For 6-year-old Dave Jr., a long line at Disneyland triggered a massive meltdown. His parents were concerned and a little embarrassed, but not surprised; Dave Jr. struggled to keep his emotions in check.

Hoping to help, Dave Jr.'s uncle, entrepreneur Craig Lund, joined forces with researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with a video game designer who had worked on Quick Hit and NBA 2K. Together, they set out to design something that could teach coping skills to kids like Dave Jr. who need to manage “big emotions,” as well as children suffering from anxiety, ADHD, and other behavior issues, which are on the rise.

Their collaboration resulted in a video game called Mightier and a startup called Neuromotion Labs—a 10-person team of psychologists, game designers, and engineers who embedded at IDEO Cambridge for a one-month sprint to improve the game and get ready for launch.

To play Neuromotion's game, kids are first taught simple, calming breathing exercises. During gameplay, kids wear heart-rate monitors on a wrist or arm that detect spikes caused by stress or anger; as their heart rates go up, the game's difficulty increases. Kids have opportunities to pause and try deep breathing to counter the ramped up challenge. As it turns out, "gamifying" restraint builds strong incentives for kids to take charge of their emotions—they have to if they want to win.

Already activated around boosting mental and emotional health, IDEO's design team worked side-by-side with Neuromotion to study how parents and children experience Mightier. From home visits to group interviews to a summer camp-style design session with kid players, live feedback fueled the next iteration of the gaming platform and better product-market fit.

IDEO helped Neuromotion hone the visual design and mechanics of Mightier and expand it's suite of games. The team observed that the Mightier program was more successful the more involved parents of players became, which revealed a need for additional resources for adults. So they created new supports, including a more detailed orientation and a personalized coaching service for parents staffed by trained therapists.

But can a video game actually help kids cope? Early peer-reviewed studies showed that playing Mightier reduced outbursts by 62 percent, oppositional behaviors by 40 percent, and parental stress by 19 percent. After 12 weeks of using Mightier, a survey of kids and parents showed that 96 percent of parents saw positive behavior changes in their children, while 92 percent of kids learned new coping skills.

Shortly after the design sprint, Neuromotion secured its next round of funding and officially launched Mightier’s array of “bioresponsive games.” The games have already been played more than a million times, and Neuromotion has measured more than a 100 million heartbeats. Mightier games are helping kids and families across the country.

What about Dave Jr.? Recently, his sister told Lund she "accidentally" bumped Dave Jr.’s bike off a pier and into the ocean. She was expecting an outburst of anger, but after eight months of playing Mightier, Dave Jr. stayed cool. His uncle couldn’t be prouder.

Many of us have let vegetables wither in the crisper drawer, or thrown out a child’s half-eaten restaurant meal, but the sheer scale of food waste around the globe is hard to grasp. According to the United Nations, about a third of the food the world produces every year—1.3 billion tons—is lost during production or tossed by consumers, with North Americans throwing out the most food per capita. The average American wastes enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days.

IDEO received a series of grants from The Rockefeller Foundation to find solutions, given the power of IDEO’s human-centered design approach to address systemic challenges. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

For IDEO’s first initiative, designers tapped into the enthusiasm of the broader creative community, in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, the City of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, the Closed Loop Foundation, ReFED, and other groups. In the summer of 2016, OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—launched the Food Waste Challenge, asking how people might curtail waste by rethinking our relationship with food. Between June and October, more than 20,000 people from 113 countries took part in the challenge, tracking their personal waste and brainstorming solutions.

Challenge participants submitted more than 450 ideas. A team of food industry experts helped select the 12 top proposals, which included software to help people buy food collectively from wholesalers and a service that delivers extra meals from corporate events to those in need. Ultimately, the Closed Loop Foundation chose to award Full Cycle Bioplastics a $50,000 grant to scale up its idea to convert inedible food and paper waste into a fully compostable alternative to oil-based plastic.

