Have you ever had that gnawing feeling, just as you’re sitting down to your computer at work, that you’ve left the central heating on at home? You’re not alone. Rising concern about wasted energy and the financial cost of unregulated thermostats, as well as the convenience of a connected and cozy home, all point to the rise of the smart thermostat. Berg Insights projects it’ll grow 64.7 percent over the next five years.

Founded in Munich in 2011, tado° is Europe’s biggest maker of smart thermostats and air-conditioning controls. Looking to grow, tado° approached IDEO, a longtime collaborator, with a late-stage prototype for a new, wall-mounted gadget to connect any air-conditioning unit to the web so it could be controlled remotely through a smartphone app.

Dubbed tado° Cooling, the device recognizes when people leave their house and heats or cools the house upon their return. The brand tasked IDEO with a three-fold goal: gauge interest in the device, raise brand awareness, and work out product/market fit.

After stakeholder interviews, research, and prototyping, IDEO supported tado°’s team in refreshing the industrial design of the hardware and creating a distinctive yet unified user-interface language for the brand’s existing and future products.

To work out what potential customers thought of tado° Cooling, tado° turned to a novel research medium: Kickstarter. Its ultimate goal? Knowing whether people would part with their money for one. The IDEO team provided an overarching crowdfunding strategy, including funding goals, giving tiers, and marketing, and shot the brand’s Kickstarter campaign video.

As a result, the campaign burst through its $150,000 funding goal to $200,000, and scored coverage in a raft of tech media outlets including TechCrunch, GigaOm, TheNextWeb, Engadget, and PC Magazine. After hitting its “stretch goal,” tado° is adding non-A/C device controls, a Windows Phone app, and IFTTT and Jawbone Up integration.

In addition to media coverage, and showing the public’s appetite for the device, the Kickstarter community’s conversation unearthed further user insights that fed into product development, according to tado° head of design, Jens Pohl.

Buoyed by that success, tado° enlisted IDEO to translate user insights and a big-picture overview of the connected home sector into new services to enhance the device’s UX, and introduced new business models to strengthen its European brand strategy. Early visual concepts, learnings, and evidence from this exploration supported the brand’s investor pitch, securing a further round of $15 million venture capital.

Dr. Reddy’s, a 36-year-old global pharmaceutical company headquartered in India, was growing at a rapid pace. Over the years, the company’s main focus had been on producing affordable generic medication. But with more than 24,000 employees and seven distinct business units operating in 100 countries, there was an urgent need to identify a core, unifying purpose—one that would articulate a set of shared values and align leaders on key business decisions and goals.

G.V. Prasad, the company’s Co-Chairman and Managing Director, knew that the vision had to be simple and elegant–an emotional drive that every employee across the company could relate to and act upon.

Prasad partnered with IDEO to distill the focus that would align the company. Over the course of several months, Dr. Reddy’s team worked with IDEO to learn about the needs of everyone, from shop floor workers to scientists, external partners and investors. Together, they defined and distilled the essence of the company, paring it down to four simple words that center on the patient: Good health can’t wait.

The simplicity of these words belie their power. According to Prasad, the newly articulated purpose has resonated across the company, changing the whole culture of the organization. The idea of infusing a sense of urgency and nimbleness to their systems as a means of serving their customers has had a direct application in almost every corner of the business. Employees connect the message to their own experience, and each of the different business units are now moving towards a common goal.

A Shift Inside

“Good health can’t wait” has become a powerful recruitment tool and employee rallying cry. It makes clear that the company is in the business of serving patients, not just creating products, no matter how innovative or affordable. This has given a new sense of meaning to all personnel, from frontline sales representatives to senior leaders to scientists. Many key decision-makers, including new CEO Erez Israeli, share that the purpose statement inspired them to join the company.

Articulating Dr. Reddy’s purpose has empowered these employees to take risks, experiment, and work together. For example, the marketing department has refocused its efforts on finding solutions that improve patients’ consistent use of their medications. And motivated by the idea that patients can no longer wait for a cure, employees from different disciplines are coming together to find inventive ways of bringing new products to market in record time.

“The website medznat.ru required immense collaboration between various teams—medical, information technology, marketing, and analytics,” says Mvsma Raja, Head of Strategy and Marketing for Emerging Markets. “This served as a platform to bring the latest happenings in the area of pain management to doctors in Russia, who we learned are looking for the latest medical updates on the go.” Building on this cross-functional collaboration and momentum, Dr. Reddy’s established an internal design studio dedicated to using consumer insights and rapid prototyping to drive innovation.

