Since its founding over a century ago, Tokyo College of Music (TCM) has trained countless world-class musicians. Despite its well-established reputation, however, the school was feeling a pressing need to reconsider its role in order to remain relevant in a changing world.

The college had plans to build a second campus in Daikanyama, a prominent area of Tokyo known for being a hotbed for new global trends. Taking advantage of this opportunity, TCM leaders asked IDEO to help them develop a new concept for the school, and to redesign the learning experience while preserving a focus on classical music.

To kick off the research phases of the project, IDEO designers interviewed TCM students, and traveled to London, New York, and Boston visiting educational institutions, music schools, and arts facilities.

The team observed that students at music colleges outside of Japan were giving serious consideration to their career plans at an early stage in their studies, acquiring a variety of skills and mindsets through a well-rounded education. By contrast, TCM students were focused on learning and performing classical music, but tended not to have a clear image of future career opportunities.

IDEO proposed four specific directions for TCM’s new campus, based on an overarching theme of “culture, fields, and people collaborating across boundaries.” The first aim was to foster a business mindset and entrepreneurial spirit among the students that surpassed their classical music training. Next was to increase opportunities for actual performances, collaborations with professionals outside the school, and joint projects. The third aim was to position the college as a platform that would encourage the spontaneous creation of communities within and outside the school. The final aim was to develop students who were digitally savvy and fluent in new technologies, enabling them to continue evolving in response to developments in the real world. These goals are reflected in the various spaces of the school, as well as in the design of the experiences that occur in those spaces.

The most symbolic of these spaces is the Creative Lab. Originally intended as a library, the space now functions as a platform where people from within and outside the school community can collaborate and generate innovative ideas. The open layout, which encloses a cafeteria for students and faculty, can be altered depending on programming needs. The Creative Lab provides a venue not only for live performances in which the students can polish their improvisational skills, but for holding workshops and other events on topics such as cultural exchange, business, and new technologies.

New furniture and objects were carefully selected to inspire spontaneous encounters and conversation between students from different departments and staff, creating a flow of activity.

Even the landings on the staircases, which tend to be dead space, were designed with this concept in mind. One student commented that the space facilitates meeting new people and creates “opportunities for deeper interaction with students from other departments.” This intentional, open design has transformed the space into a hub within the school and the local community.

Through the new environment and educational opportunities at TCM's Daikanyama campus, students now have stronger opportunities to apply their creative talents in numerous fields worldwide, creating impact informed by the various perspectives, skills, and relationships they have developed at TCM.

Georgia is among the most populous states in the American South. It’s a place with a storied past and promising future—on the rise economically, and continuing its powerful cultural impact on music, TV, cuisine, and tourism. Over 10.4 million people call Georgia home, and nearly all of these people will at some point navigate the state’s websites for securing everyday services. Ideally, this online platform would provide unifying and accessible government resources for everyone, whether they’re renewing their vehicle registration, seeking a fishing license, or looking up tax law updates.

Georgia’s Office of Digital Services (DSGA), part of the Georgia Technology Authority, was challenged with designing a platform to modernize the collective and individual online presence of 80+ state agencies, many of which used visually disconnected formats and color palettes that could leave the public feeling confused. DSGA recognized that they could provide more efficient and higher quality service to the public if they simplified the language, designed the site from the user's point of view, and created a more cohesive look and feel across agencies.

IDEO worked with the DSGA to identify the priorities of Georgia residents who use the various agency websites. On a road trip from Savannah to Atlanta, with stops in Macon and Dublin, the IDEO team immersed themselves in the rich culture of Georgia, connecting with social workers, low-income residents, state agency leadership and civic organizations to learn how Georgia’s digital properties could better address their disparate needs.

The design research underscored that there isn’t just one Georgia—it’s a tapestry of people, geographies and political orientations. Yet several common themes emerged, including:

Georgians want their government to “give it to them straight.” On the redesigned Georgia.gov platform, the people of Georgia can easily search popular topics to get the information they need. This includes learning how to apply for food stamps, renewing a business license, or simply finding out the location of a local office in their area. If a user has remaining questions, they can connect directly with a real human for further assistance, balancing direct information with warmth and a personal touch. User feedback on the site provides the opportunity for continuous design improvement.

