Sealy and IDEO first collaborated in 2008, to rethink the design of its Stearns & Foster line. For years, Sealy, the largest mattress manufacturer in the world, had taken the standard industry approach to selling mattresses and watched market share and sales flatten; it knew something had to change. Stearns & Foster evolved from a single product design into a keystone for transforming the organization.

IDEO helped Sealy use actionable consumer insights to develop a scalable design methodology and new brand principles, which it applied to product design, operational and manufacturing decision-making processes, and sales and marketing strategy. This “brand-to-product” framework was subsequently used for three separate and consecutive product launches—Stearns & Foster, Embody, and Posturepedic—resulting in an overhaul of 85 percent of Sealy’s mattress portfolio.

Tempur-Pedic was already working with IDEO on a new mattress design when it acquired Sealy in 2013. It was also interested in how design thinking and human-centered design could improve its business. Once solely focused on the technological elements of designing a mattress, together with IDEO, Tempur-Pedic redesigned the outer shells of its mattresses to reflect the quality on the inside. This design change led to the company to look at new ways to infuse design into their products.

“The initial project was to design the mattress,” said Thomas Overthun, associate partner and design director at IDEO. “But the second project was to create a whole design language from the mattress out to what it meant for any other product, from pillows to blankets and other accessories. It eventually became bigger than just the mattress.”

Working on the Tempur-Pedic/Sealy relationship has been gratifying, said IDEO partner and design director Michael Hendrix, because although home goods can be thought of as simply products, nothing could be further from the truth. IDEO and Tempur-Pedic/Sealy changed the course of the mattress company's business through the transformative power of designing where, and ultimately how, people sleep. And in the process, the organization itself changed as well, moving siloed departments to cross-functional teams, with the brand division central to their cooperation, which led to consistent and aligned decisions across the board.

Some of the projects include:

Stearns & Foster Luxury Mattress
Sealy teamed up with IDEO to develop a design language for Stearns & Foster mattresses that would reestablish what the brand stood for. Through redefining brand principles and rounds of prototypes that focused on evocative details, the new Stearns and Foster mattress was the highest rated in Sealy’s portfolio since it started keeping records, and initial retailer orders were three times what management projected.

Next-Generation Posturepedic
An icon in the mattress industry was brought into the 21st century by developing a new product that delivered on the long-running promise of the brand. Together, IDEO and Sealy designed a product that focused on holistic back health. In its earnings report, the company said US bedding sales for the quarter were up 10.6 percent, to $253.4 million, a figure driven by the new product line’s introduction. According to Sealy’s Q3 earnings report, the Posturepedic launch represented the largest and fastest rollout in the company’s history.

Embody by Sealy
The project began by defining the market opportunities for all-foam beds, and ended with the modern, streamlined Embody mattress as well as a simplified design language, free of industry jargon, to help retailers talk about the mattress to customers. “Sealy collaborated with IDEO to create an approachable and attractive mattress that delivers the simple, healthy rest consumers want with a selling story they can easily understand,” said Jodi Allen, Sealy’s Chief Marketing Officer.

Tempur-Pedic Sleep System
Best known for the revolutionary, NASA-proven Tempur material inside its mattresses, Tempur wanted to transform the exterior of its mattresses to match the caliber of innovation inside. Together with IDEO, Tempur created a new sleep system, including an easily removable and washable fabric mattress cover. “Tempur-Pedic was born of innovation, but we were never a design-driven company until we worked with IDEO,” said Patrice Varni, senior vice president of brand marketing, Tempur Sealy North America, LLC. “Seeing consumer need in a new way through IDEO’s eyes has transformed us. Our product design, our creative psyche, our brand are all fundamentally changed by this sharper focus. This collaboration has given us all a renewed sense of pride.”

The challenge of how we’ll feed the exploding world population in the future—in a sustainable, cost-effective, and environmentally friendly way—is seeding an agricultural revolution in Europe.

In 2012, INFARM founders Erez, Guy Galonska, and Osnat Michaeli found that vertical farms could be a solution to urban self-sufficiency. These farms could allow people to grow vegetables and herbs in small spaces, with no soil and far less water.

An approach that’s captured the imagination of futurists for decades, vertical farming involves growing vegetables and herbs in stacked units or inclined surfaces, within which moisture, light, temperature, and nutrients are monitored, and controlled.

After creating their first vertical farming experiment in their apartment in Berlin, the founders brought together plant scientists and industrial designers to explore and develop vertical farming’s potential.

