For the socially-conscious, investing can be a tricky proposition. The same people who wish to vote with their wallets may find that their options for investment funds and 401K plans are rife with companies that violate causes they believe in. So far, there have been few options in the marketplace that give consumers the opportunity to put their money in financial products that not only cut out environmental and social offenders, but actually contribute to the well-being of the environment and society.

Dave Fanger, a financial professional, was determined to design a solution. He approached IDEO to help create a startup venture for socially-conscious investors. Pacific Life, a Fortune 500 financial services company and Fanger’s employer at the time, offered the resources to develop and launch the idea. The online impact investment platform gave consumers the opportunity to invest in high-growth industries that are addressing global, environmental, and social challenges. Swell rigorously screened companies for both impact and performance, so consumers could be confident that their investments were in line with their values.

A holistic approach

Embedded as core team members, IDEO designers worked alongside Swell’s founder to shape the company. In just one year, they went from an initial concept and prototype to an SEC-registered investment adviser with a fully developed business model, a digital platform with initial investors, and well-defined branding that set the look and feel of the values-driven company. The IDEO team helped to hire the initial team of employees, working to ensure that the fintech startup would have the creative talent it needed to operate post-launch, as well as a defined culture that would help it grow.

A new investment platform

From the outset, it was important for the team to build an innovative, digitally-fluent, and customer-centered platform to make it easy for investors to back causes they care about. Working in close collaboration with software development partner Carbon Five, Swell and IDEO committed to act nimbly, take risks, move fast, and ditch decks for prototypes. Understanding the motivations of the investor—their values and what drives their investment decisions—was key, so the team leveraged IDEO’s network to form a consumer council, which helped to quickly iterate and refine prototypes throughout the duration of the product development process. Having that core group involved every step of the way made it easy for the team to keep consumers at the center of the design and validate key decisions quickly.

Swell offered consumers portfolios of companies that work to solve some of today's biggest challenges. The six impact portfolios offered were: green tech, renewable energy, zero waste, clean water, healthy living, and disease eradication.

As of June 2019, Swell had attracted over 15,000 investors⁠—more than half under the age of 34⁠—and $35 million AUM. Nearly 40 percent of investors were making investments on a recurring basis.

Learning to code isn’t just about knowing symbols and syntax—it can help unlock kids’ imagination by inspiring them to build new things and interact with everyday objects through discovery and play.

With that in mind, Google Creative Lab came to IDEO to help with user experience and product design on their new coding tool for children. The result of the collaboration, Project Bloks, is a simple and interactive experience that teaches kids how to code using physical blocks. This establishes a new paradigm for learning computer science: it takes a language typically only understood through screens and keyboards, and makes it tangible.

Project Bloks was also designed as an open hardware platform, enabling developers and educators to build tangible programming applications that are innovative, educational and fun.

Kid-centered design

From the very beginning, how kids physically play and learn were at the center of the project. Designers quickly iterated using sketches, foam core, paper, Play-Doh, and 3D-printed models to see how slight changes informed children’s experiences. Understanding what deepened kids’ engagement, increased their curiosity and changed their behaviors drove the language, taxonomy, architecture, and physical form of Bloks.

Because play and physical building is an important way in which many kids develop skills, designers began with a set of blocks and sought to help them discover coding through tangible objects. Each block was given a specific function and shape, guiding kids to arrange, combine, and rearrange the blocks to create commands and control things like robots or speakers in the real world. Children could also create block patterns together by physically building on each other’s ideas.

An inside look at the design process. Video by Google.

Designing for early learners also forced the team to rethink how a new language could be taught. An early version of the blocks was based on how programmers typically code, from top to bottom. However, the team quickly realized that the orientation had to be driven by the child’s natural instincts. Given young children are just learning to read from left to right, designers observed that the switch in directions was too confusing and changed the arrangement of Bloks commands to go left-right in addition to top-bottom.

The final outcome of Project Bloks was an interactive coding kit comprised of three key parts - pucks, baseboards and a brainboard. The puck is a critical component that controls a command, whether it’s an on/off switch or the ability to move in a particular direction. It’s the piece that enables children to move from words to the world of graphics and play. The puck is easy to produce and can take an unlimited range of forms and functions, enabling the Bloks system to scale.

The baseboard reads the puck’s instruction and is activated when a puck is placed on top. The brainboard provides the power and connectivity. When hooked up to a baseboard or a chain of baseboards, the brainboard sends the instructions—turn left, jump, get louder—to a connected object, like a rocket or a speaker.

