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.
‍

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%.
‍

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.
‍

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.
‍

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

When doubt creeps in, it's easy to continue with the process or the tool that we know best. But as designers, we have an opportunity to be a part of the conversation around how these new technologies will shape the world around us—and in order to do that, we have to know how they work.

IDEO designers often learn best by getting our hands dirty and making things, so we decided to invite the IDEO interaction design community to a two-day machine learning workshop to get our bearings. Our key question in building out the workshop was simple: How might we create a safe space to prototype, play with, and test new machine learning technologies?

The first day focused on inspiration, explanation, and experimentation. On the second day, we divided everyone up into teams and took a crack at using our new tools to get building. We discovered the value of bringing designers together to learn something new (and a little scary), but we also learned a lot about planning a workshop. Here are some principles that could help you next time you want to bring people together to dive into the unknown.

Have experts in the room

We invited Andreas Refsgaard and Gene Kogan, two artists and creative coders, who work specifically with machine learning. Gene even wrote a book that helps artists and designers start playing with the tools of the trade.

Andreas and Gene have been leading machine learning workshops for the past four years. They're experts at explaining complex tools to people of all technical backgrounds, and they were there to answer any questions that came up along the way.

Including experts makes people feel that the workshop is legit and ensures everyone gets the support they need to learn and build. If you're trying something brand new (like we were), reach out to an expert to get some tips and tricks to ensure your learning experience is successful. Without Andreas and Gene, our workshop couldn't have happened.

Be persistent

Once Andreas and Gene helped us put together our workshop content, we faced our biggest challenge: How do we convince a bunch of people to drop everything they're doing and attend a two-day workshop? 50+ emails and many rounds of confirmations later, we finally had more than 20 of our colleagues agree to make time for our session.

By the end of the day, the benefits of gathering in this way were clear: people had created full-on prototypes that could recognize disco moves or the difference between two friends. Setting aside the time to actually build, fail, and repeat was invaluable. We all have busy workdays, but making room for this kind of experimentation gave everyone a zing of new energy.

Turns out, if you bug people, they'll actually set aside the time and come to your workshop—and they'll probably have a good time, too. Use whatever communication channels you have to remind people: Slack, email, carrier pigeon, skywriting. When possible, share the agenda ahead of time. If folks know what they're going to get out of their time, they're more likely to RSVP yes.

Harness the power of collaborating within your community

The second day, we dove right back into building and quickly broke into our teams. As interaction designers, we’re often siloed—we’re usually the one interaction designer on a multidisciplinary team. But working on a team of other interaction designers has great benefits: You have a similar way of thinking and can bounce ideas off each other in unique ways.

There’s also something powerful about working on a creative project just for the sake of creating and learning. At IDEO, we often work on projects that have the potential to really impact people’s lives—in the worlds of healthcare, mobility, financial services. On the flipside, this workshop gave us the chance to make something truly weird and to not be afraid to fail in doing so.

Almost every project was full of funny glitches and nearly all of them were ridiculous—like a tug-of-war game where people had to meow and bark, and a game of ping pong controlled with your nose. Revolutionary stuff. This workshop gave us a break from our day jobs to work together and flex our craft-muscles in a way we don’t always get to.

The workshop structure sets the conditions for learning

By the end of the day, the eight teams created machine learning prototypes—but just a few days prior, many thought machine learning was totally out of their league. Without a thorough introduction to the topic and built-in time to get prototyping, it would have been hard to see these new skills come to fruition.

One participant said, “I had to step out of my current mind-box to realize that there are new possibilities I previously was not brainstorming.” Another said, “There were some really funny concepts that showed the power of simple programming combined with great ideas.”

There’s no way of sugarcoating it: Setting up a workshop is actually really hard, and a lot harder than we first thought. But once we got over our initial trepidation, we were able to give ourselves and our peers a unique chance to understand and play with a seemingly intimidating tool. Workshops are a framework that let us all show up as beginners. There’s comfort and power in this: We can ask questions, learn, and become stronger designers together.

‍

In our day-to-day work as designers, we stumble upon a lot of buzzwords: deep learning. Convolutional neural networks. Artificial intelligence. Staying up to date with new technologies is one thing, but understanding how to apply them is another. And personally, it's something the two of us are a little intimidated to tackle on our own.

When our team set out to build the first version of the social impact investment product Swell Investing, we decided to hack the Sprint process, IDEO style.

The Sprint method allowed the team to start prototyping quickly, collect immediate user feedback, and make small mistakes early. We conducted multiple design sprints in quick loops—folding the learning from week one into the structure of week two, and so on. We learned a lot in the process. Here are a few quick tips we picked up for running successful and energizing design sprints.

1. Anchor your sprint in a big question

Identify critical hypotheses to test. First, decide on the big question you want to answer. (Hint: This is the one that, when answered, will allow you to make the most progress.) For instance, during the Swell project, we asked: When it comes to social impact investing, are users more interested in returns or social impact?

