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.

1. THE DIXON MULTIPLEX

Multiplex is a pop-up "department store of tomorrow" trading for a month as part of the London Design Festival. It features contributions from a wide range of brands curated by legendary product designer Tom Dixon and Wallpaper magazine.

Billed as immersive and multi-sensory, I was super curious to see the designer's vision of an multi-brand store that is fighting for the attention of tomorrow's customers by offering experiences, not just products. That included British botanicals brand Haeckels’ mist spa (like walking into an aromatic greenhouse), to booking in for a fashion shoot or even a vitamin injection.

2. MINDBLOWER

Mindblower is a new 'idea to product' platform showcased at Multiplex, which invites you to pitch ideas for physical products you would like to create, to help bridge the gap between the amazing ideas we dream up and our ability to tangibly own them.

A blend of TV show Dragon’s Den and Kickstarter, its inclusion within a prototype store of tomorrow was interesting, blurred the boundaries between consumer, inventor, and entrepreneur. It's still super early days, but interesting to see someone responding to the citizen maker-economy without assuming that everyone is well-versed in design, 3D printing or engineering.

3. THE GOOD JUDGMENT PROJECT, AND SUPERFORECASTING

The Good Judgement Project is an experiment to explore how well the 'wisdom of the crowd' is able to predict future world events (e.g. will a nation's government collapse in the next six months). It's headline-grabbing finding is that within the thousands of people taking part, there is a small group of ordinary citizens dubbed 'superforecasters' whose predictions are 30% better than intelligence professionals armed with confidential data and subject expertise.

Philip Tetlock's new book - Superforecasting - looks at what sets these superforecasters apart. It's not just about raw intelligence (Superforecasters are clever but not off the charts) they demonstrate a 'growth mindset'; an openness to consider information from many different origins, to change their predictions, and to look back at their predictions and learn from their mistakes. Forecasting is something we could all potentially become better at, and Tetlock has now described how.

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Every Monday morning, the London studio shares a coffee and some inspiration. This week, design researcher Kate Wakely talks through an immersive, pop-up retail experience from famed product designer Tom Dixon, a Dragon’s Den meets Quirky-style product development platform, and a book on the emerging art of super forecasting.

Have you ever experienced one of those mornings when you are in the middle of an argument with your partner at home, but you’re late for work and you can't make peace? This was one of those days.

On my bike ride home, I get a text from her: Buy paper towels, please.

When your partner breaks the silence for something like this, you are either screwed or she is giving you a chance to reconcile. I already had in my head this image of the two of us, speaking words of love while wiping the kitchen counter with the newly bought Scottex roll.

So I enter the corner store down the road and find it. As I walk to the counter I see a bunch of red roses. Come on, cliche? I think to myself.

"I'll take them!" I say out loud. But how do I hold the roses on my last mile home?

It's then that I realize I have the perfect solution. I stab my bunch of roses through the hole of the paper roll so I can hold them under my arm, but no spike can sting me.

You might wonder if I made peace with her when home. I did. And I had also found an approach to conflict resolution. When in doubt, wrap your thorns in something soft.

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.

This requires finding people who are willing to share personal stories that can inspire and inform us as we design solutions. We call this Design Research Recruiting.

It’s a process that requires great trust and great responsibility. We know that if people are willing to let us into their lives, our most important job is protecting their stories and confidentiality. And without speaking with the right people, we can’t do our jobs.

So how exactly do we do this? How do we get vulnerable people just like us—or totally unlike us—to open up their lives and even their homes to us? And how do we protect their confidentiality as we do it?

Successful design research recruiting is equal parts knowing who to speak with and how to reach them. Here are five practical tips for recruiting people for your very own design research interviews.

Make screening surveys real conversations

Screening surveys are a useful tool and an important first step in figuring out whether or not someone is a good fit for your project. But they aren’t always the best way to make someone feel comfortable talking about themselves.

I don’t want screening surveys to feel like a standardized test, so I make sure to structure them like a conversation. I dive straight into gathering stories and perspectives and save the typical stuff, like collecting email addresses, for later.

