Glide, a video communication software startup, came to IDEO to collaborate on the design of its first hardware product. With current Apple Watch models not including cameras, Glide sought to design a compatible band that would empower users to capture and share photos and videos directly from their wrist.

Faced with this challenge, IDEO designers embarked on a six week-long design sprint, involving users in the research to understand how they might use the band for interactions such as taking reminder snapshots and intuitively sharing photo and video messages with friends. The team then brought these ideas to life through a comprehensive industrial design and engineering process, working to meet a range of technical and performance requirements along the way.

IDEO’s final band design elegantly integrates two cameras—one nestled in a wave-shaped notch above the watch face, and the other on the band’s outward-facing surface. Together, the cameras ensure that, between recording themselves and the vibrant world around them, users never miss capturing a moment worth sharing.

IDEO also designed a compatible, on-the-go charging dock that conveniently refuels both the watch and band with a single plug-in, completing an effortless user experience.

Today’s younger workers are more comfortable dressed casually. They prefer an impromptu meeting over coffee, than at the conference table. They’re used to working flexibly, collaboratively and creatively. And, via smartphones, tablets and laptops, they’re accustomed to having everything from hailing a cab, to doing work, to getting groceries, at their fingertips.

Tech-savvy, independent, entrepreneurial, demanding: this new generation of business people and the lingering impact of the financial crisis, are reshaping hospitality.

To that end, Crowne Plaza approached IDEO to understand the needs of this audience, the macro trends impacting them, and to develop a new meeting and work offer that expressed the brand’s values.

Research, sensor data, surveys, interviews with potential customers revealed what modern travelers wanted, but lacked: informal, flexible experiences; energizing and uplifting spaces; peer-style service; curated choices; and integrated technology to control it all.

IDEO translated those customer insights, and Crowne Plaza’s promise—Making Business Travel Work—into an integrated, designed and built-out branded offer. Launched with two pilot schemes in Atlanta, Ignition is a free-to-use, innovative new meeting and working experience, housed in the lobby of Crowne Plaza hotels.

Spanning space, food and beverage, service, and digital, every touchpoint is designed to keep travelers in a state of flow, and heightened productivity. From single-person Pods, to the Nooks and Huddles for four-person impromptu meetings, to the 10-person Apartment (bookable by the hour), Ignition’s spaces cater to every professional’s needs, whether they’re on the road or in their home city.

Food and beverage offerings have been redesigned specifically for work meetings. Delivered to where you’re working, it’s non-drippy, made to be eaten one-handed, and served on square plates to sit neatly alongside laptops. Out of hours, a new self-service marketplace offers 24-hour premium sustenance.

A new role, the Host, provides peer-style support, whether greeting guests’ guests, helping with meetings, or sourcing local restaurants for a client dinner.

Underpinning Ignition is a new tablet-based ordering system (Food To You), and Host chat platform, to easily get everything from photocopies to coffees.

But ultimately, IHG’s ambition for Ignition goes beyond its existing guests. It’s designed to become a local business fixture in its own right, attracting people to meet, and work, irrespective of whether they’re staying. As one guest summed it up: “There is nothing any hotel brand in this range is doing to stand out. This concept, however, could completely change that. It could even live on its own. It’s what you would seek out.”

Fender, a brand that’s been synonymous with rock ’n’ roll since 1946, is best known for its iconic electric guitars—think Stratocaster—played by everyone from Eric Clapton to The Edge, the lead guitarist of U2. Less well known is the imprint Fender has made on the acoustic space. IDEO worked with the company to design a new family of acoustic amplifiers: one professional and one with stereo effects.

After gathering insights from amateurs, professionals, music magazine editors, and producers, the team explored portability, storage, materiality, and form through a series of early prototypes that they tested with users.

While most acoustic amps in the market don’t look all that different from their electric cousins, the new Fender product line reflects the pure, natural sound at the core of acoustic. This new line of amps uses a unique manufacturing technique with bent plywood that’s new to acoustic amp design. Not just a design statement, the innovation also improves sound quality.

The acoustic amps were also designed with simple, intuitive controls, and with illuminated features that balance high-tech performance with a satisfyingly analog experience. The design emphasizes portability and maneuverability, targeting the acoustic artist who often may have to make a tough choice between traveling light and using the often unreliable house PA.

Pi Jacobs, a singer-songwriter who participated in the design research process, said acoustic sound requires its own unique medium. "Acoustic is raw, pure, no bells and whistles. You see someone playing and singing, it’s like looking through a window into someone’s soul," he said.

