Life Technologies, a global biotech company that supplies scientists with products and services, needed to grow big, from a $4 billion to a $10 billion enterprise. So it hired IDEO to help seed innovation across the company.

"When we started out, it was an R&D thing for driving innovation in new products. Now it’s not just R&D; user-centered innovation is a central part of our culture. It’s what we do throughout the organization," said Amy Cuneo, Associate Director, Customer Insights.

Over a three-year engagement, IDEO helped transform Life Technologies’ corporate culture through the introduction of User-Centered Innovation (UCI), an optimistic, experiential approach to problem-solving. Far outperforming its ambitious goal, Life Technologies is now a $13.6 billion company and uses UCI to inspire innovation throughout the 10,000-person organization.

After working with Life Technologies, IDEO designers came up with three products that have gone to market, including, a new bottle that showcases superior handling and storage, easier identification, and additional room for supplements. And Life Technologies has transformed from a company that aspires to focus on customers to one that truly does.

Unplanned pregnancies are a big problem in the US, especially among unmarried 18- to 29-year-olds. Seven in 10 pregnancies in this demographic are unplanned, a statistic that applies to women of all ethnicities and socioeconomic levels. Complicating matters are the social tension between abstinence-only and contraception-inclusive education, and the difficulty and expense associated with obtaining prescription birth control.

Since 2009, IDEO has worked closely with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, a nonprofit NGO, to address this pressing social challenge. One of the first insights on the project was identifying the need for comprehensive birth control support. Designers looked at ways to transform birth control from a prescription (a piece of paper that is handed to you by a doctor) into a subscription (a program that ensures you start using birth control, use it correctly, and migrate to more effective methods).

Given the complex and potentially overwhelming subject matter, the IDEO team interviewed women in the target demographic; talked with doctors, counselors, and other experts with varying opinions about birth control; and hosted roundtable discussions. They developed several concepts and scenarios that allowed members of the National Campaign to see sex and pregnancy through the eyes of the young women they’re working to reach.

Research and prototyping efforts led to the design of Bedsider, a multi-touchpoint birth control support system with a carefully crafted sex-positive brand, which is uncommon for the healthcare industry. Bedsider focuses on five key areas (awareness, motivational drivers, digital offerings, services, and loyalty) and acts as a vehicle for behavioral change that’s flexible, with room to grow into a much larger movement.

The Ad Council and the National Campaign debuted a multiyear, multimedia public service campaign in November 2011. The Bedsider website offers comprehensive education about existing birth control methods. This includes opt-in reminder services, personal stories from women across the country on why they chose a particular method, a phone service that provides information in both English and Spanish, features such as “Fact or Fiction” (hilarious animated clips debunking popular myths), a “Frisky Friday” newsletter, and more.

Bedsider has launched nationally with the help of an Ad Council campaign that drives sexually active women ages 18–24 to Bedsider.org. The multimedia Public Service Announcement effort includes television, radio, print, web, and nontraditional advertising, as well as an integrated social media program.

“We hope that Bedsider will be a useful tool for women to learn about their birth control options, better manage their birth control, and in the process avoid getting pregnant until they’re ready,” said Planned Parenthood of South Florida and the Treasure Coast in its monthly newsletter. Planned Parenthood and Philliber Research Associates joined forces with the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy to help test and evaluate Bedsider.

Through a social media campaign called #ThxBirthControl, people are voicing their thoughts about what birth control has made possible for women, men, families, and society. It’s all part of Thanks, Birth Control Day, launched in November 2013 as part of a continuing initiative to encourage positive conversations and more consistent use of birth control by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. To celebrate the movement, IDEO wrote, scored, and performed an animated musical featuring condoms and pill packs dancing the cancan.

According to an independent evaluation of the program, Bedsider is the first digital intervention in reproductive health in the U.S.—with adults as an audience—that has shown to prevent unplanned pregnancy. Turns out that when women and men have the ability to plan, prevent, or space pregnancies, they’re more likely to finish school, achieve their goals, and ultimately have healthier families, according to the nonprofit organization.

