Nauto, a startup in the automotive industry that’s building a system to help make driving safer and smarter, approached IDEO to collaborate on the design of their latest device. It includes a proprietary dual-camera system that can be directly installed in just about any vehicle to enable safety features. Through real-time data analysis, high-definition recording, and LTE connectivity, Nauto’s device records and analyzes activity inside and outside the car, and automatically uploads information to a smart cloud.

The device can detect if drivers are distracted based on their eye and head movements, risky maneuvers such as tailgating or swerving, and dangerous environmental conditions such as unexpected obstacles. In these scenarios, the product alerts the driver through audio feedback inside the vehicle.

Over time, the data collected by Nauto reveals bigger insights and trends in driving behavior, ranging from causes of collisions to patterns in driver distraction. These insights are stored in a secure cloud platform and made accessible to both drivers and fleet managers. Drivers can benefit from Nauto’s VERA score—personalized feedback based on their driving performance—and fleet managers can gain access to a complete picture of how each of their drivers are performing across locations. Through these data-driven insights, Nauto gives drivers and fleet managers the tools to stay safe on the road.

To help launch Nauto’s device, IDEO prototyped several iterations of the product’s housing, cabling, and ergonomics, resulting in a clean aesthetic and an easy installation process for users. The engineering team also prioritized materials that would protect against extreme temperatures and sunlight exposure. Most importantly, IDEO helped design a camera device that can be seamlessly integrated into almost any model of any vehicle, greatly expanding its potential in the market.

Nauto’s latest system began rolling out to commercial fleets and strategic OEM and Insurance partners in late 2016.

Photos by Nauto.

Most people are used to watching their favorite shows whenever and wherever they want these days. But 10 years ago, that wasn’t the case. Far ahead of the curve, HBO realized the potential for carving out its own audience, and created one of the first original on-demand offerings that allowed viewers to cut the cord from cable and satellite providers. HBO came to IDEO for help in navigating the future of its audience experience that would be distinguished from cable, and would put full control in the hands of the viewer.

With special emphasis on HBO’s Video On Demand offering, IDEO began early-phase research to explore people’s experience with the media brand and found that it centered largely on the viewing of HBO shows, the most critical part of the media experience. But other important media-related activities—learning about new shows, planning to watch new shows, creating the right viewing environment, saving and sharing viewing experiences—were either underserved or controlled by HBO’s cable and satellite partners. IDEO concluded that HBO’s challenge would be to develop a media service that holistically addressed the media consumer’s entire journey and allowed subscribers to experience HBO wherever and whenever they wanted.

To demonstrate the value of the entire media consumption journey, IDEO created a comprehensive product development and user experience vision. This vision was delivered in the form of an immersive environment, built on-site at HBO, which conveyed key customer values and behaviors and presented a roadmap for building the appropriate products and services. Included in this roadmap were future scenarios and tools that invited prototyping and exploration.

"The collaboration was foundational for us, serving as our guidepost for creating more personalized on-demand and online viewer experiences. This early work influenced what would become our streaming presence—from categorization to how the products rolled out—and ultimately led us to design the next generation of user-inspired products for a more highly engaged audience," said Bernadette Aulestia, Executive Vice President of Global Distribution at HBO.

In the 10 years since the original collaboration with IDEO, HBO has pioneered the path forward for media brands by setting the standard for a world-class array of content and accompanying viewer experience model.

While the designs of most cutting tools have evolved significantly over the years, multi-tools have remained largely the same. Recognizing this gap, SOG, an established leader in the specialty knife industry, collaborated with IDEO to identify new opportunities for innovation in the multi-tool space. The teams specifically aimed to expand SOG’s offerings into a more general lifestyle category and position them as adaptable tools for people’s everyday needs.

IDEO's research and industrial design work resulted in a family of four new multi-tools known as Baton. A sleek, black, minimal design ties together the complete set of tools, whose features vary to include bottle-openers, flashlights, scissors, pens, and pliers.

Each multi-tool’s range of capabilities, combined with its slim, compact structure that looks like a pen, makes it a travel-friendly companion for the office or the great outdoors. And its intuitive design makes it easy to use for anyone, regardless of their experience with multi-tools.

SOG’s new family of multi-tools launched in January 2017.

Every year, millions of students attend career colleges with hopes of landing jobs after graduation, but many end up unemployed and in debt, evidence of a significant disconnect between the goals of the students, educators, and institutions. Administrators are tasked with getting students in the door, but not getting them to graduation and students are focused on getting a degree to secure their future employment, while employers are looking for graduates who have professional skills beyond their new degrees.

In an effort to change this failing model, the ECMC Foundation engaged IDEO to help design a radical new vision for the future of career colleges. IDEO and the ECMC Foundation sought to develop a vision that could be used as a benchmark for the sector, showcasing a student-centered educational experience with a business model that aligns students, employers, and institutions as partners in advancement.

