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

Taking this 2025 appliance from concept video to functional prototype meant creating a realistic experience of technologies that won’t exist for many years. Designers had to come up with a way for the system to see and recognize foods on table’s surface and respond accordingly—and they had to make it work reliably for more than six months while some 250,000 visitors tried it out at pop-up exhibitions at the Salone del Mobile and EXPO Milan.

To find out how they did it, I talked to IDEO London interaction designer Siri Johansson and developers David Brody and Kalyn Nakano of IDEO Palo Alto, who built custom software that borrows techniques from computer vision.

How did the need to build a prototype for real use affect the interaction design?

Siri: As soon you put something in a public setting, people are always going to try to break it, especially if they’re really excited about it. They don’t mean to break it, of course, but they want to play with it and see what it can do. We had to focus on a few key functions and figure out how to make them work well enough that it would be feasible for people to play freely with the installation. A key design principle was to keep the technology low-key and in the background, to preserve the warmth and tactility of the kitchen, so we focused on functions that demonstrate that intention and show how the table uses digital to free up your mind so you can engage with physical things. The table knows what I’m cooking and gently guides me through the process, so I don’t have to keep going back to my iPad to browse a recipe. I can focus more on my ingredients—how they feel, how they smell.

How did it affect the software design?

Kalyn: Knowing this was going to be a live prototype forced us to consider every scenario. With on-screen prototypes, predicting how a user might interact with the screen is a lot more straightforward. But here, adding another dimension and more objects to the mix challenged us to consider all the different ways people could position and interact with the items on the table. Once we started building, it became clear that the concept video for the design was really just a starting point. Testing all the different arrangements and permutations challenged some of our initial designs and software implementation methods, especially when we started thinking about transitions. Tracking objects while they were moved around on the table forced us to implement things more formulaically to achieve a display with smoother transitions between states.

How did people’s interactions with early versions of the table change the software?

Kalyn: With a live prototype like this, you give up control over the experience. You can’t send everyone down the path you want them to take. We started building and testing our software based on the interactions shown in concept video, but those interactions are choreographed, and when people in the office started playing with the prototype, we realized the behavior in the video—putting the veggies down on the table and sliding them from place to place—wasn’t natural for everyone. Some people would hold the vegetables in their hands or lift them off the table while deciding where to put them. These interactions weren’t wrong, but we hadn’t accounted for them in our initial designs. The need to accommodate for this forced us to reconsider our image processing techniques to make sure we could still recognize the objects no matter how they were being handled.

How did you adapt the CV software to the specific needs of the project?

David: Our approach wasn’t to make CV that could be used for anything, in any situation. The better route was to take advantage of our constraints for the exhibition and build a simplified version of CV (written with openFrameworks and OpenCV) that we knew could be tractable and provable in the time we had. The table has to consistently recognize three ingredients—broccoli, tomatoes, and rice—so that people can experience how it works. While more complex CV might create models of what generic broccoli looks like, our solution uses examples of broccoli that it has already seen, along with shape and color distribution. It compares those factors with what it’s seeing in order to distinguish between objects. The distribution of color helps it distinguish between broccoli and a blue bowl of rice, while comparing with previously seen examples help it distinguish between broccoli and a green shirt sleeve.

Why was this an efficient strategy?

David: A lot of conventional CV uses a “sliding window” approach: The computer identifies an aspect of an object, like its shape, and looks for that object within a larger image by sliding the window of vision until it recognizes something that matches what it’s looking for. The hard part is making it work in real time, because the computer compares every possible “window” that contains the criteria it’s looking to match, and each comparison takes time. Since our software is only looking at colors, it’s easier to identify which windows on the table might contain the objects it’s seeking. So the first thing it does is look for the points on the table where the intensities of color are the highest, and it says, “these might be objects.” It sends that information down the pipeline to the next step, and that’s where the color-recognition algorithm comes into play: It compares the histogram of a potential object with the histograms for broccoli, tomatoes, and rice, and determines which object it’s looking at.

What was it that excited you about this project?

