There was a time when efficiency was enough. When the role of the CEO was to optimize business as if it were a machine—making sure the supply chains and manufacturing systems and marketing channels were produced maximal output at minimal cost. Those days are over. And though I don’t suffer any roman...

This week, school principals across the globe are lacing up their sneakers and toting their brown bags to school as part of Shadow a Student Challenge, a program to help school principals better understand their students’ experiences. As of Monday, more than 1,200 school leaders have taken the chal...

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...

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...

Project teams and small groups need to easily congregate—and then just as easily wander into private spaces for design iterations, coding sessions, etc. The mix of project rooms, smaller conversational nooks, and individual phone booths makes this possible. Our studio also allows for the high percen...

Great designers don’t just do design, they live design. Like them, we can learn how to practice design thinking principles both at work and at home. As you start designing your life in 2013, here are five ways to begin: 1. Be optimistic, collaborative, and generative. There’s something wonderfully...

One way to get back to basics in 2013 is to focus on behavior change that positively impacts health. The World Health Organization estimates that in excess of 346 million people worldwide are diabetic and without intervention this number is likely to more than double. This week, IDEO alums Adrian J...

Most prognostications about the future of work have explored how technology is disrupting work patterns or enabling new forms of work. Mostly they do not question the core motivations for why we work, or the value we should expect to unlock. Will Work For is a design provocation and conversation st...

If you talk to people at the Santa Fe Institute, or read any of their books, you'll learn that a key characteristic of a complex system is that the more complex a system is, the more information flows through it. If this is true, then we ought to be thinking more about these information flows when w...