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.

Smartly curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, the show features objects dating back to the late 1950s, from the Eames Office to the first iPod to a home CRISPR kit.

I've now seen the show twice. Here's what’s stuck with me:

So much of what comes out of Silicon Valley today has its roots in the DIY utopianism of the Whole Earth Catalog. Founded in the late 60s by Stewart Brand and a bunch of Stanford longhairs, the Catalog promised “access to tools" that would equip us to break free from our hidebound culture.

The title was inspired by Brand’s 1966 campaign to have NASA release a satellite photo of the Earth as seen from space—the first image we’d see of the "whole Earth." That picture, he believed, would unite humans in our belief in a shared destiny and encourage more peaceful, ecological, and holistic thinking.

When I was in my 20s, the Whole Earth Catalog spurred me to start my own DIY design magazine, ReadyMade, in the back of a used furniture warehouse in Berkeley. Whole Earth made designing a life on one's own terms seem within reach.

That spirit shines through in another standout of the exhibit: the recreated office of Charles and Ray Eames, down to the posters on the wall, the kilim rug, and a looping projection of their film for the World’s Fair (a serenade to industry and systems design). Everything they laid their mid-century paws on exudes a kind of singing-nun joy. Two things I love most about them: their philosophy that “Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects,” and that they employed the people they were designing for—Los Angeles locals, war veterans, and housewives.

There’s also the agitprop hijinks of Ant Farm; the stained leather scrappiness and propaganda of Marin’s craft guilds; and Heath Ceramics—the tableware preferred by my avocado toast.

And for us outdoorsy types, the centerpiece of the exhibit is a Bucky Fuller-inspired North Face tent, pitched alongside radically new 1970s climbing equipment made by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia.

I had a feeling the iconic "one laptop per child" by fuseproject would be on hand (check!), and was excited to see my friend Eric's (of Stamen Design) dazzling data visualizations.

Having done a tour of duty at WIRED in its third year of publication (1995), it was great to see their eye-popping cyberpunk spreads on display, and I'm always happy to learn of companies like D-Rev that care enough about social impact to design an $80 high-performance knee (80 percent of the world's amputees have no access to modern prosthetics).

California design got swept up in the digital tsunami that WIRED was chronicling and all those "new tools" for connected living now look quaint. The first Apple desktop computer and Handspring Visor sitting under vitrines look like beige relics from a technocrypt.

IDEO’s Dennis Boyle, who led the Handspring Visor design team, told me that its eye module accessory is credited as being the first digital camera on a handheld electronic PDA. "It’s the precursor to today's cell phone cameras," he said.

I'm drunk on Kool-Aid, no doubt, but I walked away from this show marveling at how IDEO appears to be the aortic valve of California design. There are no less than five examples of our work on display: The prototype for the first Apple mouse, Thoughtless Acts? and Method Cards, the Handspring Visor, and the prototype for the Q Concept workstation, designed by David Kelley and Jim Yurchenco, Jane Fulton Suri, Dennis Boyle, and Martin Bone, respectively.

Yurchenco, who repurposed a butter dish and a roll-on deodorant ball procured at a local Palo Alto drugstore to make the earliest mouse, is struck by the crude tools designers had at their disposal back in the day:

“It was done using old techniques: a pencil and paper on a drawing board instead of 3D solid CAD to design the parts; manually machined injection molding tools and pieced together check models instead of 3D printed models. Of course, everything designed at that time was done the same way.”

Though it seemed impossible to design a mouse for less than $10 when Steve Jobs first proposed it, IDEO founder David Kelley and Yurchenco alighted upon a crucial insight:

“The most surprising thing that happened during the process was we were able to make [the mouse] low-cost by realizing it didn't have to be as precise as we first thought," Kelley says. "Because the user's human brain would intuitively move the mouse to exactly the right spot."

Jane Fulton Suri still expresses surprise that a simple deck of cards (Method Cards), which were published in 2003, became the foundation for IDEO's design approach:

“At the time it wasn’t obvious that sharing information about our approach and sensibilities would be a powerful way for IDEO to lead the way. It's now core to IDEO's strategy to create design tools and empower others in the world at large.”

