American businesses are on notice: To be competitive in today’s market, you must diversify your workforce.

One way to widen the talent pool is to pay closer attention to people who have acquired their skills through alternative routes. Millions of Americans learn on the job, in community colleges, at boot camps, or through life experience. According to Opportunity@Work, more than 70 million Americans are overlooked because of degree requirements. Despite their abilities, these “STARs” (those who are skilled through alternative routes) find themselves stuck in jobs for which they’re overqualified and underpaid.

Opportunity@Work, an innovative social enterprise, reached out to IDEO to help collaborate with companies, talent developers, and STARs seeking career growth. To make this overlooked talent pool more visible, we created a campaign and video to rally companies. We also designed a data dashboard to help regional employer networks identify qualified talent and potential partnerships with skill-building programs. And to provide STARs with direct support, we scaffolded the job-seeking experience, focusing on key moments like the interview process.

It’s time for businesses searching for talent to open their eyes, look to the STARs, and see what they’re missing.

83% of HR professionals said they had difficulty finding suitable candidates in the past 12 months.

62% of Black people, 55% of Hispanic people, and 50% of non-Hispanic white people have become skilled through alternative routes, such as community college, workforce training, boot camps, certification programs, military service, or job experience.

Over the past 40 years, inflation-adjusted wages have increased 8% for college graduates with a bachelor’s degree while decreasing by 15% for people with only a high school degree.

Thousands

of state jobs in Maryland no longer require a four-year college degree

skills-based

The White House is adjusting educational requirements for I.T. professionals in favor of a skills-based approach

For many organizations, frontline workers like grocery store clerks, nurses, hospitality workers, and transit employees are an essential part of doing business.

So much so that they continued to show up at the office throughout the COVID-19 pandemic even as everyone else went remote. As the point of contact with customers and key systems, these workers often know exactly when, where, and why things don’t work, and they come up with powerful hacks and workarounds to make things better. Yet these insights and innovations rarely make it to the corporate office. And that’s a problem: large organizations often hire design and innovation consulting firms while not taking advantage of a latent source of deep, in-house expertise. It’s equally discouraging to workers who would gladly share their ideas if they were only asked. No surprise, then, that frontline workers are quitting their jobs in droves.

What could companies learn by listening?

IDEO partnered with the Ford Foundation to create the Worker Voice Design Lab, where leaders from a port authority, an airline, and a health care provider worked alongside frontline workers. That led to the planting of a seed of innovation in each organization, with interventions designed with and by workers implemented operationally at the core of the business. In one case, a group of workers zeroed in on specific problems with such clarity that they were quickly able to develop a digital prototype for testing. No one was less surprised than the workers themselves, who simply said: Well, nobody ever asked us before. Sometimes the most innovative idea a leader can have is to listen, learn, and act on their employee’s smart ideas.

A large portion of the job churn since March 2020 has been concentrated in frontline services such as accommodation, food services, and retail.

Lack of career growth is the number one reason people leave their jobs according to more than 18,000 frontline workers across 150 companies.

2 pilot initiatives

being led by frontline workers in 2022

The climate era demands new offers and new ways of working.

Would you like to be able to plug your jigsaw into your truck? How about taking a fully reclined snooze after a long day of fishing? Questions like these led to quick prototypes that ended up in Ford’s new, electrified F-150 truck, which has more outlets than the average apartment and can power your entire home. This was no small update. The way Ford reimagined the truck experience from powertrain to power nap is emblematic of how much customer-centricity is now embedded in Ford’s culture.

For well over a decade, we’ve partnered with Ford in the U.S., the EU, and China to help the organization bring to life a shared vision of the future of mobility. Together we scaled new capabilities throughout the company by running proof-of-concept “beacon” projects and, to embed this new customer-centric mindset, built a human-centered-design hub called D-Ford. This organization within the organization has become a magnet for talent and is spread across six global locations: London, Shanghai, Melbourne, São Paulo, Palo Alto, and Detroit. Ford’s commitment to serving the needs of people and the planet is what propelled the rethink of the F-150, the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. for over 40 years. It was a high-stakes move, and one that represents a major turning point for the automaker: For the first time, its primary profit source would be electric. The new Lightning is still built Ford tough, but also built for the future.‍

Passenger vehicles produced 41% of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in 2020.

One in every 20 passenger vehicles sold in the United States is a Ford F-150.

Before going electric, the Ford F-150 emitted about 100 tons of CO₂ over a 200,000-mile lifespan.

