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.

At IDEO, we’re often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We’ve developed designthinking.ideo.com in response to that request. On the site we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You’ll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others.

Creativity Challenge # 7: Eliminate hierarchy to improve idea flow.

While Speed Dating is useful in situations where people don’t know each other well, sometimes in group meetings you will encounter the opposite problem: a group where people know each other too well. Or, more specifically, a group in which hierarchy is so well established that the more junior members in the room self-edit and defer to the executives rather than putting their best ideas on the table.

To reduce hierarchy (which inhibits conversation) and self-censoring (which is equally limiting), the d.school has recently been experimenting with a “nickname warm-up.” Using a stack of colorful names the instructors have prepared in advance, the activity is a way to temporarily level out the organization during a creative working session. Each participant is given a persona to allow them to “try on” new behaviors.

Tool: Nickname Warm-up
Participants: Groups of 6-12 people per facilitator
Time: A few minutes per person
Supplies: Nametags for each person with the fake names written out. A hat and a ball for each facilitator.

Instructions

Step 1: Each participant reaches into the hat, draws out a name tag, and puts it on. Use names that lend themselves to humor and emotion. Teams tend to produce their best work when the group is having fun. Some of the monikers can imply a big dose of street credibility, while others suggest quirky personalities. For example: Dr. Fabulous, Squirt, Mr. Big Heart, The Clumsy Entertainer, or The Rooster.

Step 2: The facilitator gathers the group in a circle and tosses the ball. Whoever catches it introduces themselves using their new nickname and then tells a short story (created on the spot) about how they acquired this nickname as a child.

Step 3: After their self-introduction, they toss the ball to a new person, until everyone has had a chance to share their new name and story.

Step 4: The rule for the rest of the workshop—strictly enforced—is that everyone must use only these nicknames when referring to themselves or others.

Tips from the Field

Do the nametags work? Although this is a relatively new exercise, experience so far suggests that the answer is yes. At a recent management event, the CEO of a global hospitality company drew the “Squirt” nickname. There was a pregnant pause in the room as everyone waited to see how he would react. But he gamely played along through the rest of the workshop, and the organizers felt it contributed to an open environment in which people could speak freely.

The goal is to flatten out the hierarchy, so it’s important to get the senior people in the room to participate. Leading by example will naturally break some of the barriers to free-flowing collaboration.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems, or read more from this series of creative exercises on the IDEO blog.

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

As leaders at the CoLab, IDEO’s platform for collaborative impact, we’re familiar with tension in all its forms. CoLab brings together organizations from across industries to focus on tough challenges, from designing for the circular economy to opening our financial systems. During design sprints, small teams build prototypes to explore new opportunities. Given that team members are often industry competitors with divergent approaches and ideas, tension tends to arise. We notice participants are often used to acting with the interests of their business first, rather than seeing the collaborative potential.

In order to create the impact we’re striving for at CoLab, we need to meet this tension head-on and create ways of moving forward. No matter what you’re designing or who you’re designing alongside—be it a colleague or another organization—here are four quick tips for adopting this mindset and productively addressing tension.

Observe the dynamic

Though tension can sometimes make us want to jump into action to resolve it, there’s value in sitting back, too. Try answering the following questions for yourself: What opinion is each team member pushing forward? Why might they have this view?

Paying attention helps you establish empathy. As designers, we use empathy not only to deeply understand the realities of the people we’re designing for, but also the realities of those we’re designing with. Even if you disagree, understanding why a teammate might have a certain opinion can help you create solutions that ultimately meet a need that you might not have noticed alone.

Give it a name

Once you’ve spent time observing, try naming the tension out loud or writing it down on a piece of paper. Saying or jotting down, “There’s tension around X right now,” or simply, “I’m feeling tension,” externalizes the tension. It’s is no longer this abstract, all-encompassing feeling. The tension is a named, tangible thing that the team can hear and see — not just feel — and therefore more objectively address through listening, dialogue, or compromise. In fact, mapping out seemingly conflicting interests or goals is a great tool for synthesis and identifying opportunities for design.

Just start making

Tension frequently arises when teams are trying to align on a shared vision or strategy. After all, when there are various stakeholders involved, they’ll likely have a variety of approaches. But it’s draining to debate things like your purpose or mission statement all day long. Reaching consensus can take hours, and may not even be useful at such an early stage before teams have had a chance to validate concepts through building.

It may seem counterintuitive, but to move teams through this tension, we recommend to just start doing. Whether it’s a whiteboard sketch or a model made of construction paper and glue, acts of making can offer clarity to subjective, “big picture” items. Shifting your mental focus from defining to doing has the power to shift a team’s dynamic.

Assume good intent

Though tension can sometimes feel like opposition, it often happens because teammates are passionate about the same thing. They may just want to apply or direct this shared passion in different ways. When things get tense, remember that you’re all working towards the same goal, and that the tension is likely not about you. Don’t take it personally.

Reinforce this “oneness” and good intent through language or actions. Try this: “I’m glad we’re in the same room solving this problem together.”

The next time things get tense, try not to jump into defense mode or sink down in your chair. Tension in team environments is inevitable because each of us bring a different set of experiences and perspectives to the table (so don’t crawl under it). As a team committed to collaboration across organizations that wouldn’t otherwise work together, we’ll keep embracing tension to get to the impact we all want to see in the world.

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Tension in a team environment can make us nervously glance at the clock, play mediator, get defensive, or cling to the tried-and-true. But tension isn't always so bad (you can unclench your jaw now). In fact, we’ve found that some of our greatest work has come from embracing—even seeking out—these difficult moments.