Chicago’s federally funded, citywide bike-sharing service, called Divvy, makes a fleet of bicycles available to commuters and tourists 24 hours a day. Alta Bicycle Share (which runs bike-sharing systems in Boston, the Bay Area, DC, and New York City) collaborated with IDEO to spread Divvy’s message, “Divide and Share!” to the cyclists and would-be cyclists of Chicago through the brand.

The new brand would appear on its bikes, stations, company vans, member fobs, and website—and it needed to be ready to hit the streets in just six months. IDEO partnered with local brand strategy studio Firebelly Design to collaborate on a solution. IDEO led the early research, conceptual brand development, and naming phase of the project; the Firebelly team led the visual design and developed the brand guidelines.

The brand has become a functional and fun part of Chicago’s transportation landscape and has been embraced by Chicago commuters. Just three weeks after it launched, the City of Chicago called the Divvy Bikes program the busiest bike-sharing system in the world. Six months into the service, enthusiastic cyclists have racked up over 780,000 trips and 1.7 million-plus miles, and over 12,000 Chicagoans have become members.

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After watching her husband suffer from cancer, Tomoko Namba, founder of Japan’s leading mobile internet company, DeNA, wanted to empower people with better health information to aid them in making medical decisions. DeNA partnered with IDEO to help with the design of a genetic test that had mass-market appeal.

Together, IDEO and DeNA designed all the consumer touchpoints from the ground up for the expanding new business, called MYCODE. The aim was not only to create a functioning, usable product, but also to introduce the notion of genetic testing in a privacy-sensitive country that for the most part, hadn’t yet considered it an option. What would make MYCODE resonate with mass-market Japan? How could genetic testing results be shared in a way that was accurate but also actionable and motivating?

The team worked with doctors, nutritionists, medical governing bodies, and more, setting up fast, iterative cycles, and conceptualizing and prototyping almost every aspect of MYCODE in just 16 weeks. Data design, home testing experience, purchase flow, and how the service would be used over the long-term were all considered, along with traditional branding elements, like name, logo, and visual identity.

The result is a product that puts reliable genetic information into the hands of Japanese consumers, helping them to make more informed healthcare decisions. MYCODE went to market in August 2014, just nine months after the engagement with IDEO began. Not only did MYCODE fulfill Namba’s mission, it helped the company find new ways to grow: Upon announcement of the new service, DeNA’s share price jumped 6.7 percent.

Drawing in VR is a whole new world—one that feels as challenging and daunting as drawing once felt. Luckily, having progressed through hard work in one artistic field, I now trust that the same steady pursuit can get me to a new level in VR.

I recently joined IDEO’s New York office, and part of my job is to keep current on emerging technologies. So I took advantage of our studio’s newly-mounted VR station and spent a week drawing in Tilt Brush, Google’s 3D painting VR app. Together with IDEO’s creative technologist, known as Fuzzy Wobble, I came up with a goal:  to draw a 3D portrait of IDEO’s David Kelley.

For anyone curious about making things in VR, this post will give you a sense of what to expect, the hurdles you may encounter, and the fun you can have.

Day 1: Getting started

Okay, it’s hard. And it’s almost nothing like drawing with a real brush (no matter what the ad says). The definitive difference is that there’s a whole dimension added to your brush strokes, so you are constantly falling into open space while trying to make what used to be a simple line on a paper. This poses a technical challenge, but as you figure it out, it opens the opportunity to instantly create lots of cool “dimensional” animations using different brushes.

Let’s review some of the fundamentals:

Uploading a reference image

My first step was to figure out how to put a photo of David Kelley into my VR bubble for use as a reference image. This can be done pretty easily within the Settings panel (gear icon) / Labs panel (flask icon) / Reference Images. That would be the first fundamental thing for bringing any graphical reference into your personal VR drawing lab.

