IDEO and Fotile have had a relationship since 2009, working together on projects including a unified design language for product offerings, retail environments, and IoT strategy. For the dishwasher, IDEO and the Fotile research team came together for design research, shadowing Chinese families in different cities as they prepared meals from start to finish. Together they discovered that unlike in Western cooking, where several kinds of cookware are used for different dishes, Chinese cooks tend to use the same cookware to prepare all of their dishes.

That meant that the cookware needed to be cleaned several times during a single meal preparation, rather than once at the end. In this context, the sink serves different purposes over the course of cooking—it’s a place to wash and store prepped ingredients, rinse the cookware, and deep clean the dishes used in food prep and during the meal.

Based on this insight, IDEO made a list of product design recommendations that became Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher—a counter-level, multi-purpose appliance that specifically suits Chinese cooking habits. IDEO’s design guidance gave Fotile the confidence it needed to launch its product into the market, and served as a blueprint for the future iteration of Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher.

On March 25, 2015, six months after the project ended, Fotile launched the world's first sink dishwasher designed for Chinese families. Eight months later, its market share exceeded 30 percent, setting off a wave of innovation in the Chinese dishwasher category.

In 2016, Fotile introduced a three-slot dishwasher with an added compartment for cleaning fruit and vegetables—a direct response to a research finding that Chinese families are concerned about food safety. When this new model hit the market, Fotile’s dishwasher market share jumped to 41.1%. In China, Fotile is now synonymous with “sink dishwasher,” and the company has a widespread reputation among consumers as a symbol of a safe and healthy Chinese family kitchen.

Since its founding in 1994, Fotile’s Chairman, Mao Zhongqun, has made it his goal to “do nothing but build a high-end Chinese family brand.”

30%

Fotile Sink Dishwasher’s share of the market in China, just eight months after launch

41%

Fotile’s dishwasher market share after it launched a three-slot version in 2016

#1 selling brand

in the mainstream price segment of the Chinese dishwasher market as of August 2023

BoAo Group’s idea to design a new baby car seat was fueled by a newly revised minor protection law, which made using child safety seats mandatory beginning June 1st, 2021. As ZUOWE and IDEO looked around China’s emerging car seat market, the team noticed a singular focus on safety and safety features across most international and domestic brands. There was a clear opportunity for a new product that could meaningfully differentiate itself by not only providing safety features but also meeting the needs of modern Chinese parents.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team needed to answer two questions: What matters to the new generation of parents in China? And how will their style and approach to parenting affect their expectations for baby car seats? Taking into account the potentially different consumer needs in different geographies, the IDEO team headed to Shanghai, a city with more than 25 million people, and the city of Taizhou in Zhejiang province, which has a population of 2 million. They conducted in-depth home visits to local families, visited many brick-and-mortar mom-and-baby shops, and interviewed people like specialized nurses, parenting experts, and child psychologists. 

Despite the differences between the two cities, IDEO discovered commonalities during consumer conversations. Young Chinese parents were experiencing a perceived identity gap. As individuals, they felt they had distinct personalities and a clear sense of self. They actively expressed themselves through their clothes and belongings. But when they became parents, this sense of self weakened or disappeared completely.  Their identities shifted to being someone’s mom or dad overnight. This new generation was eager to show their unique approach to parenthood as they used to express their sense of self. But many products were designed for children, with little regard for parents. 

This core finding helped set the direction for the new baby car seat design and brand Maple&Co. However, there were still two significant challenges to overcome. One, IDEO needed to design a product with stringent technical regulations and standards on a tight timeline—ZUOWE wanted to launch the new car seat at an important industry trade show within the year. And two, the team had to help the organization transform its thinking and ways of working to be more consumer-centric.

BoAo’s strength lies in its 20 years of experience developing and manufacturing car seats for major domestic and international automotive brands. This gave the company an edge in overcoming technical barriers and driving mass production. But its engineering and manufacturing mindset had become a barrier to transforming into a D2C brand. With such ingrained ways of working, pivoting to a more creative process can be hard. 