The boards can be rearranged, sequenced, and packaged however kids like, opening up a vast realm of possibilities. Children can code anything from a toy robot drawing a shape on a piece of paper, to a sensor turning on a fan when the temperature gets too high.

Enabling innovation for education

Beyond a tangible coding kit, what makes Bloks unique is that it’s an open platform. Educators, developers, and designers can build on it to accelerate new ways of teaching and exploring tangible programming. The platform can fit into various curriculums around the world. The pucks can take on different shapes and graphics. The material used can be fabricated by 3D printing.

The Bloks platform is a new vernacular that allows kids to interact with the language of code in a way that’s less prescriptive and more open-form, like a sandbox. And the more kids play with Bloks, the more opportunities they discover for what they can create with a little bit of code.

For students who are the first in their families to pursue higher education, navigating college can often feel like navigating a foreign country. Challenges like not having enough money or poor access to support services can make graduating an insurmountable hurdle. In fact, only 55% of these students in the United States end up completing their degrees.

To help change this statistic, IDEO partnered with Beyond 12, an organization that provides personalized, virtual coaching to first-generation college students to help them learn how to register for classes, apply for financial aid, and much more. The challenge was to scale Beyond 12’s successful coaching model using technology in order to benefit as many students as possible.

In 2014, IDEO designed the MyCoach app, with the goal of helping students take ownership of their education and feel in control of their future. After the early version of the app was named as a finalist in the prestigious Robin Hood Foundation College Success Prize, Beyond 12 piloted the product with 3,500 college students across the US. Following the pilot, Beyond 12 and IDEO went back to work, using the resulting insights and data to design the next evolution of MyCoach.

First and foremost, IDEO sought to develop a more flexible model for Beyond 12 to enable scalability of the offering. As some students need more support than others, a blended business model was envisioned to recognize the spectrum of students’ needs. Engaging in-app content forms a supportive layer that helps students get organized, stay on track, and learn the skills they need to stay in college, while students who need more hands-on assistance can connect directly with coaches. An invisible data layer works behind the scenes to assess student risk and dynamically tailor student support throughout the school year.

Once the app’s model was solidified, creating a user experience that compels students to use it became essential to its efficacy. Growing up with technology has reshaped how many students engage with the world, and tools like Snapchat have set a new dynamic for participation. Youth today are the masters of their own digital worlds, fluidly jumping between conversations, engaging with stimulating content and contributing their own perspectives. As a result, MyCoach needed to speak students’ language and to create content that was authentically youthful and effective in order to be effective. By drawing inspiration from popular social sites, digital experiences and games, the team designed a user experience that keeps pace with a digitally native state of mind.

IDEO Designer, Isabela Sá explains the approach that led to MyCoach’s design and content strategy, “We created an app that makes no distinction between content and utility. We borrowed the content-first approach of social apps like Snapchat and Instagram and used it to teach students the skills and strategies they need to graduate. With that, the digital experience became more human. The intricate system that we had designed to power the whole thing was hidden below the surface. For students, the app was just the means to learn how to help themselves and get in touch with a coach when they needed one.”

Development is underway for the next version of MyCoach, which will allow Beyond 12 to scale its offering to reach exponentially more students in need.

Coca-Cola is one of the world's most iconic brands. More than 5,000 people work at its global headquarters in Atlanta.

Back in 2010, Coca-Cola found itself at a major crossroads. As the company grew, it became clear that in order to stay competitive, any kind of campus renovation would have to take into account a vision of the future of how people work at Coca-Cola. Before the company hired architects, they came to IDEO to help design this important part of their 2020 vision strategy; ultimately the redesign would change the way the company works, plays, and profits.

Imagery courtesy of Coca-Cola, Gensler, and IDEO

The answer is yes, of course. And when companies don’t fix themselves, we feel it in our products and services. The company has designed something—often a digital thing—that fails to give us what we need, and we walk away cursing the air, wondering if the leaders of the company have ever used the service themselves.

But making things that work for humans isn’t easy. We change every five minutes. How can organizations be confident that what works today will work tomorrow? It’s a lot easier to just slap on a Band-Aid and hope it won’t rip off with the first sudden move.

There are vastly different perspectives out there about how to make change happen and stick, and we’re curious about them all, so this fall, we invited five friends who’ve led major transformation projects at their companies to IDEO’s London studio and for an open conversation.