Choosing a brush

After trying them all, I settled on a simple wire brush. I recommend it as a first step on the ladder of your immersive experience because in comparison to calligraphic and wide-angle brushes (not to mention special effect and animation brushes), it offers even sides and predictable behavior.

Using three-dimensional guides

As I mentioned before (and as you can see from the portrait progress so far), it’s quite unusual to think within the 3D space while drawing, so the first handy tool I discovered was guides. If you came from a graphic or web design background, as I did, you’ll instantly notice that nasty extra dimension added to them as well. A good way to start here would be to compose your portrait (or whatever you want to draw) as a set of shapes, similar to how you’d be taught in a classical art class, and then adjust them until it feels done.

Day 2: Getting better

The second day started with an attempt to combine multiple shapes (using guides) into what would resemble a human silhouette. I decided to get away from Kelley portraits for a moment and gain general confidence in drawing in VR by fooling around and building “robots.”

Simply put, you stack a couple of 3D guides on top of each other and paint over them, like I explained above. It was easier than I’d thought it would be, so after spending about an hour assembling those statues, I switched back to Kelley and here’s what I’ve got.

Day 3: Drawing without guides

Day 3 started with an attempt to break free from floating yellow bubbles and get a little bit more real. I browsed Google Poly Gallery for some inspiration and came back with the above. It still looked far from good, but I finally felt some progress in terms of confidence and drawing without guides. The next challenge was to learn how to properly fill my surfaces without creating a total mess.

I hope the following sequence of GIFs shows some progress:

Day 4: Finding new applications

Since there was only one day left before the conclusion of my little experiment, I decided to try out more brushes than just the “wired” one, and I must say, renderings of those were executed really well within Tilt Brush. My doodles instantly got more texture, depth, and light reflections without any additional settings on my side.

My takeaway

Disregarding the fact that my drawings didn’t get anywhere close to perfect in the first week, I’ve had lots of fun drawing in space—an experience that was practically unavailable to anyone without a spacious drawing studio and a Matisse-like drawing setup prior to VR headsets. To build on top of that, I can’t help but to mention that VR drawing quite effectively stripped the 3D creation experience from its clumsy and complex environment, switching its engineering component into a purely artistic one, and making an entry point that’s surprisingly easy for everyone. That may sound optimistic but that’s exactly the path that graphic design or photography made through the last century—from being an exclusive skill that only few could master to being something that everyone can try and start getting better at.

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I used to think drawing was hard. Maybe because I was bad at it. But it’s my personality to court challenge, so at some point I decided to commit to improving my skills. I attended drawing classes and worked with a personal tutor to develop a daily drawing habit, and while I wouldn't say I think drawing is easy now, I'm more comfortable with it than I was. So I've decided to reset my learning curve to zero and try mastering a new medium: drawing in virtual reality.

At IDEO, we like to breathe new life into the mundane with design. In an effort to shape a new paradigm of meeting-dom, here are some of our best resources on making your next conference-room gathering stand out—in a good way.

1. When you want to kick things off with a bang

Stretch! Sketch! Dance! Build in a few minutes for a new opening exercise and you’ll have a team that’s fully present and ready to get down to business.

READ: 6 Ways to Kick Off Creative Meetings

2. When you have a mixed bag of introverts and extroverts

An IDEOer once called the San Francisco space an “extroverted office full of introverts.” If you have a team of folks all across that spectrum, these exercises will strike a balance between team-together-time and solitude.

READ: 5 Brainstorming Exercises for Introverts

3. When you want people to really get to know each other

Whether bringing together a brand new team or sitting down with old colleagues, a jam-packed room can make for an overwhelming and impersonal experience. Ditch the canned icebreakers and try one of these instead—any of these exercises will help reveal your group’s commonalities.

READ: 5 Exercises for Breaking Down Barriers

4. When morale needs a boost

Do any of your meetings have a jingle? Didn’t think so. Reset your whole meeting philosophy with some out-of-the-box tips.

