Keeping diabetes in check isn’t easy. Between checking blood sugar multiple times a day, keeping a detailed activity record, and logging food intake, staying healthy can be daunting.

But a recent advance in smart diabetes management—Ascensia’s CONTOUR NEXT ONE blood glucose meter and the CONTOUR DIABETES app—can give patients more clarity and control.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE is the latest product to spring from a multi-year collaboration between IDEO and Ascensia Diabetes Care (formerly Bayer Diabetes Care). In 2009, Ascensia and IDEO developed the award-winning CONTOUR USB blood glucose meter—the first meter to plug directly into a computer, providing patients and their doctors with instant access to blood sugar data and personal trend reports.

Buoyed by the success of the first collaboration, Ascensia asked IDEO to help design a next-generation diabetes management system (and the company’s first internet-connected device).

To help reduce the stigma of checking blood sugar in public, IDEO designed the CONTOUR NEXT ONE to look and behave like today’s modern tech devices. The highly simplified, seamless system allows patients to upload blood glucose readings automatically to the app, which helps guide informed, real-time decisions. The meter’s red, green, or yellow smartLIGHT feature gives instant feedback about whether blood sugar levels are below, within, or above the target range.

Seeing contextual data, which includes physical activity logs and photos of meals, paired with recent and historic blood sugar levels, nudges patients toward healthier lifestyle choices and better control of their condition.

For doctors, the accuracy and quantity of the data combined with the app’s easy-to-read pattern views invites more comprehensive, actionable conversations with patients.

The CONTOUR NEXT ONE hit shelves in Europe in 2016 and is now available in the U.S. Ascensia is poised to develop more products enabled by rich, personalized data to help people with diabetes live longer, healthier lives.

What if we could use the sky to provide alternative solutions to these problems, creating more space for living and transportation? What exciting future awaits us?

At JAXA’s Aeronautical Technology Directorate (ATD), researchers are conducting research and development on aviation science and technology for the future. They are working to affect positive impact through research like noise reduction of airframe and an integrated aircraft operation management system for disaster relief and crisis management.

Normally, JAXA begins their projects by examining the needs of the aircraft industry or comparing themselves against global technology standards. This approach often leads to ideas that are merely an extension of the current technology. JAXA needed a new approach in order to create radical ideas and real change.

The key question was: What solutions would emerge from prioritizing people’s needs over the most advanced technological possibility—taking a human-centered approach to tackling the most pressing societal challenges?

JAXA ATD voluntary partnered with IDEO to attempt to answer this question, identifying new research areas by envisioning people’s needs in the near future. Together, JAXA and IDEO developed four scenarios of future societies.

The scenarios do not necessarily focus on technologies. Rather, the focus is on telling stories that help readers put themselves in the shoes of the four personas. At the same time, the team worked with industrial designers to illustrate convincing demonstrations of the vehicles and machines of the future.

JAXA’s team embraces the belief that “technologies developed at JAXA should incorporate emotional aspects to blend seamlessly into people’s lives.” Driven by this philosophy, the visual design of the four scenarios used a friendly illustration style intended to be approachable and understandable for people of all ages.

In order to develop human-centered concepts from scratch, the IDEO and JAXA team first undertook research and inspiration-gathering. They skydived, observed cities from above, brainstormed with students from the department of architecture at Waseda University. They interviewed airline employees, a former Judo world champion, skyscraper lovers, a business producer who focuses on new working styles. Throughout the research phase, the team explored the possibilities of the sky as a “living space,” not just a place for transportation.

The team was surprised and excited when they learned from a former fighter pilot that old cockpit designs were inspired by the Japanese tea room, highlighting a historic precedent for taking inspiration from real life to inform new technology designs.

The team synthesized their research and developed several concepts, each informed by a different social issue or pressing concern. Each issue was brought to life through a fictional personal narrative.

How might we relieve city congestion and pollution using the sky, while still keeping it clean and blue? Floating public lights, a skyway that regulates air traffic, camouflaged planes that keep the sky blue—concepts introduced in this scenario were the closest to the technologies already being researched at JAXA ATD. They show us how the sky could become an infrastructure that supports our daily lives. Meet Ayame, a girl from Gunma prefecture, ready to begin her college life in Osaka.

How might we make travel feel easy for people of all ages, no matter how far they need to go? While the researchers at JAXA ATD are working to improve the mobility of aircraft, like reducing air friction or increasing the engine efficiency of aircraft, this scenario explored how people could travel door-to-door through the sky with or without aircraft. A day-in-the-life of Naoto, a 72-year-old man who commutes twice a month from Tottori to Tokyo for medical checkups.

