As many as one-third of the 300,000 annual cardiac arrest fatalities in the US could be avoided if defibrillation was applied within minutes of the cardiac event.

Working with Heartstream, IDEO tested the effectiveness of alternative defibrillator configurations with different users to help develop a highly mobile and easy-to-operate product. Heartstream systematically refined the concept with the goal of making its defibrillators affordable, transportable, and as ubiquitous as fire extinguishers.

(This device is now manufactured by Philips.)

Julep, a fast-growing beauty brand, noticed a problem that has vexed generations of nail polish users: The wand on the bottle is awkward and clumsy to use.

After rounds of user research, IDEO and Julep came up with the solution: the Plié Wand. The elegantly tapered handle sits easily in the hand and connects magnetically with a wand finely calibrated for precision. And for maximum flexibility, it bends to rest gently in the hand, making it an ambidextrous instrument.

Injured US servicemen and servicewomen returning from war must adapt to a home, finding workarounds to cope with their surroundings based on individual capabilities and preferences. Clark Realty Capital, a Virginia-based real estate firm that has partnered with the Department of Defense on more than $4.7 billion in privatized housing, collaborated with IDEO on a new model for building accessible homes on military installations.

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Facing the challenge of visualizing and designing the ideal home for soldiers injured in the field, Clark Realty Capital and IDEO designed floor plans and amenities that would meet or exceed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards and be versatile enough to accommodate varied physical and psychological needs. The IDEO design team took an in-depth look at accessibility issues, interviewing and observing civilians and injured soldiers, and asked questions that shed light on how active-duty service members resume civilian life after debilitating injuries. What could make their experience more dignified and healthy, and what might reconnect them with family, close friends, and the world? The team uncovered seven contrasts that defined the complex needs of disabled soldiers and their families, and used these as direction and inspiration for adaptable homes for specific physical, mental, and emotional needs that also fit into the context of everyday life.

The final deliverable consisted of the home design but also included a book and poster that featured floor plans, elevations, and interior renderings. A compelling video montage depicting three real-life military families in the context and challenges of their current homes further reinforced the goals of this worthwhile endeavor.

US Army Fort Belvoir and Clark Realty Capital unveiled the homes on November 30, 2011, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

With nearly 5 million registered voters, Los Angeles County represents the largest voting jurisdiction in the United States. Guaranteeing every citizen the right to an accessible and intuitive voting experience has been the highest priority for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office, which oversees the election process.

To revamp its antiquated voting system that dates back to the 1960s, LA County hired IDEO to design the concept, look, and feel of its next-generation replacement, a modular system that could adapt over time. And just as important, one that would be designed, developed, and owned by the county.

Working closely with LA County staff, IDEO designers created a voting system that addresses the complexities unique to that voter base, including its vastly diverse population and its myriad election laws and policies. It was imperative for designers to build a system that would be useful and accessible to all types of voters: those who are vision and hearing impaired, in wheelchairs, have learning disabilities, are unfamiliar with technology, speak languages other than English—voters of all ages and backgrounds.

Their goals: to create one device for equal access, to define a voting process that feels familiar to voters, balancing both emotional and functional needs, and to build a system that’s adaptable over time.

The resulting prototype, designed in collaboration with Digital Foundry and Cambridge Consultants, is a voting device that’s customizable for different user experiences. A touch screen allows any voter to easily navigate the ballot by advancing through different screens showing lists of candidates and ballot measures. For those with vision impairment or reading disabilities, an audio and controller experience guides voters through their options with a push of a few simple buttons. And voters who prefer to read the ballot in a different language—Spanish, Chinese, Korean, or any one of the 11 languages supported by the county—can choose their preference on the same machine. Once they’ve tapped in their selections on the device, they receive a printed paper ballot that goes into an integrated ballot box (the use of a traceable paper ballot is still mandated by law).

Just as we’re able to use our mobile devices to simplify our lives for everything from shopping online to fetching a taxi, the new prototype also allows voters to participate in the ultimate act of democracy with the same ease and accessibility. Voters can mark their votes on their cell phones when it’s convenient, then go to a polling station to transfer their selections from their phones to paper ballots, and cast their ballots in a ballot box.