To address this hurdle, IDEO set up co-creation workshops, bringing together ZUOWE’s newly formed baby car seat team and manufacturing experts from their factories to discuss design direction and details early on. The benefits of the collaboration were clear: It was easy to share feedback in a timely manner and make product design decisions very quickly. When IDEO presented a design that emphasized natural textures during a workshop on brand positioning, a member from Bo Ao’s manufacturing team said, “This feels very different. This could become a major selling point,” and that they had “never seen” anything like it done by other baby car seat brands.

A year after working together, ZUOWE Technology launched Maple&Co and the new Maple baby car seat across its main e-commerce channels. Modern and minimalist in soft natural colors and wooden veneers, Maple appeals to the aesthetics of young parents in China. Despite a series of micro COVID outbreaks in China, within three months, Maple had already achieved better-than-predicted sales and received favorable comments about the look and quality of the car seat from parents. Fast forward two years, additional collaborations with IDEO have enabled the young startup to grow its child travel portfolio from a signature car seat into a more holistic offering that includes highly functional, fashionable, and adaptable car booster seats and strollers that thoughtfully address the needs of modern Chinese families across various life stages at home—and on the go.

China's minor protection law mandated the use of child safety seats beginning June 1, 2021.

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Despite incoming regulations fueling a surge in purchases, car seats on the market rightly prioritized safety but did not consider the emotional needs and lifestyle preferences of a new generation of Chinese parents.

1 year

after the project ended, a new, differentiated baby seat product and brand, Maple&Co, launched

Top 6

during the 2023 “Double 11” shopping festival, Maple&CO secured the 6th spot on Tmall's new brand pre-sale list

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“Over a year ago, I had to take my cat to the vet for an unexpected and expensive surgery,” says one Card Member. “To be honest, I still don’t know if I’ve paid the bill off.”

Many crave the flexibility to pay for large purchases over time, but also want to avoid the pitfalls of debt. Others rely on debit or cash for small items—no one wants to accumulate interest on a cup of coffee, lunch with a friend, or box of Kleenex—but then miss out on valuable rewards.

American Express worked with IDEO to help them attract new customers by understanding what financially stable young adults wanted in a credit card. The team began by interviewing more than 120 millennials to understand their payment behaviors around debit and credit, and how they think about borrowing and spending.

One person described the monthly panic of receiving his bill—described as “statement shock”—and his habit of making multiple payments before his billing cycle closed to ease this anxiety. Others were wary of credit because of a large veterinarian bill or financial mistakes made in their 20s, and relied on debit because it felt safer than accruing a balance to pay off. Overall, the team learned that many consumers experience anxiety about paying their bills. And while financial products that offer more flexibility and control have been needed for years, they are especially valuable in times of economic uncertainty like today.

Based on this research, IDEO prototyped, iterated, and refined two concepts, with frequent feedback from users and the client. Called Pay It Plan It, this feature offers financially responsible consumers more transparency, confidence, and control.

Pay It allows Card Members to quickly pay for small purchase amounts under $100 with a few taps in the American Express mobile app. When that purchase shows up on their account, they can choose “Pay It” and still earn rewards on the purchase. This ensures Card Members can take advantage of rewards while lowering their monthly bill by paying for smaller items throughout the month.

With Plan It, Card Members can split up larger purchases of $100 or more—like an emergency trip to the vet or a new sofa—into equal monthly payments, with a fixed fee and no interest. When the purchase appears in their account, they can select “Plan It,” and will be offered up to three monthly payment plans, ranging from three to 24 months. Each plan comes with a fixed monthly fee and no interest. Card Members know exactly how much they have to pay each month, so there are no surprises. And if they pay the purchase off early, they no longer have to pay any future plan fees.

The design of Pay It Plan It did not come without challenges: Bill pay is critical, complex, and highly regulated. Pay It Plan It required a significant internal financial and technical investment, which was achieved after IDEO shared many of the emotional, compelling stories from credit card users with leaders at American Express.

