Working at IDEO

Sounds like you're still young and only just starting college. Which is awesome! You have so many exciting opportunities to learn and grow on your horizon. Product development at IDEO requires so many different people and skillsets: design researchers to understand the users, industrial designers to design the physical product, interaction designers to design the way people engage with the product, engineers to make it work and able to be manufactured, branding people to create a brand strategy... and so on. We hire people from every discipline you can imagine. So my advice to you is to go what you love. You'll learn an immense amount in your major, but more than the content, it's important to learn the processhow to think and build and create, regardless of the field. If you have a passion for creativity, then nurture that skill. I realize that doesn't totally answer your question, but I feel better answering it like that than telling you what to major in. :)

Sorry for the delay in responding! There's not really a single answer to that question. The best answer I can give is to go out into the world and work on some incredibly cool stuff that you get excited about (and it's cool if you get excited about it, even if it's not "cool" in the absolute sense). IDEO loves outside experience and passion. Internships are a great foot in the door to a full-time position (that's how I got hired). Also, if you know someone who works there, that's also a good way to get to know people and get yourself known.

Unfortunately the majority of what I've worked on is still confidential, so I can't show you my portfolio (sorry!). We have lots of examples of our work on our website and I'm happy to answer broad questions about my work. As for CAD software, we primarily use SolidWorks in the office. A lot of the industrial designers also use Rhino to create visual mockups where parametric models aren't needed.

We do! We have an entire group of incredibly-talented interaction designers who specialize in UI/UX. Here's a sample of some stuff we've done: http://www.ideo.com/expertise/digital-experiences/ Increasingly, clients are asking us to create digital solutions as part of the deliverables, meaning, for instance, a client will want us to design a service or experience and have an app that acts as the user's primary touchpoint with the service. Banking is a great example: a client might ask us to design a new type of savings account and might also ask us to design the app that allows the user to engage with the service.

We compete primarily with other design consultancies (e.g. Frog) and other business consultancies (e.g. McKinsey). There are other firms that do very specialized work (like interface design, or design engineering). What we offer is much more holistic and often more strategic. We charge completely on a case-by-case basis. Every project, for better or for worse, is bespoke for the client. It means we do great work that's really tailored to the client and the user, but it also often means we reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.