Increasingly, digital spaces are proving detrimental to youth mental health. By co-designing with youth, Kooth and IDEO set out to flip the script, creating a positive digital space for young people to safely explore their mental wellbeing. 

When Kooth, IDEO, and Blackbird, IDEO’s longtime development partner, first started working on the project, the window of opportunity was narrow, and the stakes were high. The group was up against a nine-week deadline to create a working proof of concept app. Also on the line: a $188 million contract with the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS)—one that would open an entirely new line of business for Kooth. 

The app needed to do more than demonstrate functionality—it needed to prove its value. To ensure that they were creating an asset that truly fit the needs of young people, the team turned to an initial cohort of 13-25 year-old co-designers who explored early features, created video diaries, and shared their questions about and experiences with mental health. These young people often gravitated toward self-service tools that helped them take action based on their feelings. With their feedback, the team created new expressions of clinically-validated behavioral health tools like journaling, breathwork and white noise—and built novel tools, such as Starboard, an expressive drawing tool and a nod to art therapy. 

The team took inspiration from content the co-designers liked to consume, such as story-driven video games that enable freedom of exploration, deepened by a unifying mythology. That led them to a constellation theme, which made the experience more intriguing and playful. The co-designers also recommended a dark color palette, because they preferred exploring the app at night. 

With these insights, the team refined the proof of concept, and then conducted a one-week pilot with another 50 young people across California. Their positive feedback gave the State the confidence to invest in a $188 million, four-year contract for Kooth to bring the app to a platform at scale. 

Over the next year, the team engaged another 150 young people to help design, shape, and test the app. At the same time, Kooth and IDEO created a clinical oversight group, which included a pediatrician, therapists, and other clinical specialists. This group anchored the platform in the practices of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), cultivating psychological flexibility—the mindful acceptance of positive and negative emotions. Young people are invited to complete short reflections and surveys throughout their journey with the app, which includes rigorous, science-backed measurements to assess the therapeutic benefits.

Behind the scenes, the team developed a clinical-facing service and digital platform that empowers Kooth’s peer specialists, social workers, community curators, and clinicians to support the youth experience, all while protecting privacy and confidentiality. They also navigated a complex landscape of state requirements and government legislation, ensuring that the platform could cover topics like substance abuse and gender identity, and that users could access coaching within 24 hours, and choose from a diverse set of experts. 

The last step was to select a name that worked across multiple languages, trademarks, and competitor branding, and didn’t come off as a mental health service, something the youth co-designers believed was critical. IDEO and Kooth landed on Soluna, a name that alludes to the app’s presence in both the bright (“sol” for sun) and the dark times (“luna” for moon). 

Now, Soluna is available for free to all youth in California, and the state has set ambitious targets for reaching all young people at scale. Soluna is a living platform that will continue to receive product and design updates for years to come, all deeply rooted in youth co-design.

The US Surgeon General named mental health “the defining public health crisis of our time,” and cited social media, online bullying, and the isolation exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as major drivers that have significant negative outcomes for youth.
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In California alone, more than 284,000 youth cope with major depression. 66% of kids with depression do not receive treatment. Between 2019-2020, the suicide rate for kids ages 10-18 increased by 20%.
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In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health set aside $4.6 billion to increase access to mental health and substance abuse support, the largest commitment to youth mental health ever made by a state.

94%

of proof-of-concept app users would recommend the Soluna app to a friend, and believe that engaging with the app would be a positive addition to their daily/weekly routine

6 million

young people in California had access to Soluna at launch in January 2024

Creating a better cervical cancer screening experience is an important mission, but also a challenging one. Not only would Teal have to address the regulations that face healthcare device companies, it would also need to build a comprehensive telehealth platform and a physical product—a wand that could easily collect an adequate cell sample, even in the hands of an untrained person. 

