International e-reading service Kobo, Inc., with more than 2.5 million digital book, magazine, and newspaper titles, approached IDEO to gain a strong foothold in the shifting publishing landscape. The design challenge was to create a new suite of advanced reading devices with the best aspects of paperback books—tangibility, portability, and a small footprint.

To make digital reading devices feel approachable, personal, and sophisticated, designers focused on the intersection of physical and digital interface design. The teams created a family of affordable e-readers with clearly differentiated feature sets, and the resulting design provides a reading experience that approximates holding and reading a paperback book. No larger than a novel, the front of the e-reader is designed for the reader’s eyes, while the back features a signature “quilted” back shell designed to create a pleasurable, tactile memory for the hands.

The Kobo family includes the Kobo WiFi, with a 6-inch glare-free E-Ink screen; the smaller Kobo Touch, with infrared touch-screen interface, E-Ink Pearl screen, and faster processor; and the Kobo Vox, a 7-inch Android tablet model with social and digital sharing options.

Kobo saw record sales of its digital reading devices during the 2011 holiday season, and was named “Editor’s Pick for Best e-reader” by Wired magazine.

The U.S. Green Building Council asked IDEO to help visualize how buildings might communicate environmental performance. Together they came up with the LEED Dynamic Plaque, an elegant public declaration of a building’s environmental efforts.

Located in a lobby or other common space, the plaque displays real-time measurements about a building’s resource use—from energy to waste disposal. IDEO designed and built the physical plaque, and the IDEO Digital Shop created an online interface that allows USGBC’s software to interact with it, enabling people to enter data, analyze details, and make personal decisions that influence a building’s performance.

WATCH: "LEED Dynamic Plaque" video

In China, most kitchen appliances available on the market are rooted in Western cooking practices. High-end kitchen appliance company Fotile, based in Ningbo, China, was looking to design a new cook top and range hood that would satisfy the unique needs of Chinese cooking culture.

The new appliances designed by Fotile and IDEO support a key need of Chinese cooking: the dual-cooking center. This two-burner range eliminates unnecessary burners, instead dedicating one side to the wok, the primary tool in Chinese cooking, and the other side to a flat-bottom pan. The wok burner has a special stand with angled posts to hold steady a round-bottom wok (typical in China) and ease the rigorous, constant “tossing” movement that is prevalent in Chinese cooking. The Fotile cook top and range hood have become popular with Chinese consumers since market launch.

Great art requires great openness, a space large enough to contain all the tragedy and comedy of the human experience.

The limestone walls and Palladian arches of the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) hold such a space. The institution’s building in Mayfair contains galleries where a wanderer can appreciate the everyday miracle of a Caravaggio or amble through the former home of Academicians, a group led by some of the most eminent artists in the world, from Anish Kapoor to Sir Norman Foster. This revered site has also been home to the Summer Exhibition for 246 years, an event open to submissions from any living artist.

As the RA approached its 250th anniversary, the institution came to IDEO to help create a digital strategy that would open new doors to these resources, reveal hidden avenues to new experiences, and offer broad vistas of the collection.

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After rounds of research with artists, staff members, and visitors, our designers immediately started building and testing. They ran workshops to refine digital tools, watched as patrons scribbled notes about things they wanted to know more about, and built pop-up design studios in RA’s galleries where they could generate insights on the fly.

The result is a rich, immersive site for different audiences. Art lovers can view stunning images of the works, artists can learn more about RA schools, and RA staff can share surprising stories about some of the most prized pieces.

Based around human needs rather than organizational structure, the new digital space allows audiences to wander freely in this immense storehouse of inspiration and awe. And perhaps most important, the RA organization has benefitted from a human-centered paradigm shift that will enable the institution to forge boldly into its next quarter millennium.

1. Sketch Your Neighbor

Most people default to verbal/analytical mode, so getting people to use their hands and get involved with pen and paper can prove to be a very refreshing gear shift. As the name suggests, Sketch Your Neighbor requires everyone to draw the person next to them. Set a timer for a minute or two and let loose. For the majority of people who claim that they can't draw, this exercise involves a certain amount of vulnerability—and that's the point. If everyone is used to failing in front of each other, the group dynamic is going to be more open, generous, and positive.

2. The Name Game

When you're dealing with strangers, learning everyone's name can be a significant challenge. The improv legends at Second City use a game to get past this. Everyone stands in a circle and takes turns saying their name while making a gesture. Everyone else repeats the name, while copying the gesture. They go around the circle doing the same thing one more time, and then everyone has to do the whole thing from memory. The association of movement with the name is a shortcut to embedding it in long-term memory. That, plus that fact that everyone has made themselves look ridiculous, leads to an open and fun meeting.