Once you’ve got your big question, brainstorm and sketch different solutions, and then select two or three good ideas to prototype. Prototypes are something people can touch, test, or play around with. Putting different approaches in front of users in a single sitting is a great way to gauge interest in different product directions.

Tip: Limit the number of variables in your prototype, so you receive specific feedback on your big question. Designing a digital product? Start by designing landing pages that express each product offering, rather than the entire user flow. Testing two feature sets? Keep the branding the same and test different product features against one another.

2. Bridge the say-do gap

Use tricks that force users to make real—not hypothetical—decisions. The goal of any new product is to create something that people find valuable and are willing to pay for over other options in the market. But as designers, we know that often what consumers say they like is different from what they actually buy in the wild. One way we bridged this gap was by testing demand with potential Swell consumers: We gave them fake cash they could “invest” in one product or another. It was a great way to gauge whether the service had real value in the market.

Tip: Use the same currency exercise for all of your sprint prototypes, so that you can see how attitudes evolve with your design tweaks. For example, give each user $500 Monopoly dollars and see where they would invest their money. Designing a new shoe brand? Ask them which ones they’d buy, or if they’d prefer to spend the money on their tried-and-true Nikes. This exercise is about the conversation it provokes more than the payments themselves, so get curious!

3. Focus your features

Design for a light-touch, full-product experience. Ask yourself: What’s the smallest set of features you can design that will still solve users’ problems? Start with the simplest version of your product, get user feedback, and then add features. As your sprint loops continue, you can move from simple prototypes to robust product directions. With Swell, we focused on creating a hero page for each key interaction (landing page, sign up, and invest). This meant we were testing the functionality of the full product experience, just in a light-touch way.

Tip: Prioritize high-impact pages that people visit a lot, like the home page or sign-up flow. This way you’re getting the most detailed feedback on sticking points, without spending a ton of money building them.

4. Be scrappy: Build just enough to learn

Choose the format that best expresses the idea. It’s impressive to build a digital prototype in a week, but remember: You can learn a lot from paper prototypes! Make a conscious decision about the areas that you design in high fidelity (like screens) and places where a paper prototype will do the trick. Being scrappy will pay off in the end. We created a combination of digital and paper prototypes for Swell. Digital prototypes were reserved for value proposition and user flow testing, whereas paper prototypes were a great way to test new and emergent thinking.

Tip: Imagine that you’re designing a mobile-first experience. Designing for a phone instead of a computer will force the team to simplify messaging and features to their most minimal expression. This is something you can develop by putting a post-it sketch on top of your smartphone.

5. Keep the team energized

Use the Tabata training method of product design. Tabata training is a workout method that focuses on 20 seconds of intense work followed by 10 seconds of rest. This is a great metaphor for sprint prototyping: It’s intense, and that means that rest is just as important as the creative bursts. Make a point of managing team energy by having intentional down days. With Swell, we made sure to keep our energy up by working in cafes, getting breather spaces when we needed to focus, and even hitting up museums or exercise classes to stay healthy and inspired.

Tip: When you need a boost, take the project on the road. Try a day of cafe hopping where the team commits to sketching one feature at each stop. Sketching in new contexts and in focused bursts means you’ll have fun and be productive.

Special thanks to Kim Cullen for her contribution to the sprint prototyping process, and to the team at Swell Investing for going on this journey with us.

‍

Here at IDEO, it’s not uncommon to see dog-eared copies of Jake Knapp’s Sprint, a book that outlines the five-day process that Google Ventures uses to solve tough design problems. The books are stacked on desks, passed from designer to designer, and referenced in research planning discussions. Why? Because the Sprint process pushes you to think outside of the box, even at a creative place like IDEO. It helps you shift away from following your gut instinct and opinions; instead, it encourages you to let users guide your decision making. And it pushes you to move fast.

IDEO’s AI Ethics Cards are a tool to help guide an ethically responsible, culturally considerate, and humanistic approach to designing with data. The deck is made up of four core design principles and ten activities, all meant for use by teams working on the development of new, data-driven, smart products and services.

Today, data systems and algorithms can be deployed at unprecedented scale and speed—and unintended consequences will affect people with that same scale and speed. How can we always make sure we’re putting people first when designing large scale systems? Especially when those systems will change over time, even evolving without direct human supervision?

As you explore these questions and more, we hope these cards serve as a tool to help designers consider these challenges with a human-centered lens.

Download the AI Ethics Cards here, and read more about them here.

The team is on week five of their project. They’ve been conducting tons of human-centered interviews and broad design research, and they’re writing and re-writing what inspired and challenged them. The first few weeks were an exciting whirlwind as they generated hundreds of half-thoughts: vignettes, questions, and future possibilities to throw into what they called the “idea parking lot.”

