As many as one-third of the 300,000 annual cardiac arrest fatalities in the US could be avoided if defibrillation was applied within minutes of the cardiac event.

Working with Heartstream, IDEO tested the effectiveness of alternative defibrillator configurations with different users to help develop a highly mobile and easy-to-operate product. Heartstream systematically refined the concept with the goal of making its defibrillators affordable, transportable, and as ubiquitous as fire extinguishers.

(This device is now manufactured by Philips.)

Julep, a fast-growing beauty brand, noticed a problem that has vexed generations of nail polish users: The wand on the bottle is awkward and clumsy to use.

After rounds of user research, IDEO and Julep came up with the solution: the Plié Wand. The elegantly tapered handle sits easily in the hand and connects magnetically with a wand finely calibrated for precision. And for maximum flexibility, it bends to rest gently in the hand, making it an ambidextrous instrument.

Injured US servicemen and servicewomen returning from war must adapt to a home, finding workarounds to cope with their surroundings based on individual capabilities and preferences. Clark Realty Capital, a Virginia-based real estate firm that has partnered with the Department of Defense on more than $4.7 billion in privatized housing, collaborated with IDEO on a new model for building accessible homes on military installations.

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Facing the challenge of visualizing and designing the ideal home for soldiers injured in the field, Clark Realty Capital and IDEO designed floor plans and amenities that would meet or exceed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards and be versatile enough to accommodate varied physical and psychological needs. The IDEO design team took an in-depth look at accessibility issues, interviewing and observing civilians and injured soldiers, and asked questions that shed light on how active-duty service members resume civilian life after debilitating injuries. What could make their experience more dignified and healthy, and what might reconnect them with family, close friends, and the world? The team uncovered seven contrasts that defined the complex needs of disabled soldiers and their families, and used these as direction and inspiration for adaptable homes for specific physical, mental, and emotional needs that also fit into the context of everyday life.

The final deliverable consisted of the home design but also included a book and poster that featured floor plans, elevations, and interior renderings. A compelling video montage depicting three real-life military families in the context and challenges of their current homes further reinforced the goals of this worthwhile endeavor.

US Army Fort Belvoir and Clark Realty Capital unveiled the homes on November 30, 2011, in Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

With nearly 5 million registered voters, Los Angeles County represents the largest voting jurisdiction in the United States. Guaranteeing every citizen the right to an accessible and intuitive voting experience has been the highest priority for the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s office, which oversees the election process.

To revamp its antiquated voting system that dates back to the 1960s, LA County hired IDEO to design the concept, look, and feel of its next-generation replacement, a modular system that could adapt over time. And just as important, one that would be designed, developed, and owned by the county.

Working closely with LA County staff, IDEO designers created a voting system that addresses the complexities unique to that voter base, including its vastly diverse population and its myriad election laws and policies. It was imperative for designers to build a system that would be useful and accessible to all types of voters: those who are vision and hearing impaired, in wheelchairs, have learning disabilities, are unfamiliar with technology, speak languages other than English—voters of all ages and backgrounds.

Their goals: to create one device for equal access, to define a voting process that feels familiar to voters, balancing both emotional and functional needs, and to build a system that’s adaptable over time.

The resulting prototype, designed in collaboration with Digital Foundry and Cambridge Consultants, is a voting device that’s customizable for different user experiences. A touch screen allows any voter to easily navigate the ballot by advancing through different screens showing lists of candidates and ballot measures. For those with vision impairment or reading disabilities, an audio and controller experience guides voters through their options with a push of a few simple buttons. And voters who prefer to read the ballot in a different language—Spanish, Chinese, Korean, or any one of the 11 languages supported by the county—can choose their preference on the same machine. Once they’ve tapped in their selections on the device, they receive a printed paper ballot that goes into an integrated ballot box (the use of a traceable paper ballot is still mandated by law).

Just as we’re able to use our mobile devices to simplify our lives for everything from shopping online to fetching a taxi, the new prototype also allows voters to participate in the ultimate act of democracy with the same ease and accessibility. Voters can mark their votes on their cell phones when it’s convenient, then go to a polling station to transfer their selections from their phones to paper ballots, and cast their ballots in a ballot box.