New Offerings

“Our brand belief has inspired how we’ve thought about our future growth,” says CEO Erez Israeli. The new purpose unlocked a series of initiatives, including the aforementioned website for Russian physicians and innovative pill packaging that helps patients better understand their instructions.

Purple Pack is a new type of pill package that ensures that vital information like the expiration date is not torn off and thrown away. Born out of Dr. Reddy’s in-house design studio, Purple Pack allows the pharmacist or patient to mark their daily dosage and reminders on the packaging itself, as paper prescriptions are often misplaced.

A Business Boost

“Good health can’t wait” has not only attracted and unified talent and inspired new offerings, it’s boosted both sales and profit. For example, Dr. Reddy’s generic oral diabetes medication, Metsmall, has become the fourth largest brand in India based on the number of pills sold. The medication is distinct from competitors’ versions in that the pill is smaller and easier to swallow—a clear embodiment of product development oriented around the patient. With its signature Purple Pack convenience packaging, the medication has been one of the fast-growing Indian pharmaceutical brands over the last two years.

Looking ahead, both Prasad and Israeli hope to continue building a purpose-led culture that influences the business from the inside out, inspiring employees to be empathetic and responsive and realizing its mission to deliver good health to all.

In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation made what became a big bet about the future of education, shifting its attention away from the traditional school-based model of reform toward a more youth-centered approach.

By 2014, the bet was starting to pay off, but for it to really succeed, it needed an innovative path to scale and an entrepreneurial approach to sustainability. That’s when MacArthur came to IDEO for help in designing a new organization.

Together, IDEO and MacArthur set out to transform the foundation’s efforts into a self-sustaining enterprise that could balance the social responsibilities of a nonprofit with the lasting viability of a business—an opportunity that was as much about designing a new infrastructure as it was about creating a new culture.

Using a novel prototyping process, IDEO created three illustrated scenarios to tell different versions of LRNG’s possible future, each with an alternative portraiture of its purpose, vision, operating structure, product portfolio, and business model. Through a playful, modular storytelling structure, the stakeholders considered the potential trade-offs of the different approaches and how to prioritize their organizational goals with clear definitions of success.

These different future-forward scenarios helped funders and partners grasp a radical organizational vision, as well as a clear operational model that was go-to-market-ready.

In October 2015, the MacArthur Foundation launched Collective Shift, the organization behind LRNG, with $25 million in seed funding and 30 partners, including Arizona State University, Gap Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs, Electronic Arts, and musical artist John Legend.

Based on the scenarios created by IDEO, LRNG is dedicated to creating a “learning as a lifestyle” movement that will transform the learning landscape and close the equity and opportunity gap for young people.

Hundreds of millions of people, from excitable teens driving their first hatchback, to new parents going in for a minivan, have driven Fords off lots around the world since the first Ford Model A was produced in 1903. And cars have changed how we shop, travel, and work; they’ve reshaped our homes, towns, and the world’s infrastructure.

Today, Ford, along with the entire industry, is at an inflection point. As millions around the world move into gridlocked, polluted cities, the allure of owning a shiny new car has dulled. In some places, young people are driving less, and getting their licenses later or not at all. Lightening their load, city dwellers are relying on ride-sharing services and other alternatives to individual ownership.

Technology underpins that shift from ownership to usership. Smartphones, sensors, and open data have enabled new ways of getting from point A to B: from car-sharing services like Zipcar to taxi services like Uber or clever transport apps like Citymapper that help people skip effortlessly between the bus, a shared bike scheme, and renting a car.

While the owner of the very first commercially available Model A—Chicagoan dentist, Ernest Pfennig—couldn’t see more than a century ago how cars would change the world, Ford is squinting into its future by prototyping it now. Building on a longstanding relationship with IDEO, the carmaker approached us, along with a number of other partners, to undertake two of 25 experiments exploring a car company’s place in the changing world of mobility.

The first, Data-Driven Insurance, investigates a new pay-as-you-go insurance offer based on people’s driving behavior, as measured by a small adapter plugged into the car. The second, Infocycle, plots a snapshot of how bikes traverse the city and interact with cars and public transport by using Ford’s open source API, Open XC, to track cyclists around San Francisco.

