No longer the province of the lone practitioner, design has become a broad, collaborative process. Photo courtesy of IDEO Boston. Just 10 years ago, design was considered to be a professional priesthood. The Designer (capital “D”) would be given an assignment—create a more attractive widget, say—th...

LAND HO!: A still from "Embrace Ambiguity," a video by the old salts of IDEO's New York office. The team wrote the script, hand-built the sets, then filmed and edited the clip themselves. Fog is always present at IDEO, and not just at our San Francisco office. It's a metaphor we use for those iffy ...

I’m the CEO of a global company, but I don’t have an MBA. Much of what I know about business I learned from Peter Drucker. I first discovered the Austrian business theorist’s writings on innovation, entrepreneurship, and management in the late 1990s, when I was heading up IDEO’s London studio, and t...

Photo by Ali Guichard / IDEO Many people think of business travel as a chore. I see it as an opportunity. Not to generate new work, necessarily (though that’s nice, too), but to exercise my curiosity, think about problems in new ways, and get inspired. Sometimes that inspiration hits as soon as I ...

Illustration by Beau Bergeron / IDEO We don’t have many rules at IDEO, but we do have some cultural values that we take seriously because we feel they make our teams more effective. We prototyped these values for a couple decades before we set them in print. One of them is to Make Others Successful...

IDEO Chicago's roof garden, and some of its bounty I love to cook almost as much as I love to eat. When making a meal, the spontaneity of grabbing fresh herbs and other homegrown ingredients from the garden is an essential part of the whole process. Over the years, I’ve given a lot of thought to wha...

Roshi Givechi is a calm, cool, design director and associate partner at IDEO. About a year ago, she uprooted herself from the San Francisco Bay Area and embarked on a nomadic year in Asia to support our growing locations in Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Mumbai. When she proposed the idea of a one-...

According to a UN report on aging, the world’s population is aging at an unprecedented rate. By 2050, the number of people 60 years or older will exceed the number of young people under age 15 for the first time in history. The effects of population aging are profound and impact everything from econ...

Part of maintaining a thriving creative culture is giving people time and permission to play. One of the ways we encourage creative play at IDEO is through Designs On—, a semi-annual internal design challenge started five years ago by my colleague Blaise Bertrand. Each edition of Designs On— centers...

Here’s the commencement speech I gave at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Information in 2010. It’s been adapted a bit for length, but my advice to you is the same: start designing your life. I am a designer and I was trained at an educational institution very different from this. I was trained to ...