It’s this convenience factor that officials hope will ultimately make the act of voting more meaningful. “As an election administrator, I can’t drive how exciting the candidates are or how controversial the measures are,” said Dean Logan, LA County’s Registrar-Recorder and County Clerk, whose vision has driven this project. “What I can do, though, is drive a voting experience that’s appealing and that makes you feel the actual weight of the significance of casting a ballot. To be able to go to any location that’s convenient to you, I think adds to that sense of intrinsic value to the voting process. It makes it feel like I’m participating in something that’s meaningful and important, that’s consistent with the way I do other things in my life.”

Once the bulk of the work was completed in June 2016, IDEO handed off designs to the county for execution. IDEO has continued to advise the county and its implementation partners on an as-needed basis to ensure the original intent of the designs—to create a deeply human-centered voter experience—are incorporated during the implementation phase. LA’s new voting system, which rolled out in 2020, has the potential to influence how other counties across the country update their outdated systems.

VIDEO: Democracy By Design, interviews with designers, researchers and Los Angeles County staff. Produced by the Los Angeles County Registrar/County Clerk.

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My husband always writes me a little bit of Valentine's Day Code. The image above is one of my favorites—Charlie was learning 3JS, a 3D web development framework, and made me my dream: an exploding pink disco ball floating in space. He's made a 3D simulation of Big Sur (where we took our first road trip together), a "Charlie Bot" (forking off of hubot, creating a fake Charlie for me to talk to when I was traveling a lot) and an Adventure-style text based game, where I got to achieve my dream of meeting Prince with my dog Hudson.
—Ashley Holtgraver, IDEO Cambridge

As a Biodesigner + Cardiologist at IDEO Palo Alto, I led three classes of 5th graders at Covington Elementary School (Los Altos, CA) in their annual sheep heart dissection this Valentine's Day. I introduced them to the fundamentals of cardiovascular anatomy and physiology, including the structure and function of each chamber and valve, their relationships to surrounding conduits, and the hemodynamics and electrophysiology that drive the system. You know, just the basics. All of the kids experienced a hands-on exploration of the heart’s surface and texture, then under the supervision of volunteering parents, dissected their ways into the depths of the organ. Accompanying me was my rockstar hostess and sidekick Celia Wedner, future doc and daughter of Palo Alto’s Grant Wedner.
—Farzad Azimpour, IDEO Palo Alto

I’ve been doing cross-stitch for more than 10 years. Cross-stitch is an ancient form of embroidery that’s very intricate—it takes a long time to finish a product! The time I spend making a pattern is one of my favorite ways of expressing love on Valentine's Day.
—Christina Shen, IDEO Shanghai

For our third annual Galentine’s Day gathering, we started by designing postcards to send to our district representatives. This was followed by whiskey tastings and a fancy dinner hosted in a room decorated with posters of inspiring power-women. Everyone left with a "treat yo-self" care package, complete with home decor, "Make Your Mark" to-do lists, homemade biscotti, and soothing teas.
—Rohini Venkatraman, IDEO San Francisco

At IDEO London, we held an office-wide Valentine’s Day celebration with activities and treats under the theme of Random Acts of Love. We set up areas to collect clothes and food for those more in need, and a station to create a heart chain of messages to people across IDEO locations, hoping they’d continue the chain. Prior to the event, we asked everyone to send us one song they’d take to a desert island and why. Over a selection of strawberry daiquiris and fresh cupcakes, we filmed people talking about their chosen song. We had tears and goosebumps. Interestingly, most people chose songs to remind them of someone they love dearly. Three others chose songs that have helped them get through life.
—Bobbie Brightman and Ryan Lovett, IDEO London

This is a fortune my boyfriend and I got on one of our first trips together, before we were "officially" dating. Something told me to hold onto it. Later, he had this greeting card printed for me for Valentine's Day. He actually had to print a minimum of 100 so somewhere we have a hefty stack of personalized greeting cards of ourselves. Over 3 years later, I still have the fortune.
—Becky Lee, IDEO San Francisco

I used to work for a company that was pretty hardcore about celebrating Valentine's Day. We would exchange gifts, play games, have a big party, etc. One year I made this clock for my good friend and former colleague Irene Pau. The design is inspired by an inside joke that's probably not worth going into here. But the main goal was really just to make something weird that would creep her out, and also help her get to meetings on time. Mission accomplished?
—Griffin Thomson, IDEO Palo Alto