Tackling the tangled ecosystems of bike sharing, private cars, and open city data proved an international effort. The two projects brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers, hardware and software developers, data scientists, and interaction, industrial, and business designers from IDEO’s San Francisco, Palo Alto, Chicago, and London studios.

Have we cracked the future of mobility? Probably not. And that’s okay, says Fields. Smart mobility is simply part of Ford’s journey of evolution. Along with global competitions, collaborations with universities, and opening up their hardware and software platform Open XC, these experiments help Ford meet the needs of a fast-changing mobile world. “As we drive innovation in every part of our business,” Fields said, “we are determined to learn, to take risks, to challenge custom and question tradition, and to change our business going forward.”

More information on Ford’s Smart Mobility projects can be found here.

（Read the English version here）

私がプログラミングに興味を持ったのは、大学院でグラフィックデザインを学んだときでした。ある授業で「ジェネラティブデザイン」という、コードを使って視覚的なアウトプットを生み出すデザインの考え方を学んだのです。この考え方は、私が以前フォトジャーナリストとして働いていたときにカメラで行っていたこととすぐに共鳴しました。デジタルカメラでは、レンズを通して世界を観察し、シャッタースピード、絞り、フォーカス、構図を操作して、最終的な結果を作り出していました。そして、出来上がった写真を確認し、必要に応じて設定を変更し、また納得のいく写真が撮れるまで何度も撮り直します。プログラミングでも同じように、プログラムを走らせ、生み出されたビジュアル観察し、自分が望む結果になるまでコードを操作する、というプロセスを経験しました。

大学院での自由な時間を利用して、私はプログラミングについて独学で学び、Processingのような視覚表現に適したプログラミング環境を使って、グラフィックデザインを作る実験を始めました。修士課程では、プログラミング、ジャーナリズム、グラフィックデザインの3つの分野の交点に重点を置きました。

卒業後、プログラミングの実験を続ける機会はほとんどありませんでした。IDEOで働くようになってからは、グラフィックデザインを試す時間が増えましたが、プログラミングとデザインに対する情熱を再発見したのは、育児休暇に入ったとき。育児休暇中、自分に使える時間はオムツ替えや授乳、お風呂といった子どもの世話の合間のわずかな時間。この貴重な時間をどのように過ごしたいか、子育ての経験が改めて考えるきっかけをくれました。コンピュータの前に座り、なまった頭でPythonで数行プログラムを書くことを通じて、コードを使ってグラフィックデザインをすることの素晴らしさを改めて実感したのです。

プログラミングは創造ツールの一つ

グラフィックデザイナーは、新しい技術を自分の仕事に取り入れる機会に飛びつくことが多いですが、私にとってプログラミングは、デザイナーが長年にわたって使ってきた他のたくさんのツールと何ら変わらないものでした。コンピュータが普及し始めた頃、デザイナーはスクリーン印刷機を補完するためにPhotoshopやIllustratorなどのツールを学びましたし、コピー機やリゾグラフは昔から実験的な視覚的な表現に使われてきました。

私自身、ビジュアルを作るための新しいテクニックを試すことを常に求めています。ポスターやブランディングのためのイメージを作るのに、3Dモデリングやレンダリングなどのツールを使うことが多いのですが、初めてプログラミングを学んだとき、従来のグラフィックデザインの成果物で使われるようなイメージを作る上での新たなツールになる可能性をすぐに感じたのです。

IDEOのパートナーであるマイケル・ヘンドリックスの音楽をテーマにしたイベントのために作ったポスターとブランディングも、従来のグラフィックデザインをサポートするようなプログラミングの活用のひとつです。ポスターのデザインでは、楽器のシンセサイザーに使われている波形のアイデアと、マイケルの著書Two Beats Ahead のテーマである「ありえない組み合わせでデザインのインスピレーションを得る」ということを参考にしました。「シンセサイザー風の波形と紙」という、ありそうでなかった組み合わせで、イベントのビジュアルを作ることにしたのです。

ポスターの背景は、Line-Usというロボットアームをプログラミングして、鉛筆で音楽の正弦波を紙に描き続けることで作成しました。その絵を撮影し、色を変えてから最終的なポスターのデザインに落とし込みました。

プログラミングで波形を描くことで、手描きでは難しい、繰り返される波の数学的な正確さと美しさを視覚化することができました。一方で鉛筆で描くことで、波そのものがラフな質感を持ち、音楽制作の有機的なプロセスも表現することができました。

