How do you lift up the middle class in a developing country?

That was the challenge facing Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who hired IDEO to build an entire network of schools powered by a progressive new learning model. IDEO’s mandate: to redesign Innova’s entire K–12 learning experience, from the curriculum to the teacher training to the school buildings, with an eye toward expansion and a goal to provide international-quality education at an affordable price—about $100 a month.

Innova Schools is a part of Intercorp, a family of 35 businesses that span everything from banks to retail stores and added schools to its portfolio. In 2010, the company had five existing schools but realized that its existing model could not grow. The shortage of well-trained, high-quality teachers in Peru, combined with rising land costs, meant the schools would need to radically change course to succeed.

To learn about scalable school models around the world, IDEO researchers visited inspirational schools and learning programs, and looked to analogous systems like retail, hospitality, and health care to understand their approaches to scale. Throughout the project, they collaborated with teachers, students, and the Innova Schools team in co-designing the work itself.

Together, Innova Schools and IDEO developed the curriculum, teaching strategies, buildings, operational plans, and underlying financial model to run the network of schools.

"I was blown away by Innova Schools," said Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. "It's inspiring to see such an affordable school deliver a quality of education that would rival schools in the richest countries."

The new Innova Schools combine teacher-led, project-based learning in small groups with self-directed time using digital learning tools. Teachers monitor students’ work online and offer personalized guidance. Parents can view their children’s progress online as well.

Dynamic learning environments include community spaces, media labs, rooftop study areas, amphitheaters, and cafés that are optimized for flexibility: furniture on wheels, movable walls, and efficient uses of space to allow for different modes of learning.

An online Teacher Resource Center includes a database of more than 18,000 custom lesson plans based on a progressive new teaching approach. The center helps teachers learn their craft and gives them a chance to connect across the network.

The business model of Innova Schools was developed at the same time as the school experience. Designers leveraged the economies of scale that come from building a network of schools and centralized tools, such as data systems that allow all the schools to learn together.

The project has allowed Innova to open more schools at an affordable cost to families, ultimately giving more of Peru’s youth the chance to compete in the global economy. This comprehensive approach to system design ranks as one of Latin America’s most ambitious privately funded educational projects, and is on track to become the largest private school network in the region. To date, Innova has opened 63 schools in Peru that are serving more than 50,000 students.

A good system design doesn’t end with strategy. The work on Innova Schools also had a huge influence on the company, according to Rodriguez-Pastor. Through the creation of new roles and an aligned set of values, Innova’s central office has become a much more nimble and creative organization. They’re constantly scanning the world for inspiration in how to best educate their students, while building out the new innovations. They realize that design thinking can become an integrated part of their daily management of this growing network of schools.

Western Digital, the leading provider of external digital-storage solutions and a pioneer in the field, and IDEO collaborated on a number of products that produced reliable, secure, high-performance hard drives for personal and professional use and have won numerous design awards.

The projects include:

• MyBook external hard drive: IDEO and Western collaborated to find a new design language for their external hard drive MyBook. In just six months, MyBook became the number-one hard drive in the Americas, and grew US market share by more than 50 percent.
• MyBook II: Looking to regain MyBook’s original number-one position in the hard drive market, IDEO and Western came together again to refresh the original design, finding ways to further differentiate the product and the brand, and winning a 2008 Spark Bronze Award.
• MyPassport: Western and IDEO designed the 320GB, ultra-portable USB-powered hard drive that appeals to the mobile user, which won both the 2008 IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, and the 2009 iF Award.
• MyBook and MyPassport 3.0: Again, IDEO and Western collaborated on bringing the popular MyBook external hard drive to the next level in the hardware, the software, and the packaging. IDEO also created in-store merchandising, the graphics and information featured on product packaging (and the “out-of-box experience”).

The city of San Francisco wanted to help its people become better prepared in case of emergency. While no one feels totally prepared for a natural disaster, people who are most connected within a local network fare better in an emergency.

So the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (SF DEM) and IDEO teamed up to create SF72, a revolutionary platform that helps to reach people where they are. In times of emergency, the city will need citizens to be self-supporting for 72 hours (or longer) before local services or outside help kicks in. With that in mind, IDEO developed an accessible platform to help people prepare for those 72 hours in simple ways that fit into their daily lives.

The SF72 website helps people with five important tasks: Get connected, gather supplies, watch stories, make a plan, and have access to an updated Google map. SF72’s content is hyperlocal, but IDEO and SF DEM also created an open-source toolkit for cities worldwide. From San Jose to Denver, other locales are using the simple toolkit to create a City72 platform of their own. Most recently, the city of Oakland collaborated with Code for America to develop its own platform. The City72 Toolkit enables SF72’s ethos of social connection for resilience to scale and grow—city by city.

