In 1987, the three companies that would later form IDEO worked together with Microsoft to create the world’s first ergonomically designed mouse. IDEO’s human factors research suggested a small but significant change: Moving the location of the mouse ball forward, from under the palm to under the fingertips, enabled more precise control and resulted in measurable performance differences compared with earlier models.

The industrial design effort examined and tested dozens of shapes in comfort and aesthetic studies that led to the famous “Dove Bar” form, a significant advance over the boxy mouses prevalent at the time. The resulting clean appearance, enhanced control, and improved reliability created enormous consumer appeal that replaced all earlier versions, and Microsoft sold more than 2 million units in its first two years.

With approximately 55,000 Americans waiting to receive kidneys and a list that could double in the next 10 years, there is an acute and urgent need for new technology to increase the quality and number of organs available for transplant. Using the conventional method of organ storage and transportation—a cooler filled with ice—doctors and nurses needed to accompany the organ to ensure proper handling.

IDEO and Organ Recovery Systems created the LifePort Kidney Transporter to provide a new high-tech alternative. The LifePort gently perfuses, or pumps, the kidney with a cold liquid solution to improve its condition before transplantation, which can nearly double storage time and may increase the number of usable kidneys and improve patient outcomes. The device also provides critical data to monitor and evaluate kidneys during transport.

Organ Recovery Systems believes that perfusion has the potential to remove tens of thousands of patients from the waiting list and dialysis, and save the healthcare system more than $1 billion annually. In 2006, the LifePort Kidney Transporter was used to transport 350 kidneys per month in 12 countries, and was included in the permanent architecture and design collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Pediatric healthcare system Nemours provides primary, hospital, and clinic-based specialty care, prevention and health information services, and medical education programs in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. When Nemours wanted to strengthen its brand, it faced two challenges: Empowered patients had more access to information and choice than ever before, and new players—alternative-care centers, retail-based care clinics, and urgent-care centers—were entering the marketplace, diverting market share.

Nemours approached IDEO for help in creating an innovative, differentiated, and patient-centric experience for a new hospital in Orlando, with the goal of establishing Nemours as a destination care provider and industry leader. Together, they identified and clarified both family needs and key experience touchpoints in the patient journey, resulting in the state-of-the-art-designed, 60-acre, $400 million Nemours Children’s Hospital in Lake Nona Medical City, Florida. “The design team’s approach to defining key moments in the patient journey was highly instructive,” said Dr. David Milov, chief of clinical informatics at Nemours. “They captured insights otherwise unavailable to us.”

Concepts that were realized in the hospital’s final design include:

• Care Team Room ID: Patients and families are introduced to each member of their care team to ensure continuity of care.
• Floor Greeters: Concierge-like greeters welcome and orient families and answer questions.
• Family Lounges: Private dining rooms have kitchenettes, so families can cook and eat together.
• Emergency Department: Patients are greeted, sorted by medical condition, and immediately checked into rooms.
• Patient Information Screens: Doctors and nurses can access patient information prior to entering an exam room to enable informed conversations and build trust.
• Smart Bracelets: Personalized RFID-enabled bracelets keep track of the care team.
• Smart Rooms: Triggered by the Smart Bracelet, Smart Rooms “welcome” the patient upon entry.

To arrive at these designs, IDEO sought inspiration via analogous kid-friendly environments, such as museums, schools, toy stores, and zoos. Designers also conducted in-context interviews with patients, parents, families, doctors, nurses, support staff, and outside physicians. One key insight that led to the final design: Patients and families came to Nemours with varied levels of experience—first-timers, occasional visitors, and those who were chronically ill—but the hospital treated them all the same.

To address these needs, the team created an experience blueprint focused on welcoming, guiding, and supporting patients and families through unique environments, integrated service moments, and market-differentiating spaces and tools. To test the look, feel, and value of the designs, designers built full-scale foam core prototypes of welcome stations, waiting lounges, and exam rooms.

The results appeal to patients, families, and caregivers. According to Dr. Lane Donnelly, Nemours chief medical officer, “all the amenities at Nemours focus not only on the child but their parents and families as well.”