At the heart of the student experience is extended support along the learning journey, from path-finding and job placement to ongoing career support for alumni, helping students mindfully navigate their education from matriculation through employment.

A key insight on the employer side was the need to prioritize the parallel development of students’ soft skills—like collaboration and communication styles—and hard skills, ensuring graduates are not only properly trained in the unique skills of their chosen career path, but also prepared to adapt to professional environments.

Institutional accountability became a core factor in the vision, directly linking the college system’s success to the student experience: as job placement improves, so do the school’s earnings and future enrollment rates. The final result is a student-centered educational experience and business model that aligns students and schools as true partners in a better life.

Key elements of IDEO’s recommendations are being implemented as pilot projects at Zenith Education Group—a nonprofit provider of career school training, funded by the ECMC Foundation.

Many students have the motivation to pursue higher education, but are dealing with external pressures and realities that make completion challenging.

So I decided to pursue my own absurd hobby that would combine my twin passions for beer brewing and fictional cartography into what I hope is the ultimate beer drinking experience. Or at least the most ridiculous. I call it Bean Brew.

We talk a lot about the user journey at IDEO. It’s a way to break down how a person experiences important moments when interacting with a product or service. While bottling my first few batches several years back, I obsessed over the taste of the beer and the bottle's label design—two key moments in the beer drinker's user journey. But then I realized that there are so many other moments that I was leaving out of the design process.

So I asked myself: Could I contextualize the combined drinking experiences of each person who received a bottle of Bean Brew? Could I turn that into a map? And could I deliver that map back to Bean Brew drinkers months later in the form of a delightful silkscreen poster? That became my design challenge.

So what have I learned from my side gig?

1. Quantitative data inspires design

Bean Brew has taught me a lot about how to integrate quantitative survey data into a cohesive storytelling experience (something we’re trying to do more and more of at IDEO these days). I start with questions like these, which I include as part of a survey wrapped around the bottle’s neck:

• What are your three favorite board games?
• Complete the following sentence: If I were on a ship for 1 year, my ideal job position would be ________.

I then transform the responses I get from people who received a particular batch of Bean Brew into a poster that looks something like this.

2. There's more to design than what meets the eye

Sometimes, as you go through the design process, you realize the thing you think you're designing (a bottle of beer) isn’t what you're actually designing (a beer drinking experience). This is true for most of the projects I’ve worked on at IDEO, and for Bean Brew, too.

3. Side gigs = side skills

Finally, I’ve learned a bunch of tangible skills throughout the process of making Bean Brew: Arc GIS (cartography software), best practices for glue adhesion (getting elaborate labels to stick to bottles), and how to use the power of analog experience to blow away anything an iPhone can do. I’m confident that I’ll be applying at least some of these skills to an upcoming IDEO project.

Bean Brew is my attempt to bring as much joy and delight to my hobbies as possible, and in doing so, I find that I’m more more creative and productive as part of my day job. And so much happier.

I am not training for any marathons. Just an expedition to Antarctica. In a submarine. With beer.

Years ago, I was working at a law firm in Boston. Many of my colleagues had the same hobby—training for the Boston Marathon in the middle of the frigid New England winter. This was what they did for “fun.” I was so amazed that these people with such unhappy day jobs would choose what seemed like such an unhappy hobby to fill their nights and weekends. Many years and two careers later, I moved to San Francisco to take a job as a designer at IDEO. In my first months here, I remember being struck by all of the wonderful and absurd hobbies that my new colleagues had. It was a delightful and inspiring contrast to my dark days in Boston.

For this method of animation, make sure to use only lines in your Illustrator file. The idea is to animate the lines across their own path, so the way you design them will play a big part on how elaborate your animation will be.

Watch this video for a quick step-by-step guide to animating lines in After Effects:

1. When your Illustrator file is ready, import it to After Effects. You can simply drag your Illustrator file to the Project area or go to File > Import > File.
2. Drag the imported file to the Timeline. It will automatically create a Composition.
3. Now you must turn your Illustrator file into Outlines that After Effects can control. On the timeline, right click on the layer and select "Create Shapes from Vector Layer.
4. The next step is to animate your outlines. For that, you will need to add a Trim Paths feature to your new layer.
5. On Trim Paths, use keyframes for Start/End to change when and where you want your paths to animate. If your file has multiple lines, you can choose to animate them simultaneously or individually.

This technique is a simple and effective way to create powerful motion graphics for storytelling, user interface behaviors, or even a simple animated gif. Hope you enjoyed it!

Adobe After Effects is one of my favorite tools for prototyping user interfaces, creating video scenarios to communicate a context of use, or simply crafting stories through animation. It's a tool that allows you to explore and visualize ideas, and there's no right or wrong way to use it. Here are a few tips for using After Effects to animate vector lines imported from Adobe Illustrator.

So, when the opportunity comes up, I like to turn off the computer and focus on creating artifacts. While an object is just a thing that serves its purpose until it’s tossed out, an artifact sparks an invisible conversation, a connection between the human who made it and the human experiencing it. Even something that people don’t think twice about, like an event name tag, deserves to be well designed.

