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...

Clients often ask me how we built IDEO's creative culture. For 20 years, I did a lot of hand-waving and gave vague answers. Then, about a year ago, we decided we really should put our values in writing. The result was a slim hardcover called The Little Book of IDEO. In it, we distilled what makes o...

Making drones less dreadful is #1 on my redesigns of 2014 list This time of year, everyone seems to be making a list. Lists of resolutions. Lists predicting what’s to come. I’ve decided to focus on innovations that could benefit from a human-centered redesign. A few of these inventions are already ...

An IDEO researcher practicing "creative listening." What would an Argentinian car mechanic know about childbirth? If you’re Jorge Odon, father of five, quite a bit. Or at least enough to design a low-cost, low-tech instrument that could revolutionize how doctors assist mothers during difficult birt...

By Tim Brown and Jane Fulton Suri There’s an entire industry built around how to be a better leader and build strong, dynamic teams. But for the last few years, my colleague and dear friend Jane Fulton Suri and I have been looking to the earth and seas and sky for inspiration. A Partner, Chief Cre...

“I’m not a creative person.” I hear that all the time from clients when they first start working with IDEO. It’s an offhand comment, meant as an excuse for not being able to come up with innovative ideas on their own, but behind it lies a fear of failure—of being judged by others. While it’s temptin...

One of my first jobs was redesigning industrial woodworking machines. Beyond the odd paper round, I landed my first paying job in high school as a store clerk for the local Waitrose. It was at this venerable UK supermarket chain that I learned to show up on a regular basis and received my first les...

Although memories of my early formal education have started to fade, I vividly recall two distinct types of learning experiences: brainwork and handwork. The vast majority of my time in school was spent listening to lectures, taking exams, writing essays, and so on. On rare occasions, we’d roll up o...