Commonwealth Bank of Australia was interested in helping customers and businesses build close connections. They believed the way to do this would be by creating richer interactions around different forms of payment. The bank approached IDEO to explore these opportunities, and the result is a new retail business platform—Pi—and a portable payment device—Albert.

Pi brings a new level of flexibility, functionality, and customization to the face-to-face interaction between a cashier and a customer, improving everything from the process of splitting the bill in a restaurant to helping a guest find more personalized experiences at a hotel.

Insights

In the team’s research in Australia, the UK, and Germany, they found a few key insights that informed the design. First, they saw that an ideal platform should support the full spectrum of human behaviors around payment. Second, platforms can add value by improving the relationships among banks, merchants, and customers. And third, the payment experience should be customized to fit a specific setting, working one way in a luxury boutique and another in a gas station.

IDEO, CBA, and Wincor Nixdorf worked together closely to steward the design of Pi And Albert through product development and implementation, and to gather feedback from merchants during rapid, iterative cycles.

Results

The platform is flexible enough to benefit organizations of all sizes: Larger merchants can incorporate Pi as part of their existing network, while smaller merchants can grow their business using powerful business tools. And customers of all kinds can easily access a variety of payment methods and helpful applications.

Albert offers a large touchscreen that’s intuitive to use, the safety of virtually encrypted PIN entry, and a variety of ways to access data connections. A large battery provides power when retailers are on the go, and a modular housing means that Albert can be used in all kinds of situations. The device is built to handle current card payment methods but can also adapt to how cards might be accepted in the future, and even eliminates the need to swivel a screen from cashier to customer during the payment process.

Forty million Americans became newly eligible for health coverage when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was fully implemented in 2014. Some enrolled in health insurance for the first time, while others were able to get better access to affordable health coverage.

In preparation for the millions of applications, states were required to develop ways for people to sign up for health insurance online for plans that were operated by state and federal governments under the ACA. To help public and private agencies to meet the requirements, a coalition of nine national and state-based foundations, led by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) developed a digital enrollment prototype, and hired IDEO to lead the consumer research and design effort.

After a yearlong collaborative process, the resulting 300-page design manual and design reference prototype illustrates a customizable approach to public and private health insurance enrollment.

The flexible set of design standards developed for Enroll UX 2014 aims to make online health insurance enrollment simple, intuitive, and easy to navigate at scale.

To encourage PhD candidates to think differently about how they tackle tough science problems, the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and IDEO embarked on a fruitful collaboration.

Three PhD candidates were tasked with the following challenge: Cultivate new audiences and uses for a microscope. Drawing inspiration from cell phone microscope CellScope, the trio arrived at a prototype that was less reliant on technology and easily disassembled and reassembled. How? By using the most basic building blocks: Legos.

Made of custom 3-D-printed parts and standard toy building blocks, the LegoScope, which functions as a microscope, can easily snap pieces in and out to hold different components. Both the device and the team-based process are now being used in various other campus projects to change how researchers think about conducting and advancing scientific research.

“The best work in the future is going to be done by teams of people with very different expertise, who know different things and think about things in different ways, who come together to focus on one big problem,” said Keith Yamamoto, vice chancellor of research at UCSF, who led the initiative.

Arye Barnehama and Laura Michelle Berman wanted to take their invention—a headband that measures brain wave activity, focus, and concentration—to the next level. As a part of IDEO’s startup-in-residence program, Barnehama and Berman collaborated with IDEO on the product’s rebranding, hoping to refine and emphasize the product’s promise: When people improve their focus, they feel more mindful, confident, and productive.

With IDEO’s help, the company changed its name from Axio to Melon, delineated their brand, refined its product, developed its user experience, and prepared a Kickstarter campaign that garnered considerable press coverage. The new name, Melon, reflected the friendly, scalable character of the company. The name also suggested the intent of the product—using neuroscience data to inform a personal activity.

To distinguish Melon as a standout in the crowded quantified-self category, IDEO designers made the logo a faceted orb that references the gear-shifting mind, with “Melon” written in a distinctive font born from that same logo. The team went with fruit colors—cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon—to evoke the sweet, refreshing experience the Melon headband promises.

Together, the Melon and IDEO teams also developed an app that shows increases in concentration after performing certain tasks and features a game in which you “fold” origami through mental focus to hone concentration.