I love giving people Spanish Sweethearts for Valentine’s Day. They’re unique (read: hard-to-find) and everyone learns some Spanish from my gift!
—Katie Clark, IDEO San Francisco

Kiley was our New York front desk concierge for a couple of years, and she decided to leave last year to head to Arkansas and pursue writing and graduate school. She always put a lot of work into making the office feel special, so we decided to throw her a big going away party to show our appreciation. The base of the K was cut from scrap foam core on the laser cutter. The colored fringe was created from discarded Post-it pad slivers that were collecting in the hallway, which were stuck onto the K then cut vertically. Try your own letter piñata for Valentine's Day!
—Njoki Gitahi, IDEO New York

Header image by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash.

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When choosing a gift for your Valentine, why settle for a store-bought card? Drop that box of chocolates and steal these IDEO designers' crafty, hacky, wacky ideas for celebrating the holiday of love. Or better yet, try dating a designer! There’s bound to be a good gift in it for you.

Not wanting to disappoint her, I started searching for some craft that would satisfy that messy complexity. I tried what I knew. Illustration might bring my imaginary characters and stories to life. But my skills were limited. Collage answered the urge for messy assembly, but lacked precision.

Then I tried making a GIF, that looping relic of the old web that’s come back as an art form. The beauty of GIFs is that they preserve a single moment, with all of its feeling, and play it back forever. It was imperfect. It was messy. I was mesmerized. It struck the balance me and my inner teenager needed.

I’ve found that custom GIFs can be made for all sorts of scenarios—to show thanks, explain an idea, even tell someone you’re thinking of them. Flowers pale in comparison to a custom-made GIF for your loved one this Valentine’s Day.

With my internship at IDEO ending soon, I decided to create a parting GIF to share my gratitude. Here’s how to make your own:

1. Find a concept. Don’t dwell here. Get to making quickly and don’t overthink it! I landed on the metaphor of a rising sun, symbolizing illumination and a new beginning thanks to my experience here.

2. Gather supplies. Don’t spend any money on materials—they’re all around you. I rounded up old San Francisco brochures from my landlord’s supply closet.

3. Form a composition. Clear a workspace or spread out on the floor (as I did here), collect your supplies, and start cutting. Cue Bob’s Burgers.

4. Photograph. Find a space by a bright window and a makeshift hand stabilizer—in this case it was an empty coffee machine. I shoot about 30 frames with my iPhone, moving each piece of paper by hand, frame after frame.

5. Assemble in Photoshop. With your batch of photos loaded into a Photoshop file, click “Create Frame Animation” from your Photoshop Timeline (pictured on the bottom of the screenshot below). This allows you to create a frame-by-frame animation, revealing one photo in your sequence per frame. Make any adjustments in light balance and cropping, and manually tweak the alignment of any shaky photos here, too.

6. Save and export. To export your finished GIF from Photoshop, choose “Save for Web (Legacy).” Adjust the export settings to pare your GIF down to a manageable file size. Add a watermark or signature if you want to ensure you'll get credit for your work.

7. Let it fly! GIFs can be embedded in email, posted on social media, even texted.

I’m an intern at IDEO who’s training to be an interaction designer. But one morning at 4 a.m., after an all-nighter studying a maze of sterile, methodically made wireframes, I felt the 15-year-old me frowning at my career choice. Who was this person obsessing over digital simplicity and efficiency? What happened to the girl who loved drama? Who loved a mess?

There I sat, staring at this person whom I deeply admired, witnessing a fleeting moment of vulnerability, and I realized that I’m not the only one that feels this way.

I’m someone who will walk by the espresso machine multiple times, trying catch a glimpse of how to make a latte, just so when I decide to do it myself, I’ll look like I know what I’m doing. I avoid confrontations, so as not to tarnish what others think of me. I convince myself I am where I am because of luck. I’ve spent the first few years of my professional life trying to be a good pretender, trying to ignore this voice in my head that takes over and says I don’t belong.

