The urgency of attending to our children’s mental health cannot be overstated.

Concern about their well-being was already on the rise in the decade prior to the pandemic. Alongside social inequity, the COVID era has seen soaring rates of depression, anxiety, trauma, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts. Knowing that mental health is influenced by numerous systemic factors, we met with families of all income levels and heard from practitioners throughout Massachusetts. In some communities, mental health is candidly discussed, in others it remains a taboo subject. Through these conversations, we learned that mental health requires both individuals and their families to be educated, supported, and empowered.

HandholdMA.org helps families find services that work for them and gives them easy access to information on a range of mental health topics. It allows parents to learn from and support one another as they navigate the landscape of mental health together. We took special care to make resources feel approachable for those in communities of color, and curated new resources for everyone from preschoolers to teens—because mental health challenges do not discriminate.

In 2020, a coalition of the nation’s leading experts in pediatric health issued an urgent warning that the mental health crisis among children had become a national emergency.

The percentage of emergency department visits for mental health crises rose by 24% for children between the ages of 5 and 11, and 31% for those 12 to 17, compared with 2019.

87,000

site visits to to HandholdMA.org since launch

223,000

people reached in bilingual social media campaign

To help shift vivo’s thinking from a focus on products to a focus on brand-building, IDEO set out to help the company understand how young consumers experience fun—a core tenet of the vivo brand. The new concept store needed to convey joy and fun in a meaningful and memorable way. The project was about more than just designing the space; it was also about piloting into vivo’s future brand systems.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team conducted user research in four different cities in China, then shared the stories of young Chinese consumers with the vivo team. Their interviews revealed that young people value experiences that enrich their lives and create a feeling of positive personal transformation. They seek opportunities to discover new experiences, express themselves in different ways, expand and deepen their social connections, and build knowledge and skills. By leaning on this definition of “enjoyment,” IDEO helped vivo identify the value proposition of the concept store, helping consumers express themselves in new and different ways. The store would allow every visitor to see something unique and find a fresh perspective.

The vivo team took that value proposition into a design brief and later built out the space and interactive experiences. The second floor of the store is dedicated entirely to interactive experiences using photo booths, sound recording, and lighting technology, designed to provide consumers with the kind of enjoyment they seek. vivo launched the concept store in Shenzhen on March 22, 2019, marking an important milestone in vivo’s transformation from a smartphone maker to a consumer brand.

China consumes roughly 30% of the world’s smartphones—which presents a tremendous market opportunity for brands looking to capture young consumers’ loyalty.

Top 1

in China's smartphone market, topping both shipments (sale-in) and retail sales (sale-out), in the first half of 2024

260M active users

within two years of vivo Lab's official opening, with 70% of them young users

The program Tsinghua and IDEO created together consisted of six modules focused on creative leadership: Rediscover Design, Build Design as a Core Competency, Creating the Conditions for Creativity, The Financial Levers for Innovation, Designing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Leading for Tomorrow. 73 Chinese and foreign experts helped teach the modules, including former Forbidden City Palace Museum director Shan Jixiang, the father of Japanese industrial design, Masayuki Kurokawa, and Jake Knapp, author of the book Sprint.

The program’s first cohort included more than 30 entrepreneurs from 20 different industries across nine cities. Participants completed the courses throughout the year, taking full advantage of holistic, interactive teaching and the opportunity to share their own practical experiences. Their feedback consistently demonstrated how the course had given them fresh approaches to problems their companies faced, whether improving internal communication or helping them see the clients they serve from a new perspective.

Liu Feng, the founder of a fast growing tourism development company, was particularly inspired by the Creating the Conditions for Creativity module’s six pillars of corporate transformation concept. Using these pillars, he not only refined the mission and value of his company, but also launched a series of measures to improve all aspects of its operations, from customer service to annual company gatherings. With a newly empowered team, he significantly increased the agility of the organization.

Ting Zhihong, the chairwoman of China’s leading logistics technology company, managed to double its profit during the course. She said her biggest takeaway from the course was how important it is to empower the team. Her company has now set up several platforms that give employees more room to experiment, create, and take part in frontline decision-making, bringing them closer to the company’s management.

Hu Chao, founder and CEO of China’s largest e-commerce platform for childcare goods, found that while other executive courses simply teach knowledge, Lead a Creative China taught him the importance of placing people at the center of what his company is doing.