Melon’s new brand strategy and UI set it apart from your typical fitness tracker, engaging the user in an elegant, joyful, and customized experience with every interaction.

Melon: a headband and mobile app to help you measure focus.

Generative art, or art derived from computer code, is a relatively new format, in which the artist-programmer realizes a vision or idea by defining parameters and commands. But making generative art is, in many ways, just like painting or any other classical fine art.

When you create a painting, you start with an inspiration and sketch it on paper. You then prepare your oils, brushes, and canvas, and you refine the painting until it’s just right. I follow a similar process with generative art. When something inspires me, whether it’s a contour map in a geographic magazine, a chart representing a mathematical formula, or the various mechE tools in my father’s workshop, I sketch it on paper and jot down the keywords that best describe it. Then, I sit down at my computer and compose the code (using the Python programming language) that will “paint” the right “brush strokes.” I run the code to generate images on my computer, and go through multiple iterations until the code outputs the shapes, colors, opacities, and shadows that perfectly express my original idea.

I leverage the power of my computer to generate the artwork. Where a classical fine artist would pull out their oils and brushes to express colors and shapes, I do the same with parameters. For example, I defined a palette of colors for painting waves like this:

As if the computer was a hand holding a brush, I tell it how to paint by defining command codes, like draw_wave:

Delightful randomness

While most of the parameters in my code are set statically, I have also added an algorithm that allows certain parameters to be generated randomly, so the visual elements of the image change randomly within a defined range. This way, the final product is unpredictable; I’ll never know exactly what image will be generated.

This function returns a float number randomly ranging from 0.1 to 0.7:

The random parameters are not only unpredictable, but also non-reiterative, so these images cannot be recreated—they are completely unique.

Algorithm as art

Computer graphics are based on mathematics, so when I paint with code, I am exploring and visualizing the beauty of structure, abstraction, and complexity in mathematics that most of us don’t get to see in our daily lives. It often happens that when I play with a new algorithm and see the images it generates, I'm inspired to develop them into artwork, as was the case with Tsunami, below. The inspiration for this series came while playing with an algorithm named Cornu Curve, which generates a fantastic visual effect of crazy waves. From the same code, I made six different images using a combination of a hundred curves in varying opacities and shades of blue.

Unlimited complexity

Creating art with code allows me to make complex images that I could never have made by hand, such as All Seeing Eye, below. It is composed of millions of lines and hundreds of layers, and each line has its own shadow, blur, and opacity.

My goal was to use the complex texture to create the visual effect of catching or entrapping the audience in the “eye.” The computer is an exciting tool for creating art like this, which requires repetitive, intricate work. A piece of generative artwork composed of millions of shapes can be drawn in just a few minutes. Rendered by hand, the same piece might take a human ten years to accomplish.

Like a painter selecting the perfect tool, I used the following piece of code to define a “brush” with just the right characteristics to create the lines I wanted:

Then, just as a painter would use a specific gesture to create a certain visual effect, I used the following code to tell my computer how to hold and draw with the brush I created:

Functional designs

The exciting thing about generative art is that it is not only beautiful, but also usable. We can create new patterns and unique fabrics for the fashion industry, or we can move beyond two-dimensional creations and use generative art to make sculpture, furniture, and even architecture.

Creating art with code, I’m constantly making new discoveries of exciting visual possibilities. Computers have revolutionized countless aspects of human life, and now, generative art has the potential to revolutionize artistic expression, opening infinite space for innovation.

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By day, I code mobile apps and design digital experiences. In my free time, I create art. I recently began exploring both at once with generative art, a sublime combination of computer programming and graphic art.

Wild ideas emerged: a Hug Deli, where patrons might order Ninja Hugs off the menu; a mystery bar, serving up a drink chosen by the previous guest. The big idea was to get people out of their “thinking minds“ in order to freely create.

And that brought us to Fauxtobooth.

A riff on the classic photobooth we all know and love, this version is completely handmade and doubles as a creative confidence booster—forcing people to draw on a deadline.

How it works

The subject takes a seat inside the booth, facing a mirror. Thirty seconds after pressing a button, the subject receives a slip of paper through a slot below the mirror with—whoa!—a hand-drawn sketch of his or her face on it.

Um, how exactly did that work?