200,000

pre-orders of the electric F-150 truck, named one of Time's Best Inventions of 2021

Most Innovative Design Company of 2022

according to Fast Company

America’s leading retailers share a common goal—doing less harm to the planet.

The systemic challenges standing in the way require a bold new approach, and no single company can solve them alone. So Closed Loop Partners convened a group consisting of founding partners CVS Health, Target, and Walmart, along with 12 other leading retailers. As the innovation partner, IDEO helped launch a global search for breakthrough sustainable ideas that yielded more than 450 submissions from startups and entrepreneurs to reinvent the single-use plastic retail bag, with nine finalists entering a six-month accelerator.

New alternatives ranged from biodegradable solutions to systems that kept reusable bags in rotation. IDEO teams not only facilitated collaboration between startups and sustainability leads from partner retailers, but also provided a boost of additional expertise from industrial, data, and business designers. In a matter of months, teams were able to launch prototypes in select CVS Health, Target, and Walmart stores in California and New Jersey.

Everyone involved in the consortium knew that replacing single-use plastic retail bags is a problem that won’t be solved quickly or easily. But the Beyond the Bag challenge helped them learn that designing for the policy and infrastructure of tomorrow requires tangible steps, taken together, today.

A hundred billion plastic bags are used in the US every year, and less than 10% of them are recycled.

Every year, plastic retail bags are among the top ten items found on beaches and waterways worldwide.

9

stores tested solutions across Northern California

Millions of dollars

raised by two startups

2

startups acknowledged by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards

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For one, creating keeps you inspired, giving you something to cling onto during those moments when the daily grind gets you down. It also forces you to push your edges—creatively, mentally, maybe even physically. By exploring your own creativity on your own terms, you’re bound to uncover new ways of thinking and working that will serve you in more ways than one.

Not sure where to start? Soak up some inspiration from IDEO designers whose side projects keep them sharp and creatively engaged.

1. If you want to learn a new skill...

IDEO New York’s Alex S. calls himself a “digital alchemist”—in other words, he loves making weird stuff on his computer. When he decided to teach himself 3D coding, he embarked on a slightly unsettling but majorly entertaining side project to create an online, 3D dance floor for his virtual colleagues to get jiggy with it.

READ: How I Taught Myself to Code in 3D

2. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and make something…

In his role as a design director at IDEO Cambridge, Michael Hendrix spends his days thinking big (and staring at screens). To keep his fingers nimble and his mind open, he started a simple yet satisfying side project: Making a paper collage every morning.

READ: I Chop Up Faces Every Morning and So Should You

3. If you’re looking to start a business on the side…

Kim Powers spends her days designing the experience of working at IDEO San Francisco. Two years ago, Kim and her husband purchased an abandoned dry cleaners and transformed it into a coffee shop—and the journey turned out to be directly relevant to her work.

READ: Thinking About Starting a Side Business? Read This.

4. If you want to find a way to mash up your passions…

Legal designer Sean Hewens has a taste for the absurd. On one hand, he’s a fictional mapmaker, and on the other, he brews his own beer. Sean’s side project manages to combine those seemingly unrelated hobbies into what he calls “the ultimate beer drinking experience.”

READ: What Brewing Beer Taught Me About Design

5. If you'd like to build your kids something special…

When she’s not designing software at IDEO Cambridge, Ashley Holtgraver is busy raising her newborn son. To help him grow up healthy and unscathed by the pressures of today’s digital world, she used her programming skills to build her son a “Slow TV.”

READ: Why I'm Building a TV For My Baby

6. If you want to get involved in your community…

Jacob Waites spends his days designing for emerging tech with IDEO CoLab, but on the side, he’s a founding member of Foremost, a creative collective intent on bringing culture to small town Florida. Together, the collective gutted an old gas station and transformed it into a community art center.

READ: How We Turned an Old Gas Station into a Community Hot Spot

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At IDEO, we’re passionate about our jobs—and everything else. Our writers, designers, and researchers spend their spare time going after everything from beer making to starting their own businesses, making toys to writing stories. Why? Because big, small, physical, digital, experimental—no matter what we create, we know it’s valuable.

Some of the best lessons I learned on the topic come from my time working at IDEO.org, our non-profit arm, which focuses on improving the lives of people living in poverty.

Here are some key lessons that can strengthen your approach, no matter where you’re designing.

1. Lead with empathy

While at IDEO.org, I worked on Health XO–a team focused on designing better access to birth control. Translation? We went into urban and rural communities throughout East Africa and talked to teens about their sex lives. These conversations are very personal for anyone, but for many of the teens we spoke to, having a sex life before marriage is stigmatized and risky. In this situation, having empathy meant considering all aspects of the topic: the individual experience, cultural taboos, and the larger community.