Here are the top 5 takeaways from our Make Change event:

1. Be a curious leader

“The problem I see in a lot of organizations is they have a lot of great tools but the top leaders don’t use them. If you’re not prepared to do what you’re asking everyone else to do, then why should you expect them to? If you want to understand what’s broken in your company, try entering your own expenses.”

—Mike Bracken (Public Digital), the guy who led digital transformation for the UK government (GDS), a model that’s been replicated in Canada, Argentina, Peru, Australia and the U.S. (and he has a letter from Obama to prove it).

If Mike had one piece of advice for making change happen, it would be this: “Go and sit next to a user when they’re using your service or product. I make sure to do six hours of that every month.”

2. Question accepted behaviors

“If you’re in a self-contained moment as an organization, I’d highly recommend that you build an innovation team that sits on the side and role models something really weird and strange, questioning the accepted behaviors. Having a constant dialogue and exchange with other perspectives is what makes companies competitive. But not a team that sits in the ivory tower. Our innovation team has reinvented itself three times in three years according to what the business needs."

—Anne Pascual, VP of Design at Zalando, Europe’s leading online fashion platform, which delivers to 24 million customers and grew its revenue to around €4.5 billion last year.

Anne's advice? “Think big. We tend to be obsessed with the details, but there’s much bigger opportunities out there.”

3. Don't build an innovation lab

“Innovation is far too important to be outsourced. I’m not a believer in gluing an innovation lab onto the side of your organization. If your culture is not innovative, that’s not going to sustain. You’ve got to fix your culture first if you want to be in this for the long term. It’s got to be everyone’s job when they wake up in the morning. And you then have to create the air cover as a leader for that to happen, which is all about creating a no-blame culture. You can’t innovate as fast as we do without sometimes screwing up. We do it regularly, and when we do, we try to learn from it, but we know it just goes with the territory of being a disruptor.”

—Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at Ocado. After a deal with Kruger in May, Ocado’s market cap blew past Marks & Spencer's—a sign of the tectonic shift happening in retail.

Paul's advice would be this: “Tell the truth about what's broken.”

4. Be a DJ

“A good leader is like a DJ—they play the music that makes people move, but they should accept that people will move in different ways and what’s important is that you move to the same rhythm and move forward.”

—Beatriz Lara Bartolomé, former Chief Innovation Officer of BBVA, and EMEA Advisor Director of Globant, a digitally-native technology services company.

To make change happen, Beatriz would advise you to “ask your teams what they think should be improved.”

5. Launch beacon projects

“Launching a product to market in a short period of time is the best organizational change program—you’re going to learn the most about how the company behaves. We call these projects that have a change agenda 'beacons.' Select them for their ability to help you build a new muscle. If you’re not building a new muscle with every project, you’re wasting an opportunity to learn.”

—Luis Cilimingras, IDEO partner and managing director of our London studio. He leads digital transformation and change projects, including starting an innovation studio called La Victoria Lab that creates new products, services, and experiences for Peru’s emerging middle class.

Luis's best advice: “Keep seeking out inspiration. It’s your job to be inspired.”

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Take a behind-the-scenes look at the event.

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People are always looking for ways to improve themselves. But what about companies? Companies are just collections of people, so it makes sense that they’d build up all kinds of bad habits over time. Shouldn’t our organizations be on a self-improvement regimen, continuously trying to fix what’s broken?

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“What's going on there?” asked my colleague Ed, in his usual bouncing demeanor, pointing at my phone propped in its handy, commonly-found, IKEA glassware receptacle.

I was in the last weeks of a project, building out a mobile-first website to showcase our final deliverables. I was going about my usual process, with a minimal set up: designing the UI in Sketch, mirroring the artboards on my phone.

“What? This?” I replied, adjusting the angle of my glass full of iPhone.

“Yeah. I've never seen anyone do that before,” he chimed back.

It dawned on me that this behavior in my design quiver—something I'd been doing since my very first mobile design moment—may not be that common.

Instead of having to stop and pick up my phone every time I need to check my work, I just plop it in a glass, adjust the angle, and check my design’s mobile readiness with a glance.

The adjustability and the “there's probably one lying around” factor of a drinking glass elevates it to a handy design tool that I’ve used throughout my career.

And once you’ve shipped the design, it also makes for a great vessel for a celebratory swally.

