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.

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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

As my team and I prepared for Typeforce, an annual Chicago typography gallery show, we started to think about how we could leverage AI and our own creative skills to build an intelligent system that could work with us—a communication designer, a production designer, and a data scientist—to create a visually distinct submission.

While you might think of typography as designing or selecting just the right font and arranging it immaculately, submissions to Typeforce range far outside that, including everything from carved sculptural elements and needlepoint to hand-drawn tableaus and digital installations. It was our first time submitting to the show, and our goal was to take advantage of this wide-open opportunity and use our individual crafts to make something out of the ordinary.

We imagined a creative process where Kristen, our communication designer, would give an algorithm examples of posters with interesting type compositions, and it would try to learn from them and spit back lots and lots of attempts to create something similar. Kristen could use the algorithm’s generated posters as starting points for creating new posters to feed back into it, as well as clues for what it still needed to learn. Trying to train the algorithm could itself become a great set of constraints for creativity, and when it was over, we could show off the visual artifacts of that back-and-forth process at the show.

We landed on Dadaist and Futurist compositions as an interesting place to begin. The Dadaists made things that didn’t make sense, reacting to a world (at the time, in the midst of World War I) that also didn’t make sense. That felt relevant to today as well, and had the added bonus of being something a computer might be better at producing than more immaculate, grid-based layouts.

So we got to work collecting historical examples we liked, and Kristen traced them so I could feed them into our algorithm as digital files. I got to work on the algorithm itself, which we named Kurt, after the Dadaist artist and designer Kurt Schwitters.

For Kristen, teaching Kurt initially felt weirdly similar to teaching a human design student. He made compositions and she looked at them, identified his strongest concepts, and "suggested" ways that they could be improved through the next round of examples. Then he responded to her feedback.

After this first exchange, though, the differences between an algorithm and a human design student became more apparent. Kurt's learning was reactive, limited to the examples he's seen and the only way he knows to think—in numerical variables like font sizes, rotations, and X-Y coordinates. Human designers often start out this way too—just absorbing examples of design and then mimicking them—but they usually grow past it. Instead of just copying a poster they see, the poster might inspire them to push aspects of it further, or combine them with other styles that work well together. AIs like Kurt can’t do this the way a person can—certainly not yet, and probably not anytime soon.

Kurt also doesn’t understand English, much less design terminology or ideas about why he’s doing anything. He can’t understand feedback about tone or context that Kristen might give her real students, like "your typography feels a little uninviting and impersonal. Is that tone appropriate to your audience/content/message?" And being able to respond to those sorts of questions in a sensitive, nuanced way is pretty central to being a good communication designer.

Ultimately we filled the wall with 90 prints, which made for a nice display of Kurt’s strengths—his ability to learn, and how prolific he can be—as well as Kristen’s—her skill as a designer and how she used those skills to teach.

Designers like Kristen can lean on Kurt to do things humans can't, like create dozens of compositions in a minute, or provide modifications or jumping off points that are really off the wall and decidedly not what an experienced designer would do. Some creative thinkers are already experimenting with these kinds of techniques; Robin Sloan, for example, a writer who hacked a text editor to complete his sentences using a deep learning model trained on a bunch of old sci-fi stories.

We imagine a future with more tools that creators can “teach"—unique products of an individual’s sensibilities that serve to amplify their intent and challenge them creatively, like a synthesizer that learns to play along and accompany in a style complementary to a musician’s vision. We hope Kurt inspires other designers, engineers, and data scientists to explore this future by building “collaborators” together.

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As a data scientist, I know computers are great at trying lots of things quickly. But when it comes to learning artful nuance, they can fall flat. At the same time, human graphic designers are great at tweaking and critiquing, but they can only move their hands so fast in Illustrator. It's a juxtaposition that begs the question, can AI and humans collaborate to leverage their unique strengths?

Battle terminology sneaks in (kill, crush, destroy, capture, acquire); and as in war, it becomes necessary to take the humanity out of those “targets” in order to execute on the plan.

But it’s not impossible to imagine a world where business success goes hand-in-hand with seeing and respecting the humanity of our competitors, or customers, or colleagues. Even at IDEO, where we champion a human-centered approach, the words we use in meetings and briefs can fall into the tried and true trope of conquest.