Because the stakes were high, I found myself paying particular attention to how I conducted research. Was the setting private enough for the young women to feel safe? Was a group interview among friends a better way to structure it? Would the girl feel more comfortable if we met a few times before launching into the more personal topics?

This experience made me realize how important it is to take a moment before every interview to make sure my attitude is collaborative, not extractive—even in for-profit design work. This makes all the difference in protecting and honoring the people you’re researching.

Ask yourself: What can I do to make this experience beneficial for my research subject? How might I approach their situation with empathy, and without the end-game in mind?

2. Find out what happens when no one is watching

Maybe you’re designing something you know a bit about. Or maybe you just have an idea about what would be cool to make, and prototyping seems like a waste of time. When we’re designing in our own backyards, it’s easy to ignore prototyping. But as I began designing in less and less familiar contexts, I found the value of prototyping increased significantly. The prototypes had to speak for themselves.

When our team worked with a local organization in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, we were tasked with finding more effective ways to engage men and boys in reporting instances of gender-based violence. In order to understand the contexts where people felt most comfortable making reports, we worked with local metalworkers to build boxes where anyone could anonymously drop a written report about incidents. We installed them throughout the neighborhood: in bars, public toilets, on the street, and in barbershops. Within a few days, we began to see patterns in where reports were—or weren’t—submitted. This informed our strategy going forward.

Prototyping is especially important if you want to observe behaviors that can be difficult to suss out through interviews alone.

Ask yourself: How might we build a stand-alone prototype that more effectively gauges how people might behave when nobody’s watching?

3. Help your clients build their own design skills

Deliverables matter. But without client ownership, even the most thoughtful design can gather dust. This is true no matter who your client is. But when you factor in a separation of 9,586 miles between you and your client, skill-building suddenly feels much more important.

One of the largest scale projects I worked on with IDEO.org was with Marie Stopes International. Our goal was to design avenues for teen access to birth control information and services, across all of Kenya. We worked side-by-side with the health workers who go from town to town as traveling medics. Not only were we learning from them, but we were also able to share how they could use design thinking methods to improve their current model.

Making sure that all team members have the tools they need starts with understanding the value that you—and your clients—bring. Our partners on the ground offered incredible expertise in the local landscape, regulations, and healthcare needs. We offered tools and a way of thinking that enabled these healthcare providers to try new ways of working, based on human-centered insights and a shared vision.

Ask yourself: What are the superpowers that my client has? How can I harness this knowledge in our designs, and include them in the creative process?

See what I mean about constraints? The next time you’re approaching a design project, take a moment to consider how you approach your work. Chances are, a step back from your day-to-day perspective will help improve your process, and your output.

Constraints are a designer’s best friend. When you have a small budget or a tight timeframe, constraints help you focus, force tough decisions, and require you to take a very exact approach. The more I design, the more I have come to value constraints. When you’re working on low budgets in emerging economies, with a language barrier, or in rural conditions, embracing the design process is key.

So last summer, in search of some sort of spark, I decided to take on a personal project: I would make one animated GIF per day, every day, until I felt like stopping.

It may sound silly. GIFs often are. But it turns out, making GIFs is a great design exercise.

For one thing, they’re extraordinarily simple by design. Steve Wilhite, a computer scientist working at Compuserve, the first big online service company in the U.S., created the GIF in 1987. He had been asked to make a simple graphics format that works on all kinds of computers and could display sharp images even over slow internet connections. (Yes, in the late 80s the image quality of a GIF was considered “sharp.”) One of the first animated GIFs is this famous airplane.

What he wasn't asked to do was create a platform for animation. In fact, the spec sheet for the then-new file format clearly states that though GIFs could be used for very limited animation, that isn’t what they were made for.

But that’s largely what we use them for these days, which means we end up working under a lot of constraints. And creativity thrives under constraints! You have to experiment to leverage limitations and quirks and make them work to your advantage. When you make a GIF, you’re working with a limited color palette (less than 256 colors). Your animation has to be very short and simple or else your file size will be so big that the GIF is no longer easy to share / quick to load. The small file size might frustrate you, but it also might force you to think more abstractly about the most concise way to communicate something complicated.

Another defining constraint: GIFs generally loop. And since those loops are short, you’ll usually see this a GIF in its entirety a couple of times. The best GIFs take advantage of this constraint and make it a central component of their design.