If you live in an American city, big or small, there's a decent chance that Sanborn had a map (or a hundred) of your town. And best of all, the entire collection is open-source and available for download in high-resolution images. The Library of Congress database isn't exactly the easiest in the world to search, but keep at it.

I live in San Francisco and was curious to see how my neighborhood was depicted by these amazingly-talented, fire insurance bureaucrats. I was delighted to find this map that shows my San Francisco neighborhood—the Lower Haight—in all of its 1899 glory. The colored rectangles form a grid, each pointing toward another map somewhere in the Sanborn collection that zooms in for much greater street-by-street detail.

I kept banging away at the rudimentary search function on the LOC website and eventually located Map 306, which visualizes my block in the year 1899.

San Francisco is not the oldest of cities when it comes to architecture, and there was that little thing called the 1906 Earthquake (and subsequent fire), which destroyed a lot of the city as well. So I wasn't too surprised when I didn't recognize many of the buildings on my block. That said, it did get me curious: Were there any buildings that were visualized on the 1899 Sanborn map that are still present on my block in 2019? I decided to make a map to find out. See, being an ameteur cartographer is actually useful in 2019! Google Maps hasn’t ruined all of the fun.

First, I set about converting the Sanborn map of my block into a file that I could manipulate in Adobe Illustrator. The original map is a JPEG, which means that it contains pixels. But since I wanted to have the freedom to tweak the map as I saw fit, I needed to convert the map to a vector version of the file. Why? A vector file (which, instead of pixels, is all about math coordinates) can be scaled infinitely large. What's more, it's much easier to change the colors on a vector-based map or make other modifications that I might need to later.

I'd like to say that there was some fancy way that I converted the map. I could have tried a Live Trace, but with a map this detailed, I wasn't optimistic. So I just rebuilt the file by tracing over the Sanborn map layer with new lines and fills and strokes. Detail by detail. This was mostly an act of love and definitely not a fast process. I recently had a kid and this turned out to be a fantastic New Year's Eve activity as we counted down the tired hours till midnight.

One unique challenge I encountered — there's no clear font out there that replicates the Sanborn hand-lettering. I spent too much time with the Adobe Typekit database and landed on Zeitung. It's not an exact match by any means, but close enough to pass the squint test.

That’s the original map on the left, in all of its pixels glory. And that’s the vector file on the right, built from scratch. How'd I do?

Okay. With the Sanborn map from 1899 more or less created, I turned my attention to the 2019 version of the map. I needed a detailed lot-by-lot map of San Francisco. My first go-to in moments like this is the Stanford University Earthworks website. The search function works quite well, and it links to open source maps from lots of other universities (like Tufts). After a quick search, I located a lot-by-lot map for the Bay Area and opened it up in QGIS, everyone’s favorite free and open-source cartography tool! Here’s what I had.

Totally overwhelming and, not surprisingly, it was actually quite tough to even find my block in all of that detail. So I loaded Google Maps, entered our home address, created a KML file with that single data point, and added it to the QGIS map. Once I zoomed way in, there was our block and our loft (represented by that little purple dot).

As I’ve mentioned before, QGIS is a wonderfully-powerful mapping tool, but mostly the pits when it comes to designing anything that would measure up to the esthetic standards of the average designer. So I zoomed way in to just our block, then exported the file as a vector file and opened it in our old friend Illustrator.

What I quickly realized is that this lot-by-lot map shows the property lines for each parcel on our block, but not the actual shapes of the buildings that sit inside each lot. Although I was getting close, I needed to go a step deeper to actually match the detail of the 1899 Sanborn map, which shows the outlines of individual buildings.

I opened Google Maps again and toggled to the satellite view of our block. If you zoom in as far as possible, you can see the outline of individual buildings. It's not perfect—shadows must get projected in weird ways when you snap photographs from orbit—but this was starting to get more interesting.

I snapped a fully zoomed-in screenshot of each building on the block, then traced them one-by-one using the Pen Tool in Illustrator. Once I had the outline of an individual building, I pasted it into the spot where it belonged inside the lot-by-lot map I’d exported over from QGIS. Then I repeated this process 31 times, for each of the buildings contained on my block.

With the buildings in place, my next task was to figure out when they were built so that I could determine if any of them had been around back in 1899. After much poking around, I found this site from the San Francisco Planning Department that had exactly what I needed—the construction date for each of the 31 buildings on my block. Once I did the research, I discovered that three buildings can be found on the map in both 1899 and 2019, all of them clustered on the southwest corner of the block. One of them is my local bodega, home to Tiger the cat and famous (in the neighborhood) for the time that the Warriors eccentric three-point maestro Klay Thompson visited the bar to buy a bottle of Grey Goose. Super cool also to know that the building was built in 1890 and survived the 1906 Earthquake and Fire.

To finish up the map, I built out a key, borrowing inspiration from another Sanborn map visualizing neighborhoods in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Then I tweaked the colors, sticking to the Sanborn color palette, but borrowing some of the brighter colors found across the collection. I also added some polka dots to both maps to call attention to the three buildings that survived from 1899 to 2019. These last couple of tweaks are just two of the many benefits to working with vector files instead of pixels.

And voila, here is the final version of the map. What do you think? Now you can do the same for your city block.

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Do you have a few hours on your hands and want to head down a wormhole of unbelievably striking maps? Mosey on over to the Sanborn map collection at the Library of Congress. Originally created as a means for issuing fire insurance across major American cities, the quality of hand-drawn detail in these maps and the color palette used by the cartographers are stunning.

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.