At IDEO, we believe in the power of play. It is an essential part of our approach: We use playfulness to design fun, inspiring experiences for kids (toys, games, and digital entertainment) and to bring elements of delight to more “serious” experiences for adults (cars, food, health, finance, and more). The latter may even include developing new methods for the workplace, such as helping clients boost the creativity of their innovation processes.

Play design at IDEO is grounded in human factors research, for which we conduct in-context interviews and empathy-building exercises with people of all ages. Our observations — combined with contemporary academic theory, our knowledge of cultural trends, and the expertise of our multidisciplinary designers, including leaders from our successful Toy Lab — help clients identify opportunities and rapidly build them into reality. 

Think to Build
Our signature process is to uncover unmet needs, synthesize those needs into opportunities, and use those opportunities as a springboard for generating lots of concepts. We then prototype the concepts as quickly as possible, bringing them to life in a way that allows us, our clients, and our target audience to react to them. We apply this process to our Play projects, paying close attention to creating experiences that are delightful and functional.

Insights to Action
Many kid-focused organizations generate large amounts of research data, but they struggle to put the information to work. Through close collaboration and synthesis, we can extract new value from existing knowledge and trends, defining opportunity areas that show how insights gleaned from research can lead to the design of new offerings.

Play to Innovation
Enabling playful creativity within an organization can lead to a flood of innovation. In our “Play to Innovation” projects and workshops, we rely on practical techniques and academic theory to develop new structures and processes that foster creativity and creative confidence.

Toy Invention
IDEO Toy Lab has a proven track record of inventing toy and game experiences, such as the Balloonimals app for iPhone. The Lab applies IDEO’s innovation process to this focused area, and it has also developed its own techniques for involving kids in idea generation and prototyping.

Brand Extension
How do you turn a great product into a suite of compelling customer experiences? Our design process enables us to tease out what makes a core experience engaging and frame it in a way that allows the brand to be re-expressed in new contexts and media.