One last incredible thing about animated GIFs: They’re not precious. People aren’t afraid to mess with them. So many animated GIFs are the result of people adding to or altering or juxtaposing existing media, which is sort of like a weird form of collaboration if you look at it from the right angle.

With all those things in mind, I started the challenge.

Since each of these were so small and self-contained (I worked on them once for a limited amount of time and then never returned to them), I felt free to make some that were purely formal or technological explorations, which is not typically my jam. I played around with the tools and applications to see the unexpected things I could do with them. Stakes were low, possibilities endless.

This project revived my passion for making things. Because of the medium’s limitations and my self-imposed one-GIF-per-day requirement, I couldn’t let what I made get too complex. The GIFs were quick, self-contained, and ultimately really joyful to create. I had to to embrace experimentation and overcome the fear of sharing "bad" design that plagues so many designers. If you force yourself to make and share something new every single day, guess what? Some of that stuff probably isn't going to be your best work, and that's all right. This is an attitude and approach that I've carried with me since starting my GIF project, and I think it's made me a much bolder and better designer.

Eventually, a cross-country move and a new job meant I was both more regularly inspired through my work and a whole lot busier, so I stopped making daily GIFs. But I have decided to keep up with weekly GIFs—and a lot of my colleagues in Chicago are now doing it with me. It sounds like a small project, but for us, it has made it easier to share half-baked ideas, inspire each other, and keep on making.

Need a little help getting started? I learned by converting from video to GIF with Photoshop, and this guide can explain how. And for those who are less technologically inclined or don’t have access to Photoshop, Giphy’s GIF Maker is a great tool.

In a previous job, I was really struggling to feel inspired or challenged. That’s not ideal when your job is to be creative and make things, so I was a bit desperate to find something that could help me rediscover the joy in making—after all, that was what had drawn me to becoming a designer in the first place.

I kept going over books, blogs, and videos, hoping for a moment where it all clicked and suddenly I became a chip whisperer. But it just wasn’t happening.

Then things changed. I bashed my fingers into my keyboard for days, failing over and over again until finally—it worked. I had a project idea that tickled my brain in just the right way. It was weird, and it was mine. I made something work, something I liked and that was just for me. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.

Looking back, I can see now that what really changed my relationship to code was letting my creative process lead. I was trying to make “useful” stuff, and that's not always necessary when you’re learning. Let the weird in! We worry about how the computer thinks when we’re learning to code, assuming that it’s smarter. It’s not. It’s a dumb box with lots of opinions. When I started worrying less about how it thought and more about what I was trying to achieve, I was able to find little toeholds in the translation process. I was able to work backwards from an idea, and break it down into tiny little steps. These steps are what every code project is made of.

I wanted to help my colleagues glimpse this feeling of creativity and control over programming—without having them touch a computer. I’m a lover of generative art and have long been inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt. His works are sets of instructions that can be interpreted and performed by anyone. This is also how a computer works. You give it instructions and it interprets them to perform some kind of function. (Literally, the part of the computer that reads code is called an “interpreter.”)

Our studio has a bi-weekly tradition called Make(Believe)Time. At each session, a member of the studio comes up with a creative activity to get us out of our heads and thinking more playfully. It might be to invent a new game, design advertisements for a future Earth invaded by aliens, or exploring our senses through making something strange. Ben Swire runs Make(Believe)Time and helped me craft a session that made this translation of code come to life with needle and thread. Each person received sewing supplies and a blank manila card (made to look like an old Fortran punch card). Everyone was asked to write simple instructions for a stitch on the card. Here are a few:

Ben and I shuffled and distributed the cards into groups. We explained that each card is a statement, a simple bit of instructions to be interpreted by the individual sewer. When each person was done with their statement card, they were to pass it to their neighbor until the group had shuffled through all of the statements. Each group of sewers would be acting like a programming function, performing a collection of simple directives.

When a group was done performing their “function,” their data (aka, the cards) was passed to another group. Much like in a computer, data was passed from one function (output) to another where it was added to (input). We were a human computer!

We were delighted to see the wild differences between each group's interpretation. That balance between constrained instruction and broad interpretation touched an interesting space between active and passive creativity. It was fun and inspiring to see the wide range of outputs that came from such simple instructions.

We’d love to hear how you explain complex processes through tangible experience. Send us your story!

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Despite what I was led to believe, learning to code was excruciating. Throughout the process, I was convinced that I was dumb and should just get really, really good at Excel because that’s as close as I’d ever get to making a computer do anything by typing at it.

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.