Three of the four designers quoted above still work at IDEO. And that reminds me of another thing I love about California designers:

They never stop trying to make things better by making better things.

Next up: Nick Pajerski interviews "Designed in California" curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher.

If my heart were a painting, it would be on permanent loan to California. I love its shaggy optimists who turn drained swimming pools into skate parks. Its fog and fearless politics. Its pioneers and garage inventors and beat poets who came in search of a Golden State. I'm a big believer in the design that was born here, too, which is on display at the SFMOMA’s "Designed in California" exhibit through May 27, 2018.

My friend Stefan suggested I try a different mindset. Instead of trying to get things right, I should put myself in “play mode.” From his email:

Right then, I was working on an illustration for part of my book where some early readers got confused. But I wanted to get it right, so I’d been putting it off. "Okay," I thought. "I can afford to waste an hour on this."

I tried play mode. I told myself the next hour didn’t matter—I was just goofing around and having fun. I set a timer. I made about 15 rough sketches. Then the hour was up. And I hadn’t gotten it right. But I’d broken the ice, and I was in the zone, so I kept working. Thirty minutes later, I had an illustration I was happy with. And the whole thing was fun rather than stressful. Play mode worked!

I’m writing this post to remind myself of the value of play mode. Next time you talk to me and I say, "I’m stuck," tell me to flip the switch.

This post was originally published on Jake Knapp's blog.

I get stuck a lot. I get stuck writing, editing, making slides, designing, replying to email. I get stuck anytime I want to get something right.

But there are limitations to voice-enabled interactions. They’re slow, embarrassing when other humans are around, and require awkward trigger phrases like “Okay, Google” or “Hey, Siri.”

Thankfully, though, talking into midair is no longer our only—or best—option.

The new iPhone introduced a camera that can perceive three dimensions and record a depth for every pixel, and home devices like the Nest IQ and Amazon's Echo Look now have cameras of their own. Combined with neural nets that learn and improve with more training data, these new cameras create a point cloud or depth map of the people in a scene, how they are posing, and how they are moving. The nets can be trained to recognize specific people, classify their activities, and respond to gestures from afar. Together, neural nets and better cameras open up an entirely new space for gestural design and gesture-based interaction models.

These new options beg the question: Of the existing interaction modalities—haptics (touch), sound (voice), and vision (gesture)—which is better to use when, and why?

The use case points toward an answer. When you’re SCUBA diving, or water skiing, or directing traffic on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the auditory channel isn’t available, so gesture or touch become essential.

In an operating room, a surgeon’s hands are sterile; she can’t flip through radiology scans—only speech and gesture are available. If you’re conducting an orchestra or on a military raid you can’t call out commands, so we’re back with gesture.

WATCH: From Charlie Chaplin to Cricket, there are a wide range of sources to inspire us as we design for gestural communication.

To dig into it further, our team at the Cambridge studio snagged a camera like the one in the new iPhone and performed a series of experiments to figure out when gesture might be the best choice.

First, we gave pairs of people an idea, then we asked them to make a four-handed pose to express that idea.

Then we recorded stories and tracked people’s hands using computer vision to study when we naturally deploy gestures to amplify emotion or explain a concept.

WATCH: Tracking how we gesticulate to bring stories to life.

WATCH: Ask a group of people to perform an action or request and you get some variation. The trick is finding gestures that are as universal as possible.

Lastly, we trained a neural network to recognize a small set of gestures, and used these to control a Philips HUE light set and a Spotify station to create an installation for the office.

WATCH: Using a set of gestures, we trained a few devices in our office to respond to our cues and adjust the lights and music.

In messing around with these exercises, we discovered that gestures need to be either sequential, like a sentence—noun then verb, object plus operation. For example, for “speaker, on,” one hand designates the noun, and the other the verb: You point to speaker with left hand and turn the volume up by raising right hand.