The team worked closely with the American Express regulatory and digital teams to ensure compliance and seamless integration into the mobile app and website’s user experiences and interfaces. To heighten the sense of competence, control, and transparency for users, the designers focused on small interactions like status animations, proactive suggestions, and straightforward language. These interactions help Card Members anticipate upcoming payments and clearly understand Pay It Plan It.

Plan It was designed with transparency, control, and accessibility in mind: The payment plan fee is displayed in dollars to give the customer certainty over their total costs.

Initially, the team set out to create a new credit card with the needs of young adults in mind. But IDEO and American Express realized that Pay It Plan It could be scaled across existing credit card products to ultimately benefit and attract more Card Members. Now, almost all U.S. American Express Consumer Card Members have access to Pay It Plan It through credit cards, co-branded cards, and the well-known Green, Gold, and Platinum Cards. Since launching in 2017, Card Members have created nearly 5 million Plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in purchases, with an average Plan size of $789. Millennial and Generation Z Card Members have created approximately 44 percent of these Plans.

The flexibility and control offered through Pay It Plan have earned American Express positive press, including a call-out in The New York Times for being among solutions that “make it easier for their customers to borrow money, and to manage their monthly cash flow.”

At first glance, design-led innovation may seem difficult to achieve in large, established organizations like American Express, operating in a highly regulated and deeply rational industry. But the IDEO and American Express team successfully found ways to introduce new behaviors like rapid prototyping, cross-discipline collaboration, and leading with emotional customer stories within the existing organizational culture and structure. American Express has since established a permanent Pay It Plan It team dedicated to evolving the feature. Made up of employees across departments, this points to a new and collaborative team structure for the company.

By seeking to understand the human behind the Card Member, American Express has transformed credit and financial services for the better, helping both to be defined by empathy, utility, and transparency.

For more than two centuries, The Times held a strong reputation as a storied British newspaper. Then came the digital deluge. Publication after publication began adopting a relentless online publishing schedule aimed at capturing eyeballs and subscribers, and guarding against waning advertising sales and print readership. But The Times and its sister publication The Sunday Times thought there might be a different way forward.

As Editor John Witherow explains, “the power of an edition” had long endured at The Times, but began to erode amid a round-the-clock breaking news cycle. Witherow didn’t want to do away with editions, but rather to update the model for the digital age. Times owner News UK approached IDEO in 2014 to explore exactly that: what the edition of the future might look like and how its design could drive revenue and subscribers.

IDEO’s research and design phase included interviews with readers, journalists, editors, and marketers at News UK. The team found that people’s reading modes vary—some reflecting new digital behaviors and others adhering more closely to paper-reading styles.

Readers, the team learned, chose The Times for its editorial opinion: a perspective that cuts through the overwhelming flood of information. They viewed the daily Times and weekend Sunday Times as one paper, despite the organizational distinction. And they were proud of their choice, valuing the papers’ consistency, trustworthiness, balance, and authoritativeness. Readers wanted these qualities distilled in a digital edition, whether on a smartphone, tablet, or on the web.

Those insights led to strategic recommendations spanning digital products, editorial, advertising integration, online membership offers, and social sharing. But the boldest among those was a publishing strategy that seemed to run counter to media trends: abandoning a real-time approach in favor of publishing separate digital editions.

The Times in March 2016 introduced an editions-based publishing schedule, with new editions available across all platforms four times each weekday: overnight, 9am, noon and 5pm; the weekend schedule shrank to three editions. A year in, they had broken that schedule fewer than a dozen times—making exceptions for major moments like the terror attack in central London and David Bowie’s death—but even in those cases, The Times refrained from incessant updates, instead resuming its regular pacing.

“The way we’re publishing now, taking our time over news...taking a more considered view of the world, it’s helped us offer something different from everything else,” digital news head Alan Hunter told Digiday in 2018. Readers demonstrated that this different approach was something they’d been wanting.