As a thought exercise, we made a list of the common terms that can dehumanize customers and competitors, and a list of alternatives that might infuse our conversations about individual and organizational performance with more humanity, agency, and reciprocity.

No one needs more business jargon, but we have a hunch that changing the way we speak can change the way we think, and in turn can change the way business feels and what it delivers. We’re trying it out and invite you to do the same.

Business is competitive by design. To succeed, as an individual or an organization, requires assertiveness, power, and strength. As a result, much of the language we use while doing business implies a desire to overpower—or even disempower—our competitors.

While we designed a new family of acoustic amps for Fender, we squeezed into an Airstream for two months to better understand the touring musician lifestyle. And when we wanted to better understand the environmental impact of the things we design, we visited a sewage treatment plant to see what happens when a product can't be recycled.

We go after big problems that have never been solved. And by going all in on the unfamiliar and uncomfortable, we’ve come up with creative solutions that we might not have imagined before.

As an industrial designer, I’m a builder. I experience the world with all my senses and apply my tangible building skills to make experiences and systems. Technology inspires me because it's always been an important vehicle to advance our current state. With technology racing forward at an ever increasing pace, some advancements can impact us on an unprecedented scale. As shapers of the future, we must strive to understand the consequences and implications of emerging technology. We do this by asking ourselves uncomfortable questions about possible outcomes during the design process in areas like healthcare, the future of work, and the circular economy.

In order to better understand how emerging technologies could affect our day-to-day life, my colleagues from multiple design disciplines—industrial design, data science, communications, interaction design—and I embarked on an internal IDEO project that could give us some clues. We got curious and asked ourselves, How might the way we’re communicating with each other change with new technology? How might we collaborate together in the future when we can show up in different realities? What could be possible if the digital and physical world blend seamlessly into each other? How will we protect our privacy if we can teach devices our most personal preferences, and what will happen to our data?

We named our project The Discomfort Zone.

In order to explore these uncomfortable, out-there questions, we had to experience them ourselves, and to experience the future we had to build it. Here are the tools that we built:

Personalized Intelligence: by building a camera that can be taught to take the best self portraits based on individualized feedback, we experienced the idea of actively teaching machines our preferences. The user trains it on their ideal lighting, placement, composition, head tilt, and facial expressions. While it may seem like a trivial thing to create, teaching machines to see us how we see ourselves can show us the path to building other devices—like health devices—that the user can teach to adapt to user preferences and feedback.

Complementary Media: a device that can be taught to recognize facial expressions and emotions, then generates an appropriate, customized emotional expression for each user—like a personalized emoji—helped us imagine more depth and expressiveness online using artificial intelligence. This tool can communicate real human emotion, which could lead to improved communication among children, for example.

Shared Realities: a tool, bridging the physical and virtual, that allows workers operating in VR to sense the presence and movements of colleagues around them as if they are on the same plane. An exploration of how virtual and augmented technology might improve collaboration, it allows people to respond to virtual coworkers’ cues without fully disrupting work in the virtual environment.

Network Empathy: code that enables a user to anticipate how large social or interconnected user networks will react to messages before they are posted, bringing deeper understanding and empathy to online communication. With cues from large online networks, smart technology becomes even smarter and empathetic interaction online becomes easier—especially when it is applied to high-profile communications, or at mass scale among networks that might be discussing politics, health, or education.

Meta Identity: code that is invisible to naked eye can be embedded in an object to make it readable by a machine—not unlike a barcode—and give it meaning online. Branding and production methods might evolve toward this physical tagging method, so that users easily learn about physical objects they see, and find them online. Making the physical as searchable as the Internet could further empower consumers to align their purchase decisions with their beliefs and values.

As designers, it is our responsibility to explore the discomfort zone, design holistically, and consider the full range of possibilities of what we create. For example, as much as Network Empathy was intended to be an inclusive tool, it could also be used to manipulate public opinion by predicting the reaction of large audiences. If we use Personalized Intelligence to teach our devices our most personal preferences, what becomes of this new personal data? And who is the owner of this information: the device, the platform, or the individual?

Because technology will serve us on an even more personal level, the stakes are high. Designers are uniquely stationed to be the connectors in an ever more complex ecosystem of stakeholders, and we must ensure the tool leaves the lab and enters an ecosystem with safeguards in place to have a positive impact.

