Bringing contractors into the fold at an IDEO food event In April, I wrote a piece called “Designing a Freelance Life.” The post received nearly 200 comments. Reading over them, it’s clear that freelancing is a mixed bag. Even the language we use to describe those who work on a temporary basis—“te...

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 ...

Now that government data is becoming more readily available, there are lots of interesting uses. Here’s one that we worked on with the Sunlight Foundation. Sitegeist is a mobile app that helps you access US Census data and other public details about a neighborhood. This means you can check on everyt...

Last month I had the good fortune to join Yves Behar, founder of fuseproject, in conversation at the Commonwealth Club for a wide-ranging discussion about how design thinking can help leaders collaborate and tackle the world’s smallest and greatest problems. To listen to audio of the event, tune in ...