Georgians want to take pride in the legacy and the future of their state. IDEO developed an entirely new design system with new navigational elements, fonts, and a color palette inspired by Georgia’s landscapes, all of which can be modified for individual agencies while remaining consistent with the state brand.

A distillation of the original Georgia seal adds authority, and new icons anchor the site’s menus and bring more clarity to the search function. The platform was designed to be Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA compliant, providing clear and accessible page content that adheres to federal laws and international web standards. To instill trust in Georgia’s online presence, each page also has a header that indicates it’s an official Georgia State website and outlines the uniform features constituents can use to identify this.

With improved navigation and easy-to-access prioritized content, Georgia.gov is a much more efficient platform for addressing requests from citizens. The site projects a happy-to-help, citizen-centered approach that aims to empower all Georgians so that they feel confident, informed, and prepared.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 million Americans have diabetes, almost 10% of the population. The vast majority of these diagnoses are type 2, which is commonly treated through a combination of medicine, diet, and exercise. Today, one of the major barriers to better outcomes is access to trusted information. As little as 15 percent of people with diabetes receive adequate education from their healthcare providers on managing their disease and making recommended lifestyle changes.

Ascensia Diabetes Care, a global healthcare company, has been a leader in diabetes treatment for over 70 years, known primarily for producing blood glucose meters. IDEO has worked with Ascensia for more than a decade, helping develop and design their CONTOUR NEXT ONE meter in 2016. In 2017, Ascensia engaged IDEO with a new goal of moving the company beyond physical devices. Ascensia envisioned a first-of-its-kind approach to educating and monitoring diabetes patients. In partnership with IDEO, they wanted to build a comprehensive solution—one that would not simply take glucose readings and document food intake, but would consider all factors that impact a person's health.

Through deep collaboration, Ascensia and IDEO built a powerful app-based service. The project began with a strategic vision for the experience and ended with the delivery of an all-encompassing health offering, including training of providers, packaging, app design, content creation, and visual design.

The patient experience married data and tracking, real-life mentorship, and personalized content. When a patient signed up, they were paired with a Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) who created a tailored program based on their needs and linked them to relevant articles on topics like cooking, mental wellbeing, and sexual health. The IDEO team led the charge in hiring and training guides, crafting the educational content, and even designing the content management hub.

The data engine behind the app is another one of the program's stand-out qualities. The app pulled data from multiple data sources—exercise bands and glucose meters—to provide constant feedback, track progress, and continually refine the experience. To generate empathy, as well as build the app's initial data set, IDEO's data scientists tested the product on themselves. One designer wore a wrist full of exercise monitors around the office and tracked her blood sugar after every meal.

The app-based service was tested with 60 people and demonstrated remarkable early results. Only two participants failed to complete the study—a stunning success rate when adherence to therapy for chronic illnesses in developed countries averages around 50%. Additionally, participants reported drastic improvements in both physical and mental health. One recently widowed 70-year-old woman emerged from depression, returned to swimming, and started having regular blood sugar readings.

The project required Ascensia to embrace new ways of working internally, adopt a broader view of their offering, and ultimately expand the way they serve people with diabetes.

When Mr. Gordon told his fifth grade students they were taking a field trip on a bus, many of them envisioned the city bus that they ride each day to school. But when they saw the Verizon Explorer Lab pull into the school parking lot, they realized a unique experience awaited them. Painted in bright colors, this bus promised something very different from their daily commute.

“Climb aboard, explorers!” says the Lead Explorer. The students walk through the bus’ sliding doors and inside, where instead of rows of seats, they find a sleek research lab. Suddenly, the lights dim. The bus makes a rumbling noise as though it’s about to lift off. And on a large screen, a vision of Earth from space appears. The students listen and point as the video narrator briefs them on NASA’s ongoing search for life in space.

Science education isn’t always this fun. Some kids have a chance to learn through interactive games, immersive experiences, or engaging field trips; but many lack access to rich educational experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). As a result, they can be less likely to pursue careers in STEM, though many future jobs will demand mastery of these subjects. This not only impacts a student’s potential and future, but reduces the diversity and number of qualified STEM job applicants.

In under-resourced schools, students are often limited to the scarce tools available for STEM learning in their classrooms. Many kids rarely have a chance to leave their neighborhoods. For these kids, mobile learning experiences that come to their school offer unparalleled exposure to cutting-edge, technologically advanced, and—most importantly—inspiring gateways into these critical academic subjects.

