Monster Moves is an app that gives kids the ability to create their very own monster dance party. Kid-approved by a rambunctious team of tiny beta testers, the app encourages children 5 and younger to exercise their creativity as they choreograph dance moves for a troupe of monsters. Kids develop an awareness of their creative control by sequencing illustrated tiles that correspond to each monster’s unique set of dance moves.

Whether it’s a twirl, flap, swing, or sway, the app enables kids to cultivate decision-making skills by drawing connections between their choices and the monsters’ dance steps. Each monster has a full repertoire of dance moves and accompanying musical beats, so kids can compose an original soundtrack and dance along. To encourage kids around the world to create and design, the app is available in English, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Italian, French, and German.

Monster Moves—available on the App Store—joins a collection of apps, including Balloonimals and Balloonimal Babies, created by IDEO’s Play Lab, made up of a team of educators, designers and toy experts who foster kids’ curiosity, play, imagination, and creative confidence.

Chronic pain changes everything. Symptoms associated with chronic conditions can make activities that were a normal part of life—getting regular exercise or even a good night’s sleep—difficult to bear.

NeuroMetrix, an innovative health-care company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, developed Quell® to help treat chronic pain in people suffering from nerve, arthritic, back, leg, and foot conditions. Using a revolutionary technology called wearable intensive nerve stimulation (WINS), this device triggers widespread relief and, in a clinical study, reduced chronic pain and use of medication in thousands of users.

NeuroMetrix came to IDEO to help create the industrial design, interaction design, and mechanical engineering to bring Quell to the consumer market. Quell is a device that is placed in a sports band with a lightweight, slim design that fits comfortably on the upper calf and delivers therapy for chronic pain in the body. Its patented OptiTherapy™ technology is customized and automatically adjusts the therapy dose for optimal relief. An accompanying app, developed by Atomic Object, allows users to track treatment sessions, measure and understand the quality of their sleep as it relates to their pain, and personalize device settings.

IDEO’s work with Quell went beyond creating the product to something bigger—reframing chronic pain. For people who are in a constant state of suffering, the ability to take some measure of control allows them to feel more like active participants in their treatment plan, and to regain confidence.

Operating a CT scanner is a delicate balancing act: The tech has to get a clear image for accurate diagnosis while reducing the patient’s overall radiation exposure. There are a lot of variables, and every second counts.

GE Healthcare, one of the country’s largest manufacturers of CT scanners, hired IDEO to redesign the console user interface to optimize the tech’s workflow, the patient experience, and the image quality. The key challenge was accommodating both junior and senior tech experience when designing a single interface, balancing support, flexibility and control. The final design allows techs to see their entire workflow up front, is optimized for “glanceability,” and draws technicians’ attention to important information. Threshold limits ensure the radiation dose never exceeds the determined amount. Ultimately, the streamlined design enables the tech to feel confident and focus on the patient’s physical and emotional well-being.

With several new hospitals using the new GE CT scanner, the impact has been evident. Within 24 hours, techs are up and running on the machines. The vision for the future looks bright and clear.

How does a 130-year-old telecom company in Bogotá appeal to a tech-savvy generation without alienating its most loyal customers? Faced with growing competition, ETB, Colombia’s oldest telecom business, wanted to modernize its entire retail shopping experience and update its branding.

The company enlisted IDEO’s help in leveraging its already highly regarded brand. IDEO created a complete blueprint for the next generation of retail centers, including in-store spaces, digital services, and new personnel role descriptions. ETB’s new retail stores are warm and bright, and self-service kiosks eliminate the need for waiting in line. The company’s brand also got a face-lift with a new color palette and brand manual.

"Working closely with IDEO, we accomplished all of our goals,” said Vice President Carlos Alberto Gómez García, “from creating organizational change to reimagining interactions with our customers to evolving the brand identity of ETB."

How did it all begin, you ask?

Long-time IDEOer Alan Ratliff was using the loo in Santa Cruz a few years back and took note of the graffiti on stall walls. He was struck by how openly and honestly strangers could share their most heartfelt feelings—in a public space. Combining this insight with the pause for thought that often strikes while seated on the throne, we thought we'd try inviting the same behavior on our own walls.

And how have people at IDEO responded?

Though the wait has admittedly increased, which brings no one joy, designing the bathroom as a place to intentionally linger and gin up ideas has become a point of pride.

Curious to learn more about how we nurture a culture of creativity? We tell the whole bathroom story, and many more, in Leading for Creativity, a new course taught by Tim Brown at IDEOU.com.

There's one stop we always make on our office tour: the john. Walls blackened by chalkboard-paint, every month presents a new opportunity to pose a controversial question and weigh in with controversial answers. Indeed, our bathroom has become one of the most—forgive us—productive places on the premises.

Unless I’m at a gig or a concert, it’s rare that I listen to music in the presence of other people. There’s background music, sure, but that feels different—I’m not really listening. Here in New York, there’s always live music on subway platforms, but we don’t listen by choice (and while it’s often great, it can also grate).