How might we leverage the sky as a resource for reusable energy and economic growth? One of the criteria of JAXA’s R&D activities is to improve the environment. While JAXA has been focusing on “protecting” the environment, this scenario focused on “creating” new environments. A day-in-the-life of Toshi, who runs a “sky-to-table” farming business.

How might we help people live with peace of mind, even during a disaster? JAXA’s disaster relief technologies have been extremely valuable in countries like Japan, which frequently suffers from natural disasters. In this scenario, we approached the problem from victims’ point of view while exploiting the potential of a network of aircrafts and other flying objects. Here's the story of Yuri, a victim of an earthquake in Tokyo who reunites with her family after evacuating to the sky.

The purpose of the project website is not to present answers, but to introduce new directions towards an exciting future. By presenting JAXA ATD’s vision through these four scenarios, the team invited people from all industries and of all ages to participate in co-creating the future.

Just like movies, cartoons, and novels from childhood stimulate the imagination, this project aims to spark new conversation and vision for a radically different, positive future.

By illustrating and communicating a more human-centered future to a wider audience, Japan’s top aeronautical technology development agency may already be changing the future of the sky for the better.

The speed and scale of change in our world are unprecedented. As more people relocate to cities, our lives are impacted by urbanization problems such as pollution, congestion, depopulation of rural areas, resource, and energy deficiencies.

‍

For factory operators, a smart valve is a game-changer. It gathers data on how smoothly the system is running and feeds it to an app, making it easier to troubleshoot from anywhere. And when things get overheated, it can automatically shut down the machinery, avoiding a meltdown.

Georg Fischer (GF), the Swiss-based, B2B industrial manufacturer collaborated with IDEO to design that valve, along with a system that adds value for generations of engineers to come.

And there were some surprises along the way. When the team set out to interview customers, they learned a lot about their real needs. “We showed a customer a sacrificial concept of a smart valve and asked, what do you think about this?” says Laura Barrabia, GF’s Head of Corporate Design Thinking. “The customer answered, we don’t want your valve to be smart, we want to be smart. If GF is providing a smart valve, where is my value?”

For GF Piping Systems, these insights helped shape initial prototypes and guided the direction of the design to something that would tie parts together into smart systems and more efficient industrial facilities—a competitive advantage.

Yves Serra, GF’s CEO, recognized early on that his company needed to strengthen its customer-centricity and digital capacity, so he approached IDEO to begin shifting GF’s culture from engineering-led and procedural to customer-focused, multidisciplinary, collaborative, and flexible. That kicked off a decade-long relationship that would help GF take a design-based approach.

Learn what it means to move from being technology-driven to being truly customer-centric.

To help GF identify clients’ pain points and address them with new digital offers, IDEO proposed three “lighthouse” projects, one for each of GF’s divisions: Piping Systems, Casting Solutions, and Machining Solutions. Lighthouse projects (also called “Beacons”) are proofs of concept that light the way for an organization and help it shift its way of working.

For example, GF Machining Solutions built a prototype for an application that uses real-time data to help customers identify and fix problems in the machines, laying the foundation for truly predictive maintenance. Making data streams more transparent for customers also simplified life for the GF service engineers, who keep the machines running.

Learn how Georg Fischer is moving from hardware offerings to digital solutions.

For GF Piping Systems, the design team developed the GF Digital Line, a set of products, apps, dashboards, and other services that help customers plan, install, and maintain water and chemical piping systems. GF teams went back to customers to test several prototypes and gather feedback on the Digital Line and make sure it addressed current and future needs. They also built internal capabilities to support product development, laying the groundwork for future innovation.

Lastly, IDEO helped GF Casting Solutions escape the “commodity trap” of competing with foreign automotive suppliers. To better understand the pressures car manufacturers face, the design team explored the development cycles of two car manufacturers. They learned how challenging it is to implement solutions to reduce vehicle weight—essential for cutting fuel consumption. As an expert in aluminum die casting, GF was well positioned to help manufacturers meet that challenge, not just with quality parts, but also with digital engineering to deliver cutting-edge lightweight casting solutions, which are harder to replicate.

By the end of these lighthouse projects, GF had rolled out a global design thinking training program that had touched more than 1000 employees. After the training, employees throughout the organization adopted a new way of working and became passionate ambassadors. The enthusiasm spread from the R&D department to HR to finance and many other departments.

Today, GF has permanent design thinking and digital teams to continue this work. All three divisions aim to launch the first releases of their lighthouse projects by early 2019. And with every project, GF’s business—and solutions—get smarter about how to meet the needs of a fast changing world.

