The urgency of attending to our children’s mental health cannot be overstated.

Concern about their well-being was already on the rise in the decade prior to the pandemic. Alongside social inequity, the COVID era has seen soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts. Knowing that mental health is influenced by numerous systemic factors, we met with families of all income levels and heard from practitioners throughout Massachusetts. In some communities, mental health is candidly discussed, in others it remains a taboo subject. Through these conversations, we learned that mental health requires both individuals and their families to be educated, supported, and empowered.

HandholdMA.org helps families find services that work for them and gives them easy access to information on a range of mental health topics. It allows parents to learn from and support one another as they navigate the landscape of mental health together. We took special care to make resources feel approachable for those in communities of color, and curated new resources for everyone from preschoolers to teens—because mental health challenges do not discriminate.

In 2020, a coalition of the nation’s leading experts in pediatric health issued an urgent warning that the mental health crisis among children had become a national emergency.

The percentage of emergency department visits for mental health crises rose by 24% for children between the ages of 5 and 11, and 31% for those 12 to 17, compared with 2019.

87,000

site visits to to HandholdMA.org since launch

223,000

people reached in bilingual social media campaign

To help shift vivo’s thinking from a focus on products to a focus on brand-building, IDEO set out to help the company understand how young consumers experience fun—a core tenet of the vivo brand. The new concept store needed to convey joy and fun in a meaningful and memorable way. The project was about more than just designing the space; it was also about piloting into vivo’s future brand systems.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team conducted user research in four different cities in China, then shared the stories of young Chinese consumers with the vivo team. Their interviews revealed that young people value experiences that enrich their lives and create a feeling of positive personal transformation. They seek opportunities to discover new experiences, express themselves in different ways, expand and deepen their social connections, and build knowledge and skills. By leaning on this definition of “enjoyment,” IDEO helped vivo identify the value proposition of the concept store, helping consumers express themselves in new and different ways. The store would allow every visitor to see something unique and find a fresh perspective.

The vivo team took that value proposition into a design brief and later built out the space and interactive experiences. The second floor of the store is dedicated entirely to interactive experiences using photo booths, sound recording, and lighting technology, designed to provide consumers with the kind of enjoyment they seek. vivo launched the concept store in Shenzhen on March 22, 2019, marking an important milestone in vivo’s transformation from a smartphone maker to a consumer brand.

China consumes roughly 30% of the world’s smartphones—which presents a tremendous market opportunity for brands looking to capture young consumers’ loyalty.

Top 1

in China's smartphone market, topping both shipments (sale-in) and retail sales (sale-out), in the first half of 2024

260M active users

within two years of vivo Lab's official opening, with 70% of them young users

The program Tsinghua and IDEO created together consisted of six modules focused on creative leadership: Rediscover Design, Build Design as a Core Competency, Creating the Conditions for Creativity, The Financial Levers for Innovation, Designing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Leading for Tomorrow. 73 Chinese and foreign experts helped teach the modules, including former Forbidden City Palace Museum director Shan Jixiang, the father of Japanese industrial design, Masayuki Kurokawa, and Jake Knapp, author of the book Sprint.

The program’s first cohort included more than 30 entrepreneurs from 20 different industries across nine cities. Participants completed the courses throughout the year, taking full advantage of holistic, interactive teaching and the opportunity to share their own practical experiences. Their feedback consistently demonstrated how the course had given them fresh approaches to problems their companies faced, whether improving internal communication or helping them see the clients they serve from a new perspective.

Liu Feng, the founder of a fast growing tourism development company, was particularly inspired by the Creating the Conditions for Creativity module’s six pillars of corporate transformation concept. Using these pillars, he not only refined the mission and value of his company, but also launched a series of measures to improve all aspects of its operations, from customer service to annual company gatherings. With a newly empowered team, he significantly increased the agility of the organization.

Ting Zhihong, the chairwoman of China’s leading logistics technology company, managed to double its profit during the course. She said her biggest takeaway from the course was how important it is to empower the team. Her company has now set up several platforms that give employees more room to experiment, create, and take part in frontline decision-making, bringing them closer to the company’s management.

Hu Chao, founder and CEO of China’s largest e-commerce platform for childcare goods, found that while other executive courses simply teach knowledge, Lead a Creative China taught him the importance of placing people at the center of what his company is doing.

The first cohort of the program graduated in December 2018. On April 8th, 2019, the Lead a Creative China program received an honorable mention in the education category as part of Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards, becoming the only award-winning Chinese project in the category.

