In 1987, the three companies that would later form IDEO worked together with Microsoft to create the world’s first ergonomically designed mouse. IDEO’s human factors research suggested a small but significant change: Moving the location of the mouse ball forward, from under the palm to under the fingertips, enabled more precise control and resulted in measurable performance differences compared with earlier models.

The industrial design effort examined and tested dozens of shapes in comfort and aesthetic studies that led to the famous “Dove Bar” form, a significant advance over the boxy mouses prevalent at the time. The resulting clean appearance, enhanced control, and improved reliability created enormous consumer appeal that replaced all earlier versions, and Microsoft sold more than 2 million units in its first two years.

With approximately 55,000 Americans waiting to receive kidneys and a list that could double in the next 10 years, there is an acute and urgent need for new technology to increase the quality and number of organs available for transplant. Using the conventional method of organ storage and transportation—a cooler filled with ice—doctors and nurses needed to accompany the organ to ensure proper handling.

IDEO and Organ Recovery Systems created the LifePort Kidney Transporter to provide a new high-tech alternative. The LifePort gently perfuses, or pumps, the kidney with a cold liquid solution to improve its condition before transplantation, which can nearly double storage time and may increase the number of usable kidneys and improve patient outcomes. The device also provides critical data to monitor and evaluate kidneys during transport.

Organ Recovery Systems believes that perfusion has the potential to remove tens of thousands of patients from the waiting list and dialysis, and save the healthcare system more than $1 billion annually. In 2006, the LifePort Kidney Transporter was used to transport 350 kidneys per month in 12 countries, and was included in the permanent architecture and design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Pediatric healthcare system Nemours provides primary, hospital, and clinic-based specialty care, prevention and health information services, and medical education programs in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. When Nemours wanted to strengthen its brand, it faced two challenges: Empowered patients had more access to information and choice than ever before, and new players—alternative-care centers, retail-based care clinics, and urgent-care centers—were entering the marketplace, diverting market share.

Nemours approached IDEO for help in creating an innovative, differentiated, and patient-centric experience for a new hospital in Orlando, with the goal of establishing Nemours as a destination care provider and industry leader. Together, they identified and clarified both family needs and key experience touchpoints in the patient journey, resulting in the state-of-the-art-designed, 60-acre, $400 million Nemours Children’s Hospital in Lake Nona Medical City, Florida. “The design team’s approach to defining key moments in the patient journey was highly instructive,” said Dr. David Milov, chief of clinical informatics at Nemours. “They captured insights otherwise unavailable to us.”

Concepts that were realized in the hospital’s final design include:

• Care Team Room ID: Patients and families are introduced to each member of their care team to ensure continuity of care.
• Floor Greeters: Concierge-like greeters welcome and orient families and answer questions.
• Family Lounges: Private dining rooms have kitchenettes, so families can cook and eat together.
• Emergency Department: Patients are greeted, sorted by medical condition, and immediately checked into rooms.
• Patient Information Screens: Doctors and nurses can access patient information prior to entering an exam room to enable informed conversations and build trust.
• Smart Bracelets: Personalized RFID-enabled bracelets keep track of the care team.
• Smart Rooms: Triggered by the Smart Bracelet, Smart Rooms “welcome” the patient upon entry.

To arrive at these designs, IDEO sought inspiration via analogous kid-friendly environments, such as museums, schools, toy stores, and zoos. Designers also conducted in-context interviews with patients, parents, families, doctors, nurses, support staff, and outside physicians. One key insight that led to the final design: Patients and families came to Nemours with varied levels of experience—first-timers, occasional visitors, and those who were chronically ill—but the hospital treated them all the same.

To address these needs, the team created an experience blueprint focused on welcoming, guiding, and supporting patients and families through unique environments, integrated service moments, and market-differentiating spaces and tools. To test the look, feel, and value of the designs, designers built full-scale foam core prototypes of welcome stations, waiting lounges, and exam rooms.

The results appeal to patients, families, and caregivers. According to Dr. Lane Donnelly, Nemours chief medical officer, “all the amenities at Nemours focus not only on the child but their parents and families as well.”

The hospital won two awards at the International Interior Design Association’s 2013 Best of the Best Gala (Georgia Chapter), one for the Healthcare Design category and one for best overall out of all 11 categories. Parenting.com writer Shawn Bean noted, “Set amidst a wooded expanse of central Florida, with theme park roller coasters peppering the horizon, Nemours Children’s Hospital is arguably the new high water mark for pediatric care in the United States.”