For Fender, the work proved to be transformative. "Working with IDEO was an eye-opening and refreshing experience," said James Gifford, vice president of design for Fender. "The result of the work that was done with IDEO on the acoustic amp project was a game-changer that challenged the traditional definition of the design and experience received from using acoustic guitar amplifiers."

To better articulate the Bigelow family values—obsessive about ingredients, environmentally conscious, community-oriented—the company asked IDEO to help convey its story to a younger demographic, for whom tea was popular but the Bigelow brand was not. Any changes to the product or its packaging would have to improve the offering without alienating Bigelow Tea’s loyal customers.

IDEO worked with the company to update its positioning statement, brand identity, and packaging. After many interviews with tea drinkers, IDEO and Bigelow executives learned that the brand could differentiate itself by crafting a strong point of view—one that cultivates and celebrates tea enthusiasts with a superior yet accessible product. With a refined positioning statement in hand, a refreshed identity system followed.

The new packaging ties together all of Bigelow’s lines of tea. Each box features bold graphic elements like a larger, easier-to-read logo, instructions for brewing a perfect cup of tea, a caffeine “caff-o-meter,” and the name of the team member who packed the box. Bigelow boxes now stand out when stacked on store shelves, winning over tea drinkers and retailers alike.

1. Inferno, by Louis-Philippe Demers, Bill Vorn

How does it feel to have an exoskeleton move your arms and make you dance? Pretty weird. Inferno, one of the single most talked-about pieces at Ars, offered visitors the curious sensation of being remote-controlled by a machine.

2. RoBoHoN, by Tomotaka Takahashi with Sharp

Half robot, half smartphone, RoBoHoN runs, dances, talks, takes pictures and projects them. Plus, it’s cute. Like a mini butler. We came away asking: Will future smart devices be gadgety, or sleek and designy a la Apple?

3. Rhizome Animation, by Boris Labbé

A hypnotising story about life on earth, and a good reminder of the power of mixing handdrawn images with computer-generated visuals. Designer Boris Labbé’s short film Rhizome is worth a watch.

4. Radical Atoms Exhibition

If the MIT Media Lab has its way, we’ll control the physical world of atoms in the same way that we control the digital world of pixels. This exhibit hewed closest to the theme of the Ars festival: “Radical Atoms: the alchemists of our time,” including provocations around biology as a responsive, “second skin” interface; a physical shape display that can be manipulated from near or far; and wearable miniature robots that rove around your body. Take a trip down the rabbit hole.

5. ASSISI, by Thomas Schmickl, Professor of Zoology at University of Graz

Tiny robots, placed among a society of fish and of bees, enabled the two to communicate and influence the actions of the other. Begged the question: how might we use robots to design and evolve swarm behavior in natural ecosystems?

6. Artificial Skins and Bones, by Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin

We loved the variety of thinking from this group of students, who are exploring the design of artificial bodies. Ideas included everything from regaining physical ability through smart prosthetics; to enhancing an experience through haptic feedback; to the inevitable evolution toward augmentation, like color- and pattern-changing skin (above), inspired by the octopus.

7. Innovation and Creativity on a Very Large Scale, by Ivan Poupyrev, Google ATAP

Poupyrev, head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group, argued that constantly introducing new gadgets does not scale. What does scale is creating technologies enabling industries that manufacture basic goods, like jeans, to transform themselves. For Project Jacquard, ATAP invented a new type of conductive thread that can be woven into clothing (like a Levi’s jean jacket—the project was a collaboration between the two companies) giving it an invisible interface. These kinds of mutations are unpredictable, Poupyrev said, and driven by serendipity, emphasising the role of the artist in technological research.

For more about Ars Electronica, or to watch all the talks and presentations mentioned, check out their website: http://www.aec.at/

Header image by Martin Hieslmair. All images sourced from the official Ars Electronica Flickr.

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We went to Ars Electronica, Linz's annual celebration of art and tech, and here’s what we saw: Exoskeletons. Dancing robots. Shape-shifting materials. Swarms of fish and bees. Skin. Just your average day in the surrealverse. Here are seven projects to watch:

Name: Andrea Oh
Location: San Francisco
Role at IDEO: Front Desk Concierge, Experience team. Steward of magical work-life experiences. Gatekeeper of the guest Wi-Fi. (She guards it with a Gandalf staff made out of Twix chocolate).
Joined IDEO: August 2015
Instagram: @fermdaza
Titillating Fact: Matcha is my life! For someone who doesn’t drink coffee, a dose of matcha powder mixed in with water in the morning is my saving grace.