Another surprising insight: Gestures are generation-specific.

When asked to signal turning up the volume, a few people twisted an invisible knob, but most of the under 30s lifted a palm or made a pinching gesture with their fingers.

After analyzing our results, we boiled our thoughts down to four reasons to opt for gesture over voice or touch:

1. Speed: If it needs to be fast, gestures are much quicker than speaking sentences.
2. Distance: If you need to communicate from across the room, gesture is easier than dealing with volume.
3. Limited lexicon: If you don't have a thousand things to say, gestures work well. The smaller the gesture set for a given context, the easier it is to remember. (Thumbs-up/thumbs-down, for example.)
4. Expressiveness over precision: Gestures are well-suited to expressing emotional salience. A musical conductor communicates a downbeat and tempo, but also so much more: dolco, marcato, confidence, sadness, longing, and more.

It's exciting to imagine a whole new category of products that will take advantage of gesture’s subtlety, expressiveness, and speed.

How might we use gesture in unexpected ways? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Many thanks to the rest of the team: Lisa Tacoronte, Todd Vanderlin, Jason Robinson, Danny DeRuntz, Brian Standeford, Eric Chan, and Ari Adler.

Since Siri was introduced in 2010, the world has been increasingly enamored with voice interfaces. When we need to adjust the thermostat, we ask Alexa. If we want to put on a movie, we ask the remote to search for it. According to some estimates, some 33 million voice-enabled devices reported for duty in American homes by the end of 2017.

“I don’t think of myself as a collector, I just keep the stuff that happens in my life," Kelley says. And what happens over the course of a life in design adds up.

Kelley, who founded IDEO 40 years ago and went on to launch Stanford's d.school, has a lot of stories to tell, and most of them are connected to stuff—stuff IDEO made, stuff given to him by other designers and architects like Ettore Sottsass (who also designed Kelley's house), stuff that unlocks memories and, not infrequently, gets him choked up. (SPOILER ALERT: skip to 1:54 where he points out a picture from his wedding. One of the guests is IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge, the father of interaction design, who died in 2012.)

Take a tour of David Kelley's office shelves

The wall of wooden cubbies in Kelley's small Palo Alto office is crowded with prototypes, model automobiles (Kelley is also a car buff who owns about 20 vehicles, including a 1954 Chevy pickup), and other curios like a giant "I" that lights up and is inscribed with his life's story. His coworkers fabricated it for him in the company shop for his 50th birthday.

In fact, Kelley has a small museum of birthday keepsakes that IDEO designers have given him over the years: a giant spotlight, an old motorcycle, and one of those mechanical horses that costs a dime to ride, purchased from a grocery store.

Inspiration and materials for those gifts often came from University Art, the Palo Alto supply store down the street from the studio. "There was a guy named Jim, lovely white haired guy," Kelley says. Jim was the store manager, and when Kelley told him he was starting a new company down the street and would like to open an account, Jim replied that they'd have to charge $50 a month to qualify. Kelley admitted he didn't know if they'd be able to do that. "Fast forward a few years, Jim was still there and we had about 350 employees and we were charging $50 a minute. Jim would always remind me of that story..."

Kelley's collecting gene runs in his family. His mother used to call it "shopping in the basement." She'd go down to the first floor of the house and dig up something from Kelley's past and send it to him for his birthday.

"Things would show up in the mail: My leather pouch that I would keep my marbles in when I was a little boy; my boy scout uniform. I'm kind of in that same vein as my mother. I'm keeping things that are meaningful. When I am sitting around, I can look at the model we made of the first mouse or the Christmas card we made in 1993 and I just think, it's pleasurable now; it's going to be even more pleasurable as I get older."

Though IDEO still makes stuff, much of what we design, along with what we consume, has become less tangible. And it's a good thing—there's not much more room on Kelley's shelves.

It's not everyday that you see the first ever example of something you love. So, when David Kelley invited us into his office and pulled an early prototype of the Apple Mouse off his shelf, I let out an audible gasp.

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.