Elmo Calling Apps and IDEO

Elmo Calls from IDEO on Vimeo.

Prototyping for Elmo's Monster Maker iPhone App. from IDEO on Vimeo.

IDEO is a global design consultancy that helps organizations to grow, innovate and develop through a human centered, design-based approach.  They believe that organizations can find new ways doing things by uncovering the latent needs, behaviors and desires within organizations.  They believe in helping organizations creative culture to sustain innovation.   

On the IDEO website they write,  

Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows people who aren’t trained as designers to use creative tools to address a vast range of challenges.  Design thinking is a deeply human process that taps into abilities we all have but get overlooked by more conventional problem-solving practices. It relies on our ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, to construct ideas that are emotionally meaningful as well as functional, and to express ourselves through means beyond words or symbols. Nobody wants to run an organization on feeling, intuition, and inspiration, but an over-reliance on the rational and the analytical can be just as risky. Design thinking provides an integrated third way.

IDEO thinks that people should keep three things in mind:  inspiration, ideation and implementation.  Inspiration is problem or opportunity that motivates the search for the solution.  Ideation is the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas. Implementation is the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.

Sesame Workshop partnered with IDEO to design a line of Sesame Street-themed apps for Apple’s iPhone. The Elmo Calls app, which functions as a utility app for parents and as an entertaining behavioral-development app for kids, is now one of the Top 100 paid iPhone apps in the iTunes store.  The collaboration began with a mutual desire to bring the show’s beloved characters to the iPhone platform – and to do so using a human-centered design approach. Child-development experts, educators, toy and interaction designers, and even the Sesame Street puppeteers weighed in on the design decisions. The team also worked closely with families throughout the project — from initial concepts to early prototyping to the final development — in order to stay focused on how children actually use the iPhone for play. The games were designed accordingly. For example, the team omitted menus from the Sesame Street apps to keep the experiences simple, playful, and fun for a young child. And each game features exclusive newSesame Street videos, allowing players to enjoy “lean back” moments along with interactive ones.  The resulting iPhone applications let children engage with the favorite Sesame Street characters in a whole new way. Kids touch, shake, swipe, and tilt their way through original games featuring Elmo, Grover, Bert, Rosita, and The Count.

IDEO has established a Design Thinking for Educators.  The toolkit which can be downloaded from the website contains the methods and process that IDEO adapted specifically for K-12 schools including examples for schools.  Tim Brown, CEO and President, has written an excellent book Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Thinking.