At the conclusion of the Food Waste Challenge, OpenIDEO launched the Food Waste Alliance, a platform for participants and experts to stay engaged with the most promising ideas and innovators. The alliance helped entrepreneurs share resources, prototype new concepts, secure funding, hire staff, and form partnerships. OpenIDEO invited hundreds to join the alliance, and 92 percent of members told IDEO they made progress in their work as a result. One member company, RISE, received funding from another participant who discovered RISE through the alliance. This investment let RISE prototype its concept for milling spent grain from beer brewing into flour for baked goods and ultimately join the prestigious Food-X accelerator.

The Rockefeller Foundation also supported IDEO’s work with City Harvest, a New York organization that collects 160,000 pounds of unused food each day and delivers it to soup kitchens and food pantries. City Harvest wanted to understand the habits of local families who visit food banks in an effort to ensure all the food the group distributes gets eaten. To get a peek into these families’ kitchens, in January 2017, IDEO researchers conducted observations and interviews across New York City’s five boroughs. Pantry customers cooked for the researchers, giving them an inside look at how the families engaged with the food they had available and what food meant to each of them: tradition, stability, even adventure. Based on insights from pantry visitors, IDEO made recommendations for City Harvest, including community-run cooking classes and a way for families to request specific foods or reserve pick-up times by text message. IDEO also created three video vignettes to help build even greater empathy between City Harvest and the people it serves.

In spring 2017, capping IDEO’s work with The Rockefeller Foundation, the organizations teamed up with World Wildlife Fund and Hyatt hotels in Florida, New York, and New Jersey to rethink all-you-can-eat buffets. IDEO studied diners and staff at Hyatt buffets and found that employees—from event planners to kitchen staff—each add a cushion of extra food to cover their bases, while guests overfill their plates to avoid missing out. In the end, diners eat just half the food organizers serve, while the rest goes to waste. This and other data-driven insights gleaned about diners’ habits led to subtle substitutions, including smaller plates of meats and cheeses that can be ordered from servers and individual pastries rather than whole cakes. These alternatives have not only built on Hyatt’s existing food waste management strategies, but have also helped reduce buffet costs at Hyatt Regency Orlando and continued to receive support from guests.

The problem of food waste is too enormous to ignore. Wasted food means squandered resources, lost money, and ultimately, hungry people—more than 15 million in the United States alone. Designers and innovators from coast to coast have helped find solutions to the crisis that fulfill a variety of needs, from preserving produce sent to food pantries to keeping plastic packaging out of the oceans. The Rockefeller Foundation and other IDEO partners are leveraging powerful design techniques to pave the way for a waste-free future.

In 2017, IDEO acquired longtime partner Datascope and integrated the company’s data scientists and engineers. Datascope team members aren’t just passionate data scientists; they’re human-centered designers who happen to work with data, as illustrated by successful collaborations like this one:

In today’s job market, there’s no such thing as being "done" with your education. This is particularly true in the fields of data science, machine learning, and AI, where significant advances are made on a monthly basis. To meet this need for more in-depth training, Metis—part of Kaplan—wanted to create a comprehensive data science program for students from all backgrounds. Metis asked Datascope to design the curriculum from scratch, drawing on the company’s deep expertise in the field.

Datascope spoke with practitioners across industries to identify the key skill sets that make them successful: a grasp of design; fluency with data management, coding, and algorithms; and effective communication with coworkers and the wider world. The team crafted a 12-week bootcamp that develops these specific abilities.

In order to prepare students for the work world, the bootcamp is structured less like a class and more like a company, where students are “hired” as data scientists—with projects to complete—starting on day one.

Students collaborate on group projects and presentations in a way that mirrors real workflows, and practice pair programming to learn from one another. Using techniques drawn from design, students are invited to refine their project briefs and continually reevaluate their approach.

Instead of a final exam, at the end of the course, students tackle five real-world, open-ended data science projects inspired by Datascope’s client work. One project involves using data from subway turnstiles to detect patterns in the volume of street traffic; another asks students to use data they scrape from the web to predict a movie’s box office profits using regression analysis.

After students complete the bootcamp, they receive an additional three months of career support, from mock interviews to site visits with potential employers. In addition to designing the curriculum, Datascope taught the first three student cohorts and helped Metis build its teaching team as it expanded the program from New York to San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. Metis now offers online courses, evening classes, and corporate trainings in data science.

If you’re going to take a data science bootcamp, it’s best to take one designed by data scientists.