After 40 years of rapid change, China has reached a pivotal point in its growth trajectory. Across the globe, traditional drivers of economic growth have slowed down, creating opportunity define the new economy.

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The Chinese government has laid out a wide range of ambitious policy plans to ensure that China successfully manages this transition, and that the country continues to grow and lead.

Honorable Mention

education category, Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards

China’s digital landscape is dominated by highly integrated mobile apps like WeChat and Alipay that seamlessly combine messaging, shopping, bill payment, and finance management. This shift toward digital-first interactions that are hyper-convenient, personalized, and intuitive has significantly shaped consumer expectations for experiences like finding, booking, and staying in a hotel. To stay competitive and meet—or exceed—young guests’ expectations, Huazhu needed to redesign its Membership App 3.0 to prioritize guest needs across all touchpoints of the hotel journey.

Through in-depth research and member feedback, IDEO discovered the true pain point the Huazhu membership app needed to address: seamlessly integrating the hotel brand’s online and offline experiences. The Huazhu Membership App 3.0 adopted “simple, stable, and real” design principles, simplifying user operations, optimizing the interface, fixing lingering experience issues, maximizing page load speed, and reducing crash rates.

The IDEO team discovered users have different functional needs. Sometimes, users want to search for hotel information quickly. Other times, they prefer to explore and browse content slowly. To meet both needs, the app needed to be optimized for efficiency and exploration. So, the IDEO team upgraded the interface of the Huazhu Membership App, adding quick operation modules and information blocks on the main page, as well as a downward scrolling interface that gradually slows the experience, offering channels for detailed exploration.

Customers also had different needs at different points in their travel journey: before, during, and after their stays. IDEO designed the language and user interface to provide personalized service information for each stage, from booking to post-stay. The app’s content adapts to the user’s travel phase, showing the most relevant service experiences at each point. The content displayed on the app also changes based on user habits, helping the app flex to meet their needs. The design aligns with the Huazhu Hotels Group’s mission to provide personalized service to a diverse clientele.

The team also worked to inject Huazhu’s brand characteristics by offering an upgraded experience in booking, stay, dining, and member benefits and adding features like a 30-second, automatic check-in experience. These thoughtful, personalized updates integrate Huazhu Hotels Group’s meticulous service philosophy, providing customers with a welcoming, human-centered hospitality experience. The updated Huazhu Membership App 3.0 is now available in major app stores, shaping a new generation of user experiences for Huazhu Hotels Group.  

Young travelers in China expect the first touchpoint with a hotel brand to be digital.

5% increase

in monthly active users after the launch of the App's 2.0 version in 2021

I wanted to correct this discrepancy—to honor my friendships with the same sense of ceremony as a graduation. So, a few weeks before the big robes-and-tassels day, I created handmade portraits for each of them using my favorite art form: collage. Collage is more visceral than other traditional forms of art-making. Rather than relying on a pencil or paintbrush as an intermediary between hand and paper, it is 100 percent hands on.

Each collage I made was roughly 4x4 inches and took about 45 minutes.

My collage portrait process:

1. Gather materials. Pull old magazines from the recycling bin. Grab any scraps of paper you've collected. (A friend who also loves collaging brought a vintage Playboy for me to use. As she said, “It’s great for finding skin tones, obviously.”)
2. Comb through all the materials and rip out pieces until you have a few piles of various skin and hair tones and interesting textures.
3. Use a photo of your subject as a reference, draw a light sketch of their basic features onto paper.
4. Trim your pieces to size, use your favorite glue, and assemble the collage on top of your sketch.

In one instance, the portrait-making session blossomed into a full music-and-snacks event, where friends and I gathered to make collages of each other and exchange them. The party itself brought an unexpected moment of closure to our time in design school—to see everyone’s visual style, matured over four years together, coalesce in a scrappy portrait.

Giving—and receiving!—these portraits filled in a missing piece of what a graduation is supposed to feel like. And now, with college fresh behind me, I wondered how I could build the practice into a habit: How might I continue to use my favorite art form to show thanks to people who have been pivotal in my life?

After graduation, I moved from North Carolina to California to return to work at IDEO, where I'd been an intern the year before. And, in celebration of mentors and friends at IDEO whose support helped make all of this possible, I collaged a few portraits of coworkers:

I continue to search for more people and moments to memorialize in collage. It might be my new strategy for repurposing ticket stubs and brochures from travel adventures. Or a new, budget-friendly holiday gift tradition. Or a way for me to simply mark another year lived, making a self-portrait with materials collected over the past year. Collage has a poetic, “circle of life” quality to it, transforming human-made ephemera into a recycled treasure worthy of display.