It’s this convenience factor that officials hope will ultimately make the act of voting more meaningful. “As an election administrator, I can’t drive how exciting the candidates are or how controversial the measures are,” said Dean Logan, LA County’s Registrar-Recorder and County Clerk, whose vision has driven this project. “What I can do, though, is drive a voting experience that’s appealing and that makes you feel the actual weight of the significance of casting a ballot. To be able to go to any location that’s convenient to you, I think adds to that sense of intrinsic value to the voting process. It makes it feel like I’m participating in something that’s meaningful and important, that’s consistent with the way I do other things in my life.”

Once the bulk of the work was completed in June 2016, IDEO handed off designs to the county for execution. IDEO has continued to advise the county and its implementation partners on an as-needed basis to ensure the original intent of the designs—to create a deeply human-centered voter experience—are incorporated during the implementation phase. LA’s new voting system, which rolled out in 2020, has the potential to influence how other counties across the country update their outdated systems.

VIDEO: Democracy By Design, interviews with designers, researchers and Los Angeles County staff. Produced by the Los Angeles County Registrar/County Clerk.

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Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, shows how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities.

In this revised and updated edition of Change By Design, Tim Brown reintroduces design thinking, the collaborative process by which the designer’s sensibilities and methods are employed to match people’s needs with what is technically feasible and a viable business strategy. In short, design thinking converts need into demand. It’s a human-centered approach to problem-solving that helps people and organizations become more innovative and creative.

Change by Design is not a book by designers for designers; it is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Purchase

Know someone who might love this book? Purchase Change By Design here.

Our checklist made all the difference when the Wellcome Trust tasked us with designing a way to cut down on unnecessary antibiotics use in middle-income countries. The world’s antibiotic misuse has staggering implications: By 2050, antimicrobial resistance is expected to kill 10 million people every year. That’s more people than we lose annually to cancer.

What became known as Project Marvelous took us to Kenya and India, where we encountered patients who self-diagnose and prescribe for themselves and their friends, community health workers with very little training, and pharmacies that dole out antibiotics without a prescription in order to make a sale.

As far as complex systems challenges go, it was an extreme one, but after testing several rounds of concepts rooted in behavior change, we found an intervention with real potential. Smart Prescriptions, as we called it, was an endpoint that varied drastically from where we began. The original hypothesis was that the intervention should be designed for pharmacists. But after following the checklist, we found we had to start with doctors.

Here are the five steps we followed to address this complex systems challenge:

1. Define your ecosystem

We can’t claim to have reached an understanding of the whole ecosystem by a longshot—the sheer number of stakeholders involved is what makes it such a complex problem. So at the outset, we defined our ecosystem, drawing a line at pharmaceutical companies, which seemed beyond the scope of the design challenge Wellcome had set. We then set out to interview antibiotic users, doctors, and pharmacists. In doing so, we realized there was a category we had overlooked: India’s tens of thousands of registered medical practitioners (RMPs). They typically aren’t licensed to prescribe antibiotics but have studied Ayurvedic medicine. Being willing to pivot and expand (or contract) the ecosystem is key: We began interviewing RMPs after realizing the huge impact their population has on antibiotics consumption.

2. Adopt a beginner’s mindset

In interviews, we positioned ourselves as people who didn’t know much about the topic. We were there to learn about them as people—their motivations, their struggles, their day-to-day. We listened. We made sure our questions were free of judgement and left our assumptions at the door. What we came to understand is that a primary motivator for doctors is to succeed as a business. They depend on patients coming back.

This insight made it through to the final design. Smart Prescriptions is, at its core, a tool to improve the doctor-patient relationship. Features like automated advice for patients and medication reminders increase the personal interactions doctors have with patients. The antibiotics recommendation is a Trojan horse, tucked inside the features doctors were really clamoring for.

3. Lead with empathy

Continually put yourself in your user’s shoes and make sure you’re seeing the situation from their perspective. We quickly came to understand, for instance, that many people working in pharmacies aren’t actually pharmacists, and that their financial motivations eclipse any duty of care. They dole out antibiotics without a prescription because refraining from doing so means sacrificing a sale and possibly losing a customer to a rival. Rather than slapping a “bad” behavior label on this, we accepted it as their reality and used it as a design constraint.

4. Consider your language

Systems challenges are often as sensitive as they are complex (consider homelessness or mental illness). As designers we are outsiders, so in designing Smart Prescriptions, we needed to make sure doctors were upheld as the experts. We weren’t creating a diagnostic tool, but rather an intervention that offers a recommendation based on their diagnosis. The tool doesn’t actually change the way they prescribe, it just offers guidance. It’s tough to remember every antibiotics guideline, especially as they update. The language that was used was consciously designed to be light and supportive of their expertise.