The hospital won two awards at the International Interior Design Association’s 2013 Best of the Best Gala (Georgia Chapter), one for the Healthcare Design category and one for best overall out of all 11 categories. Parenting.com writer Shawn Bean noted, “Set amidst a wooded expanse of central Florida, with theme park roller coasters peppering the horizon, Nemours Children’s Hospital is arguably the new high water mark for pediatric care in the United States.”

Designer turned educator Kiran Bir Sethi wanted to blur the boundaries between school and life to help young students become aware, enabled, and empowered to effect change in the world. In aiming to spread her message to millions of children across India , Sethi tapped IDEO and the d.school at Stanford to help create a design contest for youth that would show them that they could make a difference in their community.

Together with the d.school, IDEO designed a competition for middle school students called the Design for Change Contest. Adapting the human-centered design approach into a simple process that 10- to 13-year-old kids could follow on their own, the contest included rules, tools, and platforms that would be accessible to children and teachers throughout India regardless of their previous exposure to design.

The team shaped the rules so that students could learn core design-thinking skills such as empathy, brainstorming, collaboration, and reflection through the process of participating in the contest. And together, the group developed a toolkit to walk students through the simple four-step process.

The biggest challenges to the contest were overcoming the lack of infrastructure, language barriers, and a discrepancy in school resources. There was no national database of schools for easy outreach, so Riverside built relationships with NGOs across India to distribute the contest toolkit to more than 30,000 schools.

The contest receives about 2,000 entries from groups of youth in India each year. They have been addressing challenges such as illiteracy, pollution, traffic safety, care for the elderly, alcoholism, and the environment.

As of 2015, the Design for Change Contest has scaled far beyond India, and is being run in 30-plus countries, with millions of children participating. Each contest entry shows that kids really can make a big difference in the world.

From flexible working conditions to the coexistence of both physical and digital experiences, COVID-19 has accelerated the trends and behaviors that have been rearing their heads for some time, and pushed them to the forefront of our everyday lives.

Indeed, the future is already here. How might we fully step into it with creativity and resilience?

Recently, a group of IDEO designers in Tokyo convened a creative project to brainstorm and design for the implications of the pandemic on the future of Japan. Called “Emergent Futures,” the goal of the work—accessible below—was not to predict the future, but to prepare for the possibilities it may bring.

To envision these “emergent futures,” we started where we always do: with people, and by observing ourselves, our families, and communities. For each future, we describe what it looks like and what behaviors prevail, the evidence we see for this future already emerging, and what design opportunities exist for Japan-focused businesses.

For example, the first emergent future we explore is Leftover Spaces—the idea that physical spaces will become more dynamic due to public health concerns around occupancy. With this, business opportunities related to rent, consumer preferences, space design, and co-ownership emerge. We explore and ground this emergent future through Kei, an IDEO designer and blossoming curry chef, whose needs inspired us to prototype a pop-up system concept—the Kei Truck. Our research reveals how some businesses are already prototyping this future, including restaurants operating as corner stores and Hoshino Resorts, who is leveraging data tracking to keep guests safe. These examples provoke key takeaways for leaders, from the need to develop a more entrepreneurial, adaptable workforce to using data in a human-centered way.

Though Emergent Futures is a collection of provocations about the state of Japan post-pandemic, the value of this futuring exercise and framework is universal, especially now. For Japan and other parts of the world to meet the challenges and opportunities we face post-COVID—from how to safely utilize physical spaces to how to remain competitive in a changing job market—our response must be human-centered, innovative, and imaginative.

Please share the work far and wide. We hope to spark the global collaboration required to ensure the future is evenly distributed, so we can step into it with confidence and creativity, together.

Download and share Emergent Futures here.

“The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.” Though attributed to essayist William Gibson nearly 20 years ago, the quote could not be more relevant today.

It was a result of her own tenaciousness, her creativity, and the support of RepresentED, a small organization with a big mission to prepare students for careers in industries where they are underrepresented. The organization uses a human-centered approach to diversify the next generation of leaders through training, mentorship, and internships. RepresentED’s founder, Rashida Hanif, met Cisneros when she was a transfer student at UC Berkeley. Hanif notes that transfer students—particularly Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) young adults—are missing out on what she calls the “hidden curriculum of life.”