The first cohort of the program graduated in December 2018. On April 8th, 2019, the Lead a Creative China program received an honorable mention in the education category as part of Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards, becoming the only award-winning Chinese project in the category.

After 40 years of rapid change, China has reached a pivotal point in its growth trajectory. Across the globe, traditional drivers of economic growth have slowed down, creating opportunity define the new economy.

‍

The Chinese government has laid out a wide range of ambitious policy plans to ensure that China successfully manages this transition, and that the country continues to grow and lead.

Honorable Mention

education category, Fast Company’s 2019 World Changing Ideas Awards

China’s digital landscape is dominated by highly integrated mobile apps like WeChat and Alipay that seamlessly combine messaging, shopping, bill payment, and finance management. This shift toward digital-first interactions that are hyper-convenient, personalized, and intuitive has significantly shaped consumer expectations for experiences like finding, booking, and staying in a hotel. To stay competitive and meet—or exceed—young guests’ expectations, Huazhu needed to redesign its Membership App 3.0 to prioritize guest needs across all touchpoints of the hotel journey.

Through in-depth research and member feedback, IDEO discovered the true pain point the Huazhu membership app needed to address: seamlessly integrating the hotel brand’s online and offline experiences. The Huazhu Membership App 3.0 adopted “simple, stable, and real” design principles, simplifying user operations, optimizing the interface, fixing lingering experience issues, maximizing page load speed, and reducing crash rates.

The IDEO team discovered users have different functional needs. Sometimes, users want to search for hotel information quickly. Other times, they prefer to explore and browse content slowly. To meet both needs, the app needed to be optimized for efficiency and exploration. So, the IDEO team upgraded the interface of the Huazhu Membership App, adding quick operation modules and information blocks on the main page, as well as a downward scrolling interface that gradually slows the experience, offering channels for detailed exploration.

Customers also had different needs at different points in their travel journey: before, during, and after their stays. IDEO designed the language and user interface to provide personalized service information for each stage, from booking to post-stay. The app’s content adapts to the user’s travel phase, showing the most relevant service experiences at each point. The content displayed on the app also changes based on user habits, helping the app flex to meet their needs. The design aligns with the Huazhu Hotels Group’s mission to provide personalized service to a diverse clientele.

The team also worked to inject Huazhu’s brand characteristics by offering an upgraded experience in booking, stay, dining, and member benefits and adding features like a 30-second, automatic check-in experience. These thoughtful, personalized updates integrate Huazhu Hotels Group’s meticulous service philosophy, providing customers with a welcoming, human-centered hospitality experience. The updated Huazhu Membership App 3.0 is now available in major app stores, shaping a new generation of user experiences for Huazhu Hotels Group.  

Young travelers in China expect the first touchpoint with a hotel brand to be digital.

5% increase

in monthly active users after the launch of the App's 2.0 version in 2021

6:20 AM: Snooze

6:30 AM: Sweep

Sweep. Make the coffee, water the succulents, check out a few new product curation apps and services the team has been talking about. While riding the bus across the Bay, I read about immigration patterns and how they affect consumers in North America. Staying inspired is part of our job, so I try to start each day with a healthy dose.

9:00 AM: Birthday shenanigans

Today is my teammate Julian’s birthday, so we surprised him with donuts and orange juice—his morning elixir of choice!

9:30 AM: Sketching and 3D modeling

My team’s current project is to reimagine the shopping experience for a large retailer. To prepare for a review with the team, I do some sketching and 3D modeling of in-store display concepts. We are a diverse and interdisciplinary bunch, so it helps to bring everyone’s ideas together through visualization.

10:30 AM: Design review with the team

We do team check-ins throughout the day, talking through our ideas to make sure we’re meeting user needs and pushing the integration of digital behaviors and physical environments. Today, we’re critiquing a bunch of sketches of critical shopping moments that we’ll prototype later. We’re considering how digital projection can add ambient information and subtle interaction to a physical display layout.

11:30 AM: Creating a physical study model

In preparation for our prototyping session in the IDEO Shop, we use a rough physical model to map out the experience of the future retail environment. A small-scale model lets us discuss all the ways shoppers might interact with a brick and mortar store—from browsing to comparison shopping, saving for later or checking out and having things shipped home. It’s helpful to keep our work quick and dirty, so that we have a model that lets the entire team walk through design points together.

