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

For this method of animation, make sure to use only lines in your Illustrator file. The idea is to animate the lines across their own path, so the way you design them will play a big part on how elaborate your animation will be.

Watch this video for a quick step-by-step guide to animating lines in After Effects:

1. When your Illustrator file is ready, import it to After Effects. You can simply drag your Illustrator file to the Project area or go to File > Import > File.
2. Drag the imported file to the Timeline. It will automatically create a Composition.
3. Now you must turn your Illustrator file into Outlines that After Effects can control. On the timeline, right click on the layer and select "Create Shapes from Vector Layer.
4. The next step is to animate your outlines. For that, you will need to add a Trim Paths feature to your new layer.
5. On Trim Paths, use keyframes for Start/End to change when and where you want your paths to animate. If your file has multiple lines, you can choose to animate them simultaneously or individually.

This technique is a simple and effective way to create powerful motion graphics for storytelling, user interface behaviors, or even a simple animated gif. Hope you enjoyed it!

Adobe After Effects is one of my favorite tools for prototyping user interfaces, creating video scenarios to communicate a context of use, or simply crafting stories through animation. It's a tool that allows you to explore and visualize ideas, and there's no right or wrong way to use it. Here are a few tips for using After Effects to animate vector lines imported from Adobe Illustrator.

So, when the opportunity comes up, I like to turn off the computer and focus on creating artifacts. While an object is just a thing that serves its purpose until it’s tossed out, an artifact sparks an invisible conversation, a connection between the human who made it and the human experiencing it. Even something that people don’t think twice about, like an event name tag, deserves to be well designed.

That belief drove me to create a collection of one-of-a-kind name tags for a CoLab event. I wanted to make something with my hands that would bring a level of craft to our content. The tags served as the icebreaker for more than a few conversations, and reminded people at the tech-focused event that there's a human element to everything. Many attendees we reached out to a month later said that they still had the tag on their desks.

The process was simple, but arduous: I laser cut blanks, etched the names, spray painted each tag using unique colors and angles, and finished it off with acrylic screen printing ink to make the names readable.

Here's how I did it, step by step:

1. Creating the blanks

I designed the negative of the template so that I could later use it as a jig. I used 18 x 24 inch sheets of 3mm acrylic, so that with the name tags at 2.5 inches x 3.5 inches, I could fit about 32 comfortably in each batch (as opposed to 38 if I used all available space and threw away the negative).

Acrylic sheets tend to melt and then cool quickly in the laser cutter, leading to possible sticking, so I usually add about .2mm to my thickness settings to compensate (i.e. I was using 3mm acrylic, but put 3.2mm in the settings). There are two benefits: One, you guarantee that you actually cut through the sheet. Two, it also gives you a little bit of wiggle room so you don’t end up with hard to pick out joints.

Pro tip: The key to making the most of your acrylic is to leave space for future cuts on the same piece. Instead of designing my reusable jig with all the name tags in the center, I threw them to one side so that I could use the other end again. After I cut the jig, I could get 38 tags out of each subsequent batch because I could simply throw away the negative. Another bonus: When there’s excess acrylic on one end, you can always tell which side goes in which direction.

2. Etching the blanks

Once the blanks were cut, I needed to take the protective plastic off of one side, so that I had a clean surface to etch onto. I peeled the tags, slipped my template jig back into the cutter, and dropped the blanks into place.

The etch file is the same as the template jig, just with a red cut box around the perimeter of the file denoting the edge of the acrylic.

Once I had an etch file ready to go, all I had to do was push the file to the top left of the cutting area and check the focus points of the laser on the first tags on the first and second rows. Since the etch file is in the same grid form as the old cut file, everything is already spaced for me. The etch settings held ink best at around 74 to 76 percent power at 100 percent speed.

One final thing to note: We don’t want to cut anything (we’re just etching), so after setting my etch power, I set the cutting lines to 0 percent power and 100 percent speed, so we just blow right past them.

3. Taping the etched tags*

Once the blanks were etched, I peeled the plastic off of the back of the tags, then covered the etched side of each in painters tape to keep them clean.

4. Spraying the tags

After everything was taped, I slapped some aluminum foil in the vent hood and got to work spraying each tag. The process allowed me to bring out some of the old airbrush tricks my dad showed me as a kid, like holding a tongue depressor at a 60 degree angle in front of the nozzle to create thicker splatter. I used two to three colors for each tag, at varying angles.

I used Montana brand spray paints, and I definitely recommend using the BLACK formula. Over the course of the project, it dried on the acrylic within four and-a-half minutes, which is pretty insane. The GOLD formula was comparable, but my run of the mill Krylon paints took much longer, so it’s worth the extra bucks to buy Montana.