In the first half of 2016, new paying-subscriber sales were up 200% as compared to the same period in 2015. At the end of June 2016, there were 413,600 subscribers to The Times and The Sunday Times, up 3.4% from a year prior. Of those, 182,500 were digital-only subscriptions—a 6% rise and a notable figure given how much online news can be obtained for free.

Through collaboration with IDEO, News UK's own digital teams capabilities grew, enabling them to implement and evolve their new digital strategy. The capabilities of the newsroom grew, too: “The decision to move to four editions a day has freed up tremendous resources to focus on big stories,” says Emma Tucker, Editor of The Sunday Times—the kind of stories that "supercharge engagement." The approach is working: By August 2019 digital subscriptions had increased 19% year-on-year to 300,000, showing the progress the legacy publisher has made in attracting readers to its online proposition. Total subscribers for the two titles' print and digital products now stand at 539,000, and their websites total five million registered users.

More than 230 years after its first edition was published, the new Times has established solid footing in the digital age and designed its own future—one based not on the habits of its competitors but on its legacy and the reading behaviors of its audience.

Now let’s say some massive global event comes along and disrupts everything, everywhere, all at once. (Not hard to imagine, is it?)

That’s what leaders at Imaginable Futures faced in 2020. The actions it took in that moment put it ahead of the curve as a new world emerged. The impact was concrete and meaningful, with Imaginable Future’s work inspiring others to fund more than a million dollars’ worth of related initiatives and educational moonshots.

For 40 years, IDEO has helped the world’s leading organizations make the future, sometimes with startling prescience. Our work in strategic futuring has been informed and inspired by our client partnerships, but also by generations of futuring practitioners, to whom we’re indebted.

Now imagine that you're the CEO of a company navigating an uncertain future. Perhaps you already are. You might know your customers today, but you can’t see who they'll be in a decade, or what they’ll need by then. Current industry norms might no longer apply. Today’s buzzy trends will be long forgotten.

How do you make your future?

‍1. Your vision should be an inspiring anchor, not an empty gesture‍

Strategy is action: it’s not about what you say; it’s entirely about what you choose and then do. The future presents seemingly limitless choices for a leader—more the further out you look. Possible futures must be narrowed to probable futures, and from there to preferred futures. And that’s what effective visions of the future bring to life.

A great vision is inspiring and suffused with imagination. But it also enables leaders to focus on the right choices, in service of where they want to go, and to make such choices with confidence.

Not long ago, the CEO of one of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies asked, “If we could do anything in the next five years, what would it be?” Partnering closely with their team, IDEO developed seven visions of the future they could touch today, each of them optimistic, and each of them grounded in rigorous research.

Each of these future worlds provoked ways the company might respond to it: hundreds of ideas and concepts it could potentially bring to its future customers. The CEO chose three to take forward, and you might have even seen a Superbowl ad about one of them.

In another project, we also helped a global athletics brand take a jog in the future by creating a series of immersive "day in the life” stories, complete with billboards for fictional versions of major sporting events.

Creating tangible objects, stories, and experiences that invite you directly into the future is one of the ways we blend imagination and rigor in our work: It makes real the effect of intangible forces, and helps people grasp and distill what's most critical for their own work.

All of that helps move organizations to action.

‍2. Leap beyond the distraction of today's disputes‍

Infinite futures are possible, but not all are likely. Even fewer are desirable. And more often than not, the best futures—the ways we want things to turn out—can only happen as a result of deep collaboration: People need to agree on what matters, and then work toward it.

But getting aligned is hard work. In many organizations, team members are distributed across the world or engaged in work that defies simple distillation or storytelling, so getting on the same page can feel like an insurmountable obstacle. People have different goals and are accountable for different things. Over time, conversations can surface stark differences of opinion. Before long, you’re stuck.

Strategic futuring is helpful here, too. Creating future visions together before deeper strategy work begins is a way to discover what’s desirable and magnetic for everyone.

