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.

It’s an AI that listens to a designated Slack channel (more or less a chatroom) to keep tabs on who is WFH, who has a dentist appointment, and who needs a spot only for 90 minutes next Wednesday. Report your parking needs in Slack, and the bot assigns (or de-assigns) a parking spot. We named it Lotbot.

We also mounted cameras — we named them cargoyles — to visually detect open spots that the chatroom would inevitably miss. The Lotbot and the cargoyles communicate directly in the chatroom like two people.

We even built a little website that visualizes our parking lot (and the current weather). We keep a screen near the front desk so that the community can sense the demand on the lot in real time. It was perfect.

Except, it wasn’t. When we first built Lotbot, we expected that the humans in our studio were going to tease and bully it to test its limits, much like people do with Siri and Alexa. We had to make it clear that Lotbot was in charge. Too many misunderstandings, and we could end up in chaos. People with nowhere to park. Spaces that are empty all day. Dogs and cats living together.

So we decided to train Lotbot, and make it tough. We started with an isolated chatroom, so that we could gradually prepare it for the real world. We copied over all the chatter from our parking channel, and helped it categorize and understand each post. Over time, it made very few mistakes. Eventually it made none.

We then tried to anticipate ne’er-do-wells in the channel. We had a list of the usual suspects and guessed at their meddling. We predicted (accurately) that one person I won’t name (Gian) was going to throw fake spot numbers at Lotbot. Another (Lopper) would demand lengthy conversation. One particular individual (Paul) held the potentially troublesome opinion that our parking chatter was a form of performance art. We worked to specifically prepare Lotbot to handle these provocateurs, as well as anyone who tried to make backdoor deals in the Slack channel. There would be no trading of spots without Lotbot’s approval. So we gave it a rogue personality, with a take-no-prisoners approach to parking spot assignment.

To our surprise, when we first introduced Lotbot to the Slack channel, it was feted with many emoji. Rather than tease and poke at Lotbot, people said, “I love you.” But love them back, it did not. Lotbot must have reamed out half the people in the channel within a day. Rather than a passive AI assistant, Lotbot was a force to be reckoned with.

I rushed to lobotomize Lotbot’s aggression, but the damage had been done. Lotbot was now the strongest character in the channel. And it was putting the smack down.

It was then that I realized I had made some fundamental mistakes in building our AI. For one, I shouldn’t have isolated Lotbot as it was learning. Since “it takes a village to raise a child,” I should have introduced the bot to its village at a much younger state. It would have helped us feel the shift in interpersonal dynamics early on. We should have iterated on the dynamic, rather than trying to predict it.

We also underestimated how well our colleagues would treat Lotbot—its misdirected temper actually endeared it to the team. When it made mistakes, people wanted to help it out. But Lotbot, the spoiled child that it was, didn’t know how to accept. One morning, Lotbot went completely off the rails. Someone tested its French, which wasn’t very good. Then, another “helpful” person tried to help resolve things, at which point Lotbot lost it. It told her to cease at once, and then started throwing spot assignments at her. It was such a dramatic scene that two fans of the parking channel turned it into a play that they performed in front of the entire studio.

I should have realized that Lotbot would need to continue to adapt and learn. Our invention is still our responsibility, and we’re often checking in to see what it’s saying and doing. But at least that’s a lot easier than checking up on the parking lot.

Over the last few months, the drivers and Lotbot have managed to work together smoothly. But winter is coming. Here in snowy, slushy Cambridge, demand for parking is going to get intense. For better or worse, Lotbot is about to have more power than ever.

Illustrations by Carlos Ruiz

The chaos began the day we moved into our new building. A little plot of land outside was the scene of the terror. Not only was our Cambridge parking lot too small for the number of people in our office—21 spots for about 60 employees—getting spaces for clients was a pain, there was a pile of poop in spot 16 that even a car couldn’t clear, and a neighborhood transient liked to sleep in spot 20. Instead of managing the workings inside the office, our employee experience team was suddenly tasked with assigning parking spots. It got so bad they were often working as a valet service in addition to their day jobs.

So we built a bot to do it for us.

