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

My friend Stefan suggested I try a different mindset. Instead of trying to get things right, I should put myself in “play mode.” From his email:

Right then, I was working on an illustration for part of my book where some early readers got confused. But I wanted to get it right, so I’d been putting it off. "Okay," I thought. "I can afford to waste an hour on this."

I tried play mode. I told myself the next hour didn’t matter—I was just goofing around and having fun. I set a timer. I made about 15 rough sketches. Then the hour was up. And I hadn’t gotten it right. But I’d broken the ice, and I was in the zone, so I kept working. Thirty minutes later, I had an illustration I was happy with. And the whole thing was fun rather than stressful. Play mode worked!

I’m writing this post to remind myself of the value of play mode. Next time you talk to me and I say, "I’m stuck," tell me to flip the switch.

This post was originally published on Jake Knapp's blog.

I get stuck a lot. I get stuck writing, editing, making slides, designing, replying to email. I get stuck anytime I want to get something right.

But there are limitations to voice-enabled interactions. They’re slow, embarrassing when other humans are around, and require awkward trigger phrases like “Okay, Google” or “Hey, Siri.”

Thankfully, though, talking into midair is no longer our only—or best—option.

The new iPhone introduced a camera that can perceive three dimensions and record a depth for every pixel, and home devices like the Nest IQ and Amazon's Echo Look now have cameras of their own. Combined with neural nets that learn and improve with more training data, these new cameras create a point cloud or depth map of the people in a scene, how they are posing, and how they are moving. The nets can be trained to recognize specific people, classify their activities, and respond to gestures from afar. Together, neural nets and better cameras open up an entirely new space for gestural design and gesture-based interaction models.

These new options beg the question: Of the existing interaction modalities—haptics (touch), sound (voice), and vision (gesture)—which is better to use when, and why?

The use case points toward an answer. When you’re SCUBA diving, or water skiing, or directing traffic on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the auditory channel isn’t available, so gesture or touch become essential.

In an operating room, a surgeon’s hands are sterile; she can’t flip through radiology scans—only speech and gesture are available. If you’re conducting an orchestra or on a military raid you can’t call out commands, so we’re back with gesture.

WATCH: From Charlie Chaplin to Cricket, there are a wide range of sources to inspire us as we design for gestural communication.

To dig into it further, our team at the Cambridge studio snagged a camera like the one in the new iPhone and performed a series of experiments to figure out when gesture might be the best choice.

First, we gave pairs of people an idea, then we asked them to make a four-handed pose to express that idea.

Then we recorded stories and tracked people’s hands using computer vision to study when we naturally deploy gestures to amplify emotion or explain a concept.

WATCH: Tracking how we gesticulate to bring stories to life.

WATCH: Ask a group of people to perform an action or request and you get some variation. The trick is finding gestures that are as universal as possible.

Lastly, we trained a neural network to recognize a small set of gestures, and used these to control a Philips HUE light set and a Spotify station to create an installation for the office.

WATCH: Using a set of gestures, we trained a few devices in our office to respond to our cues and adjust the lights and music.

In messing around with these exercises, we discovered that gestures need to be either sequential, like a sentence—noun then verb, object plus operation. For example, for “speaker, on,” one hand designates the noun, and the other the verb: You point to speaker with left hand and turn the volume up by raising right hand.

Another surprising insight: Gestures are generation-specific.

When asked to signal turning up the volume, a few people twisted an invisible knob, but most of the under 30s lifted a palm or made a pinching gesture with their fingers.

After analyzing our results, we boiled our thoughts down to four reasons to opt for gesture over voice or touch:

1. Speed: If it needs to be fast, gestures are much quicker than speaking sentences.
2. Distance: If you need to communicate from across the room, gesture is easier than dealing with volume.
3. Limited lexicon: If you don't have a thousand things to say, gestures work well. The smaller the gesture set for a given context, the easier it is to remember. (Thumbs-up/thumbs-down, for example.)
4. Expressiveness over precision: Gestures are well-suited to expressing emotional salience. A musical conductor communicates a downbeat and tempo, but also so much more: dolco, marcato, confidence, sadness, longing, and more.

It's exciting to imagine a whole new category of products that will take advantage of gesture’s subtlety, expressiveness, and speed.

How might we use gesture in unexpected ways? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Many thanks to the rest of the team: Lisa Tacoronte, Todd Vanderlin, Jason Robinson, Danny DeRuntz, Brian Standeford, Eric Chan, and Ari Adler.

Since Siri was introduced in 2010, the world has been increasingly enamored with voice interfaces. When we need to adjust the thermostat, we ask Alexa. If we want to put on a movie, we ask the remote to search for it. According to some estimates, some 33 million voice-enabled devices reported for duty in American homes by the end of 2017.

“I don’t think of myself as a collector, I just keep the stuff that happens in my life," Kelley says. And what happens over the course of a life in design adds up.