クリエイティブパートナーとしてのプログラミング

プログラミングは、単なる創造のためのツールという枠を超え、驚きや喜びを通じて私たちにインスピレーションを与えてくれるような素晴らしいクリエイティブパートナーにもなり得ます。ChatGPTやDALL-EのようなAIベースのツールの台頭により、このようなクリエイティブな活動の中でこうした機械を試す人が増えています。実際私もIDEOのデザイナーが、行き詰っている問題についてAIチャットボットに質問しているのを見たことがあります。デザイナーはチャットボットに、"どうすればデジタルシステムをより人間らしい形に拡張できるだろうか？"などと質問できるのです。通常、AIの回答はそれだけでは素晴らしい解決策にはなりませんが、「文脈を考慮しましょう」といった回答は、デザイナーを新しいアイデアやプロトタイプに向けて刺激するのに十分な後押しになるかもしれません。

プログラミングも同じように、特に予期せぬ結果で私を鼓舞してくれることに気付きました。初期のプログラミングでは、あらかじめ定義された文法構造にランダムな単語を挿入することで、ソーシャルメディアへの投稿を自動生成するシンプルなアルゴリズムを書きました。このプログラムは、"24 Especially Terrible Wedding Animals Every Film Lover Needs（"全てのシネフィルが必要な特段ひどい結婚式動物24選”）のようなランダムに生成されるフレーズで笑いと驚きをもたらしてくれました。

生成されたフレーズが思いがけず不条理なユーモアに満ちていたことから、このプロジェクトを「ソーシャルメディアの投稿」から、「風刺的なフェイクニュースの見出しの作成」へとシフトさせることにしました。ネットで得られる情報の質が時に怪しくなることへの批判として、投稿生成プログラムを活用し、フェイクニュースの見出しを無限に自動で書き出すようにしたのです。

このプロジェクトの最新版である「AI News Network」は、1時間ごとに実際のニュースの見出しを自動的にダウンロードし、見出しの単語を形容詞や名詞などの品詞に分類し、ランダムに新しいフェイクニュースの見出しとして組み立てます。ヴィンテージのブラウン管画面には、私が作成した偽のブランド名が表示され、無限に続くヘッドラインが表示されます。私が書いたプログラムは、プロジェクトの内容を自動的に生成するクリエイティブパートナーとしての役割を果たしてくれます。見出しの作成は、プログラムに任せているので、うっかり信じてしまいそうになるような、でもやっぱり荒唐無稽なコンテンツに、私自身驚くことがあります。「インドネシア、ボブ・ディランを非難」のような偽の見出しを見ると、ボブ・ディランがインドネシアを怒らせるようなことをしたのだろうかと思うし、「サル男、ジョー・バイデンからの支持を撤回」のような無意味な見出しにはただ苦笑してしまいます。

2つの世界の間で踊るプログラミング

実用性は低いですが、私がプログラミングに最も惹かれるのは、プログラミングが持つ感覚ゆえかもしれません。グラフィックデザインのようなクリエイティブな活動では、明確な正解はありません。どのグラフィックも、他よりも正しいと証明できるわけではありません。それでもある特定のグラフィック表現が正しいように感じることがあります。私たちはデザイナーとして、直感的に良い結果を得たと判断することができるのです。論理的に正解を示すことはできなくても、直感的に「これはいい！」と感じることがあります。スタンリー・キューブリック監督は、「物事の真実は、考えることではなく、感じることにある」と述べています。

しかし、プログラミングの場合、コードそのものについて自分がどう感じるかは関係ありません。プログラムには、ある結果を出すためのさまざまなアプローチがありますが、コードを一つでも間違えれば、エラーになり何もできなくなります。プログラミングの世界は残酷なまでに論理的で、精密さがなければ機能しません。しかし、その論理と直感のコントラストにこそ、私はスリルを感じるのです。ビジュアルを表現するためにコードを書くとき、私の脳は論理と感覚の2つの世界の間で踊ることができるのです。