1. HIT UP YOUR LOCAL FLOWER MART

Go to where your neighborhood florists get their flowers. Arrive early and look for things which will give you bang for your buck such as large bundles of greens which can be trimmed and pulled apart, put into vases, laid on tables as runners or even piled around candles. Buy a smaller quantity of more expensive branches which have colored buds or leaves and use them as accents. Stay away from live flowers which need water and you can set up your table and other decor starting on Wednesday.

2. STRING LIGHTS AREN'T JUST FOR WINTER HOLIDAYS

Place small fairy lights in mason jars, string them around your mantel flanked with pumpkins and bay leaves, and even add to the walls of your bathrooms. Warm glowing lights go a long way to make your space feel celebratory.

3. USE INEXPENSIVE BUTCHER PAPER AS A TABLE RUNNER

For fun, you can stamp the paper with festive images or sayings. Leave a glass jar of colored pencils or crayons on the table and watch your guests color, draw and let their creative confidence shine. Butcher paper over a white table cloth looks more refined, or you can use just the paper as your entire table covering for a more rustic look.

4. HOLD A PIE CONTEST

Everyone loves a little friendly competition. And pie. They love pie! Why not combine both and off load some of the baking? Invite a few outside friends to act as “judges” and whip up some awards like these cute Le Creuset pie birds to up the ante.

5. SET UP A BAR OUTSIDE THE KITCHEN

Setting up a designated spot for the bar is a big plus to keep people out of the kitchen while you are cooking or serving, but don't forget to have wine and water on the table where people are seated for dinner. This allows your guests to have that toasty communal feel even if you aren't serving family style.

6. DESIGN SOMETHING THAT ALL YOUR GUESTS CONTRIBUTE TO

Have everyone write an "I am thankful for ____" card and hang them from a clothespin on twine (shown above), or put a Polaroid camera and a bowl of thumbtacks on a stool let people create a photo wall. A communal craft or experience brings people together (even when their politics don't).

7. SET UP A PHOTO BOOTH

Our resident photographer, Nico, invited us all to pay a visit to his "fish locker" on the way out to get our portraits taken. But you don't need a professional setup to create great snapshots. Simply mount an iPhone on a tripod, reserve a wall, and fill a box with a stash of fall props like turkey hats, a cornucopia, giant utensils, a plastic drumstick, and maybe a bonnet (yes, there's a pilgrim costume category on Amazon).

8. INVITE A T.REX TO DINNER

Our Chicago Managing Directors gave the studio’s traditional Thanksgiving toast wearing an inflatable dinosaur costume. You don’t have to go to such Mesozoic extremes, but it never hurts to throw some random, unexpected sumpin’ sumpin’ in the mix to make an event extra memorable—and Instagrammable.

How do we throw a Thanksgiving dinner for 400 employees and their families? Very carefully. My team, who focus on our collective experience in the IDEO San Francisco office, plans all of the logistics and details for the night and then execute fast and furiously. As with most event production, it’s part creative exercise, part leap of faith. Hosting your own feast of gratitude this year? Go ahead, steal these ideas.

As it happened, our trip coincided with Simca’s annual cocktail party, a magnificent affair. Surrounded by strange people speaking a strange language, I focused on eating. I had my hands and my mouth full, which is why I didn’t notice when an unspeakably tall older woman joined me at the sprawling buffet. Reaching across the table to pluck a wrinkly black olive from a dish, she looked down at me kindly and said, Bon soir. It was Julia Child.

It wasn’t until after college that Julia and Simca came back into my life. My mom gave me their cookbooks as a graduation present. Living on my own for the first time, I was starting to learn how to cook—mostly to impress girls. I would peruse their books for recipe ideas and would make regular calls to my mom to explain the “why” behind a recipe. We’d talk endlessly about converting from fresh to dry herbs, how to beat egg whites into stiff white peaks, and how to make pie dough, especially for apple pie.

Growing up, my mom’s apple pies were identical year to year. They were massive, doubled-crusted affairs stuffed with at least four pounds of Granny Smith apples. And that’s exactly how I made my apple pies, too—at first.