For example, to unlock a new scale of impact, the global environmental non-profit Conservation International (CI) needed a strategy that could unite its country offices on the African continent. Each had its own priorities, norms, goals, and personalities—a huge source of strength for the organization, but a barrier to scale. To create space for a new approach, CI jumped decades years into the future. Partnering with IDEO, CI experts and teams developed a set of short stories set in the year 2050, exploring future possibilities in sequestration research, satellite monitoring technologies, and more.

That futuring work created a shared language, goal, and frame of reference for the country offices. And the work accelerated the subsequent strategic decision-making and investment. The resulting goal? To expand the protection of grasslands, savannah, and scrublands in a transboundary area across six African countries. It's an effort that's now scaling Conservation International's successful Herding for Health model as a mechanism for partner-driven community climate resilience, targeting the protection of at least 10 million hectares by 2030 in partnership with a continent-wide NGO.

3. Remember: No business or organization is an island‍

To thrive in the future, organizations must also think about all the forces beyond their control—from climate events or cultural changes (both seen and unseen) to the deployment of emerging technologies. And they must even consider the potential effects of forces seemingly unrelated to their line of business. Because they might just matter.

That’s a lot to take in; making sense of it all can feel impossible. And a giant research document might just make it feel worse. Here again, strategic futuring offers a way forward. Rigorous speculation, informed by signals and data, picks out what’s most relevant from the noise—even if it’s unexpected. Distilling that informed speculation into imagined scenarios, and then into concrete experiences, can move leaders to reflect with urgency and clarity, and make choices with confidence.

At IDEO, we sustain an ongoing signal scanning practice, taking notice of what’s shifting across industries and cultures. We blend that informed sense of what’s coming with our client partners’  insights and data to build a rich tapestry of foresight. And then we employ all the crafts of design—from engineering and environments to software development and storytelling—to give life to the visions of the future that result.

When people step into a wide-angle view of what might be coming, they see what’s possible and discover new motivations to act. We used an AI-enabled process we developed to create a pocket viewfinder for D.C. residents to help them visualize the future of their city while standing in their own neighborhood.

Games can take that kind of immersion a level deeper. Recently IDEO helped global enterprise software company Sage investigate how the company might support businesses working to achieve net zero emissions. We designed a choose-your-own adventure story that asked people to play characters navigating business demands in a climate-impacted 2030; it generated empathy for future users, which led to support for the launch of the pioneering Sage Earth platform.

Sometimes, the outputs of strategic futuring work are entirely physical and can take over whole spaces. At the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2023 circular economy summit, we staged a home from the year 2050 populated with the personal items and detritus that might shape our daily lives if access to natural resources were to change, and if environmental regulations were to evolve as a result.

And at COP28 in Dubai, we built three distinct worlds from our collective climate future, traversing continents and culture, economic realities, and societal roles. We invited people to step directly into these futures—into spaces suspended deliberately between reality and possibility.

Do you want to make your future?‍

Strategic futuring is a powerful tool for solving significant, far-reaching business challenges.

You may be a leader striving to distill many levers of change affecting your organization. You may be part of a team that needs to find positive, energized alignment around what to do to set up your next era of growth.

Or you might be a leader determined to understand how your business may be transformed by forces far beyond your influence.

Wherever you are today, strategic futuring can help you make your own tomorrow.

Let’s say your job is to transform the entire landscape of learning and education. For the world.

In that room, we built an "Idea Catcher" wall, where employees could use Post-its to share ideas, questions, and answers with each other and with management.

We knew from previous studies that tough calls have a negative impact on employees for hours afterwards, and that constant monitoring can make call centers tricky places to work. But still, this Post-it showed up on the wall: “There’s positives in each call we take!” The energy that this space created showed us how involving agents in designing their jobs was a meaningful way to learn and grow.

Many of us spend much of our lives at work. We want it to be good and meaningful. But too often, workers don’t have the agency or satisfaction for that to be true. As work is increasingly monitored and automated, it’s critical that we design technology and tools to support workers' well being and sense of purpose. Over the years, we’ve pulled what we’ve learned from various projects into a set of four principles for designing good jobs.