Kalyn: This was a great example of building to learn. Creating a live prototype introduced a lot of interesting interaction design questions into the software development process, and it got us to solve technical challenges that wouldn’t normally come up during a screen-based prototype. It generated a new excitement for designing dynamic and thoughtful off-screen experiences, and watching people’s reaction to it was inspiring. When we set the table up in Milan, we came in the next morning and found construction workers playing with it, saying, “bellissima!”

The IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025 was on display at IKEA Temporary, a pop-up exhibition at Salone del Mobile in Milan, Italy, April 14-19, 2015 and can be seen at EXPO Milan, May 1-October 31, 2015.

Read more about Veggie Vision and the entire Concept Kitchen on Tech Insider and at IDEO.com.

What will kitchens be like a decade from now? IDEO recently helped IKEA envision some wild ideas that will likely be entirely plausible—someday. Usually, predictions like this exist only on screens, as concept videos and digital renderings. But this time, IKEA asked IDEO to build a working prototype of one future concept: the Table for Living, a cooking and work surface that recognizes the foods you place on it and projects customized recipes and cooking tips right onto the tabletop.

On a recent visit to the lab, I got an early look at Monster Moves, a new app that lets kids choreograph moves for a team of dance-happy monsters. If that conjures images of elaborate 3D creatures, think again: At first glance, Monster Moves appears to be completely flat. Any single frame of the game looks just like a simple 2D illustration.

But when one of those 2D monsters does a twirl or flip, suddenly (and pretty magically), you see that each one has a complete three-dimensional physiology, from the top of his head to the booty he’s shaking.

It might seem hardly noticeable, but think about it: if the image was truly two dimensional, there would be no top or bottom, no back or sides. To make the monsters look flat, but still have the ability to rotate 360°, the team used 3D modeling to create the characters, and then stripped down the art to make the monsters look two dimensional. Even though they appear flat, all the monsters have skeletons and skins, and they can turn to any angle.

So why bother making them look flat?

Toy Lab’s Michelle Lee explains that the 2D look of the game is crucial to its function. The mission of Monster Moves is to help kids understand that they are the choreographer, and that there is a direct connection between their choices and the monsters’ dance steps, which develops an awareness of creative control. The designers wanted kids to focus on the dance moves, so it was important that the art not distract them with too much 3D detail. That’s why they stripped away all the fancy shadows and shiny curves and kept the monsters as simple as possible.

The early version (left) has a 3D look, which the designers thought was still "too much." They chose to eliminate all shadows except for the drop shadow beneath the character (right).

Curious to check out the monsters for yourself? Learn more about Monster Moves and the entire portfolio of IDEO Toy Lab apps at IDEOToyLab.com.

Just like the rest of IDEO, the Toy Lab is dedicated to building creative confidence. Admittedly, they have a bit of an edge when making kids’ products—children have natural creative confidence, so the Toy Lab’s job is to encourage them to preserve it and show them new ways to apply their innate creativity.

We built a light pipe, which, in principle, can be viewed as a fiber optic cable. All the sides are polished to a clear finish so that the light can be reflected internally inside the pipe. If the light hits a section of pipe where the surface is not perfectly reflective, like if it’s gouged or scratched, it will use that section as an "emitter" and attempt to escape the pipe. We take advantage of this by covering the bottom surface of the pipe with dimples. To make the path consistently bright, we arranged the dimples in a gradient with fewer dimples closer to the source, where the light from LEDs is brightest, and more dimples to catch the light farther along the light path (where the light is dimmest).

This step-by-step guide describes our process of quick experimentation and prototyping to achieve good illumination without having to run extensive light bouncing simulations. The design is created in Illustrator using blend modes, and the light pipe is manufactured with a laser cutter on 1/4" thick clear acrylic.

Please note that results will vary depending on many factors. The optical design, LED brightness, and beam angle are important factors to consider.

1. Open a new Illustrator document and draw a rectangle. We chose 8" x .5".

2. Make a guide and space it roughly 1/4" away from the edge of the rectangle. This is where the dimple pattern will begin. (Leaving a 1/4” margin allows us to later mask off the area to prevent seeing excessive LED brightness near the source in the light pipe.) Now draw a circle with a .005" diameter.

3. ALT + Click and drag the circle to duplicate it, and move it to the other side of the rectangle. The two circles mark the two ends of the dimple pattern.