IHG’s ambition is to grow in service of its guests around the world. IHG’s Atlanta-based team had identified a major opportunity for hotels in the midscale space—a market segment known for its inconsistency.

Alongside colleagues at London-based forpeople, IDEO was invited to help IHG shepherd that business opportunity into a human one, by asking how IHG might reimagine the everyday travel experience for people relying on this category of hotel. What kind of offer might resonate equally with guests and with the owner/operators who’d need to buy into a new brand and bring it to life?

IDEO began by talking to travelers to better understand their lives, values, and needs—travelers who spend one or two nights on the road a few times every year; travelers who regularly take short trips to small cities or away from city centers; and travelers who live on the road, moving from hotel to hotel. These included court stenographers, medical technicians, consultants, conference-goers, and more.

Early research insights evolved into two distinct concepts for a new hotel brand, which were built out into two full-scale physical prototypes at IHG’s design center in Atlanta. Over three weeks, IDEO and its IHG partners led potential guests and hotel owners through each model, gathering their feedback on new formats for breakfast offerings, service details, booking experiences, and overall tone.

The investment in prototyping paid off with surprising and actionable insights. Despite wide variation in occupation and income, these guests are sophisticated and self-reliant; they know what’s out there, and they know what’s reasonable to expect. In fact, many describe a syndrome IDEO dubbed “anticipation anxiety:” the sense of dread that comes from not knowing whether a lower-priced hotel is going to be clean or safe, or provide a bed that enables restful sleep. Many have so little confidence in the cleanliness of hotels in this price range that they travel with their own packs of wet wipes.

IDEO, along with the IHG team, recognized these behaviors as an unanswered cry in the market. The purpose of the new brand crystallized around extinguishing that anxiety and rewarding guests with something much better. avid hotels exceeds its competition by doubling down on quality in just a few select areas: an extraordinary mattress; rigorously high standards of cleanliness; a focused, high-quality, grab-and-go breakfast and coffee experience; and an overall tone of warmth and straightforwardness.

These guests made clear that for trips like this, they aren’t interested in bells and whistles, or communication that isn’t frank or to the point. That led to an insight that upends an industry truism: for these guests—and there are many of them—choosing a hotel is rarely only about the price of the room. avid guests can often afford to stay in a more expensive place for a honeymoon or a vacation or a trip with friends; they’ll spend more when they need more. But for functional stays of one or two nights, it just feels wasteful. It goes against their values and their principles.

IHG and IDEO heard a clear call for a sense of focus and affordability—but never at the expense of quality. Guests should be able to access a simple booking process, rooms designed for sound sleep, and a quality breakfast, all at a fair price. And hotel owners ought to be able to deliver that experience with confidence and consistency, at costs that build a compelling case for their own business.

That’s what avid hotels is designed to deliver, every single time. Early traveler reviews have been exceedingly positive and have noted specifically the unique differentiating offers avid brings to the market.

Within a year of partnering with IDEO, IHG had issued 150 avid hotels licenses to franchisees in the US, Mexico, and Canada, and announced a development deal for 15 avid hotel locations in Germany over the next five years—a scale of success that came at unprecedented speed for the industry. The collaborative, inclusive design process is now serving as a model for how to develop robust, guest-centered hospitality brands that deliver where it matters for people.

There’s also a hint of our Chief Creative Officer’s perfume wafting in the air, “no.1173, the Last Almonds of November,” and “no. 79, Crisp Snow on Granite,” diplomatic offerings intended to remind politicians of scents that we may lose due to climate change—and what they still might protect.  

To my left, a business strategist and industrial designer heatedly debate the financial and social benefits of a “hand-me-down, doodle-me-up” backpack program to enable creative reuse in key lifestage moments across childhood. At the other end of the table, a designer prototypes an underground music genre using sound libraries sampled from hybrid species. This moment is so very weird, so very thoughtful, and so very much where dreaming up new and disruptive ideas begins.

When IDEO speculates about the future, we often start by gathering around a table and giving ourselves the creative oxygen and open space to explore the questions of tomorrow—What will we need to thrive in the  climate era? How can we humanize technology?—with gluesticks and glitter, not just whiteboards and whitepapers. It is a practice of imagining with our hands, building to think, and blending strategic hunches with wild cognitive leaps. We’re following the wisdom of our PlayLab, who have long argued that intentional play helps liberate thinking, slipping past the rational mind and inviting all the senses to be part of the conversation. This afternoon’s makeathon was only the beginning of IDEO's larger efforts to reimagine tomorrow. Tomorrow we diagram. But tonight we dance.