Listening to music with others need not be limited to experiences of live music, though. Deliberately listening to recorded music with other people can be a magical experience. That’s especially true if you’re hearing it in a context that's a little unexpected, such as a conference room.

It’s a luxury to be in the same space as others and not need to talk—to just be present.

In our New York studio, we’ve been gathering for a series of shared listening sessions, called the Sonic Shower. It’s a really simple format:

• every month or so
• we spend 15 minutes
• first thing in the morning
• listening to 3 to 5 pieces of recorded music
• from around the world
• that are selected and ordered around a theme
• and played on speakers in a room
• while people listen over coffee
• and glance at light program notes, if they so choose

Three things we like about the Sonic Shower

1. IT SUPPORTS OUR COMMUNITY

It’s just a lovely thing to start the day with music. And it’s lovely to be in the company of colleagues without the pressures of drumming up conversation. Listening together creates a delicate, light experience of community that works for everyone, even if you don’t feel much like chatting first thing in the morning.

2. IT’S A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION

At IDEO, it’s our job to seek inspiration wherever we can find it. It fuels great design by keeping our teams engaged. We’re great at hunting down visual inspiration in art, type, and digital experiments. But it’s easy to forget to open our ears up in the same way—to expose our brains and hearts to sounds we’ve never encountered before. Music is sonic storytelling—it opens up imaginative doors that we’d be crazy not to go through. Each Sonic Shower is a mix of songs that are somewhat easy (or familiar) and somewhat challenging (or likely different to what you might normally hear).

3. IT ENGENDERS GRATITUDE

In so much of our work, we’re interrogating experiences—figuring out what underpins them and picking out aspects that we can replicate or evolve. But during a Sonic Shower we just listen to the music. We don’t feel an obligation to discuss it or derive meaning from it there and then. It’s a luxury to be in the same space as others and not need to talk—to just be present. And, while it does help our work, we don’t treat the Sonic Shower like work. That gives us permission to receive the music as a precious gift. And gratitude feels good.

Sample a Sonic Shower

Here’s what we listened to at a winter-themed session in December. You can find the music on Spotify here.

Hvild (2009) by Hugi Gudmundsson

Now based in Denmark, Gudmundsson is one of the bright lights of contemporary Icelandic composition. A few years ago, in a neat nod to IDEO, he was awarded one of the country’s most prestigious arts prizes: the Optimism Award.

Hvild means "rest." It was written for a friend’s funeral and includes text about carrying water over a mountain...

Snow (1954) by Irving Berlin; performed by Rosemary Clooney and The Mellomen

This is one of the stand-out songs from Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. The movie version features the four leads—Clooney, Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen—singing the song together on a train. As you do.

Der Leiermann (1828) music by Franz Schubert; poem by Wilhelm Müller; performed by Jonas Kaufmann (tenor) and Helmut Deutsch (piano)

This is the final song of Winterreise (Winter Journey), Schubert’s monumental song cycle for voice and piano. Grab a whisky and listen to the whole thing sometime—it’s an intimate, crystalline marvel.

Der Leiermann translates as "The Hurdy-Gurdy Man." The hurdy-gurdy is an instrument where, to produce notes, you crank a handle that turns a greased wheel against its strings. Here’s the text of the song:

Behind the village stands a hurdy-gurdy man, cranking his instrument with frozen fingers. His begging bowl is always empty; no one listens to his music, and the dogs growl at him. But his playing never stops. “Strange old man. Shall I come with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to accompany my songs?”

The piano does so much more than simply accompany the voice. Elsewhere in the cycle, it becomes a powerful storm, the rush of water beneath ice, a creaking weathervane, and much more. Listen for how, in this song, it conjures up the sparse drone of the hurdy-gurdy.

Winter Darkness (2014) performed by Nils Økland (Hardanger fiddle) and Georg Buljo (voice)

The Hardanger fiddle is a traditional stringed instrument from Norway. Contemporary players such as Økland have coaxed the fiddle into modern music, working with collaborators near and far.

Buljo has done much the same with joik (pronounced ‘yoyk’), one of the oldest vocal traditions in Europe. A joik is both a style and a song form, deeply rooted in the Sami culture of Sweden, Norway, and northern Finland.

All that said, this is a pretty traditional piece—but modern, close recording lets us hear every crack in Buljo’s voice and every bow across the strings.

Does it sound like "winter darkness" to you?

It’s never been easier to share music with each other: Here’s a link, there’s a playlist, and off you go. At the same time, my experience of music has become more and more private, more and more mediated by headphones.

We thought about the physical context: If looking at a screen put viewers into a mode of judgment, what environment might lead them into a state of openness and wonder? After a few false starts—and ruling out marijuana—we settled on a campfire. Everyone has experienced the magnetism of a flickering flame and its power to open you up to a good story.

