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.

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.

Here’s how we went from a hacked-together prototype to a popular game.

Idea Seed

Our initial inspiration for the game came from “The Matrix.” There’s a scene in the beginning of the movie where the hero, Neo, gets a call from a mysterious stranger. “They're coming for you, Neo, and I don't know what they're going to do.” It’s Morpheus, who warns Neo that there are dangerous agents who are hunting him down. He then gives Neo directions to help him escape.

Our game works the same way. Player one runs around in a 3D VR maze, and player two sees a map and types out instructions for player one to follow. By making the communication of asymmetric experiences our key game mechanic, people can enjoy the experience together. This is important because VR is an immersive medium, but it can be socially isolating.

Refining the Game

Since each of the players sees a different screen (one in 3D and one in 2D), we tried my best to play to the strengths of each medium. VR is great at immersive and suspenseful experiences, so the VR player is the player of action, sneaking around to get treasure and running like hell to escape from enemy agents. A screen is great at showing flat data, and the player who sees it has access to a keyboard. So the hacker player sees a very detailed map and types to control everything.

Cooperation is critical to this game. We designed it be impossible to win by yourself—unless you cheat by looking at both screens. The VR player determines where the game goes, but there are agents around the corner that only the hacker can see, as well as hidden trap doors and lasers. On the screen below, the VR player is blocked by a door. But there’s a password that they can give the hacker player to unlock it.

There’s also a mechanic for the VR player to scan enemies and gather “bits,” the diamond-looking things, which are used to purchase bonus abilities like freezing or blinding enemies. This spices things up, so they have more agency in the game.

Design Tools

Part of designing something well is also designing how you work. With a team of four, we didn’t have the time to carefully craft every aspect of the game. So Mark, the developer, and I made a modular level building kit in Unity that allows people to build a level in just a few minutes. Everyone on the team could pitch in to create VR content. We’re in the process of preparing these tools for Steam Workshop, a website that allows developers to release game creation tools to the greater gaming community.

Our art pipeline got pretty crazy. I made the 2D assets in Illustrator so that I could avoid fussing with the resolution. For 3D assets, I made pixel sketches in Photoshop, turned them into 3D voxel art using Qubicle, played with the textures in Maya, and transferred models to Unity using Picavoxel. Finally, I set up prefabs in Unity so that I could easily swap the art in and out. The process allowed me to quickly pump out consistent and professional art, and instantly test it out in VR—a huge help for a solo artist.

Key Tips for Would-Be VR Designers
This process wasn’t always easy. Here are some important things to keep in mind as you work on your own games.

1. VR is not 2D. Or even 3D. I’ve done a ton of 2D and 3D design before, but VR is nothing like it. I had to develop entirely new design processes, and it was critical to test the game over and over again inside VR to get things just right.
2. Details matter, even for a baseline experience. If 2D UI just a little bit off, it looks funny. Misplace VR UI and people throw up. Getting everything right—from careful sizing of the environment to UI placement to 3D audio cues—is critical.
3. Offer alternative control schemes. This was a tough lesson. When we initially launched, we had a firestorm of complaints because we only had the default control scheme. We had to scramble to create a snap turn comfort mode and a teleportation mode.
4. Test in VR. Some of our biggest missteps happened because we had ideas that we didn’t test quickly enough.I foolishly made the controls more complicated than they needed to be. Since players have VR headsets covering their eyes, we had to constantly remind them about controller locations because they couldn’t see them.
5. Allow the audience to engage. VR can become an amazing social experience when you let your players share the game.

Launching the Game
We’re pretty thrilled with we managed to put together. Here’s a quick video to show what it feels like in action.

In June, we finally launched the game on the Oculus Store and Steam. Over the past 5 months, we’ve sold more than 2300 units. We’re the fourth highest ranked game on the Oculus store. Give it a try—I’d love to hear what you think.