5. Generate unlimited ideas, then co-create

Don’t fall in love with your first good idea. Every assumption we made was challenged in our first trip, which ended up being more exploratory than we expected. We made a point to talk to every stakeholder and actor about our sacrificial concepts—early ideas we put in front of people to spark reactions. We gauged whether they had a positive or negative response, then iterated accordingly. After the discovery phase, we came up with seven concepts to test with participants and gauged their reactions. Smart Prescriptions was the clear standout, generating the most interest and excitement. We refined the concept back home, then returned to India and Kenya to gather more feedback. This allowed us to design something that spoke to doctors’ primary motivation, and to add features that the doctors felt would make it even more useful.

Unlike pilots, we don’t have the benefit of a known destination. Our checklist doesn’t just guarantee a smoother ride, it plays a major role in mapping the route itself. When the ecosystem is unfamiliar and the complexity is vast, it is a must.

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Every time we board an airplane, we assume our pilots aren’t going on instinct alone. They’ve worked their way through a checklist—fuel levels reviewed, the flap setting confirmed—to ensure the plane is ready for takeoff. They may be pros, but they’re human, and the complexity of the job makes it easy to forget a step.

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While I occasionally geek out over numbers, I spend most of my time going deep with clients, sketching business models, and building prototypes to test our ideas with real people.

I’m currently working on a project to create a new taxi experience for Japan. We’re working to help our client, a taxi equipment supplier, stay relevant when taxis themselves are being disrupted.

There’s really no typical day for me at IDEO, but here’s a little peek at what a recent one looked like.

8:30am: Commute

On nice days I walk to work through Yoyogi Park, one of Tokyo’s largest. It’s hard to believe that I live in a concrete jungle with views like this! Most days, though, I take the train. It’s exactly 16 minutes to get to work. (Perk of living in Tokyo: Trains run like clockwork.)

10:00am: Team stand-up

Our team has daily morning and evening stand-ups. We’re supposed to plan the day, but we get sidetracked and spend most of it playing with our taxi prototype.

10:30am: Business model review

I sketch out our current idea using our Business Model Tiles. They’re a quick, visual way to bring our plan to life, and they make it easy enough for anybody to come in and iterate with me. (The team liked this version.)

12:00pm: Monday lunch meeting

The entire studio gets together every Monday for lunch. The food is amazing—we have different caterers provide freshly cooked, seasonal dishes every week. Usually, we share silly photos from the previous week and studio/project updates. Everybody takes a turn as host, and shares personal inspiration. This week it's Ryo, introducing one of our new D4V (Design for Ventures) portfolio companies, Tabi Labo, to the studio. (More on that later!)

1:00pm: Crash course in graphic design

Outside of work, I run a pop-up curry shop with some friends. We make curry with a Japanese twist, using seasonal ingredients or flavoring that you might not usually find in curry. I’m lucky to be surrounded by talented graphic designers who helped me transform my very analogue potato stamp logo into a digital masterpiece.

2:00pm: Video shoot

We’re making a short user journey video to showcase what our taxi service might look and feel like. As a business designer, making things tangible is important, because it makes the service feel real, and empowers clients to take risks and launch new businesses. Our client got really into it, and even starred in the video as the taxi driver!

5:00: Design sprint

IDEO Tokyo is co-located with D4V (Design for Ventures), our in-house venture capital fund. I really enjoy working with the startups, which have different needs from our typical clients, and move really fast. Here, we’re helping Famzon (a company that makes shoes with interchangeable heels) create its first pop-up store in the Haneda Airport.

6:30pm: Heading home

It’s been a long day. Can’t wait to go home, eat dinner, and recharge for tomorrow.

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When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I find innovative ways for companies to transform and grow.” I think a lot about the intangible parts of creating a new service. How do we make money? Who do we partner with? What resources do we need to begin?

IDEO organizational designer Mollie West Duffy doesn’t buy it. “By ignoring our feelings at work, we overlook important data and risk preventable mistakes,” she says. “We send emails that cause unnecessary anxiety, we fail to make work meaningful, and we are more likely to burn out.”

Last month, West and her coauthor Liz Fosslien released No Hard Feelings: Emotions at Work and How They Help Us Succeed, which argues for harnessing emotions to push your career forward. “Most of us have never learned how to do this in our professional lives, let alone been allowed to admit how much feelings at work matter,” she says. IDEO’s Anna Moore Silverstein sat down with Mollie to learn more.

