For good reasons we’re in love with beginnings. What’s more exciting than the first few weeks of a love affair? Or the first few nights in a new home? The experiences that go hand in hand with beginnings—buying school supplies, opening night performances, or even sunrises—fill us with hope, excitement and inspiration. A great beginning can set the tone for your whole day, your relationship, your life path. Conversely, a bad beginning doesn’t usually bode well and can set a tone all its own. In life, when things go awry, we start over. Stores and restaurants that get off to a rocky start often “re-open" to get back on track. Thriving (and not so thriving) businesses have taken wing on the idea of starting out on the right path: Starbucks used beginnings to revolutionize the coffee industry, while Cereality tried packaging cereal-to-go for time-crunched tweens and suits on the run.

With ‘beginnings’ as a springboard, we asked the IDEO community to share experiences that embodied everything from what jumpstarts our caffeinated culture, to kids starting off on the right path at school. We also asked a special guest from Imaginary Forces, a firm that built its reputation on creating opening sequences for Hollywood’s most influential films, to find a physical experience that embodies the best of what she’s learned from the first moments of a film. As for me, I am particularly interested in the experiences that use the idea of beginning to sustain and maintain action. In fact, my submission is something that we found while researching Eyes Open: New York—an experience that is designed to begin over and over and over again.