最近のプロジェクトでは、IDEO Tokyoのスタジオに、小型カメラでレトロなピクセル画像を撮影し、古いブラウン管スクリーンに表示する「フォトブース」のようなものをつくりました。このプロジェクトのプログラミングでは、論理と直感の世界を行き来することができました。画像データを格納する数学的な配列を作成してからプログラムを実行すると、カラフルなブロックから私の顔の写真がゆっくりと出来上がっていくのを見ることができました。コーディングはロジックですが、ビジュアルを見る瞬間は、純粋に直感的な疑問でいっぱいです。ピクセルが大きければレトロ感があるけれど、被写体は識別できるのか？画像の不思議さを楽しんでもらいつつも、飽きさせないような描画速度になっているか？色彩はクールか？何か違和感があれば、再びプログラムの世界に飛び込み、コードの行をいじり、バグを修正し、データ構造を入れ替える。そして、再びプログラムを走らせ、どう変わったかを確認するのです。「うん、これはいい感じ。でも、この1行を変えたらどうなるんだろう......」。このように、私の脳の論理的側面と直感的側面を常に行き来することは、刺激的で中毒性があります。片方が休んでいる間、もう片方は遊んでいるのです。

あなたの意外な組み合わせ

プログラミングをツールとして、またパートナーとして使うことで、グラフィックデザインの新しいアプローチを発見し、驚きと興奮を得ることができます。皆さんも、プログラミングが好きというわけではないかもしれませんが、一見異なるコンセプトがどのように組み合わされ、新しい驚きをもたらしてくれるのか、ぜひ探索してみてください。新しいアプローチに出会ったとき、そのアプローチが自分の情熱を思い起こさせるかどうか、そしてその新しいアプローチと今の仕事を組み合わせる機会はあるか、探してみましょう。その中に意外な発見があるかもしれません。

IDEOの多くのコミュニケーション・デザイナーと同様に、私もグラフィックデザインのバックグラウンドを持っています。「グラフィックデザイン」と聞くと、いわゆるビジュアルを作る仕事が思い浮かぶかもしれません。新しいブランドの価値を視覚的に伝えるために、ロゴをスケッチしたり、カラーパレットを選んだりするデザイナーを想像する人もいるでしょう。あるいは書籍やプレゼン資料のレイアウトを作成し、書体をじっくり選び、画像やテキストを配置して、ダイナミックなページを作る仕事も思い浮かべる人もいるかもしれません。

実際私もこうしたいわゆるグラフィックデザインを日々の仕事として行ってますが、最近はそれ以外の活動にも時間を割くことが増えています。それは「プログラミング」です。

There’s also a hint of our Chief Creative Officer’s perfume wafting in the air, “no.1173, the Last Almonds of November,” and “no. 79, Crisp Snow on Granite,” diplomatic offerings intended to remind politicians of scents that we may lose due to climate change—and what they still might protect.  

To my left, a business strategist and industrial designer heatedly debate the financial and social benefits of a “hand-me-down, doodle-me-up” backpack program to enable creative reuse in key lifestage moments across childhood. At the other end of the table, a designer prototypes an underground music genre using sound libraries sampled from hybrid species. This moment is so very weird, so very thoughtful, and so very much where dreaming up new and disruptive ideas begins.

When IDEO speculates about the future, we often start by gathering around a table and giving ourselves the creative oxygen and open space to explore the questions of tomorrow—What will we need to thrive in the  climate era? How can we humanize technology?—with gluesticks and glitter, not just whiteboards and whitepapers. It is a practice of imagining with our hands, building to think, and blending strategic hunches with wild cognitive leaps. We’re following the wisdom of our PlayLab, who have long argued that intentional play helps liberate thinking, slipping past the rational mind and inviting all the senses to be part of the conversation. This afternoon’s makeathon was only the beginning of IDEO's larger efforts to reimagine tomorrow. Tomorrow we diagram. But tonight we dance.

Some call it ideation. I call it rebellion. A re-wilding of imagination. As a pink-haired hacker kid in the 90s, squirreled behind my CRT in the early days of digital, I was intoxicated by the electricity of possibility crackling in the air. Digital was going to change everything. Cut to today, and it’s easy to feel that same kinetic energy all around us.

Design invites us to escape the gravity of the present in pursuit of the possible.

As we move through the Climate Era, organizations  and individuals are beginning to recognize that, as the French writer and filmmaker Chris Marker put it, “Rarely has reality needed so much to be reimagined.” Design helps conjure new possibilities from the air, bringing them down from the cloud of heady theory, up from the soil of day-to-day aspirations, and into the hands of people. When done well, design fundamentally redistributes the balance of power, changing both who is at the table, and what is created. It connects the street to the skyscrapers, the mothers to the policymakers, the ethically opinionated 12-year-old to the corporation, the makers to the strategists. When we shake off these divisions and imagine together, we all become magicians, conjurers, rebels. Together, we refuse to simply accept the world as is, and instead help collectively reimagine it as it could be.