You’re whizzing along on your bike, en route to a new restaurant for a client meeting. You reach an unfamiliar intersection; which way to go now?

Instead of dismounting and digging for a phone, you brush your hand along your jacket sleeve for directions, then double-tap the denim to re-start your music. Without taking your eyes off the road, you’ve taken care of the problem.

This intuitive interface for connected apparel began with Levi's, makers of durable workwear for 140 years, and Google, creators of forward-looking technology, which joined forces to fashion the first item of clothing with touch-sensitive, copper-core threads woven directly into the fabric. Once it was established that the first connected garment from the partnership would be a jacket within Levi’s Commuter line, with interaction on the sleeve, Google worked with IDEO, leaders in designing for human needs, to develop the gesture language of the jacket and industrial design of the technology within.

This is the first connected garment that helps us break free from devices. It seamlessly incorporates Jacquard by Google technology to perform digital tasks, such as navigation, communication, and music playing with a few swipes or taps on the sleeve.

Jacquard by Google—a platform that makes it possible to integrate touch and gesture interactivity into fabrics using conductive yarn and standard, industrial looms—was inspired by a curious twist of history. The Jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804, used punch cards to automate the process of weaving complex patterns into fabric. In the 1940s and ’50s, engineers employed a similar punch-card technique to program the first computers.

IDEO spent time on the project early on, collaborating with Google engineers and Levi’s clothiers on the jacket’s development, helping craft an experience that would make the intelligent threads intuitive to wearers.

Working alongside Google and Levi’s, IDEO’s work included:

• The industrial design of the electronics integrated into the snap tag and connector (the tag snaps onto the jacket’s cuff and connects to your phone via Bluetooth)
• A vocabulary of gestures on the cuff of the jacket that lets you interact with the jacket’s technology
• Early exploration of the basic design philosophy and conceptual design for the interaction model of a corresponding smartphone app that ties it all together (works with both iOS and Android phones)

The IDEO team’s first task was to validate what commuters of all stripes wanted from the garment, in addition to the work Levi’s did in researching with its consumers. In interviews, group exercises, and wear tests with urban cyclists and other workers on the go, the team learned that cyclists needed a way to stay connected, while still living in the moment. That meant being able to answer calls, hear text messages, get the next direction, and control their music without using a screen.

Levi’s, Google, and IDEO developed a language of movement for Jacquard-enabled fabric that feels familiar and human and builds on the ways people would naturally interact with a garment (a whole-hand brush along the sleeve, as opposed to a one-finger tap on a touch screen, for instance).

Then came the design and engineering of the snap tag on the jacket’s cuff, which gently notifies you of calls, texts, and other jacket interactions with light and vibration feedback. The flexible, lightweight strap incorporates the look and feel of a Levi’s jean button, while housing advanced electronics that capture touch data. The tag is removable, charges via USB connection, and works in conjunction with a mobile app that lets you configure settings for the garment, set notifications, and customize gestures and interactions.

The Levi’s Commuter Jacket with Jacquard by Google changes the game because it’s simply that—a jacket—with technology that adds new utility and value, allowing us to wear our everyday interactions on our sleeves.

The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google hit stores in October 2017.

IDEO and Google have a long history of collaboration. Learn more about our work on Google Bloks here.

Only 13 percent of women in Pakistan have a bank account, so they designed their product to be easier to use than traditional banks. Still, many women struggled to use the service, especially low-income women and first-time internet users.

What was happening? Why was it so hard to connect with customers?

The answer was always in front of them: male defaults.

The invisible made visible

Even though Oraan was built by women, for women, the startup struggled with the pervasive problem of male-centered norms. 

Male defaults reflect biases deeply ingrained in our society. They allow institutions to build products to fit the way men inhabit the world: the kinds of jobs they have; how they use phones; their available free time; and even their ability to move around in public. At best, this hinders women's access to financial systems, forcing them to jump over extra hurdles. Often, it means low-income women must rely on men as proxies, having to ask a husband to save money in his bank account, and then needing his permission to access that money. At worst, it excludes women from the financial system, robbing them of opportunities entirely.