Since then, the startup has created custom growing systems for clients including Airbnb, Mercedes-Benz, and Weber. Most recently, INFARM installed a vertical farm growing herbs and vegetables at the Berlin branch of German supermarket chain Metro, the fourth-largest retail chain in the world, to sell to the public. It’s been profiled in Wired Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung, The Guardian, and Zeit.

INFARM collaborated with IDEO to further explore their B2B offer, including concepts for the industrial design of the stackable, modular, climate-controlled units; the interaction design of an accompanying app to monitor and control the units, and its business model.

Urban farmers will sign up for “farming as a service,” comprising the units themselves, as well as a monthly subscription for seeds, cartridges filled with nutrients, and a pH regulator. Because they’re stackable, the modules can be scaled to suit anyone from a home grower to a restaurant chef or supermarket owner. And Erez claims a 1 square meter growing tray can yield four to six mature plants every day, 365 days a year, doubling that of state-of-the-art hydroponic greenhouses.

As well as remotely regulating each unit’s climate, the app will educate growers about new vegetables and herbs, selling packs of complementary seeds, with suggested recipes for them, and cooking instructions. Aiming to promote biodiversity, the firm will sell rare-breed and heirloom seeds too.

The startup has funding from the EU’s European Pioneers fund, and is now looking to secure investment to accelerate software development and ramp up their hardware production capabilities. Quite literally, it's growing its business.

Sesame Workshop is the nonprofit educational group that revolutionized children’s television with the launch of the landmark Sesame Street program in 1969. The show, which has since become a household name, is now watched in more than 150 countries worldwide. The Workshop also creates educational content for new media platforms, and partnered with IDEO to design a line of Sesame Street–themed apps for Apple’s iPhone. The Elmo Calls app, which functions as a utility app for parents and as an entertaining behavioral-development app for kids, is now one of the Top 100 paid iPhone apps in the iTunes store.

The collaboration began with a mutual desire to bring the show’s beloved characters to the iPhone platform—and to do so using a human-centered design approach. Child-development experts, educators, toy and interaction designers, and even the Sesame Street puppeteers weighed in on the design decisions. The team also worked closely with families throughout the project—from initial concepts to early prototyping to the final development—in order to stay focused on how children actually use the iPhone for play. The games were designed accordingly. For example, the team omitted menus from the Sesame Street apps to keep the experiences simple, playful, and fun for a young child. And each game features exclusive new Sesame Street videos, allowing players to enjoy “lean back” moments along with interactive ones.

The resulting iPhone applications let children engage with the favorite Sesame Street characters in a whole new way. Kids touch, shake, swipe, and tilt their way through original games featuring Elmo, Grover, Bert, Rosita, and the Count.

The titles, all of which are available from iTunes, include:

• Elmo Calls: Engages 2- to 5-year-olds in listening-skills practice and active participation during everyday situations.
• Elmo’s Monster Maker: Allows kids to create unique monster friends that dance and play with Elmo.
• Sesame Street Video Maker: Lets kids star in their own music videos, mashing recordings of themselves with popular Sesame music videos and adding their own stamps and special effects.
• Sesame Street Makes Music: Helps kids explore an array of instruments as they contribute to new renditions of classic preschool tunes with their Sesame friends.

How do you know when you’re successful in your work? You can check off a list of technical skills and expertise you bring to the table. You can use a career development rubric to make sure you’re hitting the right goals. But often, it’s your behaviors—the intangibles that are the most difficult to articulate—that make the most impact. Things like your ability to stay optimistic or your willingness to adapt when there’s no roadmap.

Because of the nature of our work at IDEO, these intangibles are a big part of what defines the experience of working at the company. So in 2012, a global team of designers from our U.S., Europe, and Asia offices came together to codify these values and behaviors as part of a larger effort to evolve IDEO’s career development platform. More often than not, when IDEOers hit road bumps in their career, it was not about what they were doing, but how they were doing it.

The team agreed that, in addition to identifying the technical requirements needed to progress through one’s career, it was just as crucial to give IDEOers the tools they need to navigate the complex culture. So they captured the values they believed were foundational to the culture and most strongly shared across the IDEO community, and put them to paper in The Little Book of IDEO. The title is meant to reflect its purpose for readers—a handbook that’s compact, useful, and free of any corporate jargon.