As part of its focus on digital inclusion, Verizon partnered with IDEO to share the excitement of STEM learning with middle schoolers. To facilitate access and discovery of STEM, the team designed a learning experience that takes place on a coach bus and can be scaled to reach kids across the nation.

The team set out to transform the bus into the Verizon Explorer Lab: a futuristic research lab that transports kids to new environments, from outer space to under the sea. As part of the larger Verizon Innovative Learning program, the Verizon Explorer Lab offers delightful and rigorous content that meets national science standards.

A multidisciplinary team comprised of designers across interaction, communication, environments, games, and software partnered with Verizon to bring the Verizon Explorer Lab to life.

To keep the student at the center of the experience, the team designed alongside kids. Their gravitation toward play, interaction, and technology inspired the digital game that students play onboard the bus. When developing the game’s narrative, the designers turned to popular kids’ books and movies. What began as a card game prototype eventually became a 360-degree video and virtual reality expedition to Mars—complete with a custom musical score—that introduces middle schoolers to engineering basics.

After stepping through the bus doors and taking a tour of the solar system, Mr. Gordon’s students receive an emergency call from NASA: They must rescue the missing Curiosity rover, which is dedicated to collecting evidence of life on Mars. Eager to save Curiosity, the students become immersed in the adventure at hand. And through the adventure, they become immersed in science.

Students use tablets to design their own Mars rover. Each rover appears on a large screen and traverses the planet’s extreme terrain. The goal is to collect data that suggests life on Mars, including ice deposits, photos, and more. Students iterate on their rover’s design—wheels, power sources, and sensors—to test if it can stand up against dust storms and craters. The team consulted a NASA planetary scientist to ensure accuracy, as well as educators to establish cohesion with classroom curricula.

During the game, students are encouraged to compare designs and learn from each other: One rover may be able to travel long distances and take various photos, while another can carry large quantities of ice and sediment samples but can’t go far because of its size. At the end of the mission, the group finds Curiosity and sends all of the evidence they’ve collectively gathered back to NASA to aid the search for life beyond Earth. Before departing the bus, students watch an animated video that explains various jobs in STEM and encourages kids to pursue one of these careers.

The Verizon Explorer Lab teaches students the engineering design loop, the value of collaboration and teamwork, and what a career in STEM might look like. The mission to Mars game is just one of many potential STEM learning opportunities for students and integrated, customizable learning modules for teachers.

Since launch, the Verizon Explorer Lab has traveled to various parts of the United States and reached thousands of kids. It continues to be managed by Learning Undefeated, Verizon’s nonprofit partner. By designing for and with students, it’s possible to create educational experiences that facilitate meaningful learning and genuine fun. The Verizon Explorer Lab represents progress towards a more inclusive future for employers and the STEM field.

We met a beer and sausage vendor in Germany who keeps an array of hats stored on his gearshift, a humorous-looking makeshift hat hook. When we asked him more about it he explained that he often sells his wares at football games, so it’s important that he wear the right football club’s hat. “One time, when I wore the wrong one by accident, they called me an ass and tipped the van over,” he said. “You always have to howl with the wolves.”

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.

You can’t beat the smell of fresh ink, the texture and weight of high-quality paper, and the sound as you flip through the pages. When holding a magazine, I’m not simply reading it—I’m immersed in it.

I asked my fellow designers which publications they find the most exciting, and I’ve included a few of my favorites, too:

1. Apartamento

Yes, I suppose it’s an interior design magazine, but instead of focusing on beautiful, minimalist, multi-million-dollar houses (not that there's anything wrong with that), Apartamento covers real, lived-in homes and the creative people who occupy them. Raw portrait photography, cluttered spaces, and intimate interviews show how people really choose to live. Based in Barcelona, Spain, it’s survived through subscription revenue and a higher newsstand price, and has bucked the trend of featuring numerous ads or sponsored content. Plus, its perfect novel size, centered layout, patterned spine, and chunky typography are delightfully raw and unfussy. —Lindsey Turner, IDEO Cambridge

