For Jane Fulton Suri, chief creative officer of the leading design and innovation firm IDEO, the breakthroughs that help clients improve their products or better serve their customers can come from insightful interpretations of events in our everyday world.

Inspiration can come from curiosity about simple, everyday actions that people do almost without thinking—like leaving a coat hanging on a chair, or unconsciously walking along a painted line on the floor that leads to a building's exit.

Fulton Suri has created a picture book—Thoughtless Acts—that shows such mundane actions with the aim of challenging readers to use their powers of observation, as Fulton Suri herself has done to enrich IDEO's design practice. The book "invites you to notice the subtle and amusing ways that people react to the world around them," ways that "reveal how people behave in a world not always perfectly tailored to their needs and demonstrate the kind of real-world observational approach that can inspire designers and anyone involved in creative endeavors."

Indeed, one profiler wrote that for Fulton Suri "it's as if the world is one big beta test, in which every feature is begging for improvement"—and her observations often lead to breakthroughs in the design of products and environments.

Like the "thoughtless acts" described in her book, Fulton Suri's own career path developed without conscious forethought, bringing her to design by a roundabout path after she had avoided creative fields in a kind of subconscious rebellion against her artist parents.

Instead Fulton Suri's curiosity about people led her to study psychology and she was working in a research institute in her native United Kingdom when a meeting with industrial designer Bill Moggridge nearly 20 years ago changed her life. Moggridge realized that Fulton Suri's empathic understanding of why people act as they do could be useful in his firm, which was adopting a more holistic approach that was quite uncommon in the industry at the time.

Moggridge's company merged with others to form IDEO, and as director of its Human Factors Design and Research operation, Fulton Suri pioneered the company's distinctive approach of integrating human and social science techniques to help corporate giants such as Kodak, Microsoft and Nokia maximize the user experience.

"For me, designing for people is a very broad idea," Fulton Suri explains. For starters, it means "bringing this influence of thinking about people earlier and earlier into the design process. It seems natural to show things to people when you have ideas, but it became really obvious that by going through that cycle, if you asked some questions earlier or looked at behavior earlier, you would see things that would have helped you come up with better ideas in the first place."

Fulton Suri and her 40-person multi-disciplinary team combine an anthropologist's eye for cultural observation with a philosopher's willingness to probe the fundamental motivations of seemingly random actions.

Her use of ethnographic-based techniques involves examining "the fundamental goals in people's daily lives," re-evaluating baseline assumptions that can help clients pinpoint opportunities for design.

Working with Nokia, IDEO didn't just design flashy new phones; it pondered the essence of communication and what modes of communication people utilize every day. A project for Marriott Hotels involved rethinking basic notions of space, hospitality, and the guest experience.

To help Bank of America better serve its customers, IDEO gave people cameras and had them take pictures of things that reminded them of money—"just to get some insight into how money and the idea of money crops up in people's lives," Fulton Suri says. "What does this activity mean and where might we go to learn what it means in people's lives?"

The detailed observation that Fulton Suri's team does—sometimes shadowing subjects throughout the course of a day—uses science-based techniques of empirical research "but also calls on that other side, the ability to empathize and intuit from that," she explains. "If we don't recognize and honor that ability, we're not really going anywhere in terms of innovation."

"You can't just rely on objectivity and data to take you to innovative places," she says. "We talk about innovation as a noun but in fact it's a human activity, it's about doing, it's a verb. It's about people interacting and making decisions and using their creativity. The whole activity is a human one. I haven't explored the bounds of it yet, but I'm coming at it from that direction."