Some call it ideation. I call it rebellion. A re-wilding of imagination. As a pink-haired hacker kid in the 90s, squirreled behind my CRT in the early days of digital, I was intoxicated by the electricity of possibility crackling in the air. Digital was going to change everything. Cut to today, and it’s easy to feel that same kinetic energy all around us.

Design invites us to escape the gravity of the present in pursuit of the possible.

As we move through the Climate Era, organizations  and individuals are beginning to recognize that, as the French writer and filmmaker Chris Marker put it, “Rarely has reality needed so much to be reimagined.” Design helps conjure new possibilities from the air, bringing them down from the cloud of heady theory, up from the soil of day-to-day aspirations, and into the hands of people. When done well, design fundamentally redistributes the balance of power, changing both who is at the table, and what is created. It connects the street to the skyscrapers, the mothers to the policymakers, the ethically opinionated 12-year-old to the corporation, the makers to the strategists. When we shake off these divisions and imagine together, we all become magicians, conjurers, rebels. Together, we refuse to simply accept the world as is, and instead help collectively reimagine it as it could be.

For decades, IDEO has imagined what it would feel like to inhabit the future. As our timeline for implementing climate solutions and contending with emergent technologies grows shorter, we are recommitting to that practice—creating compelling, tangible visions for how we will live, work, create, and relate to one another, the planet, and to the world around us.

Dear future, we’ve got your back. Biodegradable glitter and all.

The Day’s Agenda

Our speculation about what opportunities will arise as we do business in the Climate Era kicked off  with an in-person makeathon.

To set the scene, we hosted a conversation in our San Francisco office between ​​Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation, and IDEOer Tanja Dzambazova. Since 1997, Rose, Danny Hillis and The Long Now team have led a range of efforts encouraging imagination at the timescale of civilization—the next and last 10000 years—including a monumental, all mechanical 10,000 Year Clock. It was an excellent primer on long-term thinking.

Flush with inspiration, we gathered around a long table littered with raw materials: leather and felt scraps, leaves and twigs, markers, and glue guns. We gave each team a brief and an hour to rapidly prototype  speculative products, services, and experiences for a potential client. The point in a makeathon isn’t to come up with a perfectly viable concept, it’s to slip beyond a rigid, legacy mindset and enter a more flexible, generative mode where you can come up with new-to-the-world ideas.

OUR BRIEFS

1. Electrify Everything
   How might we live differently in a world that is running off of renewable energy? What is unlocked in a world where all industrial machines, homes, neighborhoods, and appliances are intelligent, efficient, connected, and powered by renewables?
2. Waste-Less Living
   What might everyday life look like if the products we use, clothes we wear, and industry standards and systems are waste-less, adaptable, and regenerative? What could more intentional “design for immortality” look like?
3. Frontline Futures
   How might we design new experiences, products, and services for those on the frontline of climate impacts? What new mitigation, prevention, and adaptation opportunities can we surface through a human-centered lens rooted in the experience of those most at risk?
4. Carbon Transparency
   How might we live differently in a world where carbon transparency (scope 1,2 & particularly 3) is fully complete? What is unlocked in a world where consistent measurement and blockchain logging produces a live carbon score for any object or activity on earth?
5. New Nature Rites
   How might a globally viral belief system responsive to climate change create new rituals, symbols, events, holidays, and social narratives?

With those prompts in hand, teams split off and started making. Here’s some of the output.

Remember, these aren’t meant to be realizable ideas. They are jumping off points—kernels of business opportunities that we’d like to explore further:

Client: Target
Theme: Electrify Everything

Design Concept: “Anti-Extinction Kit: Fireflies Edition”
A set of globe lights powered by fireflies is one in a series of kits to help re-nature our backyards and cultivate anti-extinction habitats. As climate change starts to affect food sources and safe places for firefly larvae dwindle, these backyard accessories are safe havens for fireflies to fuel up, lay their eggs, and lend their glow to light up a backyard. Also comes in glowing fungal and pond editions.

Client: Amazon
Theme: Waste-less Living

Design Concept: “Trash Rabbit: A rewards based packaging system”
An on-demand service that comes to your home and breaks down your trash—preserving valuable metals and other raw materials, disposing toxic elements, and processing recyclable elements. Users earn rewards and cash back when they purchase simpler, mono-material products.

