There’s a lot of excitement in the education sector about the need to equip students with skills like critical thinking, collaboration, and communication, to prepare them for a global, innovation-driven economy. But that’s easier said than done. Major changes are needed to move from a decades-old model towards creating new ways to educate students. Schools and their leaders, particularly in low-income contexts, often lack the necessary resources and support.

But given the right tools, school leaders can be the key to bringing this much-needed change to their schools. Knowing this, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation partnered with IDEO and the Stanford d.school to create School Retool, a four-month-long professional development fellowship that trains principals to take a do-it-yourself approach to school change by conducting small, scrappy experiments called “hacks.”

The best part: They use the resources they already have available to address their schools’ needs now, without waiting for external funding or assistance. School Retool is available to principals at public schools where 60 percent or more of students qualify for free and reduced lunch, which is a common measure of poverty. The School Retool program provides research-based strategies for improving student outcomes, as well as training and one-on-one coaching on how to redesign school culture through easily achievable changes.

A Scaled Approach

School Retool addresses a common challenge in creating change across schools: Each school has its own people, culture, and needs, so programs need to be flexible. The fellowship helps school leaders define their aspirations, and provides them with inspiration through “Big Ideas” that have proven to be successful in different contexts in education. It then supports them to start small with hacks that help them learn how to implement these ideas in their own school. The program scales through regional cohorts of principals who learn from each other as they go through a process of setting goals, designing hacks, reflecting on the learning and progress, and making improvements to the next iteration.

Small Steps Toward Big Change

As School Retool has rolled out at schools across the country over the past two years, it’s becoming evident that small changes are adding up to major progress, and that the small hacks approach is helping leaders go from planning to doing. Take, for example, Marthaa Torres, the principal of a low-income San Francisco high school who started with a small experiment with one struggling student, trying to create a more personalized learning plan for him. “The hacking approach is a framework that will help me eventually get to the kind of school that I’m trying to create,” Torres said. To build on the learnings of her “hack,” she created and expanded a personalized coaching program for the student’s peer group of older Latino boys. Her goal is to roll out additional advisory support in the next school year. What started as a “hack” to give agency to a single student is beginning to affect the school-wide culture by incorporating student voice into decision making.

Creating a Movement

The School Retool fellowship launched in 2015 with a pilot for 16 principals from seven San Francisco Bay Area school districts, reaching more than 12,000 students. School Retool has since hosted cohorts for school leaders in Washington D.C., Detroit, Virginia, Idaho, and Colorado. By the end of 2016, 164 school leaders of over 114,000 students had participated in the fellowship program.

In addition to the in-depth work with school leaders, School Retool is creating a national dialogue around change in schools. Its first national effort drew more than 1,500 principals in the Shadow A Student Challenge, who spent a day walking in students’ shoes to build empathy and gain insight into their students’ school lives.

Learn more about how more school leaders are enacting change: bringing a sense of true belonging to a school’s culture; engaging students as active learners; hacking towards literacy; retooling for equity; and more.

WATCH: Marthaa Torres: Adopting a Hacking Mindset on Vimeo.

Remember your first View-Master? The sound and feel of that iconic camera-snapping motion, the excitement of seeing those vivid images in the form of your own personal slideshow? Introduced in 1939, this stereoscopic toy brought beautiful landscapes and famous attractions to the eyes of kids around the world.

Flash-forward more than 75 years, and the View-Master has been reincarnated to spark that same sense of wonder for the digital age. The redesigned model, the result of a project collaboration between IDEO and Mattel, is a modern case that bridges technology with play. The new View-Master preserves the classic features of the original toy, such as the original lever and wheel, but offers a much more immersive, 360-degree virtual experience.

Here’s how it works: Download the View-Master app and slide a smartphone into the sleek new red-and-white headset. From there, the phone’s camera will scan the QR codes on the reels to view a wide variety of images, such as wildlife, outer space, and a dinosaur landscape. Two slightly different images are displayed side by side on the device's screen. As each of your eyes looks at just the image directly in front of it and tries to reconcile it with what the other eye is seeing, a 3D effect is created. By moving your head around with the viewer over your eyes and taking advantage of the sensors within your phone to sense direction and position, you can travel through each of the scenes, exploring each of the different settings.

