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.

Back in May, I saw an exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo that delivered unexpected brilliance from start to finish. Hearing other visitors remark, “I really wasn’t expecting this!” as they walked through the gallery space, I knew I wasn’t the only one.

How do you go about creating something unexpectedly brilliant? What triggers that kind of experience? Here are some learnings I had from visiting the show:

1. Disarm your audience with familiarity

This installation was created between renowned textile designer, Reiko Sudo; exhibition designer, Adrien Gardère; and Seiichi Saito from Rhizomatiks. The creators are famous, but the exhibition title, Koinobori Now!, communicated something common and familiar, with a hint of pop. Koinobori is the Japanese word for the carp streamers that appear as part of Children’s Day celebrations in Japan every spring. Nau is the Twitter-bred Japenglish word used for anything happening ‘now.’ The title Koinobori Now! is so direct it almost sounds like a children’s exhibition; everyone thought they knew what to expect. It was also a rare instance where NACT hosted a show for free, welcoming an exceptionally diverse audience.

2. Reference conventions with disruptive edge

In reality, the show was much more than just a seasonal parade of modern carp streamers. Rather, the streamers served as inspiration and as a medium for presenting the textiles designed by Sudo and her company, Nuno. Gardère mentioned in an interview that as with any textile exhibition, the challenge was to showcase the works in a way that brought them to life in the absence of the human body. He looked for inspiration in the ways in which textiles lived and breathed in Japanese traditions—on this occasion, carp streamers. But instead of following the structure and styling traditionally used in koinobori, he reinterpreted it to be more structured. From the flat fish shape, he removed the fins, tails, eyes, and scales, and added backbones and rib cages so the carp would hold their shape. The resulting koinobori was something that looked familiar yet novel.

3. Give your audience the freedom to engage

This was the first time that the NACT took down all its partitions to create one large space for the installation. Everything was kept open between the work and audience.

A school of white carp streamers floated by the entrance like phantoms beckoning people into the exhibition. Following them in, the room opened up to reveal over 300 textile carp swimming through the air in a sweeping gradation of colors. The mesmerized audience was free to wander, take photos through the carp streamers, and lay down on Muji bean bags to absorb the show at their own pace.

4. Let your theme go beyond objects to permeate the space

A lot of thought also went into the less noticeable parts of the exhibition. Saito from Rhizomatiks contributed to the environmental design by leveraging air flow and light sources. Small fans were set up on the ceiling, with shifting spotlights positioned alongside to create shimmers and ripples on the translucent fabrics The lights also cast shadows of the carp streamers onto the wall and floor.

It was a subtle gesture that made the audience register a dynamic flow throughout the room, and gave the carp streamers a current to swim in. Together with the ambient soundscape by Softpad, the exhibit came to life.

5. Interlace sensory experience with informational storytelling to trigger curiosity and imagination

The exhibition could have easily ended here, but a small space at the back revealed the backstory behind the show. Video monitors played interviews of the three main collaborators as well as Nuno’s beautiful production videos. A make-your-own-carp workstation held fragments of patterned paper for people to craft their own streamers. And a long rack of textile samples lined the walls.

Here, all 300-something textiles designed by Sudo for the installation could be seen up close, touched, and read about in detail. Each textile had a background story. Here were two of my favorites:

I learned through reading these stories that Sudo is famous for reusing and repurposing unconventional materials to create textiles that challenge the existing conventions.

Once you uncover these stories and return to the larger exhibit space to make an exit, the same installation begins to take on different dimensions.

6. Work in collaboration with others

One final learning from this exhibition—what made it so unexpectedly brilliant—was the way the collaboration between the creators materialized as a sort of alchemy, elevating each individual contribution into a magical whole. Sudo’s textiles, Gardère’s exhibit design, Saito’s space design, and NACT’s curation reacted to and considered one another, orchestrating a holistic experience beyond single objects, addressing themes beyond individual expertise, and creating something relevant and surprising for everyone.

*Exhibition flyer taken from Studio Adrien Gardère. All other photos taken by the author with permission from NACT.

