Few people have helped as many people find the right job as Dick Bolles. The best-selling author of What Color is Your Parachute? and co-founder of eParachute.com has been advising job seekers for over 40 years. I had a chance to speak with Bolles recently as part of the OpenIDEO Youth Employment Ch...

A few months ago, I wrote a post about five technologies in need of design makeovers in 2014. I’m happy to report my colleagues at IDEO.org, working with a group of NGOs and health and tech industry collaborators, have taken a shot at redesigning the most newsworthy item on that list, and the one wi...

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...

At IDEO, we often start brainstorms with the phrase, "How Might We" (HMW, for short). We use these three words because they help frame a problem in an open-ended, optimistic, and collaborative way. “How” assumes there are solutions out there. “Might” says some of the ideas may work, others won’t—eit...

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...

Design is at its most powerful when it helps us take a complex, hard to imagine problem, and makes it simple. Water access in Africa is really complex, but the image of 'filling Africa up' with irrigation is very simple. KickStart is doing important work in bringing irrigation pumps to Africa but th...

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 ...

Humanity spends billions every year designing, developing, and marketing new things. The question I have is, are we directing those efforts appropriately? Research suggests that beyond a certain point consumption does not increase happiness. So why are we spending so much time creating new things f...

Recently I spent an evening at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design attending the awards ceremony for the Curry Stone Design Prize. Founded in 2008 by Clifford Curry and Delight Stone and curated by Chee Pearlman with Emiliano Gandolfi, the  prize is awarded to designers who are developing and implem...

A show curated by John Cary of Public Interest Design has just opened in San Francisco at the Autodesk Gallery. It is a must if you are interested in design and the social sector. The exhibit features many of the organizations that contributed to the design labs at this year's Clinton Global Initiat...