12:00 PM: Julian’s birthday lunch

Continuing the festivities, we pop out of the office to get a bite of Scandinavian-inspired eats.

1:30 PM: Field testing and 1:1 prototyping

Time to refine the rough mock-up made in the office and rebuild it in a live retail environment. We wear jumpsuits to suggest how we want the client’s brand to evolve (and because jumpsuits are cool).

The prototype begins outside the store with a simulated mobile shopping experience that ushers shoppers directly to our redesigned displays. The point of the prototype is to test a store layout that could feel like an extension of a mobile shopping experience. Think curated themes, minimal options, and intuitive product comparison interactions. Turns out, some things they hate, some things they love, and a few things don’t make sense to them at all! All of that is great feedback for moving forward, by the rock-and-roll rules of prototyping. Achieving a realistic level of physical interaction while keeping the design at a prototypical level is key to getting honest feedback. We draw our insights from watching how users interact with the space, as well as their answers to directed prompts.

7:30 PM: Teach

My nightcap is heading to California College of the Arts, where I teach a class about physical space and digital interaction titled “Objects & Space.” We work with sensors, hack projectors, control motors, glue, and foamcore, and build our way through code, all in the spirit of figuring out what the environments designers of tomorrow might do.

‍

When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I use space to explore design solutions.” It might sound like I work for NASA, but what we environments designers actually do is consider how physical space influences human behavior. Much of my time is spent sketching, making models, building walls out of foamcore, miming, turning off the lights, rendering, and doing my best to break feng shui. Here's a breakdown of a typical day:

The purpose for these hybrid safety specs is threefold: I can post images of our projects or build steps to my Snapchat account, save the videos for internal documentation, and also create more structured build logs.

I’ve been using them for the past week; they're super fun. Here’s how you can modify your own pair:

1. Buy the Snapchat Spectacles directly through their website.
2. Get some $29 clear replacement lenses for the tinted ones that come with the Spectacles. I bought mine from GlassesUSA. If you require a prescription, you can have them made with prescription lenses for the same price!
3. Get some protective side shields.
4. Modify the side shields to fit the glasses. This means you will need to cut the tops and center-front part off of them like so:

You can now use the supplied O-ring to attach the shields to the Snapchat Spectacles. They should now look like this:

The Snapchat app makes it really easy to edit 10-second Snaps into a build story. I even made this display rack to show them off:

Check out this video (recorded using the Spectacles!) that shows how I made the display rack:

‍

A few weeks ago, while I was in our workshop, I had an idea: If I could modify Snapchat’s Spectacles into a pair of safety goggles, I could document our projects without ever picking up a camera.

In one sentence, who are you?

I'm a 37-year-old Tokyoite with a mane that's swiftly moving from Pauly Shore to Kenny G.

What do you do? How did you learn to do it?

I do interactive design and Japanese literature. I learned the former at NYU's ITP program, and the latter from my amazing high school Japanese teacher Susan Tanabe.

What are your 3 favorite possessions?

1. The Twitter app
2. My mint copy of Zik Emmy's "Perfect Change"
3. My engraved Tamagoyaki frying pan

What does a typical work session look like?

To me, code is like jazz, man. Improvisation. I've got a synth—a Korg MS-20—and I run the input through Max MSP. Max interprets frequency to the nearest quarter tone, and white keys are mapped to reserve words in my current coding idiom, while black keys spit out numbers. There's not a lot of reserve words in programming, so all I need to do is throw on a fatback beat and just jam.

(J/K—coding is mostly just copy-pasting stuff from Stack Overflow.)

Pierre Menard and the infinite monkeys. Created using openframeworks, a series of openGL shaders, and about 48 hours of processing. The image is drawn using images Googled from the lyrics to the album "Irresistible."

How do you get over creative block?

I'm not "real-time" at all. I'm useless in a brainstorm, and even worse at a Q&A. First dates are a disaster, and job interviews are even worse. Whenever I'm asked something, I wish I could pause the world and go on a nice walk through Shinjuku Gyoen, because I know that right around the fifteen-minute mark, when the blood starts moving, I'll find the right idea, the right reply. Working alone is great because you have this affordance, but sometimes in groups it's hard to say, "Hey y'all, keep brainstorming, you're doing a great job. I'm just going to go take a lil perambulation, if you can just hold that thought until I get back?"