As my college graduation approached this past May, I realized something about the commencement ceremony. While it celebrates all things you—your hard-won GPA, your winding list of extracurriculars, that new foil-stamped degree—what gets lost is a celebration of the relationships that helped get you there. Where was the homage to friends and mentors who, honestly, probably shaped my success more than any test score or honor club?

The work was done in collaboration with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Jeff Norris, one of the NASA crew, described how people react when they experience OnSight:

"When they first encounter this project," Norris says, people "have a feeling of, 'Wow, I've lived to see this.'"

That's precisely how I felt. Mic. Dropped. It left me wanting to know a lot more about Riccardo and his work. I'll let him take it from here:

In one sentence, who are you?

An Italian, beardy guy who likes to travel and observe people, learn about the world, and wonder how to make it a better place. (It turns out you can get paid to do that.)

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I’m leading the NEXT’s (New Experiences and Technologies) incubation team at Microsoft. We work on a number of new secret devices and experiences that have not been announced yet. Most recently, the Microsoft Hololens and Windows Mixed Reality. I learn by doing. In fact, I’m still learning how to do my job, and I expect to never stop.

I grew up in a small town in Italy, which was a great place to live, but there were not many opportunities. So I moved to London and started working as a developer there at Unit9 before moving back to design. I have a mixed background that reflects my many passions: I studied electronics and design and learned how to program on the side.

Since then, I have lived in Stockholm, New York, and now Seattle, always looking for new opportunities to learn and grow.

Chrome WebLab by Google

What are your three favorite possessions?

1. Old family photo albums.
2. All my books, now spread across two continents, which I dream of reuniting as one big library.
3. And of course BMO [a stuffed, plush video game console from Adventure Time] because it makes my niece laugh out loud when we play together.

What does a typical work session look like for you?

You could argue that what I really do daily is to press a lot of buttons, scribble on a whiteboard, and discuss with people. Sometimes I travel.

As a creative leader, I strive to build inclusive environments that foster creativity and enable every individual to learn, grow, and express their full potential. Every day is different. We research, brainstorm, sketch, build, discuss, and learn as much as we can to iterate and constantly improve.

What I personally do daily evolves pretty much every year, and I believe the role of designers and creative leaders will keep evolving with the rise of artificial intelligence. I would be surprised if my current job still exists in ten years.

How do you get over creative block?

Sometimes all it takes me is a shower, a nap, a walk, or a good dinner with friends. It helps me to read a lot of books, travel, meet new people, and be immersed in new realities that are far from my daily bubble. And it’s good to have a creative process, both as a reference to give you confidence when you feel lost, and as a framework to break away from when you are inspired.

Introducing Microsoft HoloLens: Transform your world with holograms

How do you see the world in 2078?

Um...let’s see. In 2078 I’ll be 94, maybe somewhere in the countryside in Tuscany surrounded by my grand kids, and hopefully I'll still be curious to travel, learn, and give back to the next generation. It might be a good idea to plan to be somewhere in the hills, just in case global warming makes my hometown a beach town.

It’s hard to make predictions, and too easy to fall into the trap of describing a dystopian future.

As designers, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to influence what future we want to live in. It doesn’t matter how small our contribution will be, it’s worth trying to push for a desirable future scenario.

My desirable future scenario looks like this:

• New generations will learn to live together, respecting our differences, understanding each other, fighting inequalities, and respecting nature and our planet in a deeper way.
• We will fulfill the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
• Education will be highly respected as one of the most important values.
• Religion as we know it will transform or disappear in favor of a shared philosophy and values.
• Democracy will change, evolving to a better system (probably with a different name), immune to populism and propaganda.
• There will be no more borders that divide us, centralized governments will disappear, and so will human-vs-human military conflicts.
• Communities will be as small as a town, but globally represented and connected beyond their geographical position.
• Money as we know it will disappear, replaced by other ways to measure our impact and value to society.
• We will work much less (thank you, technology), spending most of our time studying, exploring, and enjoying life. We will look back at our generation wondering why we spent our lives working eight hours a day, five days a week. We will use that time to re-discover the pleasures of the simple things that nature gives us every day.
• Autonomous robots will take care of most activities (and jobs), freeing humankind from committing their lives to repetitive tasks.