Male defaults aren't just bad for women, they're bad for business. Globally, women are 31 percent more likely to have an inactive financial account than men, and banks and fintechs wonder why. Are women just not interested in saving money? Are they not educated enough to understand new products? Are they stuck in the past? Attempts to adapt existing bank products to appeal to women have often fizzled, and many new women-centered products have tried and failed to reach product-market fit. 

Why is this problem so hard to solve? It’s difficult to fix what you don’t see—and male defaults are so prevalent that they’re nearly invisible unless you know how to look for them. Anyone who has set up a bank account or used digital financial services has probably encountered them:

• Account sign-up processes that require customers to fill in their occupation in the first few questions (something mothers, caregivers, and the unemployed may not have, and can lead to dishonest answers)
• Marital status (which can can disadvantage or raise stigma for women who are single, separated, divorced, or widowed)
• Property ownership (which can disadvantage low-income women who rent, live with family, and women who do not have deeds or documents in their own names) 
• Mobile number, especially for account verification (which can immediately cut off women who don't own a mobile phone or share one with family members) 
• Annual income (which can make it very difficult for informal workers with multiple income sources to open a financial account or qualify for a loan)

With gender-intentional design, IDEO is pushing back against these practices, and challenging the reign of male defaults. Already, we’re starting to see how even small shifts can create outsized impact for women. 

An addressable opportunity

Today, more than half of the world’s 1.4 billion unbanked adults are women. At IDEO Last Mile Money, we believe the solution to filling this enormous gap in financial agency and social equity lies in better design, with products and systems made for and with women, not just adapted after the fact. 

Over the last five years, we’ve brought together gender experts, banks, institutions, and fintechs to co-design what women-centric financial products should look like.

Together, we’ve uncovered male-default design patterns and developed design principles to disrupt them. We’ve updated our Financial Confidence Playbook with a new section dedicated to women and finance, with examples of products, features, and best practices for designing for underserved women. It’s all in service of helping teams question and ditch male defaults.

Here are three key shifts that can help companies build products designed for women:

1. From invasive to inclusive

If you sign up for any financial service, you’ll often see the same standard questions. While they are meant to build a user profile and increase security features, diving straight into these questions about occupation, income level, or home ownership can quickly make underserved women feel unwelcome, and push them to abandon the process altogether. 

Luckily, small design changes can transform the experience. In Pakistan, we explored how to make a rigorous financial account sign-up process more inclusive. We asked Oraan: What is the information you actually need? How might we reframe data requests in ways that feel empowering for underserved women? This helped Oraan rewrite those standard questions, from “What’s your occupation?” to “How do you spend your days?” Simple, but effective: 50 percent more women signed up for Oraan’s service. And the changes also reduced the load on Oraan’s back-end systems. Because Oraan articulated its requests more clearly, women submitted higher-quality documents, which meant Oraan’s team spent less time on follow-up calls. Win-win.

2. Let’s get ‘phygital’

For women at the last mile, the journey to adopt digital finance begins long before they pick up a phone. Yet, many new products default to engaging customers via digital-only channels. So, we propose going “phygital,” connecting physical and digital experiences to meet women where they are. 

Why? Many underserved women live in a world that’s mostly person-to-person and not very digital. They’re more likely to share a smartphone, and  they juggle so many responsibilities as mothers, caregivers, and informal workers, they have limited time and bandwidth to try and learn new digital services. 

These factors affected product use at Wagely, a startup that digitizes wages for women factory workers in Asia. Many women in Bangladesh had signed up for the service, but their accounts became dormant quickly. In a country where just 21 percent of women own smartphones, Wagely needed a phygital approach. 

Together we expanded its service blueprint to include a few key physical touchpoints. Our goal was to increase trust in Wagely’s service by showing up at familiar spots like community centers, building tangibility with physical collateral like membership cards, and creating a reward system that’s tailored to women’s everyday purchases like groceries and health items. 

Designing for phygital might seem less cost-effective than going digital only, but it opens doors for female customers, can supercharge usage, and improves long-term retention. 

3. No pink products

We believe that to truly include women in finance, their needs have to be prioritized from initial research all the way through to the future roadmap.