I'm also usually most creative when I'm working with some idiom or technology I've never touched before. Figuring something out for the first time is the best way to have ideas about how to use it. People like to rap about reinventing the wheel, but I feel like reinventing wheels is how we come up with bicycles.

What was the last item on your to-do list?

I have this great translation I did of Aida Makoto's novel, Youth and Perversion. I need to nudge him about rights, because it's really a sterling translation.

How do you see the world in 2078?

(Assuming a Werner Herzog mien.) I must confess, I'm pessimistic. I think we'll either have a benign socialist matriarchy, or else it will be a hellscape. My expectations have not been appreciably bolstered by the last year of world history.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I'd like to get into hang-gliding or some other flying sport. I'm banking on somebody from IDEO designing an affordable, eco-friendly personal flight module.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Mohri Yuko, a great Japanese interactive installation artist.

Kevin Freeny, funniest man alive 16 years running.

As a longtime resident of Tokyo, Matt Fargo finds ways to make Japanese culture more fun for everyone. He's written books about speaking dirty Japanese, created dynamic audio and visuals for musicals featuring dancing dogs, and built games for Tokyo train riders. He’s one of those restless creative people who just goes forth and makes. Before living in Tokyo, he spent time creating interactive experiences for Second Story in his hometown of Portland, Oregon. He's since continued his quest to build weirdness into technology through his work at Party. Let’s peek into his brain, shall we?

Sometimes the questions are serious (“How might we better design for equity—inclusion, diversity, ageism, access, technology, etc—for all?) and sometimes they’re playful (“What’s your favorite restaurant in the Bay Area?”). But no matter what type of question goes up, the responses are always intriguing.

Our latest bathroom installation asked: “What book are you currently reading?” I’m always on the hunt for a good read, so I couldn’t be happier with the bonanza of recommendations. Dig in:

4321 ◆ A Fine Balance ◆ A Man Named Ove ◆ A Manual for Cleaning Women ◆ Amazon Beaming ◆ Americanah ◆ Barbarian Days ◆ Being Mortal ◆ Beyond the 100th Meridian ◆ Big Magic ◆ Borne ◆ Brida ◆ Celine ◆ Commonwealth ◆ Como Agua Para Chocolate ◆ Danny the Champion of the World ◆ Dark Forest ◆ Devil in the White City ◆ Dolly - My Life and Other Unfinished Projects ◆ Dreamblood Duology ◆ East of Eden ◆ Essentialism ◆ Exit West ◆ Facebook ◆ Faith of the Fallen ◆ Far from the Tree

Gut ◆ Heat ◆ Homo Deus ◆ Life Over Cancer ◆ Lovie ◆ M Train ◆ Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ◆ Moon Tiger ◆ Mustache Shenanigans ◆ My Life on the Road ◆ My Year of Meats ◆ Neuromancer ◆ On Booze ◆ Origin of the Species ◆ Other Minds ◆ Pachinko ◆ Reality is Broken ◆ Sapiens ◆ Shoe Dog ◆ Stealing Fire ◆ Stories of Life and Others ◆ The ABCs of Real Estate Investing ◆ The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ◆ The Circle ◆ The Collapse of American Criminal Justice ◆ The Drowned World

The Ethical Slut ◆ The Gene ◆ The God of Small Things ◆ The Gunslinger ◆ The Harry Potter Series ◆ The Incal ◆ The Interestings ◆ The Labyrinth of Spirits ◆ The Language of Food ◆ The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck ◆ The Lightbringer Series ◆ The Name of the Wind ◆ The Orphan Master’s Son ◆ The Quran ◆ The Sellout ◆ The Sixth Extinction ◆ The Sympathizer ◆ The Travels of Ibn Battutah ◆ The Unbanking of America ◆ The Unseen City ◆ The Vegetarian ◆ The Violet Hour ◆ Third Plate ◆ Topics in Calamity Physics ◆ Trials of Apollo II ◆ Yes, Please

What have you read (or listened to) on the list? And what are you curious to read? Tag your response on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook with #bathroomread.

Visuals by Jane Ha.

‍

There’s one IDEO tradition you’ll only get to witness if you stop by our San Francisco office with a full bladder. Every few weeks, a new question goes up on the bathroom wall. IDEOers pop into the loo throughout the day, spend a few moments minding their own business, so to speak, and the wall fills up with answers.

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.