READ: How to Design a Meeting That Doesn’t Suck

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Meetings. Maybe you’re in one right now. (Are you paying attention?) Maybe you have one in ten minutes. (Are you prepared?) We know them well—and we know they’re not usually the highlight of your day. In fact, they can be quite the opposite.

A GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) is a type of AI that pits two neural networks against each other, each one training the other to improve its ability. Unlike other types of AI, GANs don’t just recognize objects—they can create them. GANs borrow a feature from biology and pit two competing neural networks against each other. One network, the “generator,” produces synthetic images, while another network, the “discriminator,” tries to guess whether the images are synthetic or real. The discriminator learns from both synthetic and real images, getting better over time. As it improves, it challenges the generator to produce ever more realistic synthetic images.

During a bite-sized sabbatical from my day job at IDEO CoLab, I dove head first into building and exploring the visual potential of GANs. I learned a lot about the differences between how humans and computers see the world, and how an AI’s output is shaped by the data we provide it. As designers, it’s important for us to understand the limitations of emerging technologies likes GANs—or else we risk creating products that harm, rather than help, humans. Here’s what I created, and what I learned. (Want to learn how to set up your own GAN? Read more here.)

1. Choosing a dataset

GANs can generate convincing fake pictures of almost anything—faces, cats, and even anime characters. How do they do it? It all depends on the dataset. GANs need to be fed a large set of images (think tens of thousands or more) so they can learn patterns. For example, GANs that produce faces learn that they tend to be roughly round, have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, and possibly hair on top. They learn pixel-level patterns, too—the textures that make up skin, eyes, and hair.

The trick with GANs is finding sets of images large enough and diverse enough for a network to pick out patterns. There are plenty out there—like CelebA (hundreds of thousands of celebrity faces) or LSUN (images of scenes like rooms and buildings)—but these are all meant for this kind of research, and training with them tends to illustrate how successful GANs can be.I wanted to do the opposite. What if we try to stretch GANs to their limit, so that we can get a better understanding of how they work? In this case, we’re using images from The Simpsons.

2. Training the GAN

Once I had my dataset of images from the show, it was time to train the GAN. For those familiar with machine learning, read my step-by-step process here. For everyone else, here’s the gist of it: I installed an open-sourced machine learning software called TensorFlow on my computer, which I souped up with a hefty graphics card originally bought for virtual reality and gaming. I then used a series of tools to reformat and resize images from my Simpsons dataset.

I trained the network overnight (sometimes over multiple days) and saved examples of images created by the generator network. The video below documents the learning process of the generator. With time, the images began look more and more like the actual Simpsons.

Scrub through the video to see the network’s progress. At 1:10 (about 13 hours of training), the first outlines of Simpsons eyes appear. At 2:00 (about 23 hours), the color scheme becomes noticeably brighter and figures start to emerge. At 3:00 (about 34 hours), there is less variation as shapes start to solidify and the networks reach some stabilization on what is classified as “real.” At 5:00 (about 57 hours) and beyond, the shapes start to vaguely resemble Simpsons characters, though the result is still too psychedelic and abstract for us to truly classify the images as real Simpsons frames.

3. Making sense of the output

The GAN manages to generate very Simpsons-esque images, but they’re definitely not going to fool the human eye. What’s going on? GANs (and any neural network or machine learning method, for that matter) only learn patterns that are in the training data. As humans, we have a deep and complex understanding of what people and objects should look like, including Simpsons characters and scenes in the show. The GAN, however, doesn’t bring any preexisting knowledge. It has to learn everything from the raw pixel values of the images it sees, and more complex patterns take more examples to learn.

In this case, the GAN easily learns the color palette of The Simpsons and its simple, flat illustration style, and starts to learn the features of each character. With enough training data, it may learn more complex patterns, like complete images of characters, or which characters show up in which settings (like the Simpson family at home, or Mr. Burns at the power plant).

What’s it all mean?