In partnership with Mansi Gupta at UnConform, a women-centric design consultancy, we created a Gender Evaluation Framework to help companies build a more gender intentional strategy that guides teams from discovery all the way to outcome measurement. With four pillars—Intent, Capability, Commitment, and Impact—teams can use our  prompts to reflect on their own gender practices throughout the product cycle. 

Last year, we also used the framework to choose which of the more than 300 startups that applied to Last Mile Money's 2023 gender and finance accelerator to accept. Our portfolio startups took the Framework a step further to generate insights and ideas to improve everything from product features to strategy for the future, as well as how to measure their impact on women's lives.  

We’re sharing these design principles in hopes that financial institutions around the world will reconsider how they are designing their products, and include women’s needs in the process from the start—whether they’re unbanked women at the Last Mile in emerging markets, or women who have been kept out of financial systems in the U.S. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s a way to reach the next billion women coming online. 

Already, Oraan is seeing the benefits of the shift it has made to center the needs of women in Pakistan. With 50 percent more women accessing digital financial services through their platform, IDEO and Oraan are demonstrating that gender-intentional design benefits both financial providers and underserved women themselves.

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Dive deeper into the Women x Finance section of the Financial Confidence Playbook.

In 2023 the team at Oraan, a women-led fintech startup in Pakistan, was facing lower signup rates than they expected.

Now let’s say some massive global event comes along and disrupts everything, everywhere, all at once. (Not hard to imagine, is it?)

That’s what leaders at Imaginable Futures faced in 2020. The actions it took in that moment put it ahead of the curve as a new world emerged. The impact was concrete and meaningful, with Imaginable Future’s work inspiring others to fund more than a million dollars’ worth of related initiatives and educational moonshots.

For 40 years, IDEO has helped the world’s leading organizations make the future, sometimes with startling prescience. Our work in strategic futuring has been informed and inspired by our client partnerships, but also by generations of futuring practitioners, to whom we’re indebted.

Now imagine that you're the CEO of a company navigating an uncertain future. Perhaps you already are. You might know your customers today, but you can’t see who they'll be in a decade, or what they’ll need by then. Current industry norms might no longer apply. Today’s buzzy trends will be long forgotten.

How do you make your future?

‍1. Your vision should be an inspiring anchor, not an empty gesture‍

Strategy is action: it’s not about what you say; it’s entirely about what you choose and then do. The future presents seemingly limitless choices for a leader—more the further out you look. Possible futures must be narrowed to probable futures, and from there to preferred futures. And that’s what effective visions of the future bring to life.

A great vision is inspiring and suffused with imagination. But it also enables leaders to focus on the right choices, in service of where they want to go, and to make such choices with confidence.

Not long ago, the CEO of one of the world’s leading consumer electronics companies asked, “If we could do anything in the next five years, what would it be?” Partnering closely with their team, IDEO developed seven visions of the future they could touch today, each of them optimistic, and each of them grounded in rigorous research.

Each of these future worlds provoked ways the company might respond to it: hundreds of ideas and concepts it could potentially bring to its future customers. The CEO chose three to take forward, and you might have even seen a Superbowl ad about one of them.

In another project, we also helped a global athletics brand take a jog in the future by creating a series of immersive "day in the life” stories, complete with billboards for fictional versions of major sporting events.

Creating tangible objects, stories, and experiences that invite you directly into the future is one of the ways we blend imagination and rigor in our work: It makes real the effect of intangible forces, and helps people grasp and distill what's most critical for their own work.

All of that helps move organizations to action.

‍2. Leap beyond the distraction of today's disputes‍

Infinite futures are possible, but not all are likely. Even fewer are desirable. And more often than not, the best futures—the ways we want things to turn out—can only happen as a result of deep collaboration: People need to agree on what matters, and then work toward it.

But getting aligned is hard work. In many organizations, team members are distributed across the world or engaged in work that defies simple distillation or storytelling, so getting on the same page can feel like an insurmountable obstacle. People have different goals and are accountable for different things. Over time, conversations can surface stark differences of opinion. Before long, you’re stuck.

Strategic futuring is helpful here, too. Creating future visions together before deeper strategy work begins is a way to discover what’s desirable and magnetic for everyone.