For IDEO-ers, this red cloth-bound guide provides a shared lexicon around both the hard and soft skills we need to succeed. It describes things like why IDEO is so loosely structured, where it comes from, and where it’s headed.

Most importantly, the book identifies the organization’s seven core values. These are by design specific, actionable, and integral to the kind of work we do and the environment in which we do it, going beyond common sense and general ethical practice. The intention: to foster meaningful conversations within the community about life at IDEO, and how to achieve success along the way. With each succinct expression comes a deeper explanation of why it matters, and how it shapes our experience at IDEO.

Over the years, the book has been roundly embraced by the IDEO community as an honest articulation of who we are, as opposed to what we aspire to be, and what we appreciate most about working together. When IDEOers first got their hands on it, a movement took shape to create videos that bring each of the core values to life. To depict the value of "Embracing Ambiguity," for example, New York-based designers built a makeshift cardboard rowboat, and while simulating a storm, navigated their way through uncharted territory with teamwork and optimism. San Francisco produced a Jacques Cousteau inspired look at the lifestyle and behaviors of designers in their natural collaborative habitat.

Through the process of making the videos, IDEOers came together to reflect on each of the values, talking through what resonated and what didn’t. It gave them a sense of ownership, and a platform through which to share their interpretations.

A Global Conversation

IDEO has a global presence—offices in two countries in Europe, two countries in Asia, and multiple locations across the U.S. As an organization that embraces a human-centered culture, it felt important to learn if the values resonated with the IDEO community in all of these locations, especially in a country like China, whose working culture is so different from the west. We saw the authenticity and resonance of the values as essential for attracting, motivating, and retaining local talent.

So how did The Little Book of IDEO land in Shanghai? Exploring this question would illuminate insights into how our own clients are often challenged to keep their company culture resonant within the global landscape.

A team of IDEOers in our Shanghai office took on the challenge of exploring the meaning behind each of the values. They were surprised with what they discovered—that despite the firm’s Western origins, locals felt largely connected to the values. It even helped to further solidify their identity as a community, even if it may have been in tension with local working culture, because it was rooted in a set of shared beliefs.

In some instances, the Shanghai team built on the existing values in order to refine the meaning for the local context. For example, the core value "Be Optimistic" rings true, but could sound naive when translated directly to Chinese, implying "rose-tinted glasses.” So in the Mandarin edition, an extra phrase was added to convey the measuredness we mean when we talk about optimism at IDEO. The lesson here: The treatment of something as fundamental and nuanced as our values requires authenticity and emotional connection, and therefore more of a transcreation process than straight translation.

Lasting Power

As an organization, we are designed to be flexible. This means we’re always changing—even when it comes to how we are structured—so that we can respond to the kinds of challenges that clients come to us for. In the midst of our constant evolution, The Little Book of IDEO is as resonant today as it was when it was published.

Zimbabwe-born Natsai studied architecture at Edinburgh University, then at Central St. Martin’s Material Futures course. There she learned about synthetic biology, and met Dr. John Ward, a professor from UCL’s microbial molecular biology lab. He became a supporter of her scarf project, called Fold.

Natsai is at the forefront of an emerging field, biodesign, that aims to tackle the climate change problems caused by textiles and farming. Fueled by advances like the gene editing technique CRISPR, which is making designing with DNA simpler and cheaper, scientists and designers are looking to harnessing nature itself to ‘biofacture’ everything from leather, to meat, to medicine.

Companies like Bolt Threads are spinning synthetic spider silk, while Modern Meadow is growing meat in labs. Meanwhile Autodesk is creating design tools for the field—think AutoCAD for DNA.

Natsai joined IDEO’s London studio as part of our two week-long Fortnight residency, collaborated with the community here, and shared the resulting scarves. As part of her final presentation, she brought to life the potential of biodesign with a series of five tweets. Here, she explains the speculative future they’re framed in. It is a future in which synthetic biology is shaping brands, products, businesses, and people’s behavior.

Future Craft

“Hyper-specialized hybrid technologies signal the rise of the niche maker. #DIYbio #biomakerspace”

Natsai: I’m really interested in the dialogue between craft and technology. This tweet depicts my own reality: my craft is so specialized that I have to design the tools to create it, and I also have had to learn how to maintain the life that co-creates it, without any precedents to learn from. Imagine a world where our materials are alive or derived from living systems. Every maker will intimately know the biochemistry of their chosen species, and will find new ways of transforming those organisms’ behaviors into truly unique products and processes. We’ll be using other living systems and even amalgamating layers of digital technology to biofabricate.