Designer turned educator Kiran Bir Sethi wanted to blur the boundaries between school and life to help young students become aware, enabled, and empowered to effect change in the world. In aiming to spread her message to millions of children across India , Sethi tapped IDEO and the d.school at Stanford to help create a design contest for youth that would show them that they could make a difference in their community.

Together with the d.school, IDEO designed a competition for middle school students called the Design for Change Contest. Adapting the human-centered design approach into a simple process that 10- to 13-year-old kids could follow on their own, the contest included rules, tools, and platforms that would be accessible to children and teachers throughout India regardless of their previous exposure to design.

The team shaped the rules so that students could learn core design-thinking skills such as empathy, brainstorming, collaboration, and reflection through the process of participating in the contest. And together, the group developed a toolkit to walk students through the simple four-step process.

The biggest challenges to the contest were overcoming the lack of infrastructure, language barriers, and a discrepancy in school resources. There was no national database of schools for easy outreach, so Riverside built relationships with NGOs across India to distribute the contest toolkit to more than 30,000 schools.

The contest receives about 2,000 entries from groups of youth in India each year. They have been addressing challenges such as illiteracy, pollution, traffic safety, care for the elderly, alcoholism, and the environment.

As of 2015, the Design for Change Contest has scaled far beyond India, and is being run in 30-plus countries, with millions of children participating. Each contest entry shows that kids really can make a big difference in the world.

Fifteen years have now passed, and in that time, I’ve developed a sincere passion for the medium. I’ve worked with many photographers both in the studio and on location, and also have shot my own work, both at IDEO and personally. Though I consider myself a designer first and a photographer second, I realize now just how much this art form has influenced the way I work. The overlapping values in each discipline have sharpened my focus and demanded a constant reassessment of line, color, and composition.

Here’s how photography can help you become a better...

1. ART DIRECTOR

Being able to identify not only the subject but also the photographic styles that will work with your concept adds richness to the message. For example, is the experience that you are creating intended for families or teenage fashionistas? Should the audience feel like they’re part of the story, or like they’re being challenged by the subject? Does the graphic design feature geometric lines or organic shapes? Try answering questions like these and choose appropriate imagery with consideration for lighting, color, tone and camera perspective to help define the experience.

2. UI & UX DESIGNER

Photographic composition translates well to design composition. In photography there are many ways to draw the viewer’s eye to the intended subject or to communicate a message. In UI/UX, it is often beneficial to limit your color palette and reduce visual noise. In photography, creating an image with areas of equal tonal values or color helps to simplify and focus. You are making conscious decisions to help the viewer (or user) make choices. Interestingly, when photography is used in conjunction with UI elements, designers often have to figure out how to maintain the legibility of text, important links, and buttons. You can sometimes get away with using a dark tint (usually an opacity of black) over the image, although this can appear dark and muddy. Use a gradient overlay rather than a full tint. It will look less heavy. Video tends to be more forgiving as your eye can distinguish the type more easily against the moving content.

3. DESIGN RESEARCHER

Most people aren’t comfortable in front of the camera, and I don’t blame them — it can feel awkward and vulnerable. Creating a good rapport with a subject can ease their stress, and is essential to capturing their true character. This is my favorite aspect of portrait photography — connecting with people — and it can be hard to do in a limited period of time.

Getting to know a person before you just start shooting away is a lot like breaking the ice before diving into an interview . As Ann Kim, a design researcher at IDEO, says, “Building trust is essential to successful design research.”

As an exercise, try photographing a colleague or acquaintance. Spend time getting to know your subject before shooting their portrait. Share your final image with a few people. Ask them who they think your subject is, and what they are like. It will be interesting to compare their feedback to the experience you had with your subject.

4. STORYTELLER

Use photographs to document each stage of a design project to visually enhance your story. Capture images of your experiences during research and inspiration trips. Record user interactions through video and photography. These tools build trust by placing the user front and center, bringing focus back to the intended audience. Build your narrative by introducing the components of your design first. For the big finale, show the human response to the product or prototype as a holistic system or journey.

Photographing your process also ensures that you have assets for sharing work with colleagues or collaborators which helps to inform and inspire.

I would love to hear how other designers and creators connect with photography — both the process and the perspective it gives. How has it influenced your work? What has it helped you to see more clearly? What hurdles has it helped you to clear? Direct message me your responses on Twitter.

Have fun shooting!

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Many moons ago, when I was a couple of years out of college working at a digital agency in London, they handed me the responsibility of directing my first photo shoot. Cue anxiety. As a junior designer, I had limited experience with professional photography. I didn’t understand enough about the medium to give adequate direction to a photographer. On the day of our shoot, it seemed like magic watching the photographer and his assistants make it happen — the combination of their technical knowledge and efficient process was fascinating.