For example, to unlock a new scale of impact, the global environmental non-profit Conservation International (CI) needed a strategy that could unite its country offices on the African continent. Each had its own priorities, norms, goals, and personalities—a huge source of strength for the organization, but a barrier to scale. To create space for a new approach, CI jumped decades years into the future. Partnering with IDEO, CI experts and teams developed a set of short stories set in the year 2050, exploring future possibilities in sequestration research, satellite monitoring technologies, and more.

That futuring work created a shared language, goal, and frame of reference for the country offices. And the work accelerated the subsequent strategic decision-making and investment. The resulting goal? To expand the protection of grasslands, savannah, and scrublands in a transboundary area across six African countries. It's an effort that's now scaling Conservation International's successful Herding for Health model as a mechanism for partner-driven community climate resilience, targeting the protection of at least 10 million hectares by 2030 in partnership with a continent-wide NGO.

3. Remember: No business or organization is an island‍

To thrive in the future, organizations must also think about all the forces beyond their control—from climate events or cultural changes (both seen and unseen) to the deployment of emerging technologies. And they must even consider the potential effects of forces seemingly unrelated to their line of business. Because they might just matter.

That’s a lot to take in; making sense of it all can feel impossible. And a giant research document might just make it feel worse. Here again, strategic futuring offers a way forward. Rigorous speculation, informed by signals and data, picks out what’s most relevant from the noise—even if it’s unexpected. Distilling that informed speculation into imagined scenarios, and then into concrete experiences, can move leaders to reflect with urgency and clarity, and make choices with confidence.

At IDEO, we sustain an ongoing signal scanning practice, taking notice of what’s shifting across industries and cultures. We blend that informed sense of what’s coming with our client partners’  insights and data to build a rich tapestry of foresight. And then we employ all the crafts of design—from engineering and environments to software development and storytelling—to give life to the visions of the future that result.

When people step into a wide-angle view of what might be coming, they see what’s possible and discover new motivations to act. We used an AI-enabled process we developed to create a pocket viewfinder for D.C. residents to help them visualize the future of their city while standing in their own neighborhood.

Games can take that kind of immersion a level deeper. Recently IDEO helped global enterprise software company Sage investigate how the company might support businesses working to achieve net zero emissions. We designed a choose-your-own adventure story that asked people to play characters navigating business demands in a climate-impacted 2030; it generated empathy for future users, which led to support for the launch of the pioneering Sage Earth platform.

Sometimes, the outputs of strategic futuring work are entirely physical and can take over whole spaces. At the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s 2023 circular economy summit, we staged a home from the year 2050 populated with the personal items and detritus that might shape our daily lives if access to natural resources were to change, and if environmental regulations were to evolve as a result.

And at COP28 in Dubai, we built three distinct worlds from our collective climate future, traversing continents and culture, economic realities, and societal roles. We invited people to step directly into these futures—into spaces suspended deliberately between reality and possibility.

Do you want to make your future?‍

Strategic futuring is a powerful tool for solving significant, far-reaching business challenges.

You may be a leader striving to distill many levers of change affecting your organization. You may be part of a team that needs to find positive, energized alignment around what to do to set up your next era of growth.

Or you might be a leader determined to understand how your business may be transformed by forces far beyond your influence.

Wherever you are today, strategic futuring can help you make your own tomorrow.

Let’s say your job is to transform the entire landscape of learning and education. For the world.

In that room, we built an "Idea Catcher" wall, where employees could use Post-its to share ideas, questions, and answers with each other and with management.

We knew from previous studies that tough calls have a negative impact on employees for hours afterwards, and that constant monitoring can make call centers tricky places to work. But still, this Post-it showed up on the wall: “There’s positives in each call we take!” The energy that this space created showed us how involving agents in designing their jobs was a meaningful way to learn and grow.

Many of us spend much of our lives at work. We want it to be good and meaningful. But too often, workers don’t have the agency or satisfaction for that to be true. As work is increasingly monitored and automated, it’s critical that we design technology and tools to support workers' well being and sense of purpose. Over the years, we’ve pulled what we’ve learned from various projects into a set of four principles for designing good jobs.

