IDEO

Living Climate Change: Design Thinking to Solve the World's Biggest Problem

What will life be like 20 or 30 years from now? That used to be a question for futurists, now global climate change makes it something we all think about. The trouble is that the way we think and talk about our impact on the environment is measured in statistics and abstracts. But there is a more tangible way to imagine what that future will look like...READ»

Want to Improve Democracy? Try Design Thinking

Better ballot design could have changed the results of the 2000 election. A better design for information sharing might have prevented 9/11. Now, could design thinking help fix something fundamentally broken in American democracy: how we engage in national debate?READ»

Big Awards for the Year's Best Industrial Design

The International Design Excellence Awards were announced yesterday, and represent the 150 best designs among over 1600 entries.READ»

Open-Source Innovation: IDEO's Human-Centered Design Toolkit

A free guide to user-focused design can be applied anywhere from a for-profit design firm to an NGO working in a developing nation.READ»

• Designers Accord Case Studies

Social Design Gets Its Own Curator

With the Cooper-Hewitt appointment, a design movement claims a more prominent place on the agenda.READ»

IDEO Method Cards Turn, Um, 7!

Ideo Method Cards are a great set of tools for unleashing creativity and problem-solving potential. READ»

News Flash From the Future: What Will Journalism Look Like?

With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here's their answer.READ»

Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: How to Design a Participatory System

Those who have stuck with me all week, know that I believe that participation is key to the next big wave of innovation in business and society. Whether it is in the fundamentals of how we think about wealth or the economy, how we ...READ»

• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Participation and Health Care
• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Why We Need Economic Dashboards
• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Learning to Measure Participation

Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Control Your Own Health Care

In the U.K. in the 1940s, Sir William Beveridge designed what became known as the welfare state. In an ambitious program, the post-war Labor government attempted to put in place a series of services designed to ensure that the ...READ»

• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Why We Need Economic Dashboards
• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Learning to Measure Participation
• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Moving Beyond Consumption

Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Why We Need Economic Dashboards

A significant difference between those of us fortunate to be living above the poverty line and those unfortunate enough to be at the "bottom of the pyramid" is that the 'wealthy' can afford to consume. Being a ...READ»

• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Learning to Measure Participation
• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Moving Beyond Consumption

Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Learning to Measure Participation

When I consider bidding for something on e-Bay, the first thing I do is check the reliability rating of the seller. When I want to meet a hard-to-reach executive, I try to establish a link through my network. When I consider which ...READ»

• Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Moving Beyond Consumption
• Welcoming Guest Blogger Tim Brown: Can We Design a Post-Crisis Economy?

Creating a Post-Crisis Economy: Moving Beyond Consumption

For the next few days I plan to explore what I am calling the Age of Involvement: the role of participation in an information society and how it leads to an expanded view of our economy. I am not an economist and have never studied ...READ»

Welcoming Guest Blogger Tim Brown: Can We Design a Post-Crisis Economy?

About a year ago, I happened to be at breakfast panel at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, where Tim Brown, CEO of Ideo, was speaking. At the time, the topic, "What is Wrong with American Design?" was much in the ...READ»

IDEO Takes a Spin Inside a Real-life Holodeck

The hunt is on, to create a real-life Holodeck, and IDEO's designers just got a spin inside one of the leading offerings: The iCube, created by EON Reality. It is a room, measuring 10 feet by 10 feet by 10 feet, that has ...READ»

Objectified: The New Design Film That Sickens, Inspires

"Your movie made me physically sick," one audience member told Gary Hustwit (left), the director of Objectified, the eagerly anticipated film about industrial design, last night at a screening in New York. Far from ...READ»

Ideo's Roshi Givechi Offers Six Ways to Make Energy Conservation Electrifiying

When Roshi Givechi first came to Ideo from Microsoft she thought she had made a mistake. The famously human-centered firm wasn't giving her many opportunities to design for real people. "I thought, is this for me?" she ...READ»

• Ideo's David Kelley on "Design Thinking"

Ideo Redesigns the Icebreaker

One of my least favorite activities of all time is the icebreaker. You know how it goes: Throw together a bunch of people--six, eight, more than two is too many--and force them to tell each other something silly, secret, anything that ...READ»

Ford's SmartGauge Improves Fuel Efficiency Through Better Instrument Design

In December, Ford announced its new Fusion hybrid, which was rated an impressive 41 mpg city and 36 mpg highway. But then something interesting happened. In one of the earliest reviews, Pulitzer Prize-winning auto ...READ»

'Objectified' Review: A Hurricane of Consumer Values

    There's a moment, at the beginning of the documentary Objectified, where Jonathan Ive, Apple's head of design, takes his iPhone out of his pocket and wipes it along the hem of his shirt to remove the ...READ»

• Gary Hustwit's "Objectified" [video]

The Most Innovative Companies in Design

You have seen our Fast Company 50. But what are the companies within specific categories doing creative and ground-breaking work? Who is leading an industry into the future? Here we present the top ten firms in Design.READ»

Ideo's David Kelley wins Edison Award for Innovation

On April 1, Ideo founder David Kelley will be awarded the Edison Achievement Award by the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University for his “pioneering contributions to the design of breakthrough products, services, and ...READ»

Why a Bowling Shirt Made Me Love David Kelley

It was a Power Point slide of Ettore Sottsass in a bowling shirt that first made Jim Hackett, CEO of Steelcase, want to get to know David Kelley. Fifteen years ago, Hackett remembers, the Ideo founder had been summoned to ...READ»

17 Career Lessons from Ideo's David Kelley

David Kelley is well-known for his astute application of design thinking to many of life's intractable problems. Less known is that he's also a veritable Dr. Phil of good advice about life, careers, and the importance of not being a ...READ»

Ideo's Newest Design Projects

Under founder David Kelley, Ideo has received more than 1,000 patents since 1978 and 346 design awards since 1991. Here are a few of the firm's many projects.READ»

Ideo's David Kelley on "Design Thinking"

David Kelley, founder of the design firm Ideo and the Stanford d.school, was leading a charmed existence. Then he felt a lump.READ»

• Infographic: The K-12 Educational Experience
• Ideo's Newest Design Projects
• 17 Career Lessons from IDEO's David Kelley
• Why a Bowling Shirt Made Me Love David Kelley
• IDEO's David Kelley wins Edison Award for Innovation