Service Design

“Who owns your wardrobe? #panasonic4nike”

Natsai: I had a conversation with a colleague about how one might go about democratizing the production of ‘bio-factured’ products. At the time I was thinking about how to streamline the process for scaling up this technology, but he challenged me to think about new models of distribution that tap into DIY culture. Ultimately, his question was: if you can grow your own textiles, then who owns your wardrobe? The hashtag #Panasonic4Nike points towards a future that sees unlikely stakeholders coming together to offer true innovations in designing the products we use, as well as the services and hardware that enable us to do this in a personalized way.

Convergence

“Digitized biology has democratized the creation of complex biological consumer products. #autodesk #synbio #AI #IOT”

Natsai: I understand that not only do I work with a pigment-producing bacteria, but that medium is also a biological sensor. Producing pigment signals a crucial stage in the bacteria’s life cycle. This made me ask: how could we harness living sensors and build them into our everyday environments? The notion of technology convergence is definitely something I see happening further into the future. Wearable technology, household electronics and the Internet of Things, in my view, will expand and come together to create mutually-beneficial ecosystems of bacteria and digital technology.

Metabolic Materiality

“Biofacturing process & biological characteristics of an organism now define a brand’s identity and its business model. #bottomupprimacy #IP”

Working in a fashion context, I am hyper aware of how a brand’s identity communicates. The product itself needs to hold true to the values of the brand. This is the part that gets tricky working with a living technology: at some point I relinquish control to my bacterial colonies to finish the garments—conceptually speaking, I provide the structural parameters. The lack of control is a challenge and an opportunity to design interventions that end up in line with the brand identity. Creativity therefore becomes crucial, to push the aesthetics and craft processes in the development of each garment. Although it’s true of any industry, fashion is a particularly interesting space to consider a business model based on that uniqueness. Even before we think about synthetic biology as a way of manufacturing, designers can and should push innovation beyond a simple “genetically-modified organism 1 fixes problem A.”

Beyond Monoculture

“Happy Kombucha shares rally as merger with Kvadrat announced. #symbioticventures #closedloopsystem”

This really looks at future business models and ecosystems of information and skill exchange. Happy Kombucha actually exists and it’s my go-to for food and beverage bacterial cultures in the UK. They mainly sell starters and toolkits for brewing your own kombucha, kefir water and kefir milk. This tweet is a little tongue-in-cheek: it imagines that their business strategy has evolved to sell the SCOBYs (the symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that ferments tea, to make kombucha) as fabrics, leading to a merger with major textile manufacturing brand Kvadrat. It also speaks of the current and future reality of the trade of living organisms.

IDEO Fortnight with Natsai Audrey Chieza from Alexandra Whiting on Vimeo.

Vivid pinks, blues, greens and yellows form beautiful, organic abstract shapes on Natsai Audrey’s delicate silk scarves. But they’re not drawn by her, or silkscreened in a print studio. Instead, the shapes are the life and death of streptomyces bacteria writ colorful on silk, folded into a petri dish, in a lab.

Being a design researcher, I’m constantly conducting real-world research on a subject area or problem. Researchers travel widely, and spend weeks interviewing, observing, shadowing, and prototyping. But even when a trip seems full of scheduled activities, there should always be room for opportunistic inspiration. Because that is the thing I value the most.

I am an inspiration hunter. When I see 45-minutes of travel time between interviews, what I actually see a window of opportunity for a real-world experience. As well as naked scrubbing, on recent research trips, I’ve subjected my teammates and myself to:

• Screaming like rabid fans to appear on a game show in Los Angeles.
• Having our fortunes told by psychics in Hong Kong.
• A workout class only described to us as “cathartic” and a “nonstop endorphin surge” in New York.
• Getting too close to the ring at a lucha libre match in Mexico City.

So how exactly can one justify this as inspiration? Well, it depends on your definition of inspiration. I like to see design inspiration as something that lives in the intersection of three things: Satisfying a curiosity, Defying the expected, and Touching an emotion.

1. Satisfying a Curiosity:

How many times have you thought to yourself, I should take that Cantonese / personal finance / fermentation course in my free time? When you’re working a design project, you’re often looking to help others adopt a new behavior or learn a new skill. You can empathize with that experience by doing something yourself that gets you outside your comfort zone.

The Class, aka scream-cardio.