2. B

B magazine is published in South Korea. Every issue, it takes an advertisement-free, documentary approach to a single iconic brand. It’s covered many amazing brands, from the luxury to the mundane, including LEGO, Ray-Ban, and Bic. Each issue goes deep into the people, history, evolution, products, experiences, and philosophies of the brand it covers. Fans and collectors are also often included. I recommend it to anyone who likes branding and brand strategy, or just loves products and design. The many ways it looks at a brand and all its expressions goes far beyond simple identity and logo. —Clark Scheffy, IDEO San Francisco

3. Banana

In 2014, first generation Asian-Americans Vicky Ho and Kathleen Tso launched Banana magazine, a lifestyle magazine dedicated to exploring the intersection of Eastern and Western cultures. Ho and Tso are not claiming to be experts in Asian culture, but rather are discovering it right alongside their readers. Their goal is to understand what this third identity—neither Asian nor American, but Asian-American—means. As a designer, I think it’s fascinating to understand how cultures can blend together. With the growing influence of Asian countries on design trends, this magazine is relevant, vibrant, and bold, and offers great graphic design inspiration. —Coline Prevost, IDEO Palo Alto

4. [BranD]

[BranD] is a Hong Kong-based magazine that explores communication design in visual art, advertising, products, graphic design, and architecture. It brings together designers, artists, art directors, marketing specialists, and business-minded people of all stripes to share new ways to express ideas and brands visually. I'm an avid reader of [BranD] for inspiration in my craft; it's a great vehicle to stay connected to the ways other designers are stretching their own skills and building their crafts in a discipline—comms design—that is always evolving. —Joshua Lavra, IDEO San Francisco

5. Cat People

Cat People is an English-Japanese bilingual magazine featuring interviews and works by cat-obsessed artists, designers, photographers, and writers. It’s only in its first issue, but it’s already sold out. I’m very excited for future editions because this magazine promises magnificent inspiration for design and feline die-hards (like me). —Camden Foley, IDEO Palo Alto

6. Cereal

Cereal is a biannual travel and style magazine based in the United Kingdom. Each issue highlights engaging interviews and stories about unique design, art, and fashion on a specific theme, such as sustainability or desire. I’ve followed this magazine since its inception in 2016 and have every issue to date. Cereal’s publisher offers beautiful magazines, city guides, art prints, and even a children’s book—all with some of the best photography and design I’ve ever seen. —Camden Foley, IDEO Palo Alto

7. The Collective Quarterly

The Collective Quarterly is a magazine about travel and creativity across the U.S. The magazine staff—a rotating team of writers, photographers, illustrators, and other creatives—visits small towns or regions around the country to interview artists, creators, and other cornerstones of local life. As a photographer, the exceptional photography caught my eye, particularly that of one of the co-founders, who still shoots film photos like I do. It’s inspired me to get out with my camera more often. I recommend the magazine to anyone who seeks a deeper appreciation of creativity in intimate communities, hopes to explore non-urban corners of the country, or wants to bask in the magic of film photos. —Tara Safaie, IDEO San Francisco

8. Drift

Back when I was a barista, my mornings were spent adjusting the espresso machine's grind and my tamp to each bean's age and provenance. I learned that coffee is ubiquitous, yet highly circumstantial; you can find it in virtually any city, and yet each urban environment and its inhabitants have radically different rituals, cultures, and methods of consumption for this most essential drink. Drift transports its readers to different cities and their respective coffee cultures, allowing readers to intimately engage with new adventures in new places through a common cup of joe. —Adam Cristobal, IDEO Palo Alto

9. The Gourmand

As we reach the peak of our food media zeitgeist, The Gourmand has emerged as one of the leading alternative voices in the space, covering everything from new ways of visualizing food emoji to Georgia O'Keeffe's strict diet. Boasting both witty writing and distinct art direction, the magazine offers a unique perspective and inspirational fodder to foodies, designers, and creatives of all stripes as we look for more visually appetizing ways to engage with the world. —Adam Cristobal, IDEO Palo Alto

10. Offscreen

Offscreen is a print magazine published three times a year, as well as a weekly newsletter, that takes a thoughtful, human-centred approach to technology. It’s is a slow counterbalance to the fast pace of popular media, exploring creativity and design through introspective writing and thoughtful human stories. Offscreen is a proponent of the “slow web,” celebrating the idea that not all that is instant and convenient is necessarily good for us. —Nathan Paterson, IDEO Tokyo

11. Surface

Surface is a New York magazine that covers a little of everything—design, architecture, fashion, culture, and travel. I picked it up because I judge magazines by their covers. Each cover features a great close-up portrait of a creative person—an architect, musician, industrial designer, etc. The portrait is paired with restrained, Swiss-style black typography and a grid well versed in white space. The magazine examines culture through the lens of design and has a whiff of one of my favorite blogs, Sight Unseen. It's conspicuous consumption for sure, but sometimes that's what magazines are for. —Lindsey Turner, IDEO Cambridge

Next time you want to explore cutting-edge design—or just enjoy a little eye candy—crack the cover of one of these magazines for an inspiring read.

