identity onto the bot — regardless of whether the design team gave it one.
• Bots allow for a nuanced interaction that might bring surprising elements to your product. Be willing to pivot in response to happy accidents.

Our Chatbots Protocol

During the past few years, the interaction design and design research teams at IDEO New York have worked closely with real people to test value propositions and the desirability of digital products and services. Together, we built ad-hoc tools that helped us design conversations with users, and engage with them in real-life contexts.

As we planned and ran these prototypes, we developed a set of principles we now rely on in our research.

• A prototype is a question, embodied. What are you trying to learn? Who are you learning from?
• Hack existing tools. There’s no need to build from scratch.
• Iterate in real-time. The beauty of SMS is that you can adapt quickly.
• Be explicit about the intentions of your work, and make sure that your actions are in line with the ethics of field research
• Consider all the stories, anecdotes, and insights you gathered through your chatbot to inspire the design.

Meet Stanley

There are several services that can help you set up an SMS-based platform. Alternatively, you can create your own conversation bot following the instructions we shared for Stanley, the SMS-based platform that we use.

You can find the source code, and the instructions to setup Stanley here.

For some more on using bots for design research, read this article on IDEO Labs.

The above is an abridged version of a longer Medium article that details three case studies where we’ve used chatbots to prototype services and products. Read the full article here.

Illustrations by Amy Wang.

The below is an abridged version of a longer Medium article that details three case studies where we’ve used chatbots to prototype services and products. Here, we'll focus on the hows and whys of using chatbots to prototype content.

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.