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

Turns out it's really hard to get people to think about why they'd use technology they don’t understand for a problem they don’t know exists. And that's exactly the challenge we've taken on at the CoLab, IDEO’s collaborative innovation lab—to determine what humans will need in the connected future.

How does that affect our quarterly design sprints? The goal isn't faster execution—as it would be with a typical work sprint—but rather surfacing and validating new opportunities.

Here's how it works: At the start of the sprint, each multidisciplinary team (a motley crew of designers, technologists, and businesspeople who range from students to entrepreneurs to corporate representatives) is given a design brief that specifies a technology to use, like blockchain or machine learning. Teams are charged with quickly getting their heads around the emerging technology, creating their first prototype, gathering feedback, iterating, synthesizing, and sharing their design.

Over the past four years, we’ve created well over 200 prototypes and learned a ton.

Here are our best tips for how to run a highly productive design sprint:

1. Big questions need small starting points

When you’re asking a huge, provocative question, you could spend months coming up with answers. So, before the sprint, we make sure we take time to craft specific briefs to work on—design challenges that are bite-sized enough that we can (in)validate them during the course of a week, but broad enough that we can sink our teeth into them.

We might start with a question like: “How might decentralized technologies change the ways communities reduce risk?” and include a suggested prototype like: “Build a peer to peer insurance product for travel using blockchain technology.” This level of specificity can feel stifling at first—but it helps teams get moving fast toward a prototype.

2. Timebox everything

An exploratory sprint can feel directionless at first—you’re trying to make something new with a brand new tool, which means you could do almost anything. The best way to not devolve into endless spiraling is by scheduling every phase of design down to the minute. When you know your team needs to make a decision between A and B in the next seven minutes, well, you put on your big kid pants and decide. By giving yourself a series of minideadlines, you can accomplish more iterations and ultimately, a better prototype at the end of your sprint.

3. Show up with a prototype

When you’re working with a revolutionary technology and trying to explain your idea to a potential user, their eyes glaze over. Showing up to user testing sessions with a prototype—even if it’s far from final—makes the future tangible and accessible. You’re not talking about faster horses anymore, you’ve got people imagining cars.

4. Strong ideas weakly held

Making something takes confidence, and nothing builds confidence like concrete evidence that you’re headed in the right direction. But evidence is hard to come by in the world of emerging tech. Try prototyping as if you’re right—and then listening as if you’re wrong. This means putting your prototype in front of people and learning from all the ways it didn’t work for them—giving you both evidence and direction on what to build.

5. Find the right questions, not perfect solutions

Exploration is about charting unfamiliar territory. Sometimes that means you get it all wrong and end up at a dead-end. But that doesn’t mean the sprint was a failure! As we said, the goal of an exploratory sprint is not to execute a million dollar idea in record time, but to surface new opportunities.

At the end of the sprint, when it’s time to present your prototype, focus the conversation on what you learned: What would you build next time to make an even better, more human-centered solution? What advice would you give to others designing with these technologies?

6. Science fair, not pitch deck

Rather than jazz hands, Powerpoints, and promises of what your prototype could do, we always end our sprints in a science fair format: multiple hands-on demos happening alongside one another, with lots of room for discussion.

This lets people experience prototypes individually and then come back together to reflect on how the ideas worked for them (or didn’t). It’s another round of user feedback that furthers our learning and participants walk away with real insights that might apply to their work beyond the sprint.

It’s not always easy to run a sprint. It means breaking out of your regular work routine and collaborating with a team to do something intense and exhausting that you aren’t always sure is going to work. It means building with tools you don’t know how to use (yet).

But when we follow these rules, our sprints offer up reams of new ideas, insights, opportunities, and next steps that send us galloping toward a more human-centered future.

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Know that timeworn Henry Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”? Turns out Ford probably never said that. But as designers who are trying to imagine and build the future, we’ve found it to be a very useful notion.

1. THE DIXON MULTIPLEX

Multiplex is a pop-up "department store of tomorrow" trading for a month as part of the London Design Festival. It features contributions from a wide range of brands curated by legendary product designer Tom Dixon and Wallpaper magazine.

Billed as immersive and multi-sensory, I was super curious to see the designer's vision of an multi-brand store that is fighting for the attention of tomorrow's customers by offering experiences, not just products. That included British botanicals brand Haeckels’ mist spa (like walking into an aromatic greenhouse), to booking in for a fashion shoot or even a vitamin injection.

2. MINDBLOWER

Mindblower is a new 'idea to product' platform showcased at Multiplex, which invites you to pitch ideas for physical products you would like to create, to help bridge the gap between the amazing ideas we dream up and our ability to tangibly own them.

A blend of TV show Dragon’s Den and Kickstarter, its inclusion within a prototype store of tomorrow was interesting, blurred the boundaries between consumer, inventor, and entrepreneur. It's still super early days, but interesting to see someone responding to the citizen maker-economy without assuming that everyone is well-versed in design, 3D printing or engineering.

3. THE GOOD JUDGMENT PROJECT, AND SUPERFORECASTING

The Good Judgement Project is an experiment to explore how well the 'wisdom of the crowd' is able to predict future world events (e.g. will a nation's government collapse in the next six months). It's headline-grabbing finding is that within the thousands of people taking part, there is a small group of ordinary citizens dubbed 'superforecasters' whose predictions are 30% better than intelligence professionals armed with confidential data and subject expertise.