Client: Ford
Theme: Carbon Transparency

Design Concept:
A globe you wear as a necklace, like a Magic 8 ball. When shaken, it displays the most efficient, carbon-neutral way to get from point A to B, offering options that require tradeoffs and offsets. An intuitive sensory companion helps you make hard choices.

Client: REI, Patagonia
Theme: Nature Rites

Design Concept: “Intergenerational rites of passage”
A program in which gear is intentionally designed as a blank canvas to be passed down from generation to generation with a hand-me-down or yearbook element: You customize the backpack, sleeping bag, jacket, and other products with badges and add-ons to celebrate rites of passage like a first camping trip.

Client: Dating apps
Theme: Carbon Transparency

Design Concept: “Carbon Dating”
Matchmaking service based on shared environmental goals and behaviors. This is a time in which your carbon score makes you more desirable. Benefits include having similar habits and values—making moving in together a lot easier. Unintended consequences include creating an elitist competitive set where having the lowest score becomes more important than other human qualities.

Client: United Nations
Theme: New Nature Rites

Wheat Pins Alliance
Made with the last piece of non-GMO wheat on earth, it’s our new cross-national symbolic pic worn to show allegiance to the earth. Due to monoculture farming practices, a future fungus wiped out the world’s wheat supply including GMO and non-GMO strains that weren’t strong enough to fight it

Lingering Scent Library
Last of their kind scents that were collected and stored in anticipation of climate change—the smell of snow on granite, an aroma of crushed almonds—that are offered to diplomats to remind them of what has been lost and what is still to be protected.

The New Earth Flag
Emblazoned with the shapes and colors of our last remaining shrubs, it represents Earth’s ecotone as it becomes increasingly desertified.

Will we see these ideas come to fruition? Probably not. But like any thought experiment that asks “what if…” they can lead to new ways of thinking and future business opportunities. The organizations that can anticipate what people will want and need in the next 10 years are the ones who will thrive in the Climate Era. What will technology make possible? What will dwindling resources make scarce? What will it take for humans to adopt planet-friendly solutions at scale?

Design’s role is to consider all of those factors and lovingly break, shape, and remake. To escape the gravity of the present in pursuit of the possible. And that starts by making a giant mess.

Dear future,

Can you smell this? It’s the scent of a melting doll’s head being gently pressed into a dayglo flowerbed.

For anyone whose day job involves creating things—proposals or presentations that require fact-finding, writing, imagery, and video—it's changing how we make stuff. Love it or fear it, generative AI may be our new co-worker. And to ensure this co-worker is ethical, friendly, and aligned with our intentions, we must first explore it.

This phase of the AI revolution feels personal. Many IDEO designers are artists or writers—crafts that generative AI is uniquely suited to disrupt. So, we’re getting ahead of it and embracing these tools to explore how our creative process might coevolve with AI.

As we would do with any new colleague, we hope to learn how to have constructive relationships with these technologies, understand them better, and collaborate.

Way back in 2019—before generative AI was everywhere—we created a deck of AI Ethics cards, which you can download here. It was a good start, but there is much work yet to be done on creating an ethical human-AI ecosystem that endures long after the hype cycle ends.

Here are a few of the ways we’ve been experimenting so far:

1. Research Synthesis

The classic image of design thinking is people huddled around a Post-It–littered foam core board. During the pandemic, this process shifted to digital tools like Miro, Reduct, and Figjam.

Interaction Designer Takashi Wickes is using generative AI to further streamline the synthesis process—a method of organizing and interpreting research data in order to identify patterns, themes, and insights that can be used to inform the design of a product or service or experience. Using Reduct to transcribe his interviews, he highlights stand-out quotes. He then runs the quotes through Notion AI with a prompt like “What are the top 10 key takeaways from this conversation?”

Knowing that the AI doesn’t have the larger context of the project at hand, Takashi and his teammates use Notion AI’s output as supplemental input. Treating Notion AI’s output as a base to build on, they combine AI and human intelligence to go deeper, faster.

And, we’re already seeing startups form around this type of process: check out Vowel.

2. Concepting & Ideation

Designers come up with a lot of ideas. A typical ideation session begins with a prompt, something like: In a world oversaturated with screens, how might we support parents and children in connecting over the dinner table through games? We scratch our heads, think it over, and begin sketching out sacrificial concepts.

Recently, we’ve been experimenting with flipping this process on its head. Rather than coming up with an idea straight away, we use AI-based image generators like DALL-E or Midjourney for inspiration.