Try it on Steam / Try it on Oculus

Around the time Oculus Rift completed its Kickstarter, I brought my virtual reality headset to a weekend hackathon called the Global Game Jam. Over 48 hours, my team and I built a game prototype where one player navigates his way through a maze, while a second player types instructions to him. The prototype was pretty simple—thrown together in 48 hours, after all—but people had a blast playing it. So a few friends and I decided to build it into something bigger. Over the past three years, we’ve worked nights and weekends to create Black Hat Cooperative, a multiplayer stealth game. We just launched this June on Oculus and Steam, and today our game is one of the highest rated experiences on the Oculus Store.

Then, about a year ago, I heard of Wim Hof. Hof holds world records for running barefoot marathons above the Arctic circle, for swimming under solid ice, and for climbing Mt Kilimanjaro in shorts. My small question became an obsession.

At IDEO, we look to extreme users to inspire the things we design, and Wim Hof seemed like the ultimate extreme user. I joined one of his workshops in the Pyrenees, Spain, and met folks from all over the world, who had come to find answers for their mental health, physical health, or athletic performance.

Hof is the cold fairy. He gives you permission to go into the cold, to enjoy it, to seek it. Cold has been his teacher, and breath-work his toolkit. He is happy to share his methods, and create the conditions for others to push their boundaries. Under his guidance, I took a 10 minute ice bath and did not shiver, during or after. I saw many new friends make breakthroughs that week. The cold was teaching us that we were in control and the decider of our own experiences: we could overcome pure pain.

Stanford Neuroscience Professor Andrew Huberman was invited by Hof to join our workshop, and we spoke about how to apply his Method, and about bringing Hof to California.

I began teaching my distillation of the Wim Hof Method to fellow IDEOers in Palo Alto, and to my surprise, over a third of our studio expressed interest in a mini-course. We got ready. We talked about how we stay warm—from shivering, to insulation, to mitochondrial chemical energy. We breathed, and observed the adrenaline-high cortisol-low effects of deep breath cycles with retentions.

Then Wim Hof and Prof. Huberman joined us in person for an afternoon of ice baths and to present their talk, “The Mind Made Visible”. This led to a great discussion on the inner workings of the Hof Method, and about the science behind his approach. Scientists are intrigued by this case of the “extreme user” who can teach his methods to other people and show results immediately—in contrast with a pranayama guru who requires 20 years of study. A groundbreaking study has shown that participants trained in the Method can control their autonomic nervous systems and suppress immune response to an endotoxin injection (the introduction of bacteria, which can trigger many adverse physiological reactions in humans).

The Method involves several minutes of deep inhalation-driven breathing, followed by holding the breath on a full exhalation for as long as is comfortable. Beginners can hold their breath for a remarkable 1- 2 minutes. After extended practice people can reach 4+ minutes. During this process, the blood pH becomes alkaline and prevents you from passing out, while also serving to restore balance in the endocrine and immune systems. At around the 90 second mark, an adrenaline release is triggered. Unlike when adrenaline is pumped out if your life is in peril, low cortisol levels ensure that you remain calm, focused, and able to direct the superhuman power boost.

The cold and breath work go hand-in-hand—the breathing fortifies you for the cold, and the release of cold-shock proteins from sustained ice-water immersion amplifies the effects of the breathing. The practice, Hof says, resets insomnia/jet lag, reduces chronic pain, heads off depression, improves memory, and increases longevity. (Note: the breathing Method should be performed in advance of, not during, cold water immersion).

For me, the Method has been most helpful while mountaineering. By controlling my body's reactions to cold and over-indexing on oxygen, I stay comfortable in extreme conditions and acclimatize more effectively. After meeting Hof, I'm no longer asking, why are we afraid of the cold? But instead, how might we harness the cold to unlock our own potential?

In the New Hampshire winter of 2005, I gave up use of all jackets, sweaters, and warm layers for the season. Crossing between high school campus buildings in a t-shirt during snow and freezing rain, I received appalled looks from my peers and teachers, but felt invigorated and unconstrained. I began asking, why are we afraid of the cold? I later reverted to social norms, and by college, I was a lover of warmth. But the question stayed with me.

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.