Cisneros immediately saw the opportunity to help other Black and Brown transfer students like herself attain university education and gain visibility into concealed opportunities for their futures. Cisneros first learned about RepresentED in 2017, when she applied to join the first cohort of fellows. As part of the fellowship, she participated in a design thinking workshop led by former IDEO designer Scott Shigeoka. Later, she and her team competed in OpenIDEO's Future of Higher Education Challenge and designed an app that connected transfer students with much-needed community and resources. The experience and process introduced Cisneros to an industry she had never considered before. “Learning about design was absolutely pivotal for me,” she says.

Making change from within

After the competition, Cisneros was encouraged to apply to IDEO, and was hired as a recruiting coordinator before being promoted to her current role. Today, she leads Color by Design (CxD), which she helped launch in the wake of the rise in activism for social justice last year. She also helps facilitate internal programs at IDEO like business and inclusive leadership trainings, which seek to support IDEO’s senior leaders (and eventually all employees) to better understand how to create a culture of belonging. “In these trainings, we’re going to provide tangible leadership skills which help build awareness of where people are in their own personal journey,” she explains.

Shifting the power dynamic

This month RepresentED and IDEO are opening application submissions for the fall session of CxD. The program is open to all BIPOC students from backgrounds that have been historically underrepresented in design.

“It was important to shift away from the typical ‘company-intern’ power dynamic,” said Hanif. “It’s about an equal exchange of value that shifts the long-held power dynamics between the company and the fellow.” Following a bootcamp in design thinking, the cohort will receive placement on a six-month full-time IDEO project and have the opportunity to pursue a career at IDEO. Whether they decide to continue a design career or not, fellows will leave the program with a deeper understanding of design that they can apply to nearly any line of work.

Fellows will also be trained holistically for entry into culturally white-dominated industries, preparing them for challenges that are likely to come up, like imposter syndrome. “Having the ability to name things like imposter syndrome enabled me to step into my own authenticity,” explains Cisneros, “while understanding that institutions need to do their own work in order truly create a culture of belonging.”

A signal to the industry

Looking forward, there’s a lot of potential for programs like CxD to drive lasting change within other companies and industries. “This isn’t just a pipeline program, it’s a signal to the industry,” Hanif notes. Companies that have more diversity in their staff will have a greater competitive edge, and the design skills fellows bring to the table can be applied to more than just traditional design work—they can be used anywhere.

“It's not about checking DE&I boxes,” she adds, “When you build products and services, you want the people who buy those products to be represented in the design process—there’s a real business case for that.”

The first cohort has been invited into IDEO in January 2022 for a 6-month period, and an iteration of the program will launch by the end of 2023. We will share more updates as we get closer to the recruitment season. If you have any questions, please contact cxdinfo@ideo.com.

For Jordan Cisneros, a Senior Specialist on IDEO’s Global Learning and Development Team, access to a career in design was not a given.

Many people share these same questions but are afraid to ask. They don’t want to be rude or make a misstep—which can generate more missteps and even cause harm simply due to being uninformed.

Solving this issue is exactly what IDEOer Stuart Getty set out to do with their new book, How to They/Them. Stuart, who uses they/them pronouns, wanted to create a guide that answered a lot of the questions they commonly get asked, and find a way to educate people in a friendly way. Far from being a niche topic, gender is an important part of the human experience and its landscape is ever-expanding as we learn new ways to describe our most innate identities. It’s important to realize that everyone has a gender identity—not just those whose identity diverges from traditional norms. In Stuart’s brilliant words, “Gender is for everyone and we all get to decide who we want to be in this world.”

We sat down (virtually) with Stuart and Brooke Thyng, a former IDEOer who helped bring Stuart’s story to life through illustration, to talk about the book—the role of humor in the story, the pair’s collaboration process, and why the timing of the book was so important. Read on for a peek behind their creative process.

This book approaches talking about gender from both an educational perspective, as well as through humor. Why was that balance so important?

Stuart Getty: There's a hidden audience with this book and for me, it's my mom who's in her 70s and lives in Kentucky. I think that jokes are what get her to be like, “Oh, okay! I'll keep reading.”

Stuart Getty: I think that people get really uptight when these kinds of subjects around gender are being talked about. People are worried they’re going to mess up and use the wrong words like “transgendering,” for example. What I'm saying is, I like to add a little levity, because it makes people relax into the learning process. It’s about access to the information.