Philip Tetlock's new book - Superforecasting - looks at what sets these superforecasters apart. It's not just about raw intelligence (Superforecasters are clever but not off the charts) they demonstrate a 'growth mindset'; an openness to consider information from many different origins, to change their predictions, and to look back at their predictions and learn from their mistakes. Forecasting is something we could all potentially become better at, and Tetlock has now described how.

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Every Monday morning, the London studio shares a coffee and some inspiration. This week, design researcher Kate Wakely talks through an immersive, pop-up retail experience from famed product designer Tom Dixon, a Dragon’s Den meets Quirky-style product development platform, and a book on the emerging art of super forecasting.

Have you ever experienced one of those mornings when you are in the middle of an argument with your partner at home, but you’re late for work and you can't make peace? This was one of those days.

On my bike ride home, I get a text from her: Buy paper towels, please.

When your partner breaks the silence for something like this, you are either screwed or she is giving you a chance to reconcile. I already had in my head this image of the two of us, speaking words of love while wiping the kitchen counter with the newly bought Scottex roll.

So I enter the corner store down the road and find it. As I walk to the counter I see a bunch of red roses. Come on, cliche? I think to myself.

"I'll take them!" I say out loud. But how do I hold the roses on my last mile home?

It's then that I realize I have the perfect solution. I stab my bunch of roses through the hole of the paper roll so I can hold them under my arm, but no spike can sting me.

You might wonder if I made peace with her when home. I did. And I had also found an approach to conflict resolution. When in doubt, wrap your thorns in something soft.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

This requires finding people who are willing to share personal stories that can inspire and inform us as we design solutions. We call this Design Research Recruiting.

It’s a process that requires great trust and great responsibility. We know that if people are willing to let us into their lives, our most important job is protecting their stories and confidentiality. And without speaking with the right people, we can’t do our jobs.

So how exactly do we do this? How do we get vulnerable people just like us—or totally unlike us—to open up their lives and even their homes to us? And how do we protect their confidentiality as we do it?

Successful design research recruiting is equal parts knowing who to speak with and how to reach them. Here are five practical tips for recruiting people for your very own design research interviews.

Make screening surveys real conversations

Screening surveys are a useful tool and an important first step in figuring out whether or not someone is a good fit for your project. But they aren’t always the best way to make someone feel comfortable talking about themselves.

I don’t want screening surveys to feel like a standardized test, so I make sure to structure them like a conversation. I dive straight into gathering stories and perspectives and save the typical stuff, like collecting email addresses, for later.

Ask one or two thoughtful, open-ended questions that get applicants thinking creatively about the topic at hand, such as, “What gets you excited or frustrated about your commute?” Or, “What are some key ways you take care of your health and wellness?” Questions like these make the survey feel more personal from the get-go, and they enable you to understand whether a potential interviewee has opinions or experiences that might benefit your research.

Get the word out on social

IDEO's Design Research Facebook page is our go-to channel for sharing our interview opportunities. People can follow the page and apply for interviews that interest them directly, or share research opportunities with their friends.

These "warm connections"—people who've been referred by friends who feel they'd be a good fit—are key to ensuring interesting and qualified people are signing up to share their stories. Cultivating a strong social media presence and making use of these platforms' built-in advertising tools are powerful ways to reach the right audience.

Give interviewees a preview of what's to come

An on-point questionnaire isn’t enough to ensure you’ve found the person to talk to. Hopping on the phone for a 10- to 15-minute phone chat is the finishing touch to ensure you've recruited articulate folks who are just the right fit. It also helps them have a better sense of your mission and what you’re looking for.

I start the conversation by giving participants an overview of IDEO and the project they've signed up for, then answering any questions they have. This establishes some trust and familiarity before I start asking more about them.

The phone call is also an important opportunity to make sure recruits feel comfortable with what's in store for them—it’s never our goal to just get them to talk to us; we want them to be comfortable sharing their lives, and to feel assured that their confidentiality will be protected.

Keep it confidential

We have to be certain the personal stories people share with us—which can sometimes include intimate details about their lives, like health struggles or the loss of a loved one—are kept confidential and used for design research purposes only, never for marketing or promotional uses. In fact, IDEO is so serious about it that we have a whole book dedicated to the practice.

When I’ve recruited folks to discuss potentially sensitive topics, like experiences getting emergency contraception, I make sure to reassure them that we’ll never share their information. I also send a copy of our consent and confidentiality form ahead of time for participants to review, so they can familiarize themselves with our privacy practices and ask questions ahead of the interview.

Prioritize quality, not quantity

When I first started as a design research recruiter, I was obsessed with hitting target interview numbers. If a team requested eight participants for a group discussion, I felt obligated to recruit exactly that amount. What I didn't grasp is that numbers don't count for much if the group isn't filled with thoughtful, articulate people who can participate meaningfully in a conversation. Worse, a group dynamic can be ruined by one person who hogs the conversation or creates an uncomfortable atmosphere.

The latter once happened during a group discussion on an intimate topic: personal lubricants. Because I wanted to hit the target number, I ended up recruiting someone I wasn’t sure would be a good fit. I figured that they'd be fine in a group setting, but they ended up making comments that made the other participants uncomfortable. The project lead ended up dismissing the participant early, and I learned a powerful lesson that it’s not about quantity. Giving yourself enough advance time to recruit will ensure that you have time to weed out anyone you feel skeptical about.

There are multitudes of interesting people with rich stories ready to delight, surprise, and most of all, inform you. I hope these tips will help you find them.

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As designers, it's our job to solve real problems for real people. To fulfill that mission, we first have to understand what is and isn't working well about a product, service, or even experience—anything from wearing a football helmet to paying a hospital bill to optimizing commutes.

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.