After working alongside Mattel to understand the heritage of the View-Master brand, researching the potential for VR and play, and exploring a variety of materials for the new device, designers created several prototypes that they tested with their core market: kids. As a result, the final design accounted for things like whether it could pass a drop-test or fit into kids’ hands.

Beyond the joy of pure play, the technology that powers the new View-Master also opens up a new world of possibilities for learning. Imagine turning a page in a textbook and seeing dinosaurs come to life. Or a virtual tour of an art museum through a set of View-Masters.

"We view this as just the beginning," said Doug Wadleigh, a Mattel executive, in an interview with CNET. "Obviously, we're getting in this space pretty early. The goal is to create the View-Master brand for the next 75 years."

Genentech is a biotech company that tackles difficult-to-treat medical conditions across the globe by creating innovative treatments. As a sponsor of the TED2012 conference, Genentech approached IDEO to partner in creating a “social space” for the TED exhibit hall that would captivate participants in an interactive brand experience and garner excitement around the future of personalized medicine.

To make leading-edge science more accessible to the masses, the team landed on an exciting new provocation: What if we could turn genes into music? IDEO worked closely with Genentech to develop an immersive genetic experiment that could incorporate traits of the TED community, using the company’s brand new technology for overnight gene analysis. A TED participant would choose a colorful trait pin packaged with a cheek swab kit and corresponding barcode, allowing them to leave a genetic sample one day and return the next day to discover that four SNPs of DNA had been analyzed overnight and translated into a unique musical track.

The IDEO team developed the concept, prototyped it with scientists, musicians, and sound engineers, and designed every element of the physical and digital experience—from the swab kit and packaging, to the built space and listening stations, iPad app, and other digital touchpoints. At the heart of the experience was music, including an algorithm that could generate 6500 unique musical combinations to reflect the genetic diversity of the TED participants.

Genentech’s “Infinite Variations” exhibit at TED2012 created the world’s first genetic symphony, an innovative and colorful blend of science and music. With the exhibit, Genentech sparked novel, approachable conversations about the role of genetics in medicine.

Of the 1850 attendees, over 1100 joined the genetic experiment in music and walked away with a new understanding of personalized science—and of their own genetic makeup.

What happens when you serve kids food made with cricket flour? And what do parents think? That’s what IDEO and Bitty Foods sought to learn during a collaboration to explore new kinds of lunchbox foods as a means to discover opportunities for alternative sources of protein.

We talked to Megan Miller, cofounder of Bitty, the Bay Area startup that makes delicious foods with cricket flour, about the collaboration.

Listen to the full audio story below, or go to Soundcloud.

As a user experience and interaction designer with a hybrid art and tech background, I’ve long been a fan of the concept of using art and design as a Trojan horse to make tricky concepts accessible. Through intrigue, curiosity, and play, these experiences can bypass our biases and open the door to understanding, without requiring deep comprehension. If you’ve ever visited a children’s science museum and watched kids excitedly engaging with subjects that would bore them to tears in book form, then you’ve seen the power of experience and play at work.

Meet ERNEST

That’s why my colleagues and I created ERNEST, an installation that gives the viewer the job of training a rudimentary artificial intelligence. Using facial and emotional recognition tech, ERNEST shows the user imagery and tries to see how happy it makes them. Our goal for this project was to engage users in a game-like experience to help them understand how machine learning models are trained, and subtly hint at the areas where bias could creep in.

Fellow IDEOer Matt Visco and I wanted to make sure ERNEST didn’t look like a modern computer—we designed it to look vintage. With its old hardware and nostalgic graphics, ERNEST doesn’t feel smart on the surface. Its look is meant to evoke a time when computers carried the promise of a utopian future, prior to mass connectivity and the ubiquitous collection of personal data.

The full installation uses five monitors, two computers, and three Raspberry Pis, which power several video loops that reveal the training data behind ERNEST, and give passersby a sense of the experience even if they don’t engage directly with it.