1. Use new tools to encourage a sense of purpose 

Involving employees in creating the tools for their own work provides an opening for them to act on their own values, and reflect on what they like (or don’t like) about their jobs. During the mortgage project, our design team worked with call center agents and homeowners to understand both the “front stage” and the “back stage” of service delivery. For the agents, being able to make a personal connection with the caller was important to their sense of agency—their perception of their own capacity for making change and being creative at work. With that in mind, we prototyped a customer dashboard with a scripted conversation, along with customized cards that prompted agents to infuse their own words and experience into the interaction. Inspired by Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, the cards included questions like: “What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten from someone else on your team?” and “Who is your role model? How would they handle the next call?” The prototypes addressed the tension between scripting and creativity, without burdening agents with additional oversight. Agents appreciated that the prompts recognized and supported their expertise and passion to engage with customers in a professional but personal way.

2. Design for values and emotions

Autonomy and creativity are foundational to high job satisfaction. Technologies like customer dashboards, time and task tracking, and software systems shape how we spend our time at work, what tasks we get to do and how, and fundamentally alter how we feel about and experience work. By designing for people’s values and emotions, new tools and systems have the potential to make work better. But that wasn’t the case when we first started working with a cruise line.

Employees (and also potential customers) thought that booking a vacation felt difficult, and compared the repetitive experience to the movie Groundhog Day. They constantly took their own notes, because the system didn't always log their entries, and had to search online to answer questions about their own services. To fix their frustration, the design team created a new dashboard that aggregated the information they were missing or currently keeping track of with pen and paper. By eliminating redundancy and cognitive load, the dashboard also made agents feel confident and informed—in their own eyes, as well as customers’. This marked a stark contrast to the earlier phase of work, in which agents had to look up the latest products and offerings on the company’s website, which gave them no more specialized knowledge than the customers calling in, deflating their image of themselves as confident service professionals.

The agents’ managers had a different problem: They hated using this tool on a desktop. They preferred to walk around and coach agents face-to-face. It was actually one of their favorite parts of the job. So, the designers moved the tool to a tablet, in order to preserve it.

3. Keep the work ecosystem in mind

Work is a true ecosystem; no worker or technology functions in isolation. Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day, social scientists formerly at AT&T Labs and Xerox PARC, define an information ecology as “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment.” It’s extremely effective for thinking through how technology can’t be implemented in a vacuum. Instead, technology should be deployed in service of individual and group goals. In the mortgage project, we were also responsible for creating a brand new role that combined service and sales. Since sales roles were mainly based on commission, and service roles on efficiency-based metrics, there was not a lot to incentivize collaboration and a new approach to homeowner relationships. Because agents had a sense of fulfillment that came from growth and financial success based on their personal skills and charisma, which was baked into the compensation structure, it was important that they be comfortable with new metrics and incentives. So, the team designed the new role to encourage long-term customer relationships by increasing base pay and the weight of customer experience metrics, along with more typical efficiency measures like length and volume of calls.

4. Co-create with employees to build trust

Trust is foundational to ethical research and successful design. By working side-by-side with employees to co-create their roles and the impact of technology on their day-to-day work, companies can model openness during times of change. In a project to redesign the patient experience for a new hospital building, the design team identified a key technology in need of innovation: appointment and medication scheduling software. Making custom medications accurately and on time in a hospital environment is crucial, because a small mistake can be fatal, and delays can be painful.

At the time, medications could only be processed in the order in which they were received—not by the level of urgency. For pharmacists, being able to process medications to fit patients’ schedules would improve workflow and ease stress. For patients, it would mean more visibility into upcoming care, and less pressure on families to keep track of medications. The lack of information between departments forced family members to play the role of mediator, communicating vital information in terms they weren’t familiar with. Pharmacists were motivated to provide the best care, but the siloed operating systems that governed appointment and medication schedules created a disconnect. So, the designers created a software refresh that would provide visibility into patients’ schedules, making the pharmacists’ relationship to the software more mutual and rewarding. They no longer felt they were missing the information they needed to do their jobs well. The ability to have a more holistic view into a treatment and current state of health also allowed them to better connect with the patients, one of the most meaningful parts of their job.

