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...

I was chatting with my colleague Suzanne recently and she told me about a friend of hers. Adam is a creative soul. He’s well-read, plays music, cooks elaborate meals, and is highly engaged in arts and culture. He’s an engineer by training, and has worked in senior roles in multiple companies, but h...

Looking back on your college years, what would you change about your experience? Would you head to college straight out of high school? Choose a sensible major? Power through and get your degree in four years? Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of the Stanford Design School, offers a provocat...

We say we practice human-centered design at IDEO, but what does that really mean? Our friends at +Acumen and IDEO.org have designed a free online course to answer that question. Open to anyone anywhere in the world—no prior design experience needed— the class is called “Human-Centered Design for Soc...

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...

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-...

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 ...

Education has been a growing theme at TED. It's one that seems to strongly resonate across the community, from techies to creatives to entrepreneurs to big business C.E.O.'s. One idea that is gaining popularity is around the notion that education has to encourage and reinforce kids' natural curiosit...

It was good to see a strong focus on education at Davos this year. One session at the Annual Meeting that I particularly enjoyed discussed the addition of creative and artistic education to the traditional STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) agenda. John Maeda, Carol Becker, Justine Cas...

I recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The overall sentiment there was one of cautious optimism. While there is a long list of major problems to be tackled, the immediate prospects for the global economy seem reasonably good and there is a sense that most economies ...