2. Defying the Expected:

Of course we should be inspired by new approaches, that’s what we’re here to design. But finding people or things that truly disrupt your equilibrium can positively influence a project in all sorts of unexpected ways.

3. Touching an Emotion:

Seek places, people, and experiences that bring out a real human emotion that you want to design for. Then surround yourself with what you find, as not to lose it. You might end up with entire mood boards or inspiration shelves from your trip, labeled “joy” and “empathy”. Keeping these artifacts in your workspace will let you feel what you first did.

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On a recent research trip in Asia, I found myself naked in a spa, being vigorously scrubbed by an elderly Korean lady. She removed whole layers of my epidermis, all the while grunting in disapproval. The experience was agonizing but also completely amazing.

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Now, two years later, we’re pushing the limits of our skills by building the project’s next iteration: Shrumen Lumen. This time around, we’re skipping flowers in favor of 12 to 18 foot-tall kinetic mushrooms. Thanks to a totally different geometry, this project is a lot harder to build. But with hard work from an enthusiastic team of volunteers and help from a Burning Man Arts grant and our Kickstarter campaign, the Shrumen Lumen will soon be ready for the Playa. Here is how we’re making it happen.

The vision

To kick off the design process, we looked back at what made Blumen Lumen work so well. Several principles stood out.

1. The flowers had a minimal footprint on the ground but created a huge interactive space.
2. The grouping of flowers was beautiful from afar, but people could also interact with a single flower.
3. The structure was scalable. We were able to build one prototype quickly to figure everything out, then mass-produce as many as we could afford, both in terms of time and money.
4. The flowers were quick to install, and packed up neatly in a shipping container.
5. Mechanical interaction made the flowers interesting during the day, while lights added a new element at night.

We folded a lot of those takeaways into the design, sketching out a garden of five mushrooms that are big enough to provide shade during the day, and can also change shape and light up at night. Just like the flowers, we wanted people to be able to interact with individual mushrooms, but also wanted to add an interaction point that controls all the mushrooms together.

Origami at scale

The geometry of the mushrooms is based on the folding pattern of an origami magic ball. The beauty of that structure is its ability to expand and contract; the challenge is that it’s much harder to control, and, as we found out later, much harder to fold at scale.

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We jumped straight into prototyping, and planned to use the same method we had used to build the flowers: Route the patterns in corrugated plastic, fold them so that they would “memorize” the fold lines, unfold them, then weld them together. But while each flower was made of only two 10 by five foot pieces, the mushroom heads were made of 12. We’d also never worked with this origami pattern at this scale.

Unfortunately, this fold pattern was much trickier. It took a team of eight people a full hour to fold the first three-piece sheet. The plastic also cracked in several places. To make the process easier, we changed the orientation of the corrugation by 90 degrees, and asked the router shop to make shallower cuts into the plastic. The new the fold lines made the pieces much stronger, and we actually managed to fold an entire sheet of 12 pieces (though it did take 10 people).

Setting the Shrumens in motion

To make the mushroom heads contract and expand, we needed to build a solid mechanical structure, kind of like an umbrella, that would connect the folded plastic to an actuator. We experimented with a 1:12 paper scale model to figure out where to attach the actuator, and prototyped the speed of the movement. Since there will be significant stress on this structure, all the parts had to be machined. We were extremely lucky to have Jim Feuhrer (and his five decades of experience in building) to help us create them.

Building a safe structure

Last time around, when the wind came up on the Playa, we could just close the blooms to prevent the flowers from tipping over. It’s much harder to make the Shrumens more aerodynamic, so they had to be carefully engineered to withstand 60-plus mile per hour winds. To hold the origami structure in place, we mounted 1 1/4 inch aluminum tubes around two aluminum hubs. One of the hubs is mounted to the top of the actuator and can move up and down, while the other one is mounted to the stem.

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The entire head assembly slides into a 6-inch, thin-walled steel tube that is mounted onto a 3.5-inch-thick wall pipe. Luckily, with some minor modifications and reinforcements, we were able to recycle the base we used for the flowers to anchor the system.

Designing the digital interaction

Not only are we installing 1560 LED lights in each mushroom, we are also designing ways for visitors to interact with the mushrooms. By standing on certain pads, burners can change the color and movement of the Shrumens. Each pad can also measure weight, so, for example, if two people hop on a certain pad, more of the structure will turn red.