How it Works

ERNEST uses computer vision to perceive the user ambiently through facial recognition, allowing it to detect when a user is looking at it and how far away they are. When a user gets close enough, ERNEST comes alive and asks the user to help it learn. It then shows the viewer images intended to make the user happy, and gauges their emotional reaction based on their facial expression using a pre-trained model. The facial tracking and emotional data is displayed to the viewer in real time, encouraging users to make faces at ERNEST. Viewers can then validate the accuracy of the model to help ERNEST know if it was correct or not.

(Sound complicated? The video below might make it clearer.)

We installed ERNEST in IDEO San Francisco’s lobby for a couple of months, and also brought it to the San Francisco Art Institute Fort Mason Gallery for the CODAME Intersections exhibition in November 2018.

The Results

Many participants loved to challenge ERNEST, often emoting in varying ways through numerous loops of the game. Once, a group of participants spent nearly 20 minutes playing with ERNEST, takings turns to compare how it perceived each person.

When viewers interact and play with ERNEST, we’re helping them see that machines can have almost human-like perception, reacting differently to different faces, and sometimes being uncannily accurate...or completely wrong. The wrong guesses were in many cases more interesting, and were in fact a very intentional part of the design. We wanted users to see that artificial intelligence is sometimes not as intelligent as we might think.

ERNEST is meant to be a game, but what happens when real-world AI makes the wrong guesses? Or what if those wrong guesses are uneven, indicating an unintentional bias, such as working well for some faces but not others?

We wanted people to realize that designing systems that can ambiently perceive humans without direct input is rife with ethical concerns. And already, systems like these are being deployed at scale. The Guardian predicts emotionally-aware tech is already a $20B industry. Even something seemingly benign like ERNEST causes us to wonder—if an AI is trying to make the viewer happy, who determines what “happy” is? What if bad actors train Ernest to think that disturbing content is “happy?” What if the technology is repurposed to provoke anxiety or anger? What happens if we deploy technology like ERNEST widely?

Of course, ERNEST only scratches the surface of these big ethical questions, but we hope that it helps give people insight into how artificial intelligence thinks, and the ways its thinking can be flawed. The more that we as a society can start to understand these systems, the better we can judge their quality, and work to design them to be in line with our shared human values.

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the hottest topics of the tech world, but some of us at the frontier forget that many people feel intimidated—or even afraid of—these technologies. The pop-culture trope of machine intelligence gone rogue has been a part of our cultural psyche for a good 150 years. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, The Terminator’s Skynet, and The Matrix’s... Matrix. Combine that fear with arcane tech-speak like “recurrent neural network” and “generative adversarial network,” and in addition to feeling emotionally intimidating, AI and ML can also feel incomprehensible.

Feedback is a tricky thing. There’s always going to be differing opinions of right and wrong, and even if it’s explained to you in a calm, clear voice, it can sting like nothing else. But getting feedback on your work is the only way you'll grow. It forces you to rationalize your thinking and creative decision-making, and teaches you to swallow your pride.

I learned the hard way: A few years ago, I designed my first typeface called Emotiv. It was a concept for a messaging app that would help people express their emotions through language (instead of emojis).

Eager to get my work out there, I decided to send a sample to a very well-respected typographer whose work I greatly admired. Given this individual’s reputation (and my lack of experience) I was reluctant to share at first, but with encouragement from friends, I sent it along with an explanation of how it came to be, not really expecting a response.

A few days passed, and much to my surprise, an incredibly lengthy reply fell into my inbox and hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the toughest feedback I’d ever received. Alignment issues, inconsistencies, readability problems, the email went on and on. It felt like my career was ending before it even had a chance to begin. We designers consider our creations extensions of ourselves—meaning that we take the pain of feedback personally.

While I can't offer up permanent thick skin, I have come up with 4 mindset shifts that will help you get—and give—negative feedback in a constructive way:

1. Introduce constraints

The least helpful feedback goes something like, “Hmmm, I’m not sure I like this.” We all have personal tastes, but there is no build-off point from that—no way to develop and improve. Instead, ask the person giving you feedback to be constructive, give their rationale, and ask as many questions as they’d like, rather than give you a gut reaction.

2. Tag team

Rather than putting yourself on the receiving end, get involved in the process. Imagine that the work being critiqued isn’t yours and offer your own thoughts. That will help you stay focused on the work itself. Plus, by making the feedback process more of a collaborative effort, you can understand the work from new angles to make it better together.