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Thanks to the digital revolution, fewer and fewer of us are getting our hands on paper copies of books, magazines, or newspapers these days. Online subscriptions and digital versions can fill the void, but sometimes, picking up a glossy magazine is simply the best way to absorb inspiration.

As a data scientist, this idea got my gears turning: What if I could use machine learning to build a laugh-detecting algorithm?

Prototyping is a great way to explore how emerging technologies will play a role in our connected future. But instead of focusing on how we will teach our machines to sense human behavior, I’m interested in designing what we will do with the information our devices are learning. In a world filled with machines that learn and interact with us, it’s important that they are able to respond to all parts of our humanity—including the things that make us laugh.

I wanted to see what kind of laugh detection prototype I could build in a few weeks. Here’s how I did it:

1. Building the algorithm

To build the laugh-detecting algorithm, I knew that I wanted to use deep learning, so I turned to Keras, a programming library which makes creating neural networks fast and simple. To train the laugh detector, I needed to use sequences of audio as the input and predict whether or not laughter would result as the output. Fortunately, I found Audioset, a collection of over two million 10-second audio clips with labels from over 6,000 categories. Using a subset of the Audioset collection that is half laughter and half speech, I was able to get a laughter detection model running with 87 percent accuracy within a few days.

After creating a training dataset, I got started on the machine learning challenge. The Audioset data does not contain the extracted raw audio, only a 128-length feature vector for each second of input, which is created using a convolutional network operating on the raw audio spectrogram. These feature vectors will be the input for the machine learning algorithm, and the output will be a binary label of whether the input contained laughter. Since I am working with a relatively large dataset, I wanted to use some deep learning methods, so I turned to keras, an API that makes creating and training neural networks extremely simple, while still leveraging the computational efficiency of optimized tensor computation libraries like TensorFlow and Theano.

Since the model input is sequential, I wanted to try a recurrent neural network first. I started with a single layer LSTM model that quickly converged to 87% accuracy. Learning from the code in a very similar project, I found that applying batch normalization to the LSTM input was very important for getting the model to converge. One of the headaches of deep learning is that seemingly trivial details like this can have a large impact on convergence. I was happy with the performance of my first LSTM model, but I decided to try out a couple more options before moving on. I tried a 3-layer LSTM (because if one layer is good, three must be better), then I tried a simple logistic regression model to see if the fancy RNN architecture made a difference. The models performed with 88% and 86% accuracy, respectively, which showed me that, in this case, more layers did not equate to more power.

Ultimately, I ended up choosing the single layer LSTM, even though it was larger than the logistic regression model, because it was able to handle variable length input. The training data was all sequences that were 10 seconds long, but I wanted the laughter detector to be able to respond quicker than that. While the logistic regression could only operate on input that was the same length as the training data, the LSTM model can still operate on any input length, as long as it is split into one-second chunks.

To take the trained model and run it as a live laugh detector, I put together a python script that pulled together a few different steps. First, the audio is captured from the microphone using pyaudio and chunked into three-second clips. (The length of these clips is an adjustable parameter.) The raw audio is then fed into the pre-trained vggish network and converted to a sequence of feature vectors with the same parameters I used for creating the Audioset training data. The sequence is then fed into the trained LSTM model, and the laughter prediction score is returned and written to a timestamped .csv file. By default, the raw audio is then discarded, and only the score is saved. That way, there are no concerns about storing or transmitting anyone’s private conversations. By running the audio capture and processing in separate threads, I was able to run this continuously without any lag on my laptop.

2. Designing the experience

Once I had the ability to measure laughter, I had to tackle the real design challenge: How do we implement the laugh detector in project spaces without making it seem obnoxious or creepy?