1. Use new tools to encourage a sense of purpose 

Involving employees in creating the tools for their own work provides an opening for them to act on their own values, and reflect on what they like (or don’t like) about their jobs. During the mortgage project, our design team worked with call center agents and homeowners to understand both the “front stage” and the “back stage” of service delivery. For the agents, being able to make a personal connection with the caller was important to their sense of agency—their perception of their own capacity for making change and being creative at work. With that in mind, we prototyped a customer dashboard with a scripted conversation, along with customized cards that prompted agents to infuse their own words and experience into the interaction. Inspired by Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the cards included questions like: “What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten from someone else on your team?” and “Who is your role model? How would they handle the next call?” The prototypes addressed the tension between scripting and creativity, without burdening agents with additional oversight. Agents appreciated that the prompts recognized and supported their expertise and passion to engage with customers in a professional but personal way.

2. Design for values and emotions

Autonomy and creativity are foundational to high job satisfaction. Technologies like customer dashboards, time and task tracking, and software systems shape how we spend our time at work, what tasks we get to do and how, and fundamentally alter how we feel about and experience work. By designing for people’s values and emotions, new tools and systems have the potential to make work better. But that wasn’t the case when we first started working with a cruise line.

Employees (and also potential customers) thought that booking a vacation felt difficult, and compared the repetitive experience to the movie Groundhog Day. They constantly took their own notes, because the system didn't always log their entries, and had to search online to answer questions about their own services. To fix their frustration, the design team created a new dashboard that aggregated the information they were missing or currently keeping track of with pen and paper. By eliminating redundancy and cognitive load, the dashboard also made agents feel confident and informed—in their own eyes, as well as customers’. This marked a stark contrast to the earlier phase of work, in which agents had to look up the latest products and offerings on the company’s website, which gave them no more specialized knowledge than the customers calling in, deflating their image of themselves as confident service professionals.

The agents’ managers had a different problem: They hated using this tool on a desktop. They preferred to walk around and coach agents face-to-face. It was actually one of their favorite parts of the job. So, the designers moved the tool to a tablet, in order to preserve it.

3. Keep the work ecosystem in mind

Work is a true ecosystem; no worker or technology functions in isolation. Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day, social scientists formerly at AT&T Labs and Xerox PARC, define an information ecology as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment.” It’s extremely effective for thinking through how technology can’t be implemented in a vacuum. Instead, technology should be deployed in service of individual and group goals. In the mortgage project, we were also responsible for creating a brand new role that combined service and sales. Since sales roles were mainly based on commission, and service roles on efficiency-based metrics, there was not a lot to incentivize collaboration and a new approach to homeowner relationships. Because agents had a sense of fulfillment that came from growth and financial success based on their personal skills and charisma, which was baked into the compensation structure, it was important that they be comfortable with new metrics and incentives. So, the team designed the new role to encourage long-term customer relationships by increasing base pay and the weight of customer experience metrics, along with more typical efficiency measures like length and volume of calls.

4. Co-create with employees to build trust

Trust is foundational to ethical research and successful design. By working side-by-side with employees to co-create their roles and the impact of technology on their day-to-day work, companies can model openness during times of change. In a project to redesign the patient experience for a new hospital building, the design team identified a key technology in need of innovation: appointment and medication scheduling software. Making custom medications accurately and on time in a hospital environment is crucial, because a small mistake can be fatal, and delays can be painful.

At the time, medications could only be processed in the order in which they were received—not by the level of urgency. For pharmacists, being able to process medications to fit patients’ schedules would improve workflow and ease stress. For patients, it would mean more visibility into upcoming care, and less pressure on families to keep track of medications. The lack of information between departments forced family members to play the role of mediator, communicating vital information in terms they weren’t familiar with. Pharmacists were motivated to provide the best care, but the siloed operating systems that governed appointment and medication schedules created a disconnect. So, the designers created a software refresh that would provide visibility into patients’ schedules, making the pharmacists’ relationship to the software more mutual and rewarding. They no longer felt they were missing the information they needed to do their jobs well. The ability to have a more holistic view into a treatment and current state of health also allowed them to better connect with the patients, one of the most meaningful parts of their job.