1. Isaiah Rashad: "The Sun’s Tirade" (2016)

There are a couple albums I’ve been gravitating towards in the past month, but the one that’s been in constant rotation—and I mean constant—is the debut release of Top Dawg Entertainment-signed rapper Isaiah Rashad, The Sun’s Tirade. His earnest, poetic musings on butter-smooth production make for perfect late-summer listening. Roll the windows down while you’re at it.

2. Drumming around with Pyle-Pro PTED01

I used to take drum lessons when I was younger and regrettably fell out of the habit of playing as I got older and distracted by high-school-Andrea things. I’ve had an itch to take it up again so I recently just purchased this electronic drum kit to practice exercises and learn new grooves and fills (YouTube tutorials are your friend). I don’t have the space to house a real set and classes in the city are steeper than I can afford, so this is a good alternative to keep that itch scratched.

3. Warsan Shire

I’ve been reaching a lot for Warsan Shire these days. She is a Somali-British writer, activist, educator—and one of my favorite female voices in contemporary poetry. She explores themes ranging from love, sexual violence, religion, war, displacement, and the immigrant experience. Her words are often sharp and unapologetic. I love that her writing is a celebration of womanhood and the female body, as well as a tribute to Somali culture and her ancestry.

Watch: Warsan Shire reads her poem “Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)” from Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth.

Header image by Markus Spiske.

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In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Andrea Oh.

1. Free Writing

Creativity manuals like the Artist's Way talk about the power of the "Morning Pages"—a ritual in which you start writing just after waking up, and bang out some prose before your conscious, self-critical self has fully come online. Conveniently, there's an app for that. Flowstate is a word processor with a twist: You set a timer, then write until it dings. If you hesitate for more than a couple of seconds, the app will delete everything that you've put down so far. Although it sounds like torture, the app can actually help you let go of editing and enter a state of uncritical flow.

2. Phone Denial

Before going to bed, move your phone charger to another room. Then, put a pencil and paper in its place on your nightstand. Now, when you wake up, instead of looking at Google News or Facebook, write down some thoughts that are related to how you're feeling, what is important for you, and how you're going to make a creative impact today. If that feels too involved right after waking up, draw a picture of something instead. Either way, don't let yourself get distracted by your phone until you've engaged your creativity.

3. Disposable Poetry

When Kurt Vonnegut was 84, he received a letter from a high school student, asking him to visit his school. The writer refused, claiming that he was now so old that he now "resembled an iguana." Instead of visiting, he sent a letter that contained a creative exercise. "Write a six-line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can." Then, Vonnegut said, the poem was to be torn up and discarded. "You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow." As a tribute to the great Mr. Vonnegut, try his ritual every morning.

4. Creative Collaging

Collect any old magazines or catalogues lying around your house. Leaf through them and cut out any interesting pictures or headlines. Assemble these into a collage. Take a photo of the collage and post it to Instagram, Facebook, or whatever social media site you use. Doesn't that feel better than posting a picture of yourself playing with your dog, or the avocado toast that you had for breakfast? Of course it does. You just stepped away from the ordinary world for a moment and created something original. For bonus points, download the Boomerang Gmail extension, and you can email your pictures to your future self—in a month or even a year. Think of it as a way to remind future you to stay creative.

5. Walking and Observing

Everyone from Beethoven to Steve Jobs relied on the inspirational powers of a walk. Neuroscience backs up their belief: A walk will remove you from the distractions of conversations and technology, freeing the mind to explore new associations between the ideas already in your head. Why not skip breakfast altogether and walk to work? Look around as you do so, and see if you notice anything unusual or surprising in the environment. Take a gander at other people too. Try to put yourself in their shoes, and imagine what they're thinking or feeling. Remind yourself that everybody sees the world differently, and that this kaleidoscope of human perceptions and viewpoints is a wonderful thing. Remember that inspiration is all around you—you just have to stop occasionally to breathe it in.

Illustrations by Megan Crabtree.

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Benjamin Franklin used to spend his mornings naked. Sigmund Freud would trim his beard. Marcel Proust smoked opium. There are many ways to start the day in a creative frame of mind. If you want an alternative to being nude, beardy, or high, here are some of our favorites.

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This post is a source of parody and is for entertainment, education and commentary purposes only.

You may have heard: Designers like fonts. They dream in Helvetica. Letterforms may play as central a role in a designer's life as their favorite bands. Knowing this, our Tokyo studio threw an event called "PLAY - Creativity at The Intersection of Design + Music." We needed posters to promote it, and asked ourselves: How might we bring music and design together? The exercise quickly devolved into a competition for who could come up with the worst font-band pun. There's a slim overlap in the venn diagram of people who appreciate both Frank Zappa and Zapf Dingbats, but that is exactly who we were aiming for. Got your own #ideobandfont? Do share.

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.