The first challenge was to create the wand. The device would need to do a lot: It’s impossible for a person to see their own cervix, so the user would have to be able to find the cervix blind, collect the sample themselves, and remove the wand from their bodies without contaminating it on other parts of their anatomy. Because this is something users are likely to do in their bathrooms, where there is no space to lie down, they would need to be able to use the device while standing—and with one hand. From the beginning, the IDEO team set out to design functional, testable prototypes to make sure the idea was viable, and incorporate diverse voices into the research process, including trans, minority, and disabled women. 

Because the product is meant for people who aren’t medical professionals, the team worked to design something as simple, intuitive, and unintimidating as possible. They used a 3-D printer to create multiples of every prototype, autoclaves to make sure that the designs they were creating were sterile, and leaned into shapes women are already used to, like the cylindrical shape of a tampon. The wand they created has that same basic form, but with a soft sponge that the user can deploy with the turn of a dial to collect the sample, then close to protect it from contamination on the way out of the body.

With working prototypes in hand, Teal set out to test their efficacy. In an initial study with 220 participants varying in age, race, socioeconomic status, and geography, Teal found that not only were participants able to successfully self-collect samples, they also preferred them over the speculum, the device doctors typically use during a screening. Some 92 percent said if they knew the results were equal they would prefer self-collection, while 87 percent reported they would stay current with screening if Teal Wand was an option. Self-collection took the vast majority under two minutes to complete, and 97% of study participants reported it was very easy or easy to use. The Teal Wand recently received a patent for its unique design.

The IDEO team also worked on the packaging and unboxing experience, which plays an important role in supporting the user through the self-screening process. The team built in thoughtful design cues to give users reassurance that they are using the wand correctly, and to provide the same level of confidence they would have in the results of an in-clinic screening. 

In January 2023, Teal raised an $8.8 million seed round from Serena Ventures, Emerson Collective, and Metrodora, and later that year, launched a nationwide clinical trial with leading health organizations including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of Colorado, Washington University, and others. In 2025, The Teal Wand became the first FDA-authorized device for at-home cervical cancer screening, with virtual medical provider support. Today, it's available in all 50 states. i’s an enormous step toward its North Star: catching cervical cancer earlier and saving lives.

Cervical cancer is nearly 100% preventable when it’s caught early, yet one in four women in the US are not up to date on their screenings.
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More than 12,000 people in the US are being diagnosed with cervical cancer every year, and more than 4,000 people die of the disease, which disproportionately impacts Black, Asian, and Hispanic women.
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More than half of cervical cancer cases are found in women that are not up-to-date on their screenings.

97%

of clinical study participants said the Teal Wand was very easy or easy to use.

87%

of participants said they would be more likely to stay current with screening guidelines if Teal Wand was an option.

94%

of participants said they would choose to collect their own sample from home rather than the current standard of care where a clinician collects it in-office.

2025

The Teal Wand becomes the first FDA authorized device for at-home cervical cancer screening, with virtual medical provider support.

Cities United already had a strong foundation with its stated mission, vision, and values. IDEO brought those to life with a new visual and verbal brand identity system that celebrates Cities United’s inclusive approach to building relationships and reimagining public safety.

To help Cities United with its verbal identity, the IDEO team defined the organization's voice, tone, and key messages, making it easier to tell its story more consistently and clearly, a crucial step toward engaging stakeholders.

To define the new visual identity, the team created a new logo, a letter C composed of interwoven shapes that represent the three tenets of their vision—“safe, happy, and hopeful;” a new design language that references city grids; and a typographic system anchored by the typeface VTC DuBois, inspired by W.E.B. DuBois’s own custom lettering and designed by the Black-owned Vocal Type Co. The team also designed a color palette that embodies the textures of city life with hues reminiscent of asphalt, sunrise, and brick. 

To amplify the refreshed branding, the team designed a new responsive website, citiesunited.org. The intuitive site shares the organization’s mission, resources, ongoing projects, and partner network, inviting stakeholders to join in their transformative work. IDEO also created a video to humanize Cities United’s mission and showcase its nationwide impact. It underscores the unity, resilience, and hope embodied by the organization through a chorus of voices.

This comprehensive rebranding widens Cities United’s reach and impact, helping the organization share its goal of creating safe, healthy, hopeful communities for young Black men, boys, and their families, and reintroduces the organization to a national audience. 