Designing for job satisfaction isn’t just a nice to have; not only is it the right thing to do, it leads to increased performance and lower attrition, and employees that are better able to deliver high-quality services to customers.

Rethinking roles, or how new technologies might affect jobs at your company? Get in touch to hear how IDEO can help.

A few years ago, when I was working on a project to help a mortgage company improve the work experience at its call centers, we created a living-room-like space we called "The Oasis," a live prototype of a space to take a break and reflect between calls.

These are also the kinds of spaces where AI is appearing in the form of new tools and personal assistants. But having AI show up on platforms Gen Z considers safe spaces can be problematic.

In the first phase of our research testing the edges of AI products with a group of Gen Zs, they laid out three principles to help guide us in our designs: Skip the engineered reality; elevate human intuition and empathy; and build in transparency. This time around, we made those principles tangible, by prototyping various expressions of AI personal assistants, and asking our Gen Z partners to test them out in the context of their own lives. 

We were also testing a hypothesis of our own, based on our work with this cohort: For users to feel they have the freedom to play and engage with AI, we first need to design a strong foundation of psychological safety. We believe that’s key to unlocking social AI experiences that Gen Z will truly want to use.

‍

Prototyping Road Trips

Because we’re working with Gen Zs, we created a prototype to help with a real part of their lives—planning a weekend trip with their friends in a group chat. In one version, an AI personality acted as a concierge, pulling together activities and itineraries in a way that was transparent and obvious to everyone in the group. In the other, the AI personality acted as an agent, operating in the background on the user’s behalf, hidden from the group’s view. The agent still pulled travel details together, but only one user could see them. It could also provide advice beyond logistical support—like how to tactfully respond to a friend if there’s a disagreement about which activities to prioritize.

When our Gen Z participants interacted with the Concierge and Agent, they were excited by the idea that AI can unlock more joyful social experiences, but they also voiced deep concerns about privacy, safety, and consent. Our participants reported that AI feels much more invasive than other technologies—more powerful, and with a greater ability to cause harm. 

“Having your whole schedule, characteristics, how you live your life—that being stored and potentially sold is a lot more damaging and scary than simply what you’re searching or sites you’re visiting, which is what we experience today,” one high school student said.

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Taking a bigger leap

We took these insights back to our team, and worked together to weave them into prototypes of new tools for Gen Z group chats. But we wanted to move past incremental change. AI enables new possibilities that haven’t existed before, so it’s important that we take bigger leaps. Instead of creating a souped-up version of the prototype we’d already made with our Concierge and Agent, we brought together perspectives from across IDEO—game designers, toy inventors, play experts, Gen Zs, researchers, and a magician—to imagine and build visions for totally new experiences.

Together, we came up with a concept called AI Playground, a discrete space contained within the group chat that helps make clear what information the AI can see and what its capabilities are. We also made AI Playground opt-in only; no one would see it by default. 

What does that look like? Imagine, you’re planning a weekend trip with your friends, and you can conjure your AI assistant into the group chat for a specific task— like generating a curated playlist or building a dynamic itinerary, unique to your friends and to this particular outing. Because there is a clear boundary between the Playground and the group chat, users don’t have to worry that their AI assistant can access everything that they say—it’s up to them what they choose to share. And because all users had to opt-in to join the space, they can feel more comfortable playing around and being themselves—generating GIFs to share an inside joke, creating music to match their mood, and more. Our goal was to enhance their play and increase their agency without intruding on their personal conversations.

A Safe Space to Play 

AI Playground is an example of an alternative way we could integrate AI personal assistants in group use cases, one that sets the conditions for trust and play.  As we learned in our research with Gen Zs, their friendship and relationship development is a key part of who they are, and they are highly sensitive to technologies that interfere with these bonds. By building safer AI experiences across all spaces and domains, we can unlock a better AI-enabled future for everyone. For more windows into AI prototyping focused on mental health, and how AI might revolutionize the ways Gen Z is preparing for their careers, subscribe to the IDEO newsletter.