We’re at the dawn of something big and unknown. New technologies are shaping the future in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. Some of them will have extraordinary benefits, while others, through unforeseen capabilities or even sinister intentions, may have unwanted consequences. But as designers, it’s up to us to explore them early, dive into the unfamiliar, and do what we can to shape the future for the better. We’d love for you to join us here in The Discomfort Zone.

The Discomfort Zone was a collaboration among many designers at IDEO. Special thanks to all involved, including the core design team: Leo Marzolf, Jochen Weber, Brooke Thyng, Christian Ramsey, and Nan Tsai.

So much of being a designer is being willing to embrace the uncomfortable. We create new products, experiences and systems for people whose needs are different than ours—sometimes really different.

In one sentence, who are you?

I am an illustrator who enjoys bringing any amount of joy to people through my creations.

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

I create different drawings using pencil and ink. The illustrations range from patterns to caricatures, unique creatures, and other one-off ideas. I grew up sketching and doodling and it has continued. When I moved to LA, I was suddenly surrounded by an amazing cadre of artists and creators who constantly inspire me, as well as push me to keep improving myself. That is how I learned my craft and continue to learn, because I believe you never truly finish learning.

What are your 3 favorite possessions?

Miniature Back to the Future 2 hover board; Magnum P.I. Tiki Mug; a drawing of my fiancé and me, which she drew. Not in that order.

What does a typical work session look like?

I have a running list of ideas and sketches that I pull from if I don't have an art show with a specific topic that I am working towards. Usually, I'll do some Google searches on the topic at hand and pull a bunch of reference photos for perusal during the pencil drawing stage. I sketch out the drawing inside a pre-drawn area, such as 4x6 or 5x7. Art that is easy to frame is always a goal of mine, because I love framed art and it drives me mad when I see things tacked onto a wall or cork board. After finalizing the pencil drawing, I'll usually step away for a moment or two to play a video game or watch a show. I like to do something that differentiates the time between stages. Once I come back to the drawing, I pull out all the different micron pens that I think I will use for the piece. I check the nibs, and then I begin inking. I put on dramas in the background to listen to, or things I've seen a ridiculous number of times. West Wing and Parks and Recreation are two such shows.

I don't like to start inking unless I am going to finish a drawing that night. Sometimes, a piece is too large, and I have to break it up over two nights. If that happens, I make sure the pens I've used on the previous night are away from all my other pens. I do this to achieve a consistency within the lines. Once finished, I scan the piece, put it within a predetermined frame, and pack it up for a craft fair or deliver it if it's for an art show. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

How do you get over creative block?

I used to stop drawing and just stew for a bit until it finally passed, which could take a bit of time. As I've gotten older, and ever so slightly more confident in my abilities, I push through it. I just keep drawing. Yes, sometimes the drawings are awful, but as Lauren (my future wife) always says, "sometimes you just have to pass a rat."

How do you see the world in 2078?

A lazy utopia, filled with autonomous everything. Humanity will have moved past Earth and outward into the stars while robots cater to our every whim and we become fat and happy. I could be confusing my vision of the world in 2078 with the timeline in Wall-E—who doesn't yearn for the saccharine dreams of Pixar in 2017. It is tough to image the future right now because at this moment it feels as though we are hanging by a loose wire, and any minute now someone with a spray tan is going to cut the wire and tell us all how huge his ratings are, as we all fall to our collective doom. I hope we make it to 2078, if only so that I can enjoy my hover chair and 128-ounce Slurpee.

What’s number one on your bucket list?

I should say something epic like bungee jumping off of Thomas Jefferson's nose on Mount Rushmore, but honestly, I'd like to have my own artist's studio. Some place I could retreat to and tune out the world and draw silly pictures. That to me is something I want to do before I fade out of this existence.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

I've had a one-sided love affair with Dustin Harbin for a long time. I own two of his original pieces and his diary comics book. The man can use an ink nib like Aaron Sorkin can turn a phrase.

I’ve been creative crushing on Austin Salmi since I saw his doodles, patterns, and adorable characters on Instagram almost two years ago. Austin’s work, learned through practice and osmosis in his job surrounded by artists, has a giggly character about it that fits his intention to hide the ugliness of the world for a moment, and make lovely order out of chaos. I got to learn a bit more about him and his process 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.