To make this work, we are using a network of Raspberry Pis in each stem. Powered by 12 volt batteries, the minicomputers control both light and movement. Each of the 1560 LEDs in the stem and cap are independently addressable, and the chip in each LED only uses one pin for data input and output, so they must be controlled with precise timing. The team chose to use a Pixel Pusher microcontroller because of its power (it can control 4000 LEDs) and built-in libraries. Processing, running on the Raspberry Pi, pushes color combinations and scenes. The Raspberry Pi also monitors the load cells, which are placed in those lighted platforms at the base of the mushroom. When visitors step on, these load cells can trigger the mushrooms to change shape or color.

The team

Of all the projects I’ve worked on, this one required the most manpower (by far). Thanks to 40-some weekend warriors—a mix of highly specialized experts and enthusiasts who picked up new skills like soldering, metal cutting, or drilling—Shrumen Lumen is about to happen. It has turned into a highly sophisticated installation, and I can’t wait to see it in the desert.

Special thanks to everyone who helped bring Shrumen Lumen to life: Ali Hasanbeigi, Anthony Wainman, Angie Kim, Annette Diefenthaler, Blake Durtsche, Bomani McClendon, Britta Durtsche, Dali Yu, Dave Sumberg, David Brody, David Good, Diem Ho, Gabrielle Fulco, George Joseph, Gilles Roux, Gina Romero, Hannah Williams, Henry Hsiung, Janko Potezica, Jazz Tigan, Jesse Silver (production lead), Jessica Pastor, Jim Feuhrer, Jimmy Chion, Joerg Student, Justin Chang, Kalan Kircher (digital lead), Lauren Fundora, Leo Marzolf, Nathalie Collins (digital co-lead), Nicholas Leverone, Nivi Ramesh, Olivier Notteghem, Peter Bronk, Rachel Frey, Remy Pieron, Sam Starr, Steve Moore, Victoria Cao

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Two years ago, I worked with a team of IDEOers and IDEO alumni to create an interactive art installation for Burning Man that we dubbed Blumen Lumen. Drawing inspiration from a foldable yurt I’d made for the art festival a few years before, we built massive, kinetic origami flowers that responded to their environment by changing color and opening and closing.

1. To create a happy group atmosphere… Hello & High Five

Everyone walks around the room in random directions. At intervals, the facilitator instructs them to interact with a person they are passing. At first, the instructions are to say, "Hello." Then, it’s a high five. And finally, it's a compliment about some aspect of their appearance. Even though you know it’s an exercise, it’s impossible to receive greetings and compliments and not feel a little better about life.

2. To get people into an agreement mindset… Yes, Let’s!

Stand in a circle. Someone suggests an activity by saying, “Let’s,” followed by a verb. For example, “Let’s ski!”

Everyone else loudly agrees together: “Yes! Let’s ski!”

Then, everyone mimes that activity, until someone else suggests a new activity. After a few minutes of this, it's much easier to hear ideas from other people and greet them with encouragement and agreement.

3. To stretch capacity for attention and focus… Red Ball

Stand in a circle. (Have you noticed that improv involves a lot of standing in circles?) Pick someone in the group, look them in the eye, say, “Red ball,” and mime tossing them the ball. They say, “Thank you, red ball,” to acknowledge receipt and then throw it to someone else. Once the group has the hang of this, you can add a green ball and blue ball. To make things interesting, these balls can be different sizes and weights. (They could even be a feral cat or a baby.) Pretty soon, the group will be highly alert to one another and focused on cooperating on the task at hand.

4. To free people of their inner censor… Ba Da Da

Everyone in the circle claps to create a beat. The first player says a word to the person next to them. They respond with whatever comes into their head. The entire circle then says both words and then adds, "Ba Da Da” (pronounced in the same rhythm as “potato”). For example, first person: “Crazy.” Second person: “In love.” Everyone: “Crazy in love, ba da da.” Then the second person starts everything again by saying a word to the next person in the circle. By doing everything to a rhythm, people are forced to respond in the moment and not overthink their choices.

5. To get everyone making eye contact and collaborating… Pass the Clap

Look into the eyes of the person next to you and without using words, coordinate so that you both clap together. That person then turns to the next person and does the same. Pretty soon, you’ll have a rhythm going and a clap will move quickly around the circle. See how fast you can go without losing rhythm. If you want to add some challenge, create multiple claps moving simultaneously in different directions around the circle.

Illustrations by Yoshi Yoshitani.

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More and more designers are using improv games in order to get groups in the mood to collaborate. There are many of these games, taught at places like Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade. We picked five simple favorites.

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.