3. Be Spock

Do your best to take your emotions out of the equation. Instead of hanging on every negative word, look for unbiased points that will help you better define and execute the work. Even if the person giving you feedback is using words like “I like...”, or “I don’t like…”, those words aren’t aimed at you—they’re aimed at uncovering the fundamental thinking or execution behind the work.

4. Don’t ask for the answer

When the feedback process unearths a problem with your work, it’s tempting to simply ask for a clear solution to the problem. But that won’t push you to go further and explore other possibilities. Solving the problem yourself gives you another opportunity to learn and grow your skills.

Looking back, I now see now that the typographer who crushed me was actually providing a great service. (Honestly, you could tell someone they are terrible at something in considerably fewer words.)

I’d made the same mistake my fellow design student had made in that first class—I reacted as if it was a personal attack on me as a designer. But that feedback prodded me to become much more critical about my own work, studying details that others might not notice, with an eye toward readability and alignment.

Getting negative feedback can hurt. You pour your time and effort into creating something, and with the swiftest of comments, it gets cut down. But receiving it not only makes your work better, it makes you better... especially at giving feedback.

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Nothing prepares you for the reality of receiving negative feedback. In one of my first design classes, I watched in horror as a fellow student had his work ripped in two for the first time in front of all of us. Shortly afterwards, he quit the course.

We've studied the effects of emotions in the workplace, and the research shows that managers can make or break an office. In one poll, 50% of people said they’ve quit a job to remove themselves from a bad manager. (In another survey, 65% of folks said they’d take a new boss over a pay raise. Ouch.)

Managers often set the tone of the workplace. But that doesn’t mean managing has to be stoic, emotionless work. In fact, we think it should be the opposite.

There’s no set formula for becoming a perfect boss, but we have a few tips for building a positive emotional culture in the office and supporting the needs of the people that work for you.

Manage individually

After surveying almost 80,000 people, researcher Marcus Buckingham came up with the insight that “average managers play checkers, while great managers play chess.” In checkers, every piece is the same: they’re interchangeable. But winning a game of chess requires you to understand each piece’s strengths and weaknesses, and you can’t effectively play unless you understand why each piece is unique.

One of Mollie’s favorite examples of this individualized approach is IDEO’s new employee survey, which includes hardball questions like, “What’s your favorite office snack?” and “What kind of flowers do you like?” The answers give teams an understanding of their new colleagues right off the bat, and help managers address a newbie’s individual interests—even if it’s just a preference for vanilla vs. chocolate.

Address your feelings without becoming “emotionally leaky”

In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott recalls a morning when a report told her, “I know what kind of day I’m going to have by the kind of mood you’re in when you walk in the door.” Managing your feelings is as important as managing your team; what you consider a throwaway comment or a momentary bad mood can ruin someone’s day. Reactive, hot-tempered managers are hurtful and demoralizing.

But don’t pretend that you’re not allowed to have feelings (you’re human. Accept it!). “The idea that you’re never going to have a bad day as a boss is bullshit,” Kim says. “The best thing to do is to cop to it. Say to your team, ‘I’m having a bad day, and I’m trying my best not to take it out on you. But if it seems like I’m having a bad day, it’s because I am.’”

You don’t necessarily have to go into great detail (oversharing is another complicated topic), but acknowledging that there’s something going on can help those around you avoid unnecessary anxiety.

Figure yourself out first

Like we said: You’re human. That means you have your own emotional responses to unpack before you’re fully equipped to help others do the same. The best leaders are able to hit the pause button when they become emotional, sit with their feelings, and understand where they’re coming from. Instead of taking action immediately, they ask themselves, “What’s behind this emotion?”

A great manager will realize, for example, that anxiety about meeting a deadline can be mitigated by building structure to help a team get work done on time, or that a tough design review means that next time, more prototypes might be necessary. Tapping into your emotional toolkit will help you arm others for the emotional demands of the office.

Listen

It sounds basic, but it bears repeating. One of the questions Wharton Professor Adam Grant fields most often is, how do you have your suggestions heard when you’re not in charge? "These are not questions asked by leaders," Grant notes. Hearing people out is an extremely important part of letting them know you appreciate their work.