Designing for job satisfaction isn’t just a nice to have; not only is it the right thing to do, it leads to increased performance and lower attrition, and employees that are better able to deliver high-quality services to customers.

Rethinking roles, or how new technologies might affect jobs at your company? Get in touch to hear how IDEO can help.

A few years ago, when I was working on a project to help a mortgage company improve the work experience at its call centers, we created a living-room-like space we called "The Oasis," a live prototype of a space to take a break and reflect between calls.

These are also the kinds of spaces where AI is appearing in the form of new tools and personal assistants. But having AI show up on platforms Gen Z considers safe spaces can be problematic.

In the first phase of our research testing the edges of AI products with a group of Gen Zs, they laid out three principles to help guide us in our designs: Skip the engineered reality; elevate human intuition and empathy; and build in transparency. This time around, we made those principles tangible, by prototyping various expressions of AI personal assistants, and asking our Gen Z partners to test them out in the context of their own lives. 

We were also testing a hypothesis of our own, based on our work with this cohort: For users to feel they have the freedom to play and engage with AI, we first need to design a strong foundation of psychological safety. We believe that’s key to unlocking social AI experiences that Gen Z will truly want to use.

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Prototyping Road Trips

Because we’re working with Gen Zs, we created a prototype to help with a real part of their lives—planning a weekend trip with their friends in a group chat. In one version, an AI personality acted as a concierge, pulling together activities and itineraries in a way that was transparent and obvious to everyone in the group. In the other, the AI personality acted as an agent, operating in the background on the user’s behalf, hidden from the group’s view. The agent still pulled travel details together, but only one user could see them. It could also provide advice beyond logistical support—like how to tactfully respond to a friend if there’s a disagreement about which activities to prioritize.

When our Gen Z participants interacted with the Concierge and Agent, they were excited by the idea that AI can unlock more joyful social experiences, but they also voiced deep concerns about privacy, safety, and consent. Our participants reported that AI feels much more invasive than other technologies—more powerful, and with a greater ability to cause harm. 

“Having your whole schedule, characteristics, how you live your life—that being stored and potentially sold is a lot more damaging and scary than simply what you’re searching or sites you’re visiting, which is what we experience today,” one high school student said.

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Taking a bigger leap

We took these insights back to our team, and worked together to weave them into prototypes of new tools for Gen Z group chats. But we wanted to move past incremental change. AI enables new possibilities that haven’t existed before, so it’s important that we take bigger leaps. Instead of creating a souped-up version of the prototype we’d already made with our Concierge and Agent, we brought together perspectives from across IDEO—game designers, toy inventors, play experts, Gen Zs, researchers, and a magician—to imagine and build visions for totally new experiences.

Together, we came up with a concept called AI Playground, a discrete space contained within the group chat that helps make clear what information the AI can see and what its capabilities are. We also made AI Playground opt-in only; no one would see it by default. 

What does that look like? Imagine, you’re planning a weekend trip with your friends, and you can conjure your AI assistant into the group chat for a specific task— like generating a curated playlist or building a dynamic itinerary, unique to your friends and to this particular outing. Because there is a clear boundary between the Playground and the group chat, users don’t have to worry that their AI assistant can access everything that they say—it’s up to them what they choose to share. And because all users had to opt-in to join the space, they can feel more comfortable playing around and being themselves—generating GIFs to share an inside joke, creating music to match their mood, and more. Our goal was to enhance their play and increase their agency without intruding on their personal conversations.

A Safe Space to Play 

AI Playground is an example of an alternative way we could integrate AI personal assistants in group use cases, one that sets the conditions for trust and play.  As we learned in our research with Gen Zs, their friendship and relationship development is a key part of who they are, and they are highly sensitive to technologies that interfere with these bonds. By building safer AI experiences across all spaces and domains, we can unlock a better AI-enabled future for everyone. For more windows into AI prototyping focused on mental health, and how AI might revolutionize the ways Gen Z is preparing for their careers, subscribe to the IDEO newsletter.

Parts of the images in this article were created/altered using generative AI.

Many of Gen Z’s friendships and much of their relationship development happens online—on social media, online gaming platforms, and in community spaces and group chats.

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.