Parts of the images in this article were created/altered using generative AI.

Many of Gen Z’s friendships and much of their relationship development happens online—on social media, online gaming platforms, and in community spaces and group chats.

If you missed the first installment of our Gen Z + Gen AI prototyping series, you can catch up here.

“I could see myself starting up a business someday,” one high-school senior told us. “So say I wanted to make visuals, or ads for that—I'll want to have an AI guide me through the creative process.”

To find out what that really means in practice, we prototyped a set of creative AI tools and asked a cohort of young people between 13 and 24 to test them in their own work and lives. 

AI Creator vs. AI Collaborator

We built two contrasting prototype experiences to test the breadth of roles, capabilities, and personalities that a creative AI might have. On one end of this spectrum, we have an AI that is designed around speed and efficiency. Its interface is meant to feel highly-optimized to get you the best, most suitable output possible in minimal time.

On the other end, we created a hyper-collaborative creative partner more focused on helping you express your own unique style. This AI can not only create content, but share inspiration—helping Gen Zs discover new styles, see what’s trending, narrow down likes and dislikes, and gain insight into their own personal tastes.

We then customized our prototypes to fit each participant’s life context.

Exploring the values behind our designs 

In testing our range of prototypes, we found that no AI creative tool will work for everyone in every moment. Gen Zs have a wide spectrum of values when it comes to what they want from creative tools—some value speed and efficiency, while others value deeper collaboration and personal expression, and their values may fluctuate as they go from one context to another.

For quick, everyday creative needs—efficiency is key.

We heard from Gen Zs whose lives are extremely busy—from managing social media for multiple school groups to starting and running their own businesses, and keeping up with school, family, and social circles. There isn’t always a lot of time or energy left over for lengthy creative processes. "Social media doesn't feel meaningful to me, only the end goal,” a college freshman told us. “So I love that this AI can help me reach that end goal faster.”

To design for users like this one, the challenge lies in getting to a satisfying creative output faster, in minimum time. The distance between prompt and output should be short, and UX should offer visual templates and clear parameters that help people to create quickly in a well-defined style.

For creators, aspiring professionals, and artists, AI should show up as a more nuanced collaborator—offering tools for inspiration, personal expression, and a greater depth of creative control.

On the flip side, we heard from Gen Zs who aspire to create original and expressive work. "I think the ability to re-edit to make it have a more human touch and connection makes it a good tool. I want a good combination of AI and human—in graphic design at least,” Cole, one of our Gen Z collaborators, told us.

For Gen Zs who value craft and personal expression, the distance between prompt and output needs to be longer. Future collaborative AI interfaces will need to allow for more rounds of feedback, create more opportunities for humans to give direction, and be capable of working with multi-modal inputs—such as reference images, sketches, font files, CAD files, and more. These more collaborative AI experiences should still offer tools for humans to create and customize by hand. The challenge here is not to replace human craft and creativity, but to design interfaces that help AI augment our creativity to deliver output nuanced enough to match the richness of personal expression that Gen Zs want, alongside tools for them to add their unique vibe by hand, too. 

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An AI-enabled creative future 

So what does all this mean for the future of AI? AI experiences themselves should continuously work to establish user intent, and to understand what good means in different moments—does a user need a quick solution, or a creative partner? As a rule, designers should offer multiple options for how their AI shows up in terms of tone, role, capabilities, and suggestions to users, and put in the work to continually listen, discover, and elevate the most relevant options for their audience. 

Creativity is just one of the many spaces where we are listening, discovering, and experimenting with how to prototype future AI experiences; we are also exploring how AI should show up in education, mental health, work, social media, and more. Stay tuned for our next piece, which dives into how Gen Z feels about AI personal assistants entering the group chat.

Parts of the images in this article were created/altered using generative AI.

When we first started exploring the possibilities of creative AI products with a group of Gen Zs, they were clear about what they want: tools that scaffold the creative process, lower the barriers to entry, and connect creative communities.

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.