But now, the team has tears in their eyes. They are frustrated and exhausted. Post-It notes cover the walls in disordered clusters, and many lie crumbled on the ground. A stack of flip-chart pages on the floor contain sketched Venn diagrams and pyramids, remnants of attempts to wrangle the insights into a framework. The team is on edge, pointing to the clock, aware of every minute left before the scheduled call with the client. They’re not quite sure what they have learned, and they don’t yet know what ideas they would recommend. And they’re looking to me for answers.

This is the phase of design that gets talked about least: synthesis. It is where designers shift from the openness of “beginner’s mind” to attempting to make sense of it all. Synthesis is when things feel most unclear and unsettled, where the pressure to make new meaning from our learnings feels most oppressive.

The team knows it’s not enough to categorize observations into obvious themes. To innovate, they need to put the pieces together in new and insightful ways. They need to find a fresh mental model. And they have to imagine how this model yields a product, service, experience, or system that reframes the world in a new and better reality.

As a leader, there are few things as challenging as seeing people on your team struggle. It feels easy to offer a fast answer or a framework from your previous experience, hoping to alleviate their anxiety. But, in the end, I knew that my quick conclusions were not going to get the team creating groundbreaking ideas, and it also wouldn’t help them develop their creative muscles.

I remembered what my best teachers have done to help me through this onerous step: acknowledge how hard this particular part of the work really is, ask them great questions, and show them my confidence that they will find their way through.

In other words, I had to lead like a Constructivist.

Constructivism teaches us how we learn

One of the most difficult courses I took in graduate school focused on theories of learning. My classmates and I struggled to understand heavy academic texts, but every week we were asked to create learning experiences for each other based on these theories. Despite complaining throughout the quarter, I now realize how much graduate school taught me.

In particular, I find myself constantly referencing the Constructivist theory of learning. Constructivism, it turns out, has a surprising relationship to the design process.

Back in the 1950s, the psychologist Jean Piaget observed children to understand how people learn. He concluded that, counter to popular belief, knowledge doesn’t exist in the world, and you don’t acquire it: Knowledge exists in our own minds, through our own active construction. No one really teaches you anything, Piaget claimed. Instead, he believed that we are natural learners, constantly processing the world in order to create our own understanding.

It’s easiest to think about this theory by considering how young children learn language. Let’s say you are driving through the countryside and see a cow. You point to it and say “cow.” As the child looks, she forms a picture in her head, something like, “Ok, a ‘cow’ is big animal with four legs, and is black and white.” Later, you point to another cow, this time one that is brown and small. What’s happening in the child’s mind? Her thought process might sound like, “Wait! That doesn’t match what I understand about a cow. I thought a cow was bigger. This has four legs, but it’s not black and white.”

In that moment, the child has a choice. She can ignore you, and her mental model will stay fixed. Or, she can reconsider her understanding of a cow. Maybe cows are also brown. Maybe cows can be big and small. Piaget chose the perfect word to describe this state of misalignment: Disequilibrium.

Disequilibrium happens when you begin to see things in the world that don’t make sense to you. The things you thought you knew—the things that helped you feel stable and clear—are now in question. And, woof. This state is hard. We crave equilibrium.

To understand more, I spoke with Beth Hennessey, professor of psychology at Wellesley College. Beth is a former elementary-school teacher and now studies motivation and creativity across cultures. “Whether someone is sitting down to write a scholarly paper or trying to solve a problem in the workplace, Piaget would tell us that the state of disequilibrium is a really uncomfortable place to be,” she says. “But we don’t give up, because we don’t like being in that stage of confusion. It’s hardwired in us to create new frameworks to accommodate the information we get about the world.”

In order to bring yourself back to a calm state of knowing, you have to generate a new “a-ha” inside your mind that reframes your old information with the new information. A mental model that, through the force of your imagination and intelligence, connects those dissonant dots into new meaning.

Learning isn’t about the consumption of new information. Learning is the process of using our innate abilities to construct—or create—new understandings of the world. Learning, by its very nature, is a creative act.

Our natural process of learning is well aligned with the creative process. Design research methods—finding inspiration from diverse sources, meeting people at the extremes, finding empathy for others’ experiences—provide structured activities to purposefully shake up your understanding of a problem and put you straight into that state of disequilibrium. The approach helps you seek information that surprises you, rather than reaffirming what you already know.

We crave equilibrium. So when all this input shakes up our understanding of the world, the only way through it is to create new meaning. Synthesis is our natural creative process, and once you start to put those pieces back together into new frameworks of understanding, that’s when the new ideas start to flow.