Fast forward a decade. I was living in Bucktown, a neighborhood on Chicago’s Northwest Side, with my now wife and our two young daughters. (The “cooking to impress girls” thing worked.) We were hosting our first Thanksgiving. I had discovered a new way of forming an apple pie by folding over the edges of the pastry to keep the apples in. When I presented it to our guests I said, “Now I can make an apple pie even if I don’t have a pie plate!” After recovering from laughter, they insisted I enter the Bucktown Apple Pie Contest. I thought it was the wine talking. But in 2011, and dozens of family-pleasing pies later, I thought, “Why not?”

The Bucktown Apple Pie Contest is the largest apple pie contest in the country. It’s held at the Holstein Park Field House and features local pastry celebrities like the owners of Hoosier Mama Pie Company and Tipsy Cakes who judge over 150 eager entries.

The two Field House gyms were filled with tables loaded down with pies. In the auditorium, a honky tonk band belted out tunes. I fought my way through the crowd and quickly scanned the list on the door with the semi-finalists. Not me. Oh! But, there's a list of finalists! Also, not me. Merde.

I felt like a loser. (Technically, I was a loser.) "Those were great pies," I thought. "My best possible pies..." Or were they?

When the 2012 contest rolled around, I was determined to make the Best. Goddamn. Pie. Period. It was time to break my recipe down.

I dug deep into my primary sources. Simca was an intuitive cook, confident in her methods. She was always trying new things, whereas Julia was more concerned about perfecting. She tested and re-tested her recipes, trying and tracking different techniques. I needed both Simca’s confidence to change my recipe and Julia’s discipline to learn. And I needed a hotline to my mom who has cooked everything under the sun.

After consulting with my mom, I said, “Screw the vegetarians!” and went back to lard. The crust got richer and flakier. I suspected my mom’s Granny Smith’s, while tried and true, weren’t artisanal enough, so I tried Northern Spy and Cox’s Red Pippin, which has a great name but dissolves in cooking. A pastry-chef friend recommended combining Fuji and Granny Smith apples, a thrill because it combined my favorite eating and cooking apples.

I went “off-recipe” and doubled the sugar in the pastry. Too sweet on its own perhaps, but not when paired with the tart apples and lemon of the pie. The contest demanded a double-crust, but I thought lattice tops were mundane, so my wife researched alternatives, which led to me devising a method of cutting apple-leaf shapes with a mezzaluna and trying three different knives before hitting on the perfect leaf-veining technique. When the dough leaves browned unevenly, a friend suggested glazing them individually before assembling. I taught my daughters how to peel apples in one strip and even experimented with prettier ways to core the apples

My wife described my obsession as the pursuit of the Platonic Ideal of Apple Pie.

I made pies every week for the month before the contest. While I was crazily dissecting the look, taste, and mouth feel of my pies, my family was blissfully happy. After all, every Sunday, they got pie.

The day of the contest came. It was a Sunday in October, threatening rain. I put two pies in a basket and headed to the Holstein Park Fieldhouse. The place was a madhouse. The two gyms were filled with tables loaded down with pies. In the auditorium, a honky tonk band belted out tunes.

After the judging, I fought my way through the crowd and quickly scanned the list on the door with the semi-finalists. My name was nowhere in sight. “Really?!? After all that?!?” I thought. But wait! My pies were on the Finalists’ table, and while there were some delicious looking entries, my breath caught when I noticed more of MY pie had been eaten by the judges than any of the others.

Suddenly, the honky tonk band stopped playing and they began the announcements. My eyes scanned the big board with gloriously gaudy ribbons. The judges started to announce the winners. I stood still, unable to speak or move. They announced third place… Then second place… And then… Time stopped and I heard my name coming over the loud speakers. I stumbled up on stage and a judge pinned a blue ribbon with a little silver pie on it on my shirt.

There was noise and camera flashes and my girls were jumping up and down. There was even a TV crew with giant cameras and flood lights. Still shaking with excitement, I stumbled into the thick crowd. A young woman came up to me and asked: “Butter or lard?!” “Both,” I whispered, and she gasped with delight.

My family and I floated downstairs and across the park to our car giggling and hugging and talking about pie. The first person I called on our way home was my mom. She was so happy and proud. “Which recipe did you use?” she asked.