Ask one or two thoughtful, open-ended questions that get applicants thinking creatively about the topic at hand, such as, “What gets you excited or frustrated about your commute?” Or, “What are some key ways you take care of your health and wellness?” Questions like these make the survey feel more personal from the get-go, and they enable you to understand whether a potential interviewee has opinions or experiences that might benefit your research.

Get the word out on social

IDEO's Design Research Facebook page is our go-to channel for sharing our interview opportunities. People can follow the page and apply for interviews that interest them directly, or share research opportunities with their friends.

These "warm connections"—people who've been referred by friends who feel they'd be a good fit—are key to ensuring interesting and qualified people are signing up to share their stories. Cultivating a strong social media presence and making use of these platforms' built-in advertising tools are powerful ways to reach the right audience.

Give interviewees a preview of what's to come

An on-point questionnaire isn’t enough to ensure you’ve found the person to talk to. Hopping on the phone for a 10- to 15-minute phone chat is the finishing touch to ensure you've recruited articulate folks who are just the right fit. It also helps them have a better sense of your mission and what you’re looking for.

I start the conversation by giving participants an overview of IDEO and the project they've signed up for, then answering any questions they have. This establishes some trust and familiarity before I start asking more about them.

The phone call is also an important opportunity to make sure recruits feel comfortable with what's in store for them—it’s never our goal to just get them to talk to us; we want them to be comfortable sharing their lives, and to feel assured that their confidentiality will be protected.

Keep it confidential

We have to be certain the personal stories people share with us—which can sometimes include intimate details about their lives, like health struggles or the loss of a loved one—are kept confidential and used for design research purposes only, never for marketing or promotional uses. In fact, IDEO is so serious about it that we have a whole book dedicated to the practice.

When I’ve recruited folks to discuss potentially sensitive topics, like experiences getting emergency contraception, I make sure to reassure them that we’ll never share their information. I also send a copy of our consent and confidentiality form ahead of time for participants to review, so they can familiarize themselves with our privacy practices and ask questions ahead of the interview.

Prioritize quality, not quantity

When I first started as a design research recruiter, I was obsessed with hitting target interview numbers. If a team requested eight participants for a group discussion, I felt obligated to recruit exactly that amount. What I didn't grasp is that numbers don't count for much if the group isn't filled with thoughtful, articulate people who can participate meaningfully in a conversation. Worse, a group dynamic can be ruined by one person who hogs the conversation or creates an uncomfortable atmosphere.

The latter once happened during a group discussion on an intimate topic: personal lubricants. Because I wanted to hit the target number, I ended up recruiting someone I wasn’t sure would be a good fit. I figured that they'd be fine in a group setting, but they ended up making comments that made the other participants uncomfortable. The project lead ended up dismissing the participant early, and I learned a powerful lesson that it’s not about quantity. Giving yourself enough advance time to recruit will ensure that you have time to weed out anyone you feel skeptical about.

There are multitudes of interesting people with rich stories ready to delight, surprise, and most of all, inform you. I hope these tips will help you find them.

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As designers, it's our job to solve real problems for real people. To fulfill that mission, we first have to understand what is and isn't working well about a product, service, or even experience—anything from wearing a football helmet to paying a hospital bill to optimizing commutes.

While Lotbot has started to calm down and find its rhythm, another story has emerged. It’s the story of how our studio has adapted to living with a robot. It’s a story about how the design of AI, no matter how small a role it might play in our lives, has implications beyond its intended use—and can even influence the culture of an entire organization.

As a researcher with a background studying and designing human-computer interaction, I was enamored by the social bot. I started observing Lotbot’s day to day operations, and over time, I noticed that while most people were interacting with the bot using commands that it was trained to understand (e.g. “spot today”), a small group of people were holding on to the social norms they’d typically use in interpersonal interactions. This made me think: What motivated people to use words like please and thank you, when they knew that the AI wouldn’t know the difference anyway? And what does this mean for future interactions with robot coworkers?

