At IDEO, we keep hearing from native spanish speakers who are curious about design thinking and creativity and hungry to learn more. And in our own work in Latin America, we’ve found fantastic people who are setting up innovation labs, building creativity in their teams, and working across companies. As we look to spread design thinking methods and mindsets throughout the globe, we’ve been chatting with IDEO U alums and others who have insight into making design thinking a part of innovation in Latin America.
When Jenn Maer first arrived at IDEO from the advertising world a decade or so ago, not many people were calling themselves storytellers. Now, as she says, “storytelling is having a moment.” Companies are incorporating it into so much of what they do, from pitching to branding, and explaining their values. But just as home cooks have a lot to learn before they can become trained chefs, there’s a lot to learn before you can master storytelling.
The average person works 1,842 hours a year. That adds up to 92,100 hours over a 50-year career. And during those hours, sometimes it’s easy to forget why we do what we do. But the research is clear, individuals are more fulfilled and organizations perform better when they’re rooted in an authentic purpose. Here are five studies that show why purpose matters.
Facing change isn’t always easy—especially when it’s a competitor taking market share, a start-up suddenly disrupting the space, or a product becoming obsolete. IDEO partners with clients spanning a wide range of industries to develop the organizational structures, culture, and behaviors that drive their success, and ultimately to build creative capabilities within these companies so they can continue to innovate and adapt.
Your Superpower is your contribution, the role that you’re put on this Earth to fill. It’s what you do better than anyone else. Tapping into it will not only help your team, but you’ll find your work more satisfying, too.
Lynda Deakin, Managing Director of IDEO’s Design for Food studio, joined Suz to chat about ways design can enable system-wide change in the food industry.
When it comes to emerging technology, it’s often anyone’s guess what the future will hold. At IDEO U we are far from having a crystal ball and that’s why we advocate for “building to think” or, rather, making prototypes to learn how people react. To help get our heads around emerging tech, we invited our IDEO friends, IDEO CoLab, in for a Creative Confidence Series session about emerging tech (and why you should care).
Service design includes all the intangible aspects of how an organization seeks to build a relationship over time with its customers. And one goal of prototyping these service design experiences is to bring tangibility to these intangible experiences. Ready to make your own service prototypes? Here are Suz and Ilya’s tips and tricks.
We spoke with Paul about what he sees as cornerstones of creative leadership, how to use storytelling to catalyze people toward action, and his no fear attitude toward delving into the void—darker more challenging topics like death and aging.
How do you build the capacity for continuous innovation within a company? Bryan Walker developed a curiosity for this challenge, designing for change, as he was trying to figure out how to help organizations get new ideas out in the world. As a partner at IDEO, he leads the IDEO Design for Change studio and is an instructor in the upcoming IDEO U course, Designing for Change.
You may know Debbie Millman from her podcast Design Matters—the world’s longest running podcast on design—or from her six books, two of which are collections of illustrated essays and poems. Named “one of the most creative people in business” by Fast Company, Debbie is a fierce figure in the world of design. She gravitated to a career in design because she realized that greatness could be achieved through design and ultimately, that’s what grounds her work. We caught up with Debbie in preparation for Dribble’s Hang Time Boston event this month.