Kelley, who founded IDEO 40 years ago and went on to launch Stanford's d.school, has a lot of stories to tell, and most of them are connected to stuff—stuff IDEO made, stuff given to him by other designers and architects like Ettore Sottsass (who also designed Kelley's house), stuff that unlocks memories and, not infrequently, gets him choked up. (SPOILER ALERT: skip to 1:54 where he points out a picture from his wedding. One of the guests is IDEO cofounder Bill Moggridge, the father of interaction design, who died in 2012.)

Take a tour of David Kelley's office shelves

The wall of wooden cubbies in Kelley's small Palo Alto office is crowded with prototypes, model automobiles (Kelley is also a car buff who owns about 20 vehicles, including a 1954 Chevy pickup), and other curios like a giant "I" that lights up and is inscribed with his life's story. His coworkers fabricated it for him in the company shop for his 50th birthday.

In fact, Kelley has a small museum of birthday keepsakes that IDEO designers have given him over the years: a giant spotlight, an old motorcycle, and one of those mechanical horses that costs a dime to ride, purchased from a grocery store.

Inspiration and materials for those gifts often came from University Art, the Palo Alto supply store down the street from the studio. "There was a guy named Jim, lovely white haired guy," Kelley says. Jim was the store manager, and when Kelley told him he was starting a new company down the street and would like to open an account, Jim replied that they'd have to charge $50 a month to qualify. Kelley admitted he didn't know if they'd be able to do that. "Fast forward a few years, Jim was still there and we had about 350 employees and we were charging $50 a minute. Jim would always remind me of that story..."

Kelley's collecting gene runs in his family. His mother used to call it "shopping in the basement." She'd go down to the first floor of the house and dig up something from Kelley's past and send it to him for his birthday.

"Things would show up in the mail: My leather pouch that I would keep my marbles in when I was a little boy; my boy scout uniform. I'm kind of in that same vein as my mother. I'm keeping things that are meaningful. When I am sitting around, I can look at the model we made of the first mouse or the Christmas card we made in 1993 and I just think, it's pleasurable now; it's going to be even more pleasurable as I get older."

Though IDEO still makes stuff, much of what we design, along with what we consume, has become less tangible. And it's a good thing—there's not much more room on Kelley's shelves.

It's not everyday that you see the first ever example of something you love. So, when David Kelley invited us into his office and pulled an early prototype of the Apple Mouse off his shelf, I let out an audible gasp.

In one sentence, who are you?

I'm a creative jack of all trades, I guess, which can be useful but is often frustrating, especially because I'm surrounded by very talented people with a depth of skill and knowledge that always feels out of reach for me.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

These days, I mainly make music and podcasts. I write and sing songs under the name The One AM Radio, I've scored some film and TV, and I make beats in a project called Moors. The podcasts I make are called Song Exploder, in which musicians trace the creative decisions that went into a song of theirs, and The West Wing Weekly, in which the Aaron Sorkin TV series is discussed in detail. As far as how I learned—I studied graphic design in school and I think that had a big influence on how I think about things. With music, I mainly learned by listening to others talk about what they do. That became the basis for starting a podcast, too; Song Exploder is about listening closely.

3 favorite possessions?

1. My computer (whatever it is at any given time, it's my way into everything)
2. My custom Healy electric guitar (it looks and sounds beautiful, and it's the first time I'd ever had anything custom-made)
3. My house (it's small but peaceful and cozy, it's where I live and work, and it feels like an extension of who I am).

What does a typical work session look like?

Part of the garage at my house was converted into an office, which I use as a makeshift recording studio. I have my computer, my piano, and my guitars in there. I sit in front of the computer, and usually work in two-hour bursts until my focus runs out. Then I pace around the backyard and in and out of the house for a while until my ears and my brain settle back down, and then get back to work. I usually start in the early afternoon and work until pretty late into the night.

How do you get over creative block?

I'll let you know once I figure it out. I started Song Exploder in part because of writer's block in my own songwriting…and I'm still not sure that I've gotten through it.

How do you see the world in 2078?

At this point, I'm just hoping there will still be a world left to see in 2078.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

One casualty of my dilettantism is that I don't have a a number one bucket list item. I have three items that might rank at number four, though: I'd like to produce a feature film, design my own house, and see all seven continents. But if none of them happened, I'd find something else.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

I am in love with the music of Grouper and the prints of Phil Chang, who is pushing at the edge of what photography can be.

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Podcasts are the most important medium of our time. That’s right. They provide a meritocratic platform, and the best of them verge on art. One such podcast, Song Exploder, introduced me to the creative talent of Hrishikesh Hirway about three years ago. Since then, Hrishi and I have kept in touch—he even gave a visiting lecture on the intersection of sound and graphic design at our San Francisco studio. Like all of us at IDEO, Hrishi approaches every project as a design problem. I was thrilled to again catch up with him in this installment of Creative Crushes.

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.