What inspired you to write this book?

The inspiration for this book came from the fact that when Liz and I started our first jobs, we thought professionals did not fail, did not fuss, and certainly did not feel. But we soon realized this view was not only unrealistic, it stood in the way of our sense of fulfillment—and of our success. Our goal as we began researching No Hard Feelings was to better understand our emotions—when are they useful and when are they just noise? Can we mold them to change how we experience work?

Can you explain the concept of an emotional work culture?

Emotional culture is how and to what extent employees of a company express feelings at work. Every office has one, though few companies talk about emotional norms. Emotional culture affects how much we enjoy our jobs, how stressed we might feel, and our ability to do work well and on time.

To instantly get a sense for a particular office’s emotional culture, Wharton professor Adam Grant suggests you say to an employee,“Tell me a story about something that would only happen here.” For example, at IDEO’s New York studio, Thursday lunches are dedicated to Make(believe) time. Creative activities like aromatic fingerpainting, writing group haiku poems, and blind contour drawing help employees get goofy. You can also look for more subtle cues that indicate what kind of emotions are acceptable in a work space. Do your coworkers seem more comfortable expressing frustration or joy? Are there tissues in meeting rooms (which might indicate it’s okay to cry)? Is it cool to respond to emails with a funny cat GIF?

Why does emotional culture matter so much?

When we feel supported and motivated by our colleagues, we are happier, more productive, and stick around longer. We’re also healthier and better able to cope with job stress. And when our bosses respond to our mistakes with patience instead of fury, we trust them more.

As an org designer, you help people design and scale change in their organizations, and change can be challenging. How do you account for emotions in client work?

Something we say a lot at IDEO is “Change is beautiful.” But change is also uncomfortable, and can be an emotional roller coaster

To help with this emotional journey, we try to set time for weekly check-ins. On my last project, we had a retrospective every Friday that included the client team. We asked everyone to go around and share one thing that went well, one thing they’d like to change, and their overall feelings about the week. This helped us all share our feelings in a dedicated time, so it felt less awkward.

I also have had to work on my own emotions with clients. I tend to be an under-emoter, which means I process my feelings inside. (You can take our emotional expression tendency assessment to see if you are an over-emoter or an under-emoter). So I’m working on trying to warm more quickly. I try to verbalize how excited I’m feeling about a project and a team, to help get our energy up. I also try to verbalize when I’m feeling overwhelmed and I need more help. It’s an ongoing process!

Are there other exercises you would recommend to help a company build a better emotional culture?

Awareness is a really powerful communication tool. Many of the CEOs interviewed by New York Times columnist Adam Bryant create “user manuals” or “how to work with me” guides to make collaboration easier. It’s one of the best ways to pre-empt potential misunderstandings—or hurt feelings. To achieve the same with your team, Adam recommends blocking off an hour to answer the questions below.

What everyone should know about you:

1. What are some honest, unfiltered things about you?
2. What drives you nuts?
3. What are your quirks?
4. What qualities do you particularly value in people who work with you?
5. What are some things that people might misunderstand about you that you should clarify?

How to work with you:

1. What’s the best way to communicate with you?
2. What hours do we want to work together? Where and how do we want to work (same room, what kinds of meetings, what kinds of file sharing, etc)?
3. What are our goals for this team? What are our concerns about this team?
4. How will we make decisions? What types of decisions need consensus? How will we deal with conflict?
5. How do we want to give and receive feedback (one-on-one, in a group, informally, or during a specified time each week)?

For me, answering these questions was about revealing that I warm up to people slowly. Once people get to know me, I think they find that I’m warm, generous, and even silly. But I can come across as more reserved and serious at first. For Liz, it was about showing people that she loves to be left alone when she works. For people who enjoy frequently emailing or messaging one another, her behavior could come across as antisocial, but she’s a person who needs to put her head down to work—cognitive switching is a productivity sinkhole.

Exercises like these make it easy for people to be honest up front, and set an emotional tone for your team or office. By sharing early, you can make it easier to meet people where they are, and set the stage for sharing of feelings and preferences throughout the process.

Emotions affect so many parts of work, from collaboration to decision-making, motivation, and communication between employees and managers. But in American work culture, “emotional” can be a dirty word. There’s a misconception that expressing feelings is unprofessional or out of place in the office.

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.