The varied and strange outputs of these networks are a succinct example of both the promise and risks of building products, services, or systems with machine learning inside. They’re seemingly magical, learning from patterns in data without being told what to look for, but they’re also limited by that data. Imagine you came into this world yesterday and had to make sense of it all just from still frames of The Simpsons—how would that inform your thinking?

Biases in training data, intended or not, will be reflected in the output of the network, which, if embedded into a product or service, can codify the bias at an unprecedented scale. As designers, we are uniquely positioned to help with this problem. As Kate Crawford, cofounder of the AI Now Institute has said, the problem is neither a specifically social nor technical problem: It’s a socio-technical problem. Designers have a responsibility to understand the unique role data plays in machine learning, so that we can create networks that equitably serve human needs.

Learn more about training GANs on IDEO Labs. Special thanks to CoLab’s Adam Lukasik for his help wrangling GANs for this post.

Pop quiz: What the heck is a GAN? You might not have heard the term, but you’ve likely seen one in action. From generating images of fake celebrities, to creating training data for self-driving cars, and even recreating suggestive (and weird) nude portraits, GANs are everywhere these days. But what exactly is this bleeding-edge technology, and what can we do with it?

In one sentence, who are you?

I am Vince Kadlubek, CEO and cofounder of Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I am a momentum artist. I have dedicated my life to the study and sculpting of momentum, which primarily entails finding authentic, collaborative understandings and influences with the brilliant people around me.

What does a typical work session look like?

I'm usually dealing with these questions: What is the brightest vision? How do we articulate that vision? What steps are necessary for the most effective articulations? Work sessions are meetings or checking email. Those are the two kinds of work sessions I have these days. Sometimes I get to have creative work sessions, which are really just big meetings with beer and Indian food.

When it came to building something like the House of Eternal Return, we imagined, then found scrap armature materials, started producing structure and skin, utilized a bunch of air drying sculpting medium, and started turning large amounts of the exhibit into plaster forms. Lots of stuff was sculpted around the armature produced by the architects and general contractors, using more standard finish practices like painting.

3 favorite possessions?

Oh gosh. Together, “favorite” and “possession” are kinda an oxymoron for me. All I can think about are non-physical things like my memory, my spirit, and my compassion.

How do you get over creative block?

Collaborate with someone who is not stuck in a creative block.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

The last item on my to-do list was to donate money to Beto O'Rourke. But as for work, my last to-do item was to send our SVP of art direction a copy of a PowerPoint that she can use in an upcoming presentation.

How do you see the world in 2078?

Um... well, warm. And I also see a massive network of interconnected spatial computing, photo-realistic artificial intelligences, the liveable internet, monumental creator tools that result in instant manifestation—essentially, we will have transitioned into the 5th dimension.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

Chilling poolside in the Oia Village in Santorini, Greece with a bottle of Krug Clos d’Ambonnay 1998 and three of my closest friends.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Young Thug, constantly. It is actually a problem. I have a hard time getting excited for any other musician. And I have recently fallen for food and cocktails, so Grant Achatz from Alinea in Chicago is on my mind a lot. LeBron James is creating a reality that is mind-blowing and way beyond basketball; the world is wrapped in his storytelling. And finally, I am a huge coaster guy and what RMC is doing in the coaster world is unbelievable—Steel Vengeance at Cedar Point has completely flipped the script.

Vince Kadlubek is a visionary. He leans into tension, ruffles feathers, and has spent more than a decade constructing new worlds with the art collective Meow Wolf. In 2016, they transformed an abandoned 20,000-square-foot bowling alley into the House of Eternal Return—an immersive experience full of creativity and curiosities—drawing more than a million people to Santa Fe, New Mexico for a dose of childlike wonder. Now their sights are set on two new activations in Las Vegas and Denver, as they aim to create the modern-day Disneyland. As an immersive experience designer, I’ve been personally inspired by Meow Wolf and the big-thinking and resourcefulness of Vince, the collective's CEO. I was stoked to chat with him about his inspiration and aspirations for the future.

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.