For decades, IDEO has imagined what it would feel like to inhabit the future. As our timeline for implementing climate solutions and contending with emergent technologies grows shorter, we are recommitting to that practice—creating compelling, tangible visions for how we will live, work, create, and relate to one another, the planet, and to the world around us.

Dear future, we’ve got your back. Biodegradable glitter and all.

The Day’s Agenda

Our speculation about what opportunities will arise as we do business in the Climate Era kicked off  with an in-person makeathon.

To set the scene, we hosted a conversation in our San Francisco office between ​​Alexander Rose, Executive Director of the Long Now Foundation, and IDEOer Tanja Dzambazova. Since 1997, Rose, Danny Hillis and The Long Now team have led a range of efforts encouraging imagination at the timescale of civilization—the next and last 10000 years—including a monumental, all mechanical 10,000 Year Clock. It was an excellent primer on long-term thinking.

Flush with inspiration, we gathered around a long table littered with raw materials: leather and felt scraps, leaves and twigs, markers, and glue guns. We gave each team a brief and an hour to rapidly prototype  speculative products, services, and experiences for a potential client. The point in a makeathon isn’t to come up with a perfectly viable concept, it’s to slip beyond a rigid, legacy mindset and enter a more flexible, generative mode where you can come up with new-to-the-world ideas.

OUR BRIEFS

1. Electrify Everything
   How might we live differently in a world that is running off of renewable energy? What is unlocked in a world where all industrial machines, homes, neighborhoods, and appliances are intelligent, efficient, connected, and powered by renewables?
2. Waste-Less Living
   What might everyday life look like if the products we use, clothes we wear, and industry standards and systems are waste-less, adaptable, and regenerative? What could more intentional “design for immortality” look like?
3. Frontline Futures
   How might we design new experiences, products, and services for those on the frontline of climate impacts? What new mitigation, prevention, and adaptation opportunities can we surface through a human-centered lens rooted in the experience of those most at risk?
4. Carbon Transparency
   How might we live differently in a world where carbon transparency (scope 1,2 & particularly 3) is fully complete? What is unlocked in a world where consistent measurement and blockchain logging produces a live carbon score for any object or activity on earth?
5. New Nature Rites
   How might a globally viral belief system responsive to climate change create new rituals, symbols, events, holidays, and social narratives?

With those prompts in hand, teams split off and started making. Here’s some of the output.

Remember, these aren’t meant to be realizable ideas. They are jumping off points—kernels of business opportunities that we’d like to explore further:

Client: Target
Theme: Electrify Everything

Design Concept: “Anti-Extinction Kit: Fireflies Edition”
A set of globe lights powered by fireflies is one in a series of kits to help re-nature our backyards and cultivate anti-extinction habitats. As climate change starts to affect food sources and safe places for firefly larvae dwindle, these backyard accessories are safe havens for fireflies to fuel up, lay their eggs, and lend their glow to light up a backyard. Also comes in glowing fungal and pond editions.

Client: Amazon
Theme: Waste-less Living

Design Concept: “Trash Rabbit: A rewards based packaging system”
An on-demand service that comes to your home and breaks down your trash—preserving valuable metals and other raw materials, disposing toxic elements, and processing recyclable elements. Users earn rewards and cash back when they purchase simpler, mono-material products.

Client: Ford
Theme: Carbon Transparency

Design Concept:
A globe you wear as a necklace, like a Magic 8 ball. When shaken, it displays the most efficient, carbon-neutral way to get from point A to B, offering options that require tradeoffs and offsets. An intuitive sensory companion helps you make hard choices.

Client: REI, Patagonia
Theme: Nature Rites

Design Concept: “Intergenerational rites of passage”
A program in which gear is intentionally designed as a blank canvas to be passed down from generation to generation with a hand-me-down or yearbook element: You customize the backpack, sleeping bag, jacket, and other products with badges and add-ons to celebrate rites of passage like a first camping trip.

Client: Dating apps
Theme: Carbon Transparency

Design Concept: “Carbon Dating”
Matchmaking service based on shared environmental goals and behaviors. This is a time in which your carbon score makes you more desirable. Benefits include having similar habits and values—making moving in together a lot easier. Unintended consequences include creating an elitist competitive set where having the lowest score becomes more important than other human qualities.