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Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

Creativity Challenge #3: Jumpstart an ideation session

Here’s one quick, simple exercise to get creative muscles warmed up. We learned it from David’s mentor, Bob McKim, back when David was a product design student. It’s called Thirty Circles, and you can do it on your own or in a group. The goal is to push people to test their creativity by turning circles into recognizable objects in a very short period of time.

Tool: Thirty Circles Exercise
Participants: Solo or groups of any size
Time: 3 minutes, plus discussion
Supplies: Pen and a piece of paper (per person) with 30 blank circles on it of approximately the same size. (We recommend printing it on an oversized sheet of paper. You can also just ask everyone to draw their own 30 circles on a blank piece of paper.)

Instructions

Step 1: Give each participant one 30 Circles sheet of paper and something to draw with.

Step 2: Turn as many of the blank circles as possible into recognizable objects in three minutes (think clock faces, billiard balls, etc.)

Step 3: Compare results. Look for the quantity or fluency of ideas. How many people filled in ten, fifteen, twenty or more circles? (Typically most people don’t finish.) Next, look for diversity or flexibility in ideas. See if the ideas are derivative (a basketball, a baseball, a volleyball) or distinct (a planet, a cookie, a happy face). Did anyone “break the rules” and combine circles (a snowman or a traffic light)? Were the rules explicit, or just assumed?

Tips from the field

Besides being a great warm-up exercise, Thirty Circles offers a quick lesson about ideation. When you generate ideas, you are balancing two goals: fluency (the speed and quantity of ideas) and flexibility (ideas that are truly different and distinct). We know from experience that it’s easier to have a great idea if you have many to choose from. But if you have a lot of ideas that are just variations on a theme, you might really only have one idea with twenty-nine other versions. When you combine fluency and flexibility, you can generate a rich array of concepts to choose from.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems.

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

How could Fintona make their newbies feel comfortable saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll find out?” They began by experimenting on themselves. Their first idea was a goofy one: arm each newbie with a Bat Signal—a flashing red police light that newbies could trigger any time they were stumped to summon help from across the call center.

The first day of the experiment, it was clear that the lights weren't working. Newbies who were already uncomfortable saying, “I don't know,” were even more uncomfortable turning on a flashing emergency light that screamed to the whole floor, “I DON’T KNOW!” When other service agents saw the signal, they just assumed that someone else would jump in and help. The experiment failed.

The team needed to iterate. They thought that maybe each Bat Signal needed a Batmanager—a dedicated leader who could watch the lights and swoop in to save the day. So, the team moved the lights to the managers' offices and asked them to be on the lookout.

That didn't work either. Newbies still felt singled out, and the Batmanagers weren’t at their desks often enough to act as a reliable safety net. Realizing the team needed a private way to call for help, they created a private chat channel—the Bat Chat—where newbies could connect directly with experts from Fintona’s specialized departments.

But the experts didn’t answer any questions. In fact, the only answers that newbies got on the Bat Chat were from other newbies. That gave the team an idea: They would launch the Bat Chat across the entire call center. They figured that veteran agents must know the answer to 80 percent of newbies’ questions, and they might be a safer resource than some stranger in another department.

Finally, success. The Bat Chat took off like crazy. Surprisingly, it wasn’t newbies who first started using the chat, but veteran service agents asking each other questions. As more veteran voices spoke up (or typed up), the newbies started asking their own questions and getting immediate answers.

The Bat Chat was the perfect solution for this team. But, there was no special analysis that they could have done beforehand to figure that out. No market research or benchmarking data would have suggested it. They had to build, fail, iterate, and repeat to find the answer. And once they found it, it didn’t need careful change management to extend it to the rest of Customer Support. It spread by word of mouth, and became a source of pride because the team found their own solution.

Fintona learned some remarkably similar lessons to what Harvard professor Teresa Amabile found in her two-year study of the culture of helping at IDEO: Newbies don’t need to be singled out. They need to see that everyone—even their most successful colleagues—need help sometimes.

This post is an excerpt of a longer article I wrote for Harvard Business Review. Read the full story here.

This article is excerpted from a longer story in Harvard Business Review.

Fintona Financial (not the company’s real name) was growing fast—so fast that their Customer Support call center had tripled in size. They couldn’t recruit fast enough. Many new service agents were pulled out of their two-month training program in as little as two weeks. Eager to look good in front of their bosses, these newbies struggled to answer tricky questions—all too often, they would give a right-sounding answer instead of saying, “I don’t know,” and asking someone for help. This not only triggered inceased call volumes but also began to erode Fintona’s customer satisfaction scores.

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.