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What separates a great cultural experience from a truly memorable one? An element of surprise. Unexpected brilliance sticks in your mind, and the memory becomes something you can return to for inspiration.

It doesn't look like much, but this spoon/bowl combo was a satisfying dining experience. Not long ago, I visited a college cafeteria that had several different stations, each with a different kind of plastic cutlery. Someone suggested that I use a plastic spoon from one station with a bowl from another, because they had observed over time that the inside radius fillet of this bowl perfectly matched the outside radius curve of the spoon. This way, your spoon always scraped the corner of the bowl clean. They had gone so far as to make sure there was always a supply of spoons at the the other counter, to make sure they could use them with the mis-matching bowl.

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.

We’ve brought back thousands of photos and videos and hundreds of Post-its. As we stare at the sea of notes, I feel stuck and a little panicked. Are there answers in this data soup?

This messy moment in the design process is called “synthesis,” when designers start to distill all our research into tangible possibilities. Synthesis can feel ambiguous, stiff, and chaotic all at once; the secret is to keep moving forward any way you can.

My way of conquering the chaos is a method I call “sketch synthesis.”

Here's my sketching process for this project, which you can adapt for your own team.

Step 1: Pare it down

First, I put the notes from each research interview, observation, or experience onto separate poster boards. Then, I took a step back and distilled the information from each of these boards into just four or five sketched post-its.

These sketches are from our interview with an extreme commuter. The express his ideal travel experience: an environment that brings the outside in and serves as an extended coworking space.

Sketches can feature characters, icons, or graphs—anything that provides a helpful cue for you. You don’t need to be a great artist to sketch. The idea is to summarize what you’ve learned visually, even if those visuals are stick figures!

Step 2: Cluster it up

Next, I took another step back and turned my individual sketches from each poster board into a series of sketch clusters, grouped around emerging themes.

This cluster is focused on the theme of "place." It's a mind map of sorts, featuring images that represent a range of experiences, interviews, and secondary research we uncovered related to the theme.

Don’t be afraid to discard the ideas that aren’t standing out. The aim of this step is to sort and refine what you’ve learned, using sketching as a filter.

Step 3: Talk it through

I invited the rest of the team to review the sketch clusters with me. Working together, we turned the clusters into concrete design questions that could help us get tangible, fast.

The goal is to share your sense-making with others to figure out if you’ve captured the essence of the research, or need to go back to your original poster boards and find the missing thread that ties it all together.

These sketch clusters helped the team gather our thoughts and articulate the questions we hoped to explore with our client in the next phase of the project. They captured our research insights and pointed the way to new transportation innovations.

For me, sketch synthesis is a way of bringing clarity and momentum to tough moments in the design process. Plus, drawings are a natural starting point for design, which the team can build on and our clients can easily understand.

Sketching also creates a common language for designers to communicate. At IDEO, people come from all around the world. On this team, I worked alongside designers from Germany, South Korea, France, and the U.S.

While I’m drawn to sketching, you might have a natural inclination to express yourself through role play, writing, film, or data. There are no limits to the creative problem-solving skills that might help your team synthesize.

The secret is to keep moving toward the answers, even when things feel messy—and to have a little fun along the way.

This post was adapted from a talk I presented for Mixed Methods, hosted at Airbnb in San Francisco.

It’s Monday morning and our design team is back after three weeks on the road researching the future of shared vehicles. We've soaked up a ton of inspiration by talking to transport experts and observing commuters.

As someone whose profession is to design new experiences with technology, I find this thought-provoking. It’s a current and widely-experienced example of something that has always been true of new technology: It has as much potential to have negative impact as positive. Which way it goes has always been more about the path that we put the technology on than the technology itself.

When I was asked to speak at TEDxGlasgow this year, I took the opportunity to explain how design can help. There are straightforward things that we can do to make sure that our technology brings out the best in us. Watch my talk below.

David Webster speaks at TEDxGlasgow.

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We all have love-hate relationships with those buzzing bricks of aluminum in our pockets. On the one hand, they have the incredible power to connect us to people, information, and knowledge. But on the other, that constant access can become constant distraction, detaching us from real moments that matter.

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.