But, there are ways to shake off those feelings, to help you remember the value you have, that you should trust yourself, and that you belong in your job. It took me a while to figure it out, but I’ve developed ways to cope. If I could take a time machine back to when I first started out, here are the three things I would remind myself:

1. NEVER STOP ASKING FOR FEEDBACK

I’m an introvert who, for years, kept my vulnerabilities wrapped up. Fake it til you make it was a subconscious motto. What I didn’t realize was how empowering it is to openly admit the things you are afraid of, and the empathy and advice you get from others when you do. The sooner you are able to identify these fears and voice them, the sooner others will be able to help you through these challenges. Don’t try to pretend your insecurities don’t exist—voicing them is the first step to overcoming them.

2. GET OUT OF YOUR WORLD OF EXPERTISE

Throughout school, I was laser-focused on learning everything I could about design. When I came to IDEO, this passion for design was no longer something that made me unique. It’s what you know beyond design that allows you to come up with a solution that your peers haven’t considered. Good design skills are most powerful when they are applied with another discipline or two, or three. I found the designers I most admired were experts in some other area—neuroscience, climbing, magic, baking.

3. MEASURE YOURSELF BY YOUR OWN YARDSTICK

It’s so easy to be consumed by other people’s talents, but comparing yourself to others is an impossible game to win. Instead, try competing with yourself. Where were you a year ago? Six months? Can you measure your improvement over time? It’s a commitment to continuously learning that will make you grow as a designer. You went from getting coffee at an internship to distributing the first magazine article you designed? Growth!

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I first heard the term impostor syndrome from a fellow designer. We were chatting about the projects we were on, and comparing each other’s work to our peers: designers we knew, designers we didn’t know, even super-influential icons we swooned over, like Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Hische.

“How did we even get hired?” he asked me. “It’s like I have perpetual impostor syndrome—it’s bad.”

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How so? A classic rookie mistakes in design work is “me-search”—doing research on yourself and creating something tailor-made for your needs, rather than seeking broader inspiration from the outside world. So, in service of greater creativity—and maybe a more clear-eyed body politic—here are four ways to escape your bubble.

1. Talk to Strangers

Now that the time and directions are available on every smartphone, it's amazing how little we need to talk to strangers. But think about what is lost when you never have a serendipitous encounter. To reignite this habit, seek out contexts that are naturally social: bars, book clubs, craft circles. Go alone, so you're required to interact with someone new. Going solo not your bag? Here's another approach: Follow Bill Murray’s advice and strike up a conversation with every taxi driver you ride with. Ask them plenty of questions beginning with the word “why.” Maybe you’ll figure out, as Murray did, what’s preventing them from doing what they love.

2. Unfollow People Like You

If you're choosing to hear from people who think exactly like you, you're going to get sucker punched every time public opinion swings the other way. Are you a bleeding-heart liberal? Try following conservative pundits, think tanks, and some of the average Joes who tune into them. Lean to the right? Look to the left! Hat tip to Harper Reed, CTO of the 2008 Obama campaign, for this one. Reed recently unfollowed most of the white men in his Twitter feed, instead directing his attention to women, people of color, and people with disabilities. Just to be clear, this was not an act of political correctness—his motivation was to expose himself to different points of view, in service of inspiring his personal creativity.

3. Join a Different Demographic

When it comes to picking a night out, most of us choose something that we know we're going to enjoy. And chances are, we’ll be surrounded by people just like us. As an alternative, go for an evening activity in which you're immersed in a completely different demographic. If you're a millennial, hit up bingo night with seniors. If you're a Boomer, grit your teeth and shake it off at a concert full of teenagers. If you're visiting a new city, seek out a comedy open mic and see what people are talking about. Yes, there's every chance that this evening’s experiment won't be as comfy as your usual fare... but we bet that it will help you understand people’s needs in a different way, making you better suited to creating new things for them.

4. Volunteer

Giving back is always the right thing to do, and it has the seldom-mentioned added benefit of easing you out of your filter bubble. Whether you're helping the homeless, people with disabilities, or any other group, you will be eye-to-eye with people you rarely encounter on your Facebook feed. The fact that you're serving others is a bonus. The person you may be helping most is yourself.

Illustrations by Ashley Holtgraver.

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In the aftermath of the 2016 election, there has been a new focus on the “filter bubble”: the phenomenon of being fed news and social media that is tuned to your existing point of view, rather than challenging it.

Filter bubbles are a problem for democracy. We believe they’re a problem for creativity, too.

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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.