That belief drove me to create a collection of one-of-a-kind name tags for a CoLab event. I wanted to make something with my hands that would bring a level of craft to our content. The tags served as the icebreaker for more than a few conversations, and reminded people at the tech-focused event that there's a human element to everything. Many attendees we reached out to a month later said that they still had the tag on their desks.

The process was simple, but arduous: I laser cut blanks, etched the names, spray painted each tag using unique colors and angles, and finished it off with acrylic screen printing ink to make the names readable.

Here's how I did it, step by step:

1. Creating the blanks

I designed the negative of the template so that I could later use it as a jig. I used 18 x 24 inch sheets of 3mm acrylic, so that with the name tags at 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches, I could fit about 32 comfortably in each batch (as opposed to 38 if I used all available space and threw away the negative).

Acrylic sheets tend to melt and then cool quickly in the laser cutter, leading to possible sticking, so I usually add about .2mm to my thickness settings to compensate (i.e. I was using 3mm acrylic, but put 3.2mm in the settings). There are two benefits: One, you guarantee that you actually cut through the sheet. Two, it also gives you a little bit of wiggle room so you don’t end up with hard to pick out joints.

Pro tip: The key to making the most of your acrylic is to leave space for future cuts on the same piece. Instead of designing my reusable jig with all the name tags in the center, I threw them to one side so that I could use the other end again. After I cut the jig, I could get 38 tags out of each subsequent batch because I could simply throw away the negative. Another bonus: When there’s excess acrylic on one end, you can always tell which side goes in which direction.

2. Etching the blanks

Once the blanks were cut, I needed to take the protective plastic off of one side, so that I had a clean surface to etch onto. I peeled the tags, slipped my template jig back into the cutter, and dropped the blanks into place.

The etch file is the same as the template jig, just with a red cut box around the perimeter of the file denoting the edge of the acrylic.

Once I had an etch file ready to go, all I had to do was push the file to the top left of the cutting area and check the focus points of the laser on the first tags on the first and second rows. Since the etch file is in the same grid form as the old cut file, everything is already spaced for me. The etch settings held ink best at around 74 to 76 percent power at 100 percent speed.

One final thing to note: We don’t want to cut anything (we’re just etching), so after setting my etch power, I set the cutting lines to 0 percent power and 100 percent speed, so we just blow right past them.

3. Taping the etched tags*

Once the blanks were etched, I peeled the plastic off of the back of the tags, then covered the etched side of each in painters tape to keep them clean.

4. Spraying the tags

After everything was taped, I slapped some aluminum foil in the vent hood and got to work spraying each tag. The process allowed me to bring out some of the old airbrush tricks my dad showed me as a kid, like holding a tongue depressor at a 60 degree angle in front of the nozzle to create thicker splatter. I used two to three colors for each tag, at varying angles.

I used Montana brand spray paints, and I definitely recommend using the BLACK formula. Over the course of the project, it dried on the acrylic within four and-a-half minutes, which is pretty insane. The GOLD formula was comparable, but my run of the mill Krylon paints took much longer, so it’s worth the extra bucks to buy Montana.

Pro tip: If you’re spraying a bunch of parts in a hood, aluminum foil is actually a great material for coverage as it tends to not stick to your parts like paper.

5. Sealing the tags and revealing the beauty

After the sprayed tags had dried, I hit the painted side with a couple quick coats of the Montana clear matte varnish so that they wouldn’t stick to each other. When everything had dried, I peeled off the painter’s tape—my favorite part of the project.

6. Applying the ink inlay

Next came the most time-consuming part: the ink inlay. I used speedball acrylic screen printing ink for its fast drying time, and how easily it wipes off acrylic. I liberally brushed and swabbed the ink into the etch using a Q-tip, then quickly wiped the excess off with a paper towel. Once dry, they were ready to go.

That's it!

*Imperfect process: I know what you’re thinking—why didn’t you just remove one side of the plastic before etching, spray that side, then remove it from the other side, then etch that? I did! After a few batches, I added the taping step because I noticed the spray paint was eating away the plastic coating that kept the paint off the front of the tags.

I work with CoLab, IDEO’s tech-focused R&D group. I’m also someone who’s committed most of my life to craft. Luckily, my day job allows me to bring the two together. But the minute you start making a living from your craft, problems start to surface. You get burnt out. You compromise your vision to deliver things on time. At that point, you're no longer transforming objects—you’re just pushing matter around.

I snapped this photo in the Amazon jungle town of Iquitos, Peru. A jar full of individually cut blister packs sat in the corner of a general store set up in front of a family’s home. By making individual doses available—not even a daily dose, but a single, one-time dose—more families were able to afford treatment for their ailments. In a community where money is very scarce, this family was filling a very real, pressing need that wasn't being addressed by local stores.

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.

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.