Listening is also the only way leaders can understand the source of problems or strong emotions. As a manager, ask questions instead of immediately trying to problem solve. You’ll never understand another person’s perspective unless you listen and show compassion.

Find time to prioritize yourself

Managing means cooking something on every burner without burning anything. You also have to time every step perfectly to make sure the meal comes together. If the simple thought of that balancing act exhausts you, try taking a "Shultz hour." When he was in office, former Secretary of State George Shultz protected one hour each week for solitary reflection with paper and pen. No one was allowed to interrupt him (except the president or his wife, which we understand).

If solo time feels a little too isolating, seek support. Try connecting with peers and folks who have a similar role with whom you feel safe talking openly about personal and professional issues. As Liz Koenig, who managed Teach for America teachers, told us, “You can’t pour out of an empty cup.”

Acknowledging emotions in the workplace is one thing; harnessing their power to become a better manager is another. It’s not impossible, but it does take work. We’d recommend not putting on a brave face, but instead getting a little vulnerable with the people that work for you. Here’s one last reminder: You’re human.

Like playing the flute or choosing the right sized Tupperware for your leftovers, being a good manager is a skill. You’re not born knowing how to play scales or eyeball specific volumes of pasta—it’s something learned and practiced. And when it comes to building your managerial muscles and shepherding others through a career journey, there are a lot of emotional skills that can really boost your toolkit.

Not necessarily, says Chris Nyffeler, IDEO Executive Design Director and a faculty member in the undergraduate and graduate programs in Interaction Design at the California College of the Arts. Those vocational skills are important, but they can come later. A foundation in design—whether built through education or early career experience—comes from understanding the process and building up the soft skills that all designers, but especially interaction designers, need to master.

Chris would often see his students hung up on mastering tools first. But according to him, great interaction designers have three things at their core—empathy for users, storytelling chops, and the instinct to prototype.

1. Empathy for users

The role of a designer is to be the voice of and advocate for the end user. This is especially true when you're working in-house alongside engineering and product teams that might feel disconnected from the customer.

Empathy starts with an awareness of others and an ability to detect their emotions and understand their perspective. What does it actually feel like to live with a problem, and how would a potential solution actually fix it? “The more that you can build that muscle of empathy,” Chris says, “the better you're going to be as a designer.”

And for more seasoned in-house designers, the more you can help your counterparts across the organization develop their empathy muscles, the more successful it will make you and your UX team in delivering great products to market.

2. The desire to tell a story

Chris describes storytelling as effectively envisioning ideas and putting them into a more strategic framework. That frame could be user insights (how the work is right for the user), a business context (how the work builds on business goals), or organizational context (how the team is well equipped to deliver on the work).

“Storytelling is an under-appreciated soft skill,” Chris says. Storytelling doesn’t just come in handy for presenting your ideas—it helps build consensus with cross-functional teams. Being able to share your ideas and bring others on board helps designers be strong advocates for their own work.

3. The instinct to prototype

At IDEO, we talk about prototyping as a central step in the design process, but it's also a mindset that should be fundamental to the way an interaction designer thinks.

“As they have an idea, great designers put pen to paper, or pixels on screen, or just start building something as a way of working out their process,” Chris says.

Designers should be skilled at prototyping at various levels of fidelity, but most importantly, their gut instinct should push them to test ideas early and often.

“I love seeing that, especially from designers who are just discovering prototyping as a tool in their tool belt,” Chris says. “Seeing them realize that there’s more than one way of doing things, and that their first assumption of how they should present an experience could be right or wrong.”

Putting unfinished, scrappy ideas out into the world can make a designer feel uncomfortable, but Chris says the best prototypes leave room for users to co-design parts of the experience. “If they show you something that’s not working,” Chris says, “quickly change it. Move a button, rewrite copy, replace an image. Users can also take you down unexpected, delightful paths that can lead you to a powerful new idea."

Connecting more deeply with that end user—the person you’re designing for—is key to developing all three of these skills.

Want to learn more about interaction design? Dive deeper with IDEO U’s on-demand class, Prototyping for Digital Experiences.

How do you identify the makings of a great interaction designer? Is it coding expertise? Mastery of digital tools? A beautiful portfolio of visual design 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.