Client: United Nations
Theme: New Nature Rites

Wheat Pins Alliance
Made with the last piece of non-GMO wheat on earth, it’s our new cross-national symbolic pic worn to show allegiance to the earth. Due to monoculture farming practices, a future fungus wiped out the world’s wheat supply including GMO and non-GMO strains that weren’t strong enough to fight it

Lingering Scent Library
Last of their kind scents that were collected and stored in anticipation of climate change—the smell of snow on granite, an aroma of crushed almonds—that are offered to diplomats to remind them of what has been lost and what is still to be protected.

The New Earth Flag
Emblazoned with the shapes and colors of our last remaining shrubs, it represents Earth’s ecotone as it becomes increasingly desertified.

Will we see these ideas come to fruition? Probably not. But like any thought experiment that asks “what if…” they can lead to new ways of thinking and future business opportunities. The organizations that can anticipate what people will want and need in the next 10 years are the ones who will thrive in the Climate Era. What will technology make possible? What will dwindling resources make scarce? What will it take for humans to adopt planet-friendly solutions at scale?

Design’s role is to consider all of those factors and lovingly break, shape, and remake. To escape the gravity of the present in pursuit of the possible. And that starts by making a giant mess.

Dear future,

Can you smell this? It’s the scent of a melting doll’s head being gently pressed into a dayglo flowerbed.

For anyone whose day job involves creating things—proposals or presentations that require fact-finding, writing, imagery, and video—it's changing how we make stuff. Love it or fear it, generative AI may be our new co-worker. And to ensure this co-worker is ethical, friendly, and aligned with our intentions, we must first explore it.

This phase of the AI revolution feels personal. Many IDEO designers are artists or writers—crafts that generative AI is uniquely suited to disrupt. So, we’re getting ahead of it and embracing these tools to explore how our creative process might coevolve with AI.

As we would do with any new colleague, we hope to learn how to have constructive relationships with these technologies, understand them better, and collaborate.

Way back in 2019—before generative AI was everywhere—we created a deck of AI Ethics cards, which you can download here. It was a good start, but there is much work yet to be done on creating an ethical human-AI ecosystem that endures long after the hype cycle ends.

Here are a few of the ways we’ve been experimenting so far:

1. Research Synthesis

The classic image of design thinking is people huddled around a Post-It–littered foam core board. During the pandemic, this process shifted to digital tools like Miro, Reduct, and Figjam.

Interaction Designer Takashi Wickes is using generative AI to further streamline the synthesis process—a method of organizing and interpreting research data in order to identify patterns, themes, and insights that can be used to inform the design of a product or service or experience. Using Reduct to transcribe his interviews, he highlights stand-out quotes. He then runs the quotes through Notion AI with a prompt like “What are the top 10 key takeaways from this conversation?”

Knowing that the AI doesn’t have the larger context of the project at hand, Takashi and his teammates use Notion AI’s output as supplemental input. Treating Notion AI’s output as a base to build on, they combine AI and human intelligence to go deeper, faster.

And, we’re already seeing startups form around this type of process: check out Vowel.

2. Concepting & Ideation

Designers come up with a lot of ideas. A typical ideation session begins with a prompt, something like: In a world oversaturated with screens, how might we support parents and children in connecting over the dinner table through games? We scratch our heads, think it over, and begin sketching out sacrificial concepts.

Recently, we’ve been experimenting with flipping this process on its head. Rather than coming up with an idea straight away, we use AI-based image generators like DALL-E or Midjourney for inspiration.

For a project on new dinnertime games, we fed DALL-E the prompt: “a family playing with their food during dinner.” The images rendered spark new directions that we might not have come to on our own. Mom with a carrot as a nose? Why didn’t we think of that? When you’re all at the table, why not use food as costumes in gameplay? Magical game design is all about turning expectations on their head. Now, we start to wonder… What other foods would make fun play pieces?

And of course, there are a cohort of new companies who are formalizing this process into a consumer tool: check out Fermat.

‍

3. Critique

One thing we’re always exploring in our very riffy culture is how to get better at critique. There’s always this one thing to pick on: Weak insights. Insights at IDEO are concise statements that reflect our understanding about the current state of affairs in a given challenge and the way they are framed can be foundational to how we design solutions.

A few years back, before AI tools were everywhere, we made an insight analyzer chatbot. It looked for overused terms and poor word choice and would essentially chew you out. It was just an NLP bot that used natural language processing to match user chats with a set of known statements. The interface was a physical telephone (hotline). A funny gimmick with a simple learning: bots can get away with being mean.