Team Rubicon, formed in 2010 as a response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti, is made up of former military veterans who swoop into help in times of disaster. The organization started with six vets in the US who were eager to transfer their battlefield readiness in to frontline relief efforts, and has grown to more than 28,000 volunteers across the world.

To explore its growing global effort and to shape the future of the organization’s venture, Team Rubicon approached IDEO for help. After an 11-week collaboration with government, military, and veteran groups, a vision for Team Rubicon Global emerged. Inspired by sources as diverse as TED and The Hell’s Angels, the three-tier model consisted of an anchor network to share best practices across the organization and two supporting platforms designed to help countries with varying capacity and needs.

Team Rubicon Global coordinated its first deployment in April 2015, when a quake struck Nepal, sending US and UK teams to double down on the rescue effort. According to Vince Moffit, Team Rubicon USA Incident Commander, that incident alone validated the network effect of IDEO’s work. “We couldn’t have done this without Team Rubicon UK,” he said.

And for the veterans who are part of Team Rubicon, the shared desire to serve—applying skills ideally suited for disaster response—creates a renewed sense of purpose, community, and leadership that helps reintegration to civilian life.

In design and innovation projects, we are always trying to understand constraints, eliminate uncertainty, and ground ourselves in the problem. But in any creative exercise, there is always a moment when the individual or the team needs to take a leap. And when that leap happens, you want it to be as dramatic, confident, and exploratory as possible. Put another way: There is a moment in any creative process when you actually want to maximize uncertainty. The Surrealist methods were aimed at achieving this, by embracing randomness and accessing the unconscious.

Here are five of of our favorite Surrealist methods:

1. Word Spinner

Make a list of 16 words that you find interesting, and number them. Cut out a circular piece of paper, write the numbers 1-16 on the circumference, and stick a pencil through the paper to create a spinner, like you'd use in a board game. Use the spinner to generate three numbers. Now write a poem or short piece of prose that uses the three words that correspond to the numbers.

2. Automatic Writing

This writing habit has been broadly adopted; it was featured, for example in The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. The method originated with the Surrealists, who believed that forcing yourself to write whatever comes into your head without self-editing will lead to surprising creative breakthroughs. The easiest way to practice this is to set a timer, and then write without pausing for that period. Though uncomfortable at first, this practice can quickly become a valuable source of ideas.

3. Surrealist Collage

Artist Max Ernst invented this technique of cutting out imagery from multiple sources and reassembling it to create something surprising and new. He chose images of similar styles (for example, all black and white etchings) so that they all worked together in the final image. With so many images available to us in the form of magazines and junk mail, we all have the chance to become surreal collagers.

4. Frottage

This is a variation on the "found image" technique of collating. Instead of cutting images out of source material, take a blank piece of paper and a crayon or charcoal and look for interestingly textured surfaces from which to take rubbings. Layer several rubbings on top of each other to create an entirely new image.

5. The Exquisite Corpse

The most famous of the Surrealist games, the Exquisite Corpse is an example of a chain game—a game in which a piece of creative work is passed from one player to another. This one began life as a writing exercise, with players taking turns writing nouns and verbs. (The game gets its name from the sentence that came from the first time it was played, "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.")

Over time, the game morphed into its better-known sketching form, in which players fold a piece of paper so that one person can sketch a head, the next a body, and the last one the legs.

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There is more to surrealism than Salvador Dali's mustache or people wearing lobsters on their heads. The movement, started one hundred years ago, was founded on the idea that creativity could be accessed by lessening the controls of the conscious brain, and giving free rein to the unconscious. Today's neuroscience supports their thinking: There is evidence that imagination and day-dreaming takes place when we are not focusing our conscious attention.

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Designing for Public Services is a toolkit for policymakers and those who deliver public services, developed in collaboration with Nesta, a U.K. innovation charity, and Design for Europe, a design and innovation program co-funded by the European Commission. The tools and methods included allow users to get to the heart of the needs of citizens and civil servants.

The processes and supporting tools, which have been tried and tested in government agencies from Singapore to Qatar, the U.K. to the U.S., can be applied to designing policy and citizen-centered services.

Download the toolkit here.

Spying on Harriet the Spy, Kid Design Researcher

During design projects at IDEO, we often seek inspiration by looking at the world through someone else's eyes. One of our favorite children’s book characters is Harriet the Spy, and we asked ourselves, What if you could see New York through Harriet's eyes? She’s the original design researcher—setting out with her notebook to observe the subtle ways her neighbors behave.