For a project on new dinnertime games, we fed DALL-E the prompt: “a family playing with their food during dinner.” The images rendered spark new directions that we might not have come to on our own. Mom with a carrot as a nose? Why didn’t we think of that? When you’re all at the table, why not use food as costumes in gameplay? Magical game design is all about turning expectations on their head. Now, we start to wonder… What other foods would make fun play pieces?

And of course, there are a cohort of new companies who are formalizing this process into a consumer tool: check out Fermat.

‍

3. Critique

One thing we’re always exploring in our very riffy culture is how to get better at critique. There’s always this one thing to pick on: Weak insights. Insights at IDEO are concise statements that reflect our understanding about the current state of affairs in a given challenge and the way they are framed can be foundational to how we design solutions.

A few years back, before AI tools were everywhere, we made an insight analyzer chatbot. It looked for overused terms and poor word choice and would essentially chew you out. It was just an NLP bot that used natural language processing to match user chats with a set of known statements. The interface was a physical telephone (hotline). A funny gimmick with a simple learning: bots can get away with being mean.

Late last year, a team of brand and interaction designers started packaging up our favorite simple methods of critique and revisited the old insights hotline. Anne Graziano and I fed simple prompts such as “Give a brutally honest critique of the following insight: Meet people where they are at” to ChatGPT, and as might be expected, if you talk to an AI modeled after what’s said on the internet  it’s going to be very good at criticizing things.

We tried the OpenAI api (GPT3_davinci-003) and got decent results, so we wired it up to an emoji reaction in a Slack channel. When you add a “crit” emoji to an insight, it replies with a critique. The original prompt was harsh and getting a bit obstinate, so our group adjusted to the prompt “Give constructive feedback on the following insight:” which changed the tone and made it more creative and fun.

Our colleague Takashi figured out that the AI was pleased to critique quotes from classic movies and romcoms, which Takashi sourced from ChatGPT (prompt: “Give me the 10 cheesiest famous lines from movies”). He then fed the AI old chestnuts like, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." (Hitch, 2005).

‍

4. Marketing Copy

As community builders at IDEO, we host a lot of events. Recently, when writing up the copy for an internal informational session about the fundamentals and history of generative AI, I turned to ChatGPT to write the marketing copy. The output was pretty spot-on, and ended up informing both the content of the event and the copy we used to pitch it. We built on it, of course—inserting things that we thought were especially important for our community to learn—but it was a true collaboration.

5. Slide Decks

Google Slides are a staple of IDEO’s creative process. We use slides for project deliverables, ideation, business proposals, and internal events. We've found Tome.app, which creates AI-generated slides, to be a helpful springboard. Business designers are experimenting with the technology to refine their communications, interaction designers use it to think through how a new product might look, act, and feel, and our Play Lab is using it to explore new rules and play styles for games that do not yet exist.

Companies are forming around key parts of our creative process—capabilities which humans (and a few animals) once claimed as their sole domain.

In a 1948 documentary about U.S. agriculture called "The Land" the disruptive force of large-scale mechanization is described in a way that feels like it could be about this AI moment:

"These miraculous machines!
Do we shape them
Or do they shape us?
Or reshape us from our decent, far designs?

But we are learning.
We are learning to build for the future
From the ground up."

We’re curious: How are you using generative AI tools at work? We’d love to hear from you! Send us a note: Savannah Kunovsky & Danny Deruntz

Are you using ChatGPT yet? If the answer is no, keep reading.

「なぜ日本の組織では個の創造性を発揮することが難しいのか？」という問題意識のもと、さまざまな調査研究を実施。年代、専門性、性別などに多様性を持たせた「個と組織の創造性」に関する研究会を発足し、ディスカッションを重ねながら、同時にアーティストやスポーツ選手、デザイナーの方々へのインタビューを実施、そして国内外の中小企業、大企業に勤める様々な役職の方へのインタビューも行いました。文献や海外の事例に学ぶだけでなく、多様な方々と、とことん日本の組織に向き合ったのが、今回の調査の特徴です。

こうしたプロセスの中で浮かび上がってきたのは、日本社会における創造性に対する思いこみ。創造性は、一部の個に宿るものではなく、さまざまな人・モノ・コトの掛け合わせで生まれる。だからこそ、個の創造性を求める前にまず、どのように創造性が開きやすい環境を作ることができるのか。ここから、「どのようにして、固定観念を覆し、個々が問い続けられる土壌を作ることができるか？」という問いが生まれ、個と組織の創造性を高めるための考え方を「提案」として整理しました。