Late last year, a team of brand and interaction designers started packaging up our favorite simple methods of critique and revisited the old insights hotline. Anne Graziano and I fed simple prompts such as “Give a brutally honest critique of the following insight: Meet people where they are at” to ChatGPT, and as might be expected, if you talk to an AI modeled after what’s said on the internet  it’s going to be very good at criticizing things.

We tried the OpenAI api (GPT3_davinci-003) and got decent results, so we wired it up to an emoji reaction in a Slack channel. When you add a “crit” emoji to an insight, it replies with a critique. The original prompt was harsh and getting a bit obstinate, so our group adjusted to the prompt “Give constructive feedback on the following insight:” which changed the tone and made it more creative and fun.

Our colleague Takashi figured out that the AI was pleased to critique quotes from classic movies and romcoms, which Takashi sourced from ChatGPT (prompt: “Give me the 10 cheesiest famous lines from movies”). He then fed the AI old chestnuts like, "Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." (Hitch, 2005).

‍

4. Marketing Copy

As community builders at IDEO, we host a lot of events. Recently, when writing up the copy for an internal informational session about the fundamentals and history of generative AI, I turned to ChatGPT to write the marketing copy. The output was pretty spot-on, and ended up informing both the content of the event and the copy we used to pitch it. We built on it, of course—inserting things that we thought were especially important for our community to learn—but it was a true collaboration.

5. Slide Decks

Google Slides are a staple of IDEO’s creative process. We use slides for project deliverables, ideation, business proposals, and internal events. We've found Tome.app, which creates AI-generated slides, to be a helpful springboard. Business designers are experimenting with the technology to refine their communications, interaction designers use it to think through how a new product might look, act, and feel, and our Play Lab is using it to explore new rules and play styles for games that do not yet exist.

Companies are forming around key parts of our creative process—capabilities which humans (and a few animals) once claimed as their sole domain.

In a 1948 documentary about U.S. agriculture called "The Land" the disruptive force of large-scale mechanization is described in a way that feels like it could be about this AI moment:

"These miraculous machines!
Do we shape them
Or do they shape us?
Or reshape us from our decent, far designs?

But we are learning.
We are learning to build for the future
From the ground up."

We’re curious: How are you using generative AI tools at work? We’d love to hear from you! Send us a note: Savannah Kunovsky & Danny Deruntz

Are you using ChatGPT yet? If the answer is no, keep reading.

「なぜ日本の組織では個の創造性を発揮することが難しいのか？」という問題意識のもと、さまざまな調査研究を実施。年代、専門性、性別などに多様性を持たせた「個と組織の創造性」に関する研究会を発足し、ディスカッションを重ねながら、同時にアーティストやスポーツ選手、デザイナーの方々へのインタビューを実施、そして国内外の中小企業、大企業に勤める様々な役職の方へのインタビューも行いました。文献や海外の事例に学ぶだけでなく、多様な方々と、とことん日本の組織に向き合ったのが、今回の調査の特徴です。

こうしたプロセスの中で浮かび上がってきたのは、日本社会における創造性に対する思いこみ。創造性は、一部の個に宿るものではなく、さまざまな人・モノ・コトの掛け合わせで生まれる。だからこそ、個の創造性を求める前にまず、どのように創造性が開きやすい環境を作ることができるのか。ここから、「どのようにして、固定観念を覆し、個々が問い続けられる土壌を作ることができるか？」という問いが生まれ、個と組織の創造性を高めるための考え方を「提案」として整理しました。

社会はVUCAの時代を迎え、日本企業は「創造性」を発揮することがこれまで以上に求められています。一方、個人に目を向けると、これらの複雑な社会や環境にどのように対処したらよいのかが分からず、次の一歩が踏み出せない「モヤモヤとした閉塞感」に囚われています。どのように組織や部署・グループの創造性を引き出したらいいのか悩んでいる方、どのようにまず第一歩を作ったらいいのか考えている方にぜひ触れていただきたいと願っています。

→レポートPDF：「進化し続ける組織へ 〜個と個をつなぎ、創造性を解放する〜」

提案

レポート内でまとめている提案のいくつかを例としてご紹介します。個々が創造性を発揮できる環境を作りたいが、まず何をしたらいいか悩んでいる方が、具体的に何かを始められるきっかけになればと考えています。

ヒエラルキーが逆転する場を作る

年齢、役職、性別、職種など、組織に根強く存