When the host brings the subject around to the back of the booth, the inner workings of the machine are revealed: table, chair, paper, Sharpies. The subject was actually posing in front of a two-way mirror and now it's his or her turn to take on the role of fauxtographer—of capturing the next unsuspecting subject.

How it's made

To make a full-scale prototype, you’ll need some foam core and tape. A crude model will help you get a sense of the dimensions and how long it would take to build. The massive black exterior offers an opportunity to advertise your offer. We used vinyl decals for our slogan: “Automatic portraits while you wait!“

Enlist friends: Building a Fauxtobooth takes a village (who likes to cut foam core alone anyway?).

Glue together pieces of foam core to provide structural integrity, and attach the parts using industrial strength velcro, making it possible to easily deconstruct and transport the booth.

Finishing touches

A few key elements bring the Fauxtobooth to life: a two-way mirror, a giant red “Start” button, and graphic flourishes:

• Two-way mirror: The artist can see the subject, but not the other way around. Position the Fauxtobooth under direct light on the subject’s side (you can also use a spotlight), and make sure the curtain is closed on the other side to completely conceal the artist.
• “Start” button: Program an Arduino to keep time (we used an interval of 30 seconds). When pressed, the button lights up for 20 seconds; for the last 10 seconds it blinks and counts down. This serves a dual purpose: the subject knows to hold still for their portrait and the artist knows how much time they have to complete the portrait.
• Graphics: IDEO designer extraordinaire Njoki Gitahi loves bold, vintage signs, and playful, typographic compositions. She took inspiration from Lou Dorfsman’s “Gastrotypographicalassemblage.“ The team vinyl cut and applied the graphics—a tricky process, but well worth it in the end. The white lettering creates a dramatic display against the black backdrop.

What we learned

Once we narrowed in on the Fauxtobooth concept, we realized that (1) you can capture the gestalt of a person in a very short time, (2) people have fun with it, and (3) the collection of images make for an awesome display wall. Here are a few other things we discovered along the way:

• Get back to basics. Building with common materials like foam core, tape, and Velcro reconnects you to basic skills and tools. And the analog experience charmed the pants off people.
• Velcro is your friend. Not only is the sticky stuff forgiving if you don’t get the alignment just right on the first try, it also allows you to disassemble and reassemble structures on location. Consider it the new duct tape.
• Fine-tune light and sound. We were able to position the subject’s side of the booth under a light and keep the artist’s side relatively dark. Check your space ahead of time and use a spotlight if necessary. Also, as the party heats up, the sound of the Start button may be drowned out. Turn up the volume!

Your turn

Up for the challenge? We put together a handy manual so you can learn from our mistakes. If you do build a Fauxtobooth, we’d love to hear about it. Send us a few (real) photos!

Download the replication manual and vinyl graphics

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There was a lot of work to be done. IDEO's New York studio was to host an event to celebrate Tom and David Kelley's new book, Creative Confidence, and whatever we designed had to reflect their ideas. Pressure on, we brainstormed over lunch—tools and sticky notes spread out across the largest room in our office.

Sixty years later, amidst technological advances that have spurred massive innovation and changed the face of science, we decided it was time to re-inspire today’s generation. James Musick, a digital communications lead at Genentech, came to us for help in creating an immersive iPad experience that would celebrate Watson and Crick’s seminal discovery, as well as engage the science-curious. But with three months to complete the project, we needed to hit the ground running.

Ralph and The Cheesy Mess

The idea of using a game or puzzle as a way to bring users into a world filled with genetics became an early favorite in the ideation stage. Puzzle-based gameplay was a great analogy to reflect the scientific process: from trial-and-error learning stages, to information synthesis, all the way through solving the puzzle and answering the question. A game hinging on a real-life genetic mechanic would be novel and stood to introduce the science to a new audience. If designed well, with engaging play and a compelling story, we would be able to integrate the science, narrative, and gameplay into a beautiful app.

We started off diving deep into the world of video games. We indulged in playing some of our tried-and-true favorites, as well as newer games such as Osmos and Eufloria to understand how they bridged science and storytelling. At the same time, we were learning about cutting-edge research in genetics through conversations with Jason Long and other Genentech scientists, listening to podcasts, and a hefty amount of reading.

Throughout this inspiration phase, we kept coming back to a wildly intriguing area of research called epigenetics, which focuses on how environments affect genetic expression. In short, epigenetics is the area of genetics that, given a fixed DNA makeup, tells the DNA which parts of the code should express themselves and how they should express themselves as determined by external factors like weather, stress, diet, etc. So while we may have a fixed genetic makeup, the environment still plays a large modulating factor in our genetic expression.