The Cities United work was supported by IDEO’s Racial Justice Impact Fund, part of a commitment IDEO made in 2020 to ​​address systemic racism and advance equity within our own organization, our client work, and beyond.

Cities United is committed to reducing the epidemic of homicides and shootings among young Black men and boys ages 14-to-24 by 50%.

Between 2009 and 2019, the number of Black children who “did not go to school at least one day in the past month because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school” increased by 84%, according to Cities United.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for Black men and boys from birth to age 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2023 SF Design Week Award

In recognition of IDEO’s brand work with Citizens United

Sleep is a critical resource for shift workers—and their employers, too. Together, IDEO and Somni worked directly with people with acute and chronic sleep challenges to create concepts that could support their sleep goals, and provide employers with the means to improve employee health.

When IDEO and Somni first partnered, the startup was an early-stage company, so the team started small, with focused sprints and workshops to redesign the core aspects of the company and product offerings. The team interviewed shift workers about their sleep patterns, which can vary quite a bit. Even when people keep to a specific schedule on work days, they often have to change their patterns on days off to spend time with family and friends, leading to a very disruptive sleep cycle. Research revealed that many third shift workers were dealing with sleep and health issues, but also a pervasive “machismo” culture,  pressure to “tough it out,” and a reliance on energy drinks to deal with lack of sleep. 

To address those issues, the team designed a digital experience for sleep cohorts, support groups where members could share their experiences and sleep strategies, and work with a coach and sponsor who already had been through the program. The platform analyzed workers’ data, and provided AI-enabled recommendations for improving their sleep. The big takeaway? Data by itself wasn’t necessarily helpful, and could be confusing for folks who were less digitally-fluent. Providing context, like a calendar that displayed sleep experiments at a glance, was crucial. 

The IDEO team also created a new user experience for a genetic testing program that could uncover factors associated with sleep issues. Somni aims to use a saliva-based genetic test to monitor for DNA damage caused by circadian disruption, then leverage its sleep improvement program to prevent further damage. Because biomarker testing is a differentiating offer for Somni, it was extremely important that the team get it right, both to make sure that users could understand its utility, and for Somni to provide real value. The design challenge was unique—and not just because of data privacy concerns. Presenting data about DNA damage in a non-human-centered way could increase the anxiety workers had around their sleep.

At the end of the project, Somni leveraged the insights the IDEO team surfaced to improve products like its sleep coaching service, and to refine its biomarker testing offering. Based on this work, Somni has also created a pilot with a Fortune 100 company, which is currently in progress, as it works to mitigate the ill effects of disrupted sleep for employees and the companies they work for.

In the short-term, circadian rhythm disruption leads to an array of jet-lag-like symptoms, and in the long-run, it may contribute to weight gain, obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

It also impairs people’s ability to work, affecting productivity, creativity, and the overall work environment. Productivity loss can lead to employer baseline healthcare costs that are 26% higher, and over time, insomnia can result in an average cost of $4,267 more per employee per year.

In June 2019, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified shift work as a probable carcinogen.

75%

user retention in Somni's sleep program

$2,450

savings per year per employee for users who complete the program

33%

improvement in sleep quality, and 41 more minutes per night

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

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

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

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

How do you make your future?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of that helps move organizations to action.

‍2. Leap beyond the distraction of today's disputes‍

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

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

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

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

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

3. Remember: No business or organization is an island‍

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you want to make your future?‍

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Use new tools to encourage a sense of purpose 

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

2. Design for values and emotions

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

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

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

3. Keep the work ecosystem in mind

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

4. Co-create with employees to build trust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‍

Prototyping Road Trips

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

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

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

‍

Taking a bigger leap

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

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

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

A Safe Space to Play 

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Creator vs. AI Collaborator

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

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

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

Exploring the values behind our designs 

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

For quick, everyday creative needs—efficiency is key.

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

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

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

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

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

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An AI-enabled creative future 

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

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

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

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

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.