3. The Stretch

Sitting hunched in a chair while someone drones on and on feels like going through a slow death. Getting people out of their chairs is a quick way to perk up energy levels and set the stage for collaboration. The Stretch is a very simple exercise: A facilitator asks everyone to stretch their arms up to the ceiling, tilt them to the left and the right, and then shake them out. It takes less than a minute, and allows the meeting leader to take control of the room and wakes people up.

4. Last Word, First Word

One problem with meetings is that we aren't great at listening to each other. This is even more of a problem if people are glued to their phones and laptops. We cribbed this game from Second City, too. Everyone pairs up and has a conversation. The rule is that the first word of your sentence must be the same as the last word of the sentence your partner just said. This requires listening to their entire sentence before beginning to frame your reply. Sadly, for most of us, this is an unusual behavior.

5. The Story Opener

One of the keys to a good creative meeting is to have everyone show up as their whole, human self, rather than their"work self." A quick way to get there to have everyone tell a quick personal story. For example, ask your colleagues to talk about a youthful hobby. If possible, connect the story topic to the purpose of the meeting. Talking about ways to motivate a team? Ask them to tell a story about the moment in their life when they felt most excited. The main benefit comes from having each person tell a story from the heart, which will bond everyone for the rest of the meeting.

6. Dance Lesson

If you're ready for an added level of risk, get people to do rhythmic movement in unison. This requires a charismatic (i.e. shameless) facilitator or a very willing group of participants—or, ideally, both. The facilitator takes the group through a set of dance moves, and then everyone performs them together to music. If you start a meeting like this, nothing that happens afterwards will faze anybody.

Illustrations by Steve Har.

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In the age of Slack, Asana, and other tools for collaboration, in-person meetings are losing ground. It’s true that having a great meeting isn't easy, and too often we fall into dull routines. But it’s also true that real magic can happen when people are face-to-face in a room together. To get people to be fully present and spark creative ideas, try these meeting warmups.

The boozy makeover started with the lid. We wanted opening the bar to be one-handed and easy, and have some dramatic flair, so we added a gas-spring hinge to connect the lid and kettle. Figuring out where and how to attach the hinge, then drilling out a slot, ended up being the hardest and most time-consuming part of the build. Go figure.

Once the gas spring was in, we designed a cooking grate—laser cut out of acrylic and spray painted silver—to accommodate six hand-lettered liquor bottles.

Next, we added a Bluetooth speaker to the inside of the lid for what we called the “Complete Party Effect,” and a push-push latch to make opening and shutting the grill seamless. A few holes in the leg of the grill and—boom!—we had cord management.

We thought we were finished when Chris Gold, mechanical engineer extraordinaire, walked into the Shop. “How can you have a grill wet-bar thingy without glowing embers?” Good point. Ten minutes, a strip of LEDs, and some quick coding later, Chris had made a modern fire. We crinkled some paper to diffuse the lights and give it some texture and we put it under the bottom grate. Embers: check.

But a grill isn’t real grill until it is loved. So this year, we’ll be throwing one hell of a St. Paddy’s Day Happy Hour by queuing up a good Irish jig and giving Webby a proper welcome to the IDEO Chicago family.

Video by Sophie Feng

Special thanks to Annette Ferrara, Party Designer in Chief, for the idea!

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Even though our Midwestern hearts haven’t quite thawed yet, springtime is right around the corner. For too many long, cold months, IDEO Chicago’s Weber Original Kettle grill—that icon of carefree springtime afternoons and a beloved local brand—has been collecting cobwebs in the corner. We thought: What better way to welcome spring than to bust out our beloved grill and transform it into a tricked-out studio wet bar? And just in time. With the start of spring comes everyone's favorite excuse to drink with coworkers: St. Patrick’s Day. (Chicagoans are particularly notorious for celebrating the holiday in style, from our rowdy St. Paddy's Parade to literally dyeing the Chicago River green.)

Name: Tony Browne
Location: London
Role at IDEO: I’m an organizational design director. I help people build modern, purposeful organizations through design, and a more human use of technology.
Joined IDEO: January 2017
Twitter: @misterbrowne
Titillating Fact: I was crowned UK Computer Gaming champion in 1994 and haven’t really given up the joystick in the 20 years since. Approximately 60 percent of our household arguments are over who is allowed on our Playstation—me, or my 5 year old son, Spencer.