4. Select both circles and create a blend.

5. Open up the blend options to fine-tune the blend.

6. Change the spacing to "Specified Steps" and set the number to 700.

7. You should see 700 evenly spaced dots! In order to get them to start off sparsely spaced and then get closer together, we'll modify the path of the blend. Select the Anchor Point Tool (Shift + C).

8. Use the white arrow to select the first point and drag it until you see the spacing start to change.

9. Create another guide halfway along the path, and then drag the anchor point (with the white arrow selection tool) just past the guide. Repeat the same process with the last circle, but move its anchor point about half an inch to the right.

10. You should now have a gradient spacing of 700 circles becoming more closely spaced as you move from left…

11. …to right.

12. Once you are satisfied with the blend, expand it.

13. ALT+Click and drag the blend to copy it, and place it at the bottom of the rectangle.

14. Select both blends and then use the instructions from Step 4 to create another blend.

15. Use the instructions from Step 5 to fine-tune the new blend.

16. We chose to give our pattern a little bit of randomness, so we ALT+Click-ed and dragged the blend down and to the right ever so slightly.

17. With that, we’re ready for the laser cutter! This process is pretty quick to prototype (roughly 15 minutes from start to finish), so explore different gradient patterns and techniques, and try light pipes that are curved or bent (just keep in mind the critical angle).

18. Next, we raster the dot pattern on 1/4″ thick acrylic. Be sure the acrylic surface is clean and scratch-free.

19. Different laser cutters have different settings for varying materials and thicknesses, so keep that in mind when choosing your settings. We used a speed of 80, power of 50 and maximum PPI for the raster. For the vector cuts, we took 4 cuts at speed of 4, power of 95, and maximum PPI.

20. Now take your light guide and examine the edges. Make sure the material is transparent; otherwise you’ll need to do some hand-polishing.

21. The slightly bumpy yet clear finish the laser leaves after a cut works great for our purposes. You’ll want to surround all clear surfaces with white reflective paper or tape, and mask off the quarter inch where the light first enters the pipe.

22. Here are the results with a super-bright LED! You can see that the light starts to drop off a little toward the end of the pipe.

23. We could come back to tweak the blend pattern (reducing the number of dots at the beginning of the light pipe and increasing it toward the end).

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Light guides are physical tools that transmit light along a path from an illumination source while maintaining constant brightness. They’re often used in products to create a line of light that is consistently bright and dynamic-looking, even when it comes from a single source. Unfortunately, there is no simple how-to guide available for making them. The process is kept tightly guarded by optical engineering companies. We came up with a quick process to make our own light guides, and now you can too.

IDEO has decades of experience with automotive work, which has brought keen insight into the trends and technologies that will define the vehicles of the future. This presents an important design opportunity: If we visualize today the way we’ll live in decades to come, we’ll be better prepared to make smart decisions when the age of autonomous vehicles arrives.

The Future of Automobility is an online visualization of how life with driverless cars might really look and feel. It considers four scenarios: “Moving People,” which looks at how commutes will change when we can look away from the road; “Moving Things,” where we examine automated package-delivery fleets; “Moving Spaces,” where we envision mobile offices meeting people where they live and parking in underused areas of our cities; and “Moving Together,” which explores how the interior of future vehicles will be customized to meet our personal needs during ride-sharing.

The experience is as emotionally compelling as it is feasible, combining radical innovation in transportation concepts with immersive storytelling. It expresses not just our vision of the future, but also how we work, how we think, and what we value.

Want More?

IDEO alum Jonah Houston continues the conversation in a Medium article on how the horse can provide inspiration on designing modern driving interfaces.

Press‍

A Fascinating Glimpse at How We'll Carpool in 2027, WIRED
Imagining A Future Where Autonomous Cars Let Everyone Carpool, Fast Company
IDEO envisions ride-sharing car concept for 'the future of moving together', designboom
IDEO Visualizes the Role of Autonomous Vehicles and Ride Sharing, Core77

Awards

‍2015 Webby Awards

Once our hands are off the steering wheel and more vehicles are shared rather than owned, what will change in our lives?

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.