We might have learned how to control our planet's energy, gravity, climate, and resources. Some of us will live (probably with machines) on other planets, in the ocean, or the thermosphere, working hard to give us all an alternative to extinction and overpopulation. We will find new ways to help animals stay alive. We will learn how to balance ecosystems, maybe even to re-introduce extinct species, or introduce new human-made species that will help us fight illnesses and colonize new planets, making them habitable.

The meaning of being human might change in our lifetime. We might be super humans by then, and we will have to be very careful, as there is a huge risk of creating new inequalities based on who can afford what extension. There might be incredible innovations in brain-computer interactions, connecting us to technology and each other via a collective mind.

There might also be supermachines, hopefully like R2-D2 and C-3PO, to assist us and help us be better humans.

Who are you crushing on lately?

I really like Bret Victor’s way of thinking.

Ivan Poupyrev's work is excellent and always surprising. Ishac Bertran and Claudio Guglieri are good friends, great designers, and some of my favorite people.

I feel very lucky to work with some incredibly interesting people from all over the world to help imagine the future. We are always facing new challenges—sometime solving problems for the very first time and defining experiences that have never existed before.

A lifelong space nerd, I was blown away when I heard about OnSight, a Microsoft HoloLens experience that allows NASA scientists to navigate the surface of Mars using imagery captured from the Curiosity Rover. I met a creative leader of HoloLens, Riccardo Giraldi, at a conference in Milan, and was so impressed by the work he and his team at Microsoft presented.

We decided to transform our drab and sterile office kitchenette (not the main one where the rest of the office eats) into a space that could be both a chef’s and a designer’s paradise—a space that actually asks you to play with your food.

The food industry is evolving like never before, and even at-home chefs are becoming more experimental. So, if you work in food or are outgrowing your home kitchen, here are a few ideas you might want to take to-go.

Our Top 4 Kitchen Design Rules:

1. Keep it versatile

A kitchen should be beautiful, but it should also feel like a blank canvas upon which wild ideas can be cooked up.

Our first priority was to create a clean, open space where different project teams could come in and set up how they see fit.

Since we only had a small space to work with, keeping the floor plan bright, open, and versatile was crucial to avoid feeling like we're cooking in a dark closet.

The main wall above the sink is made from plywood panels cut with a CNC machine to look more like pegboard. The design, which uses movable dowels, makes it easy to add or adjust shelves to meet the needs of the cooks.

2. Design for conversation and collaboration

Making the IDEO community feel connected to what we’re doing is just as important as being able to showcase our work.

While much of what we do is prototyping food on a near-scientific scale, we wanted our space to feel less like a lab and more like a home, with a warm, inviting color palette and wooden stools at the counter to sit and have a chat.

Even though it’s not technically a kitchen island, that counter was added with the same intent: to create smaller, more intimate spaces for the chef, but also allow them to face out to the space and chat with people sitting on stools on the other side. This always seems to be the gathering place in everyone’s kitchen.

3. Don’t try to do it all

The problem with redesigning a kitchen is that you never know how you’re going to use the space until you start using it.

We could have spent months iterating and reiterating on the floor plan, making sure every last knob was perfectly placed. Instead, we kept it simple, moved fast, and left room for modifications that we’ll inevitably need as the food industry continues to evolve.

This helped us save on upfront costs, and allowed us to finish the renovation much sooner.

4. Let the food speak for itself

Above all, we wanted the space to reflect how we feel about food, rather than distract from it. Sleek, minimalist design and large, neutral counter tops allow the inherent beauty of food to shine through.

I intentionally kept as many of the built elements—like the bookshelves—as low as possible. This makes the space feel more open and larger than it is. This is key when dealing with small spaces. Your eye goes to the long horizontal surfaces, elongating the space, as opposed to being confronted with tall cabinets or shelves that break your line of sight.

Everything we do revolves around food, so why not build a kitchen that allows food to be the star of the show?

Next time you remodel, keep these ideas in mind and apply some design thinking to your dinner.

Build to think. That mantra is imprinted on our brains from the moment we walk through the doors at IDEO. In our Design for Food Studio, we build by cooking. And just as our shop guys need to be able to make noise and be surrounded by their tools, we need a kitchen that inspires us creatively, adapts to our needs, and demonstrates to clients how we prototype in a tangible way.

I took this picture in the neighborhood where I grew up in Istanbul. The streets of Istanbul are very dynamic places, full of commerce, conversations, fights, love, drama. But they’re not always designed to facilitate all the different activities that take place there. So people regularly find ways to design the interventions they need.

In this picture you can see a table built around a tree to create more space for people to hang outside. An awesome way of working around nature and creating space for social encounters—tactical urbanism perhaps?

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.