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The more ideas you come up with, the better chance you have to reach a truly brilliant solution. For many, brainstorming is the bread and butter of ideation. It’s a great tool to help teams push past obvious solutions to get to breakthrough ideas. Across the thousands of brainstorms IDEO has run—both with internal teams and with clients—we follow seven important rules.

In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, IDEO’s Brendan Boyle shares how to bring more playfulness into your work. This is the second in a series of articles about our conversation with Brendan.

Brendan Boyle, IDEO partner and founder of the IDEO Play Lab, joined us on the Creative Confidence Podcast to share how to bring more playfulness into your work. Get into a creative mindset and generate an abundance of new ideas with his favorite creative warm ups and group activities. This is the first in a series of articles about our conversation with Brendan.

Michael Hendrix is an IDEO partner and global director of design, as well as a lifelong musician and associate professor at the Berklee College of Music. Over his 25-year career he’s co-founded an art school for high schoolers, a professional design curriculum for undergrads, two professional design clubs, and three small businesses, as well as helping clients across all kinds of industries find innovative solutions to tough design challenges. In this conversation, he talks about the topic of his upcoming book—what we can learn from the shared mindsets of musicians and designers.

Looking for prototyping inspiration? Expand your definition of what a prototype is with these very different examples made by designers at IDEO.

Building early concepts of your ideas can help you avoid costly mistakes, and build something that your users will truly love. Brendan Boyle, partner at world-renowned design firm IDEO, explains the art of prototyping in more detail, and why it’s not just an activity for designers.

In this episode of our Creative Confidence Series, IDEO Executive Design Director Chris Nyffeler chats with IDEO U Managing Director Coe Leta Stafford about the value of prototyping, how to create low-fidelity prototypes for digital products and services, and the role of technology in design. 

Chris Nyffeler is an Executive Design Director at IDEO, leading IDEO's community of interaction, visual, and user experience designers. He is also the instructor of our new class, Prototyping for Digital Experiences. As a design practitioner himself, Chris has led and worked alongside Fortune 100 executives, entrepreneurs, and IDEO teams. He's led programs to design experiences for everything from ATMs to smartphones to connected home devices. We caught up with Chris leading up to the launch of Prototyping for Digital Experiences to chat about his experience at IDEO, his journey to interaction design, and advice for others in the field.

In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, IDEO managing director and Human-Centered Service Design instructor Melanie Bell-Mayeda and IDEO U’s Coe Leta Stafford shared stories and tips about how to use service design to bring more meaningful experiences to customers and organizations.

Teachers are the innovators education has been waiting for, and design thinking can help them activate their own creativity and solve the biggest challenges in education today. In our most recent Creative Confidence Series chat, Coe sat down with with Sandy Speicher, Managing Director of IDEO’s education practice and a strategic adviser to the K-12 Lab Network at the Stanford d.school, to discuss design thinking in education and how teachers can be powerful change agents for schools and education as a whole.

When teams explore and iterate with five or more different ideas rather than selecting one or two ideas and moving them forward, they are 50% more likely to successfully launch.

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).