社会はVUCAの時代を迎え、日本企業は「創造性」を発揮することがこれまで以上に求められています。一方、個人に目を向けると、これらの複雑な社会や環境にどのように対処したらよいのかが分からず、次の一歩が踏み出せない「モヤモヤとした閉塞感」に囚われています。どのように組織や部署・グループの創造性を引き出したらいいのか悩んでいる方、どのようにまず第一歩を作ったらいいのか考えている方にぜひ触れていただきたいと願っています。

→レポートPDF：「進化し続ける組織へ 〜個と個をつなぎ、創造性を解放する〜」

提案

レポート内でまとめている提案のいくつかを例としてご紹介します。個々が創造性を発揮できる環境を作りたいが、まず何をしたらいいか悩んでいる方が、具体的に何かを始められるきっかけになればと考えています。

ヒエラルキーが逆転する場を作る

年齢、役職、性別、職種など、組織に根強く存在するヒエラルキーには、あえてそれが逆転するような場を作ることで、新しい考え方を取り入れる余白を生むことができる。

"階層やサイロ化が強い組織構造では、相互理解、相互の尊重が生まれるような環境づくりが必須だと思います。そのためにあえて、既存のヒエラルキーをひっくり返すというのも手。一番若い人が上司にリバースメンターシップをするとか。会議では発言しにくい人から発言してもらうとか。"
-Michael Peng, Moon Creative Lab, Chief Creative Officer

自主練できる場をつくる

現状に問いかけ、自分なりのアイデアを考えることにハードルを感じる人が多いため、まずは安心できる場（いわば自主練できる場）で試行錯誤し、自分なりに考えるきっかけを作ることが必要である。自分のアイデアに自信を持つことで初めて、それを周囲に共有することができる。

"クリエイティビティは、敷居の低い場所でないと発揮しにくい。新たにチャレンジする人が、簡単な実験をまずキッチンのようなパーソナルな場所で始めることが多いのも、まさにそういうこと。キッチンで練習して大丈夫だと思ったら、初めて外に出て試すことができる。"
-デザイン教育者（米国）

個人の任務の目的・役割を明確化する

「なぜ何のためにこの仕事をやっているのか分からない」といった、主人公がいない仕事が多い。仕事の任務やそれぞれに期待される役割を明確にすることで、仕事が自分ごと化される。それなくして、人々は自分なりの問いを持ち続けることはできない。

“個人に任されている任務、役割を明確化することで、より自分ごと化された問いをたてやすくする。何のためにやっているのかがクリアになると、どんな創造性を発揮する必要があるのかも明確化される。”
-株式会社NTT ドコモ イノベーション統括部 グロース・デザイン 担当部長　笹原 優子

「水」を探し求める虫たちの物語

調査の結果浮かび上がってきた問題意識や提案を、ストーリーを通じてより年代を超えてわかりやすく伝えるため、ピクチャーブック「新たなはじまり: Between Water and Insects」も作成しました。

日照りに悩まされ、枯れ果てたとある虫たちの村。豊かだった頃の時代を思いながら、伝統的な雨乞いの儀式を行いますが、雨は降りません。そこで、ある冒険家が外の世界に「水」を探す旅に出ます。果たして冒険家は水を見つけることができたのでしょうか？

日本の組織をとある虫の村に、組織風土を村の土壌になぞらえて作成したストーリー。レポートと合わせてぜひご覧ください。

→ピクチャーブック「新たなはじまり: Between Water and Insects」

個の創造性が発揮される日本社会を目指して

IDEO Tokyoは、日本の変化・進化の触媒となり、クリエイティビティを開花させることで、新たな価値を創造していくことを志しています。どのように個の創造性を解放する環境づくりに取り組むべきか悩んでいる方々をはじめ、さまざまな方に読んでいただきたいです。このレポートを一つのきっかけとして、皆さんからフィードバックをもらいながら本書をアップデートし、日本の「創造性」に関する議論を加速させ、個々の創造性が発揮される社会となるための具体的な活動に結実させることを願っています。

またレポートの内容を踏まえ、組織の中で対話を促すツール「創造性の土壌を作る問いかけ」も公開しました。このツールには、下地作りと仕組みづくりの計20項目について、チームでの対話を始めるための3つの問いかけがそれぞれ用意されています。ぜひご自身の所属するチームで取り組んでみてください。

詳しい調査の概要については、経済産業省のホームページをご覧ください。
→創造性人材の育成支援

IDEO Tokyoは、経済産業省と協業し、創造的組織の開発及び創造性人材のキャリア形成に関する調査研究を実施しました。その結果をレポート「進化し続ける組織へ 〜個と個をつなぎ、創造性を解放する〜」として公開しています。

But we'd be fools to claim that we can always see what's coming around the bend. Never trust anyone who says they can predict the future.