As it turns out, a real estate site has already tracked down Harriet's address: 558 East 87th Street. If you pay a visit to her apartment, look up to the third floor, right under the eaves. According to the book, this is the perch from which she peered down at the street and recorded notes. We were curious to see if any of Harriet’s neighborhood hangouts still exist. Carl Schurz Park, where she lost her notebook, still sits on the East River at East 86th. Harriet reports that the Gregory School, where she was a student, is right nearby, so many people assume it is based on Chapin School, two blocks away. Harriet spies on delivery boy Little Joe Curry from an alley behind the Dei Santis’ grocery store on York Avenue at East 86th Street. Though that shop is now a restaurant—denying us the vicarious thrill of peeking through the window where Harriet did much of her spying—visiting her old haunts sent a spike of childlike joy through us, and transported us to a time when a book could open up an entirely new world.

Koneko Cat Cafe

Koneko Cat Cafe is a relatively new spot on the Lower East Side where customers nibble on Japanese pastries while lounging with an adoptable clowder from Anjellicle Cats Rescue. The cats roam free between rooms on two different levels, lazing on designer cat furniture or swatting at the many cat toys provided for visitors. Everyone can engage in a different way: playing directly with the cats, doing other work with the bonus of being surrounded by felines, or striking up a conversation with humans who have the same affinity for cats. Koneko’s founder toured 25 cat cafes in Japan to get inspiration for her own place. Koneko is similar to Japanese cat cafes, but has a more sophisticated interior design with curated art on the walls. As one visitor told the New York Times, “I have a cat, so I feel a little dirty coming here. It’s like going to a strip club if you’re married.”

Tiny Doll House

We know many designers who find pleasure in miniature things: miniature spoons, miniature post-its, you name it. Hidden in the middle of a long residential block on the Upper East Side is a miniature heaven: Tiny Doll House. It’s a store that sells dollhouses, as well as dollhouse furniture and supplies: miniature nightstands, candelabras, and even equipment to electrify a dollhouse. The store sources miniatures from Europe and South America. Immediately after stepping inside, your imagination is fired up. Peek inside an English Cotswold Cottage—next door to a Riverside Townhouse. The attention to detail and passion that goes into each one is simply astounding. Even if you’re not passionate about decorating dollhouses, you can use these supplies for making terrariums, architectural models, or prototyping small versions of design projects. You can buy tiny Thanksgiving dinner sets, caskets, Starbucks coffee mugs, garlic presses, bunk beds, broken eggs, beaux arts desks, and everything in between.

Header image courtesy of Koneko Cat Cafe.

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Our designers, anthropologists, and architects are professional wanderers. And we don't have to wander far in NYC to find inspiration—it's right outside our door. Here’s where we’re headed this fall.

One way to achieve this is with art. I love the phrase “design is art with rules.” If that is true, can we then assume that “art is design without rules?” If design requires restraint, art requires exploring ideas with abandon. I believe that tapping into that abandon can positively affect our design work.

Here are three ways to use art to shake up your design process.

1. Gallery Immersion

Take a break from your project and visit an art gallery. As you walk around and look at the pieces, consider the questions the artist is asking, or solutions they are proposing. What new rules of gravity or physics have they created? What rules have they broken, and what laws have they upended? Now consider how your project would exist in this world. How would things change, what would be possible? What would you create?

2. Image Provocation

Draw inspiration from art without ever leaving work. Curate a slideshow of images, then present them to your team as a prompt for idea generation. While not as experiential and serendipity-friendly as roaming a sculpture park or an art gallery, the right selection can still provide valuable fuel to a design team. Try using Visual Thinking Strategies to get coworkers to engage in a deeper way.

3. Create your own artwork.

Just as we can find inspiration by making insights tangible, making art in line with the project theme can also be valuable. Pull out the watercolors, pastels, or even the prototyping materials. Grab some old shirts from secondhand stores to use as smocks and transform the team from designers to artists. Have a team spend an hour of quiet, focused time creating a work of art that explores the project content. The goal is not to create a solution, but an expression. Then have the team share their works. Create a “gallery walk.” The resulting art may fall short of masterpiece status, but the head space that was explored will create new considerations and possibly new directions for the project.

Sometimes, the design thinking process can become a little too linear and predictable. Most great innovation involves a shift in perspective, a moment when our everyday point of view is turned upside down, and the team finds a new way to approach a challenge. Getting to that shift requires some disruption of the predictable flow of a project.

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.