Burning wood was going to be a challenge indoors. But then another part of our talk occurred to us, in which we identify iPhone addiction as a scourge that prevents people from engaging in creative daydreaming. What if we took away the audience's phones and used them to stoke up the flames rather than dowse them?

Here’s how the experience played out. We gathered everyone in a conventional classroom setting and ran them through a calendar review exercise (“Look at your last week and count the hours of creative imagination”). Then we shared some recent brain science studies that point to the power of daydreaming to cultivate creativity. Diving deep into the intricacies of neuroanatomy, we could tell we were losing people.

Just before everyone fell asleep, we herded them through a back door to another part of the building. Here, in dimmed light, we had each person load a YouTube video of a campfire and set it on top of a foam-core structure made by our designers in the Chicago office. Soon we had a raging digital bonfire of iPhones, with additional sound effects from having our audience gently crinkle Post-It notes in their hands.

No campfire would be complete without taking turns strumming a guitar and telling stories of things we’d done to rediscover our creativity, so that's exactly what we did. The previously restless audience sat on the floor, gazing at the virtual fire, curious and relaxed.

Look at your last week's calendar and count the hours of creative imagination.

We turned the floor over to the attendees. What strategies did they use in their own practice?

One colleague shared a story of hanging a lamp above his desk to serve as a beacon. When the lamp was on, it let others in the studio know he was available to talk. Another shared her technique of running away from distractions—literally, on foot—until her head was clear. A third announced he would try to change his mindset by drawing for a few minutes each morning when he got out of bed. As the session ended, we asked everyone to write down something they would try in the future to spark their own creativity. Commitments were made and notes were tossed into “flames” as attendees drifted away, dreaming of a new way to work.

In sum, here are 5 ways to design a non-boring meeting:

1. Start conventionally, then lead attendees to an unknown frontier
2. Confiscate phones
3. Commit to a gimmick so they don't complain that you've taken their phones
4. Play music
5. Ask people to share personal stories

*Only one iPhone was lost during the making of this session… but seriously, who took it?

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Our quest: to invent an un-boring meeting. My colleague Michael Hendrix (above, immersed in one experiment—a bubble-bath-based brainstorm) and I were preparing a conference session about the importance of putting yourself in a creative mindset. But the way we were delivering it—two dudes standing at the front of a room with a PowerPoint deck—was about as inspiring as the DMV. We needed the audience to experience the thing we wanted to teach.

Last November, three IDEOers and I set off to South Africa for a project focused on women's health. With so many others back in Cambridge eager to stay involved, we wanted to create a way to share our experiences from 8,000 miles away.

So we transformed our project room back at IDEO into an immersive, womb-like experiential space. Inside: a single chair and VR viewer. Every day over the course of the trip, we sent virtual reality videos that teleported our colleagues from Cambridge to our happenings in the field.

From this experiment, we got a glimpse into the impressive potential of this technology to radically change our industry. Here are five reasons to consider using VR for your next design research adventure:

1. Being invisible is super powerful

The VR camera we used was pocket-sized—hardly intrusive. Its 360-degree lens also breaks users’ mental model of a camera, no longer conveying that it's staring at them, or you, or anything, really. It puts participants at ease as it quickly fades into the background.

2. You can capture background noise

Our research environments are rich and beautifully complex. But during a typical interview, we're so focused on what the participant is saying or what question we’re going to ask next, it’s hard to take it all in, and much gets lost in translation when recounting the details later on. VR gives you a way to capture the background environment, and lets you elegantly weave it into the full narrative.

3. You gain empathy from those far away

The IDEOers back home felt like they were a part of the experience—as if they were with us, in the moment, and not just hearing the story secondhand. They said the videos felt active and immersive, allowing their senses to be fully engaged. Photos and traditional video are useful, but it’s just not the same.

4. You’ll be part of the scene (like it or not).

Filming in 360 degrees means there are no degrees to hide in! And while some may argue that this is more an obstacle than a benefit, to me, it feels more honest. It captures the reality that our research is not a one-sided investigation but rather a two-way conversation and collaborative experience.

5. You’ll want to watch it again. And again.

With VR, each viewing opportunity is unique. The viewer decides where to look and what little detail to pay attention to. It’s like getting to relive a moment in a thousand different ways, without ever getting called out for staring at anyone or anything. Even more compelling: Because the experience feels so vividly real, one is left with an almost visceral sense of nostalgia that’s powerful and addictive.

I'm excited to see how design researchers continue to experiment with VR. Will we embed insights directly into the video? Will research participants be able to "walk" into virtual environments we create? The possibilities are limitless, so strap on your seatbelt (and headset).

Thanks to my project team: Ann Kim, Lauren Kim, and Greg Wolos

Today, everyone’s buzzing about virtual reality and its potential to revolutionize the gaming, news, and film industries. But there’s one application that you rarely hear about: research.

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.