I enlisted the help of a few smart colleagues to approach the challenge from multiple angles: a software designer experienced in designing for play, an environments designer to explore how the detector would show up in a project space, and a communication designer who’s written on the science of laughter.

We had a brainstorm around what we might be able to do with a laughter detector, and the ideas poured in. Perhaps we could use laughter as a weekly indicator of morale (similar to Bhutan’s gross national happiness), or host a competition between project teams for who laughed the most? If we could determine when people are laughing, maybe we could figure out why they are laughing, too. We could determine when laughter is genuine or just polite, which jokes are the funniest, or even measure who is laughed at the most.

Some of the more wild ideas included a gif of an IDEO Chicago director Jon Wettersten (below) who laughs along with us, or an alert that would play videos of clowns if we went too long without laughing.

Ultimately, we wanted to select ideas that would give teams insight into their laughter, but not be too intrusive or prescriptive.

Information systems shouldn’t overwhelm users—particularly when that information concerns people’s moods. There are times when it’s appropriate to not be laughing; you don’t want your smartwatch telling you to laugh more during your grandma’s funeral. And if we were to build a device that listens for laughter, we'd need to make sure that we communicate and maintain people’s expectations of privacy.

With all this in mind, we narrowed it down to two concepts that we would take forward into the prototyping phase.

3. Hatching prototypes

The first thing we made was a simple information dashboard built in Dash. We referred to this design as a “FitBit for laughter,” as it was meant to help teams set goals and measure their progress towards those goals.

This raised the the question, what if you could track your emotional health in the same way that you tracked your physical health? What kind of goals would you set? What would your “laughter workout” look like?

To start, we measured laughs by time of day over a period of 24 hours, laughs per day over the past week, and how close teams are to achieving a daily “laugh quota.”

The second prototype used the output of the laugh detector to control the color and intensity of a Hue lightbulb. When there is a lot of laughter in a room, the light glows a bright yellow to mirror the warmth that laughter brings to a space. When there is less laughter, it transitions to a dim blue to help teams stay calm and focused. In this way, the environment responds to the activities and emotion of its inhabitants.

What if the smart systems we create could react not only to a user’s presence or interaction, but adapt to the user’s mood? How might we design smart systems or spaces that are emotionally responsive?

4. User testing

We wanted to see how people would react to the laugh-bulb, so we got a few colleagues to sit down and test it out. The original plan was to play funny videos to stimulate laughter, but as soon as people sat down, they started joking so much, the videos were unnecessary.

Laughter is a reinforcing behavior; when you laugh, the people around you laugh too, creating a virtuous cycle that can leave you laughing until you’re sore. Seeing the light grow brighter as the room fills with laughter adds energy to that cycle. The group that came in to test the laugh-bulb ended up laughing so much that you could hear them throughout the studio.

WATCH: Testing the laugh-bulb prototype.

Next up, I’d love to put these prototypes in front of more people to see whether quantifying laughter can affect their mood. And I'm left wondering, which emotional or mental health signals could be measured and recorded next?

As more aspects of our lives are recorded, we are going to be able to quantify and improve our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine. Let’s design these systems not just to make us smarter, but to make us more joyful, too.

Play goes hand in hand with innovation. I learned this from Brendan Boyle, director of IDEO's Play Lab, who says that if you measure the amount of laughter in a project space, the teams who chuckle most are also the most successful.

As soon as the rain stopped, we got on our bikes to survey the damage. We saw the flowers on the horizon: droopy and sad-looking. Then, suddenly, they started illuminating, one after the other—opening up, blooming. To this day, we still don’t know how they came to life. But the sight was exactly what we had envisioned. Better even.

That was 2014: the official start of FoldHaus Art Collective. Since then, our art installations have become bigger and more audacious. Shrumen Lumen, five massive, origami mushrooms, followed in 2016 (they’re now on exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum), and we most recently built a five-story tall, geodesic sphere covered with 42 origami shells called RadiaLumia.

Each project takes months to design, prototype, and build. Which means I often get asked: Why do you spend your nights and weekends doing this when you have a fulfilling day job as a creative leader?

For me, it means that I get to work with a bunch of other creative types who pitch in to build something beautiful that’s bigger than what any one of us could do on our own. I get to work with my hands in a way that’s rare in my day job, and every project stretches my own sense of what’s possible.