Pro tip: If you’re spraying a bunch of parts in a hood, aluminum foil is actually a great material for coverage as it tends to not stick to your parts like paper.

5. Sealing the tags and revealing the beauty

After the sprayed tags had dried, I hit the painted side with a couple quick coats of the Montana clear matte varnish so that they wouldn’t stick to each other. When everything had dried, I peeled off the painter’s tape—my favorite part of the project.

6. Applying the ink inlay

Next came the most time-consuming part: the ink inlay. I used speedball acrylic screen printing ink for its fast drying time, and how easily it wipes off acrylic. I liberally brushed and swabbed the ink into the etch using a Q-tip, then quickly wiped the excess off with a paper towel. Once dry, they were ready to go.

That's it!

*Imperfect process: I know what you’re thinking—why didn’t you just remove one side of the plastic before etching, spray that side, then remove it from the other side, then etch that? I did! After a few batches, I added the taping step because I noticed the spray paint was eating away the plastic coating that kept the paint off the front of the tags.

I work with CoLab, IDEO’s tech-focused R&D group. I’m also someone who’s committed most of my life to craft. Luckily, my day job allows me to bring the two together. But the minute you start making a living from your craft, problems start to surface. You get burnt out. You compromise your vision to deliver things on time. At that point, you're no longer transforming objects—you’re just pushing matter around.

I snapped this photo in the Amazon jungle town of Iquitos, Peru. A jar full of individually cut blister packs sat in the corner of a general store set up in front of a family’s home. By making individual doses available—not even a daily dose, but a single, one-time dose—more families were able to afford treatment for their ailments. In a community where money is very scarce, this family was filling a very real, pressing need that wasn't being addressed by local stores.

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.

6:20 AM: Snooze

6:30 AM: Sweep

Sweep. Make the coffee, water the succulents, check out a few new product curation apps and services the team has been talking about. While riding the bus across the Bay, I read about immigration patterns and how they affect consumers in North America. Staying inspired is part of our job, so I try to start each day with a healthy dose.

9:00 AM: Birthday shenanigans

Today is my teammate Julian’s birthday, so we surprised him with donuts and orange juice—his morning elixir of choice!

9:30 AM: Sketching and 3D modeling

My team’s current project is to reimagine the shopping experience for a large retailer. To prepare for a review with the team, I do some sketching and 3D modeling of in-store display concepts. We are a diverse and interdisciplinary bunch, so it helps to bring everyone’s ideas together through visualization.

10:30 AM: Design review with the team

We do team check-ins throughout the day, talking through our ideas to make sure we’re meeting user needs and pushing the integration of digital behaviors and physical environments. Today, we’re critiquing a bunch of sketches of critical shopping moments that we’ll prototype later. We’re considering how digital projection can add ambient information and subtle interaction to a physical display layout.

11:30 AM: Creating a physical study model

In preparation for our prototyping session in the IDEO Shop, we use a rough physical model to map out the experience of the future retail environment. A small-scale model lets us discuss all the ways shoppers might interact with a brick and mortar store—from browsing to comparison shopping, saving for later or checking out and having things shipped home. It’s helpful to keep our work quick and dirty, so that we have a model that lets the entire team walk through design points together.

12:00 PM: Julian’s birthday lunch

Continuing the festivities, we pop out of the office to get a bite of Scandinavian-inspired eats.

1:30 PM: Field testing and 1:1 prototyping

Time to refine the rough mock-up made in the office and rebuild it in a live retail environment. We wear jumpsuits to suggest how we want the client’s brand to evolve (and because jumpsuits are cool).

The prototype begins outside the store with a simulated mobile shopping experience that ushers shoppers directly to our redesigned displays. The point of the prototype is to test a store layout that could feel like an extension of a mobile shopping experience. Think curated themes, minimal options, and intuitive product comparison interactions. Turns out, some things they hate, some things they love, and a few things don’t make sense to them at all! All of that is great feedback for moving forward, by the rock-and-roll rules of prototyping. Achieving a realistic level of physical interaction while keeping the design at a prototypical level is key to getting honest feedback. We draw our insights from watching how users interact with the space, as well as their answers to directed prompts.

7:30 PM: Teach

My nightcap is heading to California College of the Arts, where I teach a class about physical space and digital interaction titled “Objects & Space.” We work with sensors, hack projectors, control motors, glue, and foamcore, and build our way through code, all in the spirit of figuring out what the environments designers of tomorrow might do.

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When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I use space to explore design solutions.” It might sound like I work for NASA, but what we environments designers actually do is consider how physical space influences human behavior. Much of my time is spent sketching, making models, building walls out of foamcore, miming, turning off the lights, rendering, and doing my best to break feng shui. Here's a breakdown of a typical day:

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.