Brooke Thyng: I wanted to follow Stu’s lead and make sure that everything that I created was in service of their message. So as much as I wanted to make myself laugh, as a cis-person, it was important for me to come to this project very humbly and with the utmost respect.

The whole time, we’d ask, “Is this pushing people, but in a way that's authentic and respectful, and not just doing it to be a jerk?” There's a time and place for joking around. And I think it was clear that Stuart’s message wasn't a joke, but that it needed to come across with some levity, or just some openness.

I was really conscious of finding that nice balance of, yeah, it’s not a joke and we're fighting for rights and we're fighting for exposure and visibility, but at the same time, when we take ourselves so seriously I think we block out people from coming into the message. And so I really wanted to use humor as access, and use the visuals as access.

How does this book connect to what’s going on in our society right now?

Stuart Getty: If you look at the stats for Gen Z, 35 percent of them know someone who uses they/them pronouns, and something like 20 percent of them also identify as gender neutral, even if they don't use they/them. People are stepping into these places of breaking binaries, and I think the binaries of sexuality have been crumbling over the last couple years. People are now asking, “Why do we have to be only gay or straight?”

What I also love about this book is it means cis-people get to look at their gender and the way that they've been told to be a man, a woman, an American, a human, whatever—and decide what they actually believe and what they actually want to be. And I think that is the thesis statement of the whole book. “They” is for me, and I want to explain it to you, but also, gender freedom should be for all of us.

Tell us more about what your collaborative process was like.

Stuart Getty: I came to Brooke with pages that looked like this, and then we would sit down and go page by page. I do think that I had a really good idea of the story, but it was on a level seven or eight when I turned it to Brooke, and then she kicked it up to the, “It's a 10, everyone!” She just made it such a better story.

Brooke Thyng: Stuart came with all of these pages printed out, and I would meet up with them at IDEO. We’d sit in the communal area and we'd go through the pages, and they'd be like, “Oh, I was thinking about this here. And this is sort of what I meant here.” I would just take notes and try to take it in.

I'm always so taken aback when Stuart asks me to be a part of things like this. I really felt like I was helping make the vision come to life, like I was Stuart's visual hands for this project. I just wanted to amplify the text that was written. As I read through their draft, it was an immediate, “Oh, this is what it's making me think of.” Either I am slightly out there and can just see weird images come to life, or Stuart is really good at crafting their words. I think maybe it's both.

Want to read How to They/Them and learn more about gender identity? Get your hands on a copy here, or wherever books are sold!

Animations by Louisa Liu and Devin Peek

Ever wondered what “nonbinary” and “gender nonconforming” really mean? Or if it's grammatically correct to use “they” as a singular pronoun? You’re far from alone.

A founding member of the alt-rock band Garbage, Steve Marker had generously agreed to an interview on one condition: that he could read an advance copy of my book, Two Beats Ahead, before we talked. This made me sweat, not because he was a rock star—my co-author and I had spoken to many of them while writing—but because he was the first rock star reading the book about the inventive mindsets of musicians. It was like waiting on Julia Child for feedback about the omelet you just served her.

“I’m enjoying your book so far,” Steve said. My shoulders relaxed.

I first heard Garbage on college radio in the mid 90s. The band had an unmistakable sound—a combination of shoegaze, hiphop, and electronic dance, with the pouty attitude of the Cure reinvented by a feminist fatale. It was an unexpected direction for the band given that Butch Vig, another founding member, had rocketed to fame as the producer of Nirvana’s major label debut, Nevermind. Grunge—as that Seattle sound was called—was nowhere to be found on Garbage’s debut. And it turns out, that was by design, or as Steve implied, maybe an un-design.

“You know, it was interesting reading about the intention that so many artists have had in making their music,” Steve told me. “It wasn’t like that for us. We didn't have a written-out plan or even something we really talked about that much. It was just a combination of everything that we loved.” He shared a story about Butch seeing My Bloody Valentine in New York and being blown away by their white noise and pop melodies. He mentioned Public Enemy and their gritty noise loop samples. He talked about 60s rock.

“Garbage could have turned into a totally pop thing. Or it could have turned into a noise experiment that would have been an interesting album to listen to once or twice. Luckily, we found a combination that worked for us. A lot of that had to do with Shirley [Manson], as she brought this whole other thing into the mix that we couldn't have planned. The combination of all our different influences is what the band became.”