Our fascination with the content—combined with a teamwide love of comic books and mutant-origin stories—evolved into an epigenetic-inspired noir-puzzle game based on Ralph, an artisanal cheese-maker, and his cheese company Ralph's Killer Muenster.

The mechanisms of genetics

Early on in the ideation phase, Evan Shapiro, who would become a core team member and help prototype game logic, introduced us to phylogenetic trees and maximum parsimony theory. You’ve probably encountered phylogenetic trees in biology class, where they serve to illustrate evolutionary relationships among species. Maximum parsimony, on the other hand, is more obscure. It serves as a computational forensic tool to help us understand the evolution of genetic traits along the phylogenetic tree, as well as help us infer species evolution. With maximum parsimony, the “preferred phylogenetic tree is the tree that supposes the least evolutionary change to explain observed data.” After mulling that over for a bit, we decided creating and solving a phylogenetic puzzle by employing maximum parsimony as a scoring criteria was a great jumping-off point and a compelling challenge.

To test this, our first prototype was a paper prototype where we started with a sample origin genetic trait. We sketched out several generations by mutating one trait at a time, and created our own phylogenetic tree. Given the final generation of traits and no tree structure, the goal was to see if we could work backwards to recreate the tree structure and uncover the origin trait. Basically, reverse evolution. After a lot of finessing we came up with a rule set that actually reflected natural evolutionary rules and allowed us to solve the tree and find the origin species.

With this excitement, we spent a weekend programming a single prototype puzzle using mechanics that would become the main gameplay: players reverse engineer evolution by mutating a given set of species traits backwards to a common ancestor in the fewest moves possible. This was maximum parsimony made tangible. In order for the puzzles to be solvable, we had to use real evolutionary rules describing how the species’ traits can change. By the end of the weekend, we had puzzles and a game mechanic that were keeping us up late into the night trying to one-up each other’s scores, which, to us, meant we had hit the nail on the head.

From a design perspective, one of the significant balancing acts of the project involved weighing the desire to impart specific scientific knowledge against the value of experiential learning. When we used maximum parsimony it became clear that this was a perfect mechanic to give people an experiential interaction with real genetics.

Prototyping and puzzle design

From day one, Ralph’s Killer Muenster was an intensive prototyping project. The first bare-bones prototype of the puzzle was written in Qt because we wanted a framework in which we could rapidly prototype the GUI and could reuse game logic for the production app. Qt, although not extensively used, has great functionality and plays natively with Javascript and C++. It was a well-suited framework for prototyping the core puzzle experience, which included coding the evolutionary logic, adding and testing interactions, modifying visual communication, and testing informational displays.

Our daily workflow started with an early morning meeting so we could all share progress from the previous day. We spent the rest of the day implementing and testing new visuals and interactions on paper and integrating them into the Qt prototype architecture. Lastly, we tested them with people around IDEO to see how they reacted to specific design and gameplay decisions.

We used Unity for the production app in the development environment for many of the same reasons that we chose Qt. But Unity has the added benefit of working with native OpenGL, along with the capability to compile to iOS. As time-constrained as this project was, we still wanted to impart as much narrative and visual interest as possible, and Unity proved an excellent match for this challenge.

Nivi Ramesh, our interaction designer and art director, worked to create an amazing game landscape with analogies to microscopy and slide specimens. Working closely with developers at Substantial, we created layered and animated textures paired with OpenGL shaders to achieve the tone we wanted. We had parallel work streams throughout the prototyping phase, with one team working on developing the logic and overarching architecture of the production app while the prototyping team refined interaction elements, game mechanics, and informational displays in the prototype testbed.

What makes a good puzzle?

Before diving any further, we took a step back to make sure we got the puzzles right. Good puzzle games tend to adhere to some basic principles: They are purely cognitive challenges with a few simple rules, nearly infinite outcomes, difficulty that increases with mastery, and some clear goals. Plus, they're easy to learn.

In building the game, one of our most critical challenges was creating visual representations of the genetic traits that people would be using to solve the puzzles. People had to quickly grasp how they could manipulate and evolve the traits given the genetic logic. If we couldn't get people to make this mental leap, the game wasn't going to succeed.