I launched a full-on design research project. With support from my colleague Justin Wan, I collected quantitative data from Lotbot’s Slack channel to understand how the studio’s language patterns had changed since the bot was introduced. I also conducted a series of surveys and qualitative interviews to understand what motivated people’s approach to interacting with Lotbot.

Here’s what I found—and what it means for how we consider the connection between AI and the culture of organizations.

Language has changed, but we're still holding on to something

Before reviewing the Slack data, I hypothesized that shorter messages of 15 characters or less (“Need spot today”) indicated that the user believed they were interacting with a “robot,” while longer messages (“I need a spot today, please”) aligned with a more human-to-human conversation style. I also looked at the change in frequency of polite language such as please and thank you to see how often people were holding on to human-to-human conversation styles.

It turns out that once Lotbot was introduced to the parking channel, the number of messages that had 15 characters or less increased significantly, while the percentage of total messages using polite language decreased significantly (from 30 percent to 10 percent).

As Danny DeRuntz, the creator of Lotbot, explains, the AI was trained to recognize the basic components of a request—the need (a parking spot) and the timeframe (tomorrow)— so it’s no surprise that our interactions in the channel had started to become more, well, robotic.

The survey data, on the other hand, revealed that some people thought about Lotbot as another member of the studio—they treated it with the same respect they would a human colleague. Others said that they based their interactions on the fact that they knew the rest of the studio was watching. People were conscious of how their commands came across to other human colleagues who do care about people’s attitude, even if the bot doesn’t.

The in-person interviews further supported what the survey highlighted. Those who continue to use polite language are motivated to do so because they feel that it’s important to show gratitude when you’re asking for a limited resource. As one of my colleagues put it, gratitude is an important part of the collaborative culture at IDEO, and that should not be lost just because there’s a robot among us—especially since that robot exists solely to help us do our jobs.

Learning goes both ways with AI

So what does it all mean? The prominent narrative about AI and robots is that they are learning to interact with humans, but this quick study highlights that the learning goes both ways. In the context of the parking Slack channel, the limits of Lotbot’s functionality trained the humans to interact in a different way. A way that, for some who resisted the changes, felt antithetical to our company culture.

A group of data scientists at IDEO recently published a set of AI design principles. One of these principles asks designers to consider how their designs can be sensitive to people’s context and culture. AI systems are designed to provide efficiency, but in some settings, that efficiency might compromise and conflict with other institutional and cultural priorities, like politeness and gratitude. A recent article in Fast Company echoes this concern, suggesting designers of social bots should consider emotional thinking, helping bots be better companions in their interactions with humans.

But what does this mean for the design of Lotbot? Should it be designed in a way that encourages expressions of gratitude? It wouldn’t hurt— but the stakes are low, and the occasional robotic conversation is overshadowed by a number of other rituals and activities that keep our culture feeling friendly and free.

But the question does bring up an interesting opportunity area for social robots and AI in the context of larger offices, especially those that haven’t scaled ritual and culture. As companies grow, corporate culture can be hard to maintain, and as automation becomes more common it could get harder. If social robots like Lotbot can draw attention to the social norms that matter to a company’s culture, we might be able to create and use them to support corporate culture at scale. Social robots may be able to serve as reminders of cultural practice and values.

The possibilities are endless, but one thing’s for sure—human-computer interactions are influenced first and foremost by humans, and the humans of IDEO have spoken. After sharing my research about changes in conversation style with the studio at a recent lunch meeting, my colleagues took to Lotbot’s Slack channel to declare their love and admiration for the tiny bot. In the weeks that followed, I observed an uptick in polite language as well. While I’m in no position to analyze the psychological motivations behind this outpouring of love, it did make me wonder if we all felt the need to make something more human after we found ourselves becoming more robotic.

In November, we shared the story of Lotbot, an AI Slack bot we built to manage parking spots at our Cambridge studio. Long story short: In building Lotbot, we utterly misjudged its personality and found ourselves on the wrong end of a tiny tyrant.

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.