Well, maybe there wasn’t a plan, but there was definitely a principle of designing the conditions for creativity and letting the outcome emerge from that. Steve and the band had figured out how to bring together all the things they loved, and at the same time, reject all the things that were popular in the mainstream. They chose a new path, which became their own path to mainstream success. Their debut sold 4 million copies in its first 12 months.

As I reflected upon how this happened, I was thinking about the numerous client teams that I’ve worked with under rapid deadlines and inflated expectations.“We want to be the next iPod of banking!” they say. The bygone days of Bell Labs open briefs feel like business mythology now. And yet, that was exactly the situation Garbage had. “We were lucky enough to have somebody say, ‘Okay, go make a record,’ mainly because Butch had a great reputation. We had the luxury to take as much time as we wanted to figure out what we were going to be.”

In Two Beats Ahead, Panos Panay and I interviewed Imogen Heap and Steve Vai about music and product breakthroughs they had in their own careers. We also spoke with folks at Amazon’s PillPack about launching their startup idea. What ties these stories together are mindsets of curiosity and learning. Experimentation wasn’t confined to any single part of a workflow or to particular roles. It was more like a cultural attribute, the water they swam in. For Garbage, that culture looked like persistent play. Steve illustrated this with a story about making Garbage's first record.

At the time, they were often just sampling other people’s songs to find elements they liked. During one session, he grabbed a handful of CDs looking for a beat and happened to play “Train in Vain” by the Clash. “Right there, we had a good four-bar loop to use as a click track...I put down a bass line and that was the foundation of the song right there.”

The next day, Butch came up with the lyrics:

you stupid girl
pretend you’re high
pretend you’re bored

“It can take minutes or months to make a song,” Steve continued, “and you’ve just got to stay open to letting it make its own path.”

I can imagine someone reading this and thinking to themselves, “So that’s it? The secret to innovation is to try a bunch of random stuff until it works?” But remember, this wasn’t just any band coming up with songs. This was Garbage. And this led Steve and I to an interesting discussion about team dynamics and experience.

“I guess we were lucky that we all worked with bands for 10-15 years before Garbage. We were in dozens of bands that hated each other. You learn by doing that.” He went on to talk about fluidity, respect, and vulnerability—the essential chemistry of the band.

It would be misleading to suggest that musicians somehow have a more natural ability to collaborate than others. It's not about an inherent gift. We all know the stories of a band breaking up over creative differences, sometimes with incredible public meltdowns. The reason musicians have so much to teach us is that the conditions in which they work are the ideal classroom for these mindsets.

Great creative talent is in every company, but the structures and social norms of the organizations often dictate who is permitted to collaborate. I’ve been in situations where clients have asked me not to talk to their colleagues because they didn’t trust them. I’ve seen departments make competitors of one another because they were incentivized to do so. I’ve been in buildings that have rooms dedicated to innovation rather than cultures committed to it. To get the best teams, it's often left to the creativity of the project leader to work around these organizational constructs and find the ideal contributors, no matter where they are in the organization.

Garbage set themselves up without defined roles—except for Shirley, who always sings. Otherwise, roles and contributions are left up to the person with the best ideas. “Being in a band is the most fun thing I can imagine doing. It's a dream come true from when you were a kid. And I've done it as a job, as my livelihood for a long time. It's amazing,” Steve shared with a smile.

Those words, “I’ve done it as my job,” have stuck with me because they really are the premise of Two Beats Ahead. We often don’t see the musician’s life as a job. And yet the mindsets that Steve and Garbage bring to work are the mindsets that we are regularly striving for in the corporate world. We’ve categorized the rock star life as something else. But on my best days, I’m working just like those legendary musicians, pursuing curiosity, building on new ideas with my teammates, and trying to get the video lighting just right.

Two Beats Ahead: What Musical Minds Teach Us About Innovation, by IDEO partner R. Michael Hendrix and Berklee College of Music Senior Vice President for Global Strategy and Innovation, Panos A. Pany, will be available worldwide in April.

Preorder in the U.S. here and the UK here.

Steve was supposed to be in bright colored lights on stages across the U.S. along with Liz Phair and Alanis Morrisette. Instead, he was on a video call with me, trying to find a camera angle that didn't make him look like he was in witness protection.

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.