A real genetic trait is made up of a snippet of DNA and is a long, winding series of genetic code (or, a lot of AGTC). To make the game approachable, we chose to abstract and simplify the cheese trait representations as visual identifiers that had a bit of mystery and were themselves a puzzle to decode. We tested many different ways of visually representing the traits, the majority of which people could not directly connect to an increasing or decreasing series. The simplest visuals turned out to be the most effective: shapes, dots, and lines.

With simple geometric shapes, people could see that moving from a triangle to a square to a hexagon involved moving through a progression of increasing the numbers of sides. Similarly, lines and dots worked well for understanding how the traits could be mutated. They were easily accessible by players in planning a strategy for mutation.

Less is more

After the weekend of playing the prototype level, we needed a way to determine the optimal solution to these puzzles so that we could give user feedback and help players improve in the game. With Ralph's Killer Muenster, an optimal solution for any puzzle involves making the “most parsimonious” decisions, i.e. using the least number of moves or fewest mutations. We needed to find a way to reward people for doing less, contrary to typical game design where users are rewarded for doing more. Without a clear and appropriate qualitative feedback mechanism, we found that people were finishing puzzles without any sense for how much better they could perform.

Scavenging the Internet for a tool to analyze phylogenetic trees uncovered Mesquite, a software package built specifically for computational biology and evolutionary analysis. After learning from tutorials produced by Harvard University, we could solve the initial species sets and puzzles we had created, and arrive at the most efficient tree structure and trait mutations.

We used the statistical language R to generate thousands of possible levels, export files for Mesquite to crunch, and output the moves required for each level into a custom level file that we could use to test in our prototype game.

Levels testing and design progressed in parallel with refining the scoring display and making hundreds of other visual and UX enhancements. With our trait visualizations, levels design and scoring mechanism solved, we felt we had achieved something that was both subtle and significant: People who grasped the underlying puzzle dynamics were quite literally using their brains in a way that mimics a core methodology of genetic science. This seemed to hit at the essence of experiential learning.

Muenster launches, Bill Nye approves

The Ralph's Killer Muenster iPad game launched at the 2013 GET (Genomics, Environments and Traits) conference, coinciding with the anniversary of Watson and Crick's seminal paper describing the structure of DNA. At the conference, Bill Nye the Science Guy, a long-time advocate of a science literate society, played the game, and loved it. This made our day. The app also caught Apple's attention, and was listed as a new and noteworthy Education app in the App Store.

To further raise awareness around the game, we created a Ralph's Killer Muenster brand, including a visual identity, packaging, website, Twitter, game trailer, and food truck—all mobilized by Ralph to push the only tool that could save the city (and his reputation) and allow him to lift the health code violations that kept him from producing and distributing cheese. Ralph’s food truck, sent throughout San Francisco, distributed grilled muenster cheese sandwiches.

What we learned

After the launch festivities, our team took a step back to consider what we had learned. Here's the take-away:

• Set constraints to help make a hard problem more approachable. Our self-imposed constraint that the game needed to rely on a scientific mechanism helped us narrow in on phylogenetic trees and maximum parsimony as our core concepts.

• A good story goes a long way. We spent significant time concocting Ralph's story, and getting the tone and art direction down in order to engage people. We want them to stick around for the more mentally taxing interactions later down the line.

• Find the right tool for the right job. We used a variety of prototyping and user testing methods and environments, rather than trying to find or force an all-in-one. Each tool elicited learnings unique to them.

1953 was a good year for science and technology. The polio vaccine was developed, the first open heart surgery performed, and color TVs hit the store shelves. It was also the year Watson and Crick revealed one of the most important discoveries of the 20th century: the double-helix structure of DNA.

David Kelley, IDEO founder and Stanford d.school creator, and his brother Tom Kelley, IDEO partner and the author of the best-selling The Art of Innovation, have written a powerful and compelling book on unleashing the creativity that lies within each and every one of us.

WATCH: David Kelley's TED Talk: How to build your creative confidence.

Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the “creative types.” But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet, David and Tom Kelley, show us that everyone is creative.

In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO and with many of the world’s top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work and personal lives, and innovatively approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

Learn more at CreativeConfidence.com.

Purchase

Know someone who might love this book? Here are some options for purchasing Creative Confidence (Crown Business, 2013):

• Order from Bookshop.org

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.