Nevertheless, we have launched ourselves into the unknown for decades. Joining a long history of science fiction, this is an exercise in speculative design, where we build on early signals we're picking up and ask, “What if?” At times, our speculation about the future has come across as a little too naive and niche, like when we proposed stamping fruit with the full FDA nutrition label or suggested a fixie-inspired walker for senior hipsters. But when we’ve set our sights on what tomorrow’s humans might want from our clients, our portfolio of the future has been startlingly prescient.

In 2005, two years before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, a short film we made with Intel showcased the hyperconnected, hypermobile, on-demand lifestyle we all know now.

That same year, we created a series of shorts for HBO foretelling a world of personalized streaming content—well over a decade before binging our favorite shows became standard fare.

In 2010, our exploration of the future of the book anticipated the need to verify the legitimacy of sources on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.

These predictions may seem easy to come up with in hindsight, and in one sense that is true. When you pair the exponential power of technology (Moore’s Law) with evergreen human needs, it leads to logical conclusions. The harder part is making such foresight tangible.

That’s where design becomes a valuable tool.

IKEA, which has its own future-facing research and design lab, Space10, understands the power of tangibility. We partnered with the company in 2015 to imagine the future kitchen. The final exhibit, staged at EXPO Milano, anticipated an augmented reality in which screens and data are no longer confined to devices. More than an exhibition, the prototype served as a strategic roadmap for integrating multi-sensory digital content into a built environment and helped IKEA build an organizational belief in, and understanding of, this technological shift.

We’ve delved into the future of automobility, manufacturing, connected intimacy, the workplace, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. We’ve also used design fiction to explore complex human experiences like aging, citizenship, and time. These “What-Ifs” aren't an art school indulgence. Rather, they are queries about what world we want to inhabit and what choices we need to make today in order to get there.

While we don’t believe our era is any more exceptional than the next, the choices we are making today feel more consequential. We are facing global economic contraction, the explosion of artificial intelligence, and a developing climate crisis that scientists say could cross an irreversible threshold by the end of this decade.

The urgency to ready our clients, ourselves, and everyone for the Climate Era has been a longtime obsession. In 2017 we designed an exhibition called “Never Finished” to illustrate the principles of a circular economy. We reimagined makeup, food packaging, sneakers, and electronic devices as part of regenerative systems. A few years later, this fiction became a beacon for global fashion leader H&M, whose pursuit of a circular future has involved eliminating plastics from its consumer packaging.

But even the most on-the-nose prediction about what the future will bring can go sideways. In 1997, Kodak asked us to create a consumer experience for digital photography. Using that era’s available technology, we built a fully working digital camera with an integrated screen menu. The working prototype was nearly twice the size of what cameras would become, but it established the fundamental experience of digital photography that we use today.

While the team at Kodak hoped to design a pioneering new product, they ultimately didn’t have the internal alignment to move forward. Instead, they continued investing in film, a choice that ultimately proved to be a losing bet.

The takeaway: Even the most beautiful speculative design won’t sway hearts if the leaders of an organization don’t have the ambition or desire to invest in a better future—and we don’t mean just a profitable one. “What if?” is the beginning of a design-driven process to understand what choices we need to make today in order to create the future we want.

While the contracting economy, climate change, and systemic bias can feel insurmountable, we remain optimistic. Over the coming year, we will be sharing a series of design fictions that portray a world in which we got things right.

The questions we are asking—“What if everything is electrified and we have abundant energy?” and “What is the future of ordinary data?” and “How do we unleash the creative capacity of the next generation?”—are shorthand for deeper investigations into how we redesign consumer goods, healthcare, AI, and education.

Turning these questions into experiences so that others can visualize, feel, and participate in a better world is an essential practice of design and, for businesses that want to be here in 2033, the only way to stay relevant.

We will begin each of these design fictions, which will roll out over the coming year, with a letter:

“Dear Future, we designed this for you…”

We may never meet those born 10 or 20 or 30 years from now who will live out these visions (or something that looks quite different), but that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. We are accountable to one another and stewards of a fragile planet. In 10 years, every business will have become a design business because every business will have had to change. And every person will have a hand in designing our future.

*One sentence in this article was written by ChatGPT after giving it the prompt “Slogan for a campaign about designing the future.” Can you guess which line?

—

Hero image: Magic Mirror, an augmented reality dressing room designed for Prada in 2003 in partnership with OMA.

We designers are optimistic to a fault. We believe we can build something better and will take great leaps of faith to prove it.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.