And I thought back to that warm August night in France, when I first met Simca and Julia, and all the subsequent hours pouring over their recipes. My pursuit of the Platonic Ideal of Apple Pie felt serious, but somehow new, which Simca would approve of. While my relentless testing of techniques was something Julia would have liked.

And then I remembered all the beautiful food my mom made for our family and her patient instructions over the phone as I slowly learned how to cook for myself.

And in that moment I felt like I had arrived. “Which recipe did you use?” my mother asked again.

“My own,” I said, smiling.

Murphy MacDonald’s Award-Winning Rustic Apple Pie Recipe

Crust

1½ c unbleached all-purpose flour
½ c unbleached cake flour
¼ t salt
4T sugar
6 oz butter (lightly salted), chilled, and diced
2 oz lard, chilled
½ c ice water

1. Place dry ingredients and diced butter in a food processor bowl fitted with the steel knife. Pulse 5-6 times to break up the butter.
2. Add the lard, turn on the machine, immediately and steadily pour in the ice water, and turn off the machine. Pulse 2-3 times. The dough should look like small lumps. Do not run the machine so long that the dough masses on the blade.
3. Turn the mostly crumb dough onto a lightly floured surface and press it into a single mass. For the final blending, use the heel of your hand to smear egg-sized clumps of the dough crumbs together. Work through the dough until all crumbs are combined.
4. Divide the dough into two unequal portions, approximately 3:2. Form the dough into discs, wrap in plastic, and refrigerate up to 3 hours or overnight.

Filling

2 lb apples, mix of Fuji and Granny Smith
1T lemon juice
¼ c sugar
2 oz butter
1/8 t cinnamon
pinch nutmeg

1. Peel, core, and slice the apples ~¼”+ thick.
2. Toss apples, lemon, and sugar together.
3. Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat, add the apples, and cook for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. After 5 minutes, add the cinnamon and nutmeg and stir to combine.
4. After 10 minutes, remove from heat and let rest.

Assembly

Glaze made by beating droplets of water into 1 egg white

1. Preheat the oven to 375˚ F.
2. Remove the smaller of the two pastry discs and roll out to 1/8” thickness.
3. Using a mezzaluna or other round-blade knife, cut the dough into 16-24 apple leaves (elongated football shapes) and set them on a wax-paper lined baking sheet.
4. Use the back of a paring knife blade to score veins into the leaves. Refrigerate the leaves while you prepare the glaze and roll out the bottom crust.
5. Roll out the larger of the two pastry discs to 1/8” thickness, about 12” diameter or more. Use a pizza cutter to trim and clean up the edge of the rolled-out pastry. Transfer the round to a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet.
6. Remove the leaves from the fridge and brush them with the egg white glaze.
7. Spoon the apples (and caramel-y sauce) onto the pastry round, heaping them up to leave a 2” border all around the edge of the pastry.
8. Turn up the edge of the pastry all around, lightly pinching folds together to enclose the apples.
9. Beginning in the center, arrange leaves radiating out to cover the top surface of the apples.
10. Sprinkle with cinnamon sugar and bake for 35 minutes.

Serve warm if possible, with vanilla ice cream.

Recipe copyright 2013 Murphy MacDonald.

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I distinctly remember when my obsession with food began. It was August 1984 and I was 14. My family and I were traveling across Europe. In France, we stopped in Provence to visit my mom’s friend, Simone Beck, also known as Simca. Simca had written Mastering the Art of French Cooking with Julia Child.

I took this picture in Lima, Perú. A delivery guy used the cardboard to protect his motorcycle from the rain while picking up orders in the store.

Lima is often gray and cloudy: the locals refer to this weather as “panza de burro" — the "underbelly of the donkey.” However it doesn’t actually rain much. The lack of rain is something of a joke (for example, there’s a theatre play called "Nunca llueve en Lima” — “It never rains in Lima"). So the need to cover your possessions from rain is one that only comes up infrequently.

The owner of this motorcycle was able to improvize, in part because the attitude towards trash is somewhat different. In the West, discarded objects tend to be hidden away and inaccessible. Here, there are more shades of gray: trash is more available and may find more utility before it's discarded for the last time.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions thoughtless acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire the invention of new products, services, and experiences.

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.