Kelly masterfully weaves together what he calls the 12 forces, tech trends driving us into the future. In Kelly’s view, the forces—Becoming, Flowing, Filtering, Remixing, etc—lean on and reinforce each other. Each is a combination of technologies and societal factors that give us a preview of what the future will look like. In the Cognifying chapter, Kelly details the ways artificial intelligence is already catalyzing technological disruption, and imagines the infinite ways it will continue to change our experience. What happens when physical objects aren’t just smart, but also constantly learning? Like many of the chapters in the book, Cognifying is both entirely relatable and totally mind bending; you unpeel layer after layer, occasionally pausing to savor the individual seeds.

As Rodriguez notes in the episode, each chapter almost seems like a book unto itself. “It feels like what we get here at IDEO with a group of people in a project space for six months.” It turns out, some of these chapters started 10 years ago as blog posts, then went through ruthless revisions by magazine editors, and were rewritten again over the years, eventually ripening into this multifaceted fruit.

Some business books are like bananas: easy to consume, bland, too mushy. But when IDEO Futures host Diego Rodriguez dug into podcast guest Kevin Kelly’s latest book, The Inevitable, it felt like something entirely different. Kelly’s book outlines the technological trends that will drive every aspect of business going forward. It’s no banana. It’s more like a pomegranate—layered and fractal. Peeling back the layers requires work, but the rewards are juicy.

That’s the radical promise of the Circular Economy: moving from our traditional take-make-dispose economy, to one that has a closed loop, where materials, nutrients, and data are continuously repurposed.

Working with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which aims to inspire a shift to that new model, we’ve designed this guide to meet an emerging need among industry leaders: an alternative, restorative, and regenerative approach to business, one that creates new value and delivers long-term economic, social and ecological prosperity.

Transitioning the Circular Economy into the mainstream will be one of the biggest creative challenges of our time. But we believe design thinking is an ideal approach for tackling this complex, systemic, ambitious challenge.

Created for innovators, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, the guide aims to raise awareness of the Circular Economy, nurture a systems perspective, and share practical innovation methods.

We hope these ideas will galvanize readers to start designing tomorrow’s breakthrough businesses.

Get started at circulardesignguide.com.

What if we had a new way to design products, services, and businesses that were good for people, the planet, and business?

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I’ve always loved drawing. I had cool, encouraging parents who’d do things like let me draw an invitation to my 6th birthday party, then go make copies of it so that I had personalized cards to send out.

I remember discovering my mom’s college sketchbook in the basement when I was a teenager, and feeling like it gave me a window into who she was at that time of her life. I started keeping sketchbooks in 10th grade, and have managed to hold on to almost all of them since then.

In my career as a programmer, I live and work inside my computer screen. My professional body of work can sometimes feel so ephemeral—everything I’ve ever made could be wiped out by a really strong magnet. So it feels really nice to have some solid, double-layered bookshelves and bins full of sketchbooks to step back and look at sometimes.

Lately, I’ve been drawing complicated women in the evenings. A woman’s physicality is so much more political than a man’s—and to me, this makes it so much more powerful. A woman has more expectations placed on her physical looks—her clothes, her hair, even her expression—and that only makes it that much more of a provocation when those expectations are thwarted.

When I was a kid, I’d spend hours drawing Ariel from Disney’s A Little Mermaid. I'd sometimes catch myself unconsciously copying her expression with my own face. Even at 9 years old, I’d feel a little embarrassed when I felt a big, fake grin on my face. I liked Ariel and her gadgets and gizmos aplenty, but I wasn’t like Ariel. I was faking it.

Then in high school, when it was time for my exciting locking-myself-in-my-room-and-drawing-self-portraits period, I had to shift into thinking intentionally about what my face was doing while I drew from the mirror. I found that whether I was trying to make a specific kind of face, whatever came out ended up feeling like a character. And that somehow felt instantly more powerful than just the image in the mirror.

The women I like to draw now capture some element of that feeling. They may not be the definition of self-possessed, they may or may not be confident and composed, but they are self-aware, and in control of what they are putting out into the world. They may be performing a little, but they're doing it on their own terms, for their own benefit.

They’re from noir movies and punk bands. They’re artists, journalists, wastoids, and dweebies. I like to think they lived for themselves and as themselves—the most provocative act there is for any human. I admire them and want to see myself in them

“I have been drawing complicated women in the evenings lately.” Cambridge software designer Ashley Holtgraver reveals the secrets of her notebooks.

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.