Few people have helped as many people find the right job as Dick Bolles. The best-selling author of What Color is Your Parachute? and co-founder of eParachute.com has been advising job seekers for over 40 years. I had a chance to speak with Bolles recently as part of the OpenIDEO Youth Employment Ch...

Fancy a career in design? When I made that choice 30 years ago, the options were limited. You either got an engineering degree and then went to design school, or you went to art school and studied graphic design, architecture, or industrial design, like I did. Today, things are very different. Than...

Typically, the soundtrack of Fourth of July is the deafening boom of fireworks. You can barely hear yourself think, let alone have meaningful conversations with family and friends. This year, why not try something different and hone your creative listening skills in the time it takes to fire up a gr...

Are you “vacation deprived”? According to a 2013 study by Expedia.com, Americans only used 10 of their 14 annual vacation days. That’s twice as many unused days off as in 2012. While the restorative powers of a good, long vacation shouldn’t be ignored, there’s also something to be said about creatin...

Design thinking doesn’t just apply to creating memorable products, services, or experiences; it can also help you land a job you love. Just ask my colleagues Duane Bray and Lauren Wallins who, along with a global HR team, help recruit, support, and grow IDEO’s incredible talent pool. I spoke with t...

Does changing how you make things change the way you live? The answer is “yes,” according to Made in the Future, an experimental project I collaborated on with some colleagues at IDEO Boston. The Made in the Future website recently launched and it explores how today’s innovations in maker technolog...

For three decades, three big red letters have signified an annual forum for the creative and forward thinking to share groundbreaking ideas. From revealing the first Apple Mac in 1984 to Jamie Oliver’s heartfelt plea for a Food Revolution in 2010, TED has been one of the best platforms in the world ...

Blocks. Legos. Forts. Kids are natural builders. But most schools don't offer such hands-on learning. They offer sitting at a desk and listening quietly. That's a shame, because there's no better way to learn than by doing. Designer-activist Emily Pilloton gets this idea in a big way. The founder o...

Daydreaming has a bad reputation. Just think of any classroom scene on TV where a teacher is chiding a child for staring out the window during class. Traditionally, those kids have been thought of as slackers, but, according to a recent report on education and entrepreneurship for the UK parliament ...

A drawing is worth a thousand words. That's my version of the age-old adage. When it comes to expressing the functional and emotional merits of a new idea, I firmly believe you have to make it visual. All children draw. Then, somewhere in the course of becoming logical adults, we unlearn this eleme...