Learning to love disequilibrium

While it is obvious that a child naturally refines and recreates their mental models of the world, we often ignore the fact that we go through this same process as adults. It is even more challenging for us, however, as our mental models have become entrenched and intertwined with our identity. It’s no longer just about understanding the word “cow”: Now it’s about designing whole new offerings, experiences, and organizations that go against the convictions that have solidified in our minds. Putting ourselves into that vulnerable state of disequilibrium becomes riskier over time, especially if we are high-status leaders.

As I’ve dug back into the Constructivist learning research, I’ve been thinking about what I am taking away from this investigation.

To begin, it takes a lot of effort to create new mental models, but we leave little room for the cognitive load of innovation, what with our endless news feeds and unrelenting inboxes. For example, while I constantly think about the time required to tick off my to-do list, I rarely evaluate how much emotional energy is required to take my work to new creative heights. I realized that I am misspending my energy. How might I more clearly recognize the areas where I’m committed to developing new solutions? How might I make space for myself to be in the challenging state of disequilibrium? How might I pace ambitions so that I’m not disrupted by too many things at once?

Hennessey doesn’t offer much comfort here. “Being in that state of disequilibrium is hard work,” she says. “If a lot of different aspects of your life are in a messy place, you’re going to struggle, because so much energy is going to need to be expended. Getting out of this state is not just cognitive demand, it’s also affective: It’s emotional.”

Recently, I found myself sitting in an important meeting, feeling frustrated and wanting to point out what was wrong. I was starting to make fast decisions and putting pressure on my team to do the same.

Then I realized that I was in disequilibrium. I was feeling stretched, insecure, and like my mental models were insufficient. I was pushing for things to make sense. So instead of getting angry, I admitted my feelings of discomfort, and asked my colleagues to help me find my way through the ambiguity. And we did.

Somehow, just knowing that you’re in that state of disequilibrium makes it feel less stressful. We can become conscious of the signals of our mental states, and we can turn them into positive feedback. For me, the signs seem to be frustration and impatience. Now, when I feel those bubbling up, I smile and realize I’m just in that pesky state of disequilibrium, and that I can be patient with myself and realize that a new state of knowing is on the other side.

Permission to struggle

It’s no wonder that my design team was in tears as they worked through the synthesis stage of their project. Their minds, hearts, and emotions were all engaged in the difficult question they were answering, and they were a vulnerable mess. They felt the pressure of time, the pressure of the cause, and the pressure of not knowing the answers yet.

As a leader, I was challenged, too. I wanted to find quick answers, be ready for the client, cut through the confusion, and get on with it. But if I had filled in the blanks for the team or pushed them to get it done fast, we wouldn’t have gotten to the depth of the design solutions that the team found over the following days and weeks. In fact, toward the end of this effort, our client who had been working in the field for 25 years said, “I’ve been working with these guys for my entire career, and I want to thank you for helping me understand them better.”

So how does this Constructivist learning theory help us support creative teams? What if, as creative leaders, we saw ourselves as great Constructivist teachers instead of orienting around our knowledge and expertise? How would Piaget’s theories change our behavior?

As good Constructivist teachers, we need to give people the permission to struggle. As Hennessy says, “Whether you’re a teacher or a manager, you need to make it explicit that you understand that innovation and creativity is hard work, that people will hit that state of disequilibrium, that people will hit dead ends, and that that is valued. The best thing a teacher can do is model their own struggles.”

Just like classroom teachers, leaders face pressure to accomplish a set of outcomes within a particular timeframe and often, unintentionally, send signals to their teams that their time messing about in search of a new mental model isn’t valid. This urgency may trigger teams to cut short those deeper, more difficult stages of creative work, leading to shallow solutions.

IDEO's “mood meter.”

Years ago, IDEO developed a tool called the “Mood Meter” to help prepare newcomers for design projects. It’s a graphic that shows the journey of the design process with various levels of joy and anxiety charted on it. The idea was to provide reassurance that, although there would be some struggles, the project would end happily.

I was personally not a fan of this tool because I found it unfair to tell people how they would feel before they actually felt it. And yet, it was always right. During the research phase, people were elated, and during prototyping, too. Making stuff was always fun. But during synthesis, the phase devoted to making meaning, that line on the graph would drop to its lowest point. And that’s when you need time to sit in the struggle.

There is a belief out there that designers are constantly optimistic and confident, but that hasn’t been my experience. Creativity isn’t all about fun. Acknowledging that allows us to design better environments and processes that support the profound vulnerability necessary to develop creative solutions.

After more than a decade of leading creative teams, I believe that some of the best work comes from some of these hardest times. Confusion, self-doubt, existential searching, getting lost, and then finding your way out of that state of disequilibrium—these are the essential experiences for the emergence of creativity.

Header illustration by Timo Kuilder. This piece was originally published in Quartz.

It’s a Wednesday morning in the IDEO San Francisco studio. Bright sunshine reflects off the Bay and through the floor-to-ceiling windows. But in the project space, the mood is darker.

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.