And because FoldHaus projects are always a group effort, we need to broaden the question: Why do any of us—between five and 30 volunteers contribute to our projects on any given weekend—give up sleeping in to solder? Or skip the beach to code LED patterns? As one of the leaders of the group, I have learned a few things about what it takes to build a strong community and take a bold vision from a Post-it to the Playa.

Here are the 5 principles that have helped this team pull off increasingly ambitious projects:

1. Set an audacious—and contagious—vision

Drawing in a team requires not only that you love your idea, but that others do, too. After all, if you’re asking them to volunteer their time, they’ve got to be pulled in week after week, when they could easily be at the taco truck.

Blumen Lumen was a hit because everybody loves flowers. With the Shrumen Lumen, it took some convincing—many worried about associations with 'shrooms at Burning Man. This year, I made sure to test out the RadiaLumia concept with a few key members of the team, so I knew I had broad support. The buy-in worked, and has yielded our biggest team of volunteers by far.

The bottom line: Pressure-test your idea early—before you get too attached to it—so others will want to join up and help you realize the vision.

2. Stand on your own shoulders

Leading people to a grand vision is impressive only if you can actually pull it off. Ladder up from where you (and your team) actually are to where you want to go. And, acknowledge that it may not all happen at once.

Even before our Blumen Lumen, we built three shade structures for Burning Man. One was a disaster, but we learned from it. Now, we ensure that we are leveraging all we mastered the previous year to create the next installation. People are drawn to us because of our bold vision, but they stay with us because they know we have what it takes to make it happen.

The bottom line: Learn from previous outings that you can get over the mountain, so you can ask people to stretch and meet a new challenge.

Folding the origami pieces looks easier than it is.

3. Make it accessible

Part of the fun of leading a creative team is building camaraderie and community. But that can be constrained if a project requires too much specialized knowledge. Ensuring that part of the project is achievable by those without technical or unique skills is key to drawing a crowd when you need it.

On all of our projects, a big part of the effort is folding the plastic origami pieces. That requires pure manual labor, and anyone can be trained to do it, so we hosted all-hands-on-deck build parties every weekend leading up to Burning Man.

The bottom line: If you want to draw a crowd, create easy ways for people to participate without specialized expertise.

4. Leave room for individual passions

When people are motivated to do something, get out of their way and let them go for it. Given the freedom, teammates will create something together that’s more amazing than what a single creative leader could pull off. Set the vision, then let people self-select into groups to get it done.

With RadiaLumia, no one person knows everything that’s going on at every given moment, which is kind of scary but also amazing, because it’s coming together despite—or because—of that!

When we shared the vision at the kickoff meeting in February, there were a bunch of people who’d only just met. Within minutes, they were already troubleshooting light placement. By the end of the afternoon, they’d demonstrated a cool light show—on day one! We now have several self-directed teams that are loosely connected, but working independently.

The bottom line: If you create a compelling enough vision and rough guardrails, you’ll create the conditions for people to self-organize in a way that will surprise you.

5. Embrace ambiguity

The beauty of large-scale creative endeavors is in all of the unknowns. Try to remain flexible about who realizes the vision (and how).

Each year there are moments of extreme uncertainty. Weeks before installing the Shrumen Lumen at Burning Man, the origami kept getting stuck when we tried to pull the stems over the steel substructure that would anchor them to the ground. This was completely unexpected and took two weekends to debug. (Spoiler alert: We fixed it, but not without panic!). Troubleshooting is part of the process.

The bottom line: Expect the unexpected, and look for the beauty and lessons in it rather than the difficulty.

One of the most rewarding parts of FoldHaus is that while I may set the vision, once we pull off a communal project, the whole team feels immense ownership and pride. Being able to share both the process and the result is what makes the late nights and desert rainstorms worth it.

See RadiaLumia come to life at Burning Man 2018.

Also: We’d love to hear about your ambitious team efforts, at Burning Man or elsewhere, using the hashtag #MakerArt.

Special thanks to Amy Bonsall for her massive help crafting this story.

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We’d been working 16-hour shifts to install our art piece, a series of 10 larger-than-life, undulating, mechanical origami flowers. It was our first big build at Burning Man, and it took way longer than we expected to set up. After days, the flowers still weren’t working. Then came a torrential rainstorm.

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.