1. Corporate Rebels

I mean, just look at them. With their long hair, nonchalant stance, and leather/denim apparel, Joost and Pim have corporate rebellion chic down. But they didn’t start out like that. In fact, they came from a fairly standard finance and consultancy background—until they quit their jobs, and committed to traveling the world in search of “rebellious” organizations.

Their blog has some great case studies about companies that are experimenting with radically different ways of working. Check out their insights into Zappos, Gutmann, and my personal favorite, West Coast tomato processing company Morning Star.

2. The Meaning Conference

Established in 2012, the Meaning conference is an annual UK event for those of us who believe there is more—so much more—to business than making money. It started off as a fairly small, low-key affair, but by 2016 it had grown enormously, attracting leading UK economists, global business leaders, and politicians. I always come away from the event buoyed by conversations with passionate and like-minded people, and excited that meaning and purpose are really starting to be taken seriously in the business world.

Look out for news of the 2017 event (where I’ll be a volunteer).

3. A16Z Podcast

I’m a tiny bit obsessed by all things digital. I love technology, and I love thinking about how it is blowing up business models, transforming organizations, and creating entirely new sectors. The A16Z podcast from venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz (16 refers to the number of letters between the A and the Z in their names) is the best I’ve found to help keep my thinking current and fresh. There are other podcasts that may be closer to the cutting edge of technology trends, but none that are able to translate it all into usable business insight as well as A16Z does.

In this series, we ask IDEO designers to share the stuff they're digging right now—tools, books, music, sites, people, places—so you, too, can drink from the fount of inspiration bubbling up here. This week's guest star: Tony Browne.

1. Create agreements, not rules

For our weekly bits&bites meeting about the intersection of digital and creative technology, we decided to carve out five minutes from an existing office-wide gathering—our weekly Monday lunch—and offer the mic to anyone who wanted to talk about a piece of digital wizardry that's really rocking their world.

For the open mic share to catch on, we created a set of agreements that was structured enough to describe to people what and how to share, yet loose enough to encourage them to take risks.

• Whatever excites you, excites us. Pick a topic that combines digital with another craft, discipline, concept, or anything else that you’re passionate about.
• Keep it real. Talk about something that you either use, or would have loved to design.
• Keep it short. Remember, you only have five minutes! Keep it simple—don't overthink it.
• Take initiative. Interested in presenting? Add your name to the calendar!
• Take ownership. Once you’re up, you’re up. If you can’t make it, find someone to take your spot.

2. Design and brand it

Create a distinctive identity. In this world, even meetings need a brand to maintain their appeal. To make bits&bites really stick, we came up with a name, a look, and a jingle, and turned to our community for a design boost. Writer Jason Baker took inspiration from the bite-sized format and lunchtime milieu to come up with the moniker. Communication designer Peter Antonelli lent his talents to a simple, eye-catching visual identity. And design researcher with musical talents Alex Gallafent composed a catchy theme song, seemingly extracted from a 1980s science show. Taken together, the attention paid to designing this meeting has made bits&bites an exciting familiar moment every week (we often catch people absent-mindedly humming the jingle around the office).

3. Make it interdisciplinary and inclusive

Invite people from across disciplines. Our intent for bits&bites was to shift our thinking from digital as a craft to digital as a medium or mindset. This lens prompted people to share work that explored questions like, what does digital mean when it overlaps with the idea of delight? Or protest? Or the sense of touch? How can we explore digital in the context of analog experiences? What lies at the nexus of digital and fright? The interdisciplinary approach not only made the bits&bites meeting more robust, it turned what could have been a closed door session with a few into an inclusive event.

We’re now entering our 9th month of this inspiration part of our regular lunch meeting. We’ve accumulated some of our favorites here, including Selma Durand’s “Digital Magic”, which celebrates digital illusions within industrial design, and “Hello World Wide Web” from Fuzzy Wobble, which looks at the rich history of firsts since the Internet began. Check out this slideshow.

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“Oh god, not another meeting.”

Yes, we know, communication is important. But most meetings end up feeling more like black holes in your calendar—rote check-ins that suck up more energy than they create. And just as with black holes, we who design meetings may not observe how bad they are directly, and only observe their effects—frequent phone checking, a battle to sound like the smartest person in the room, zero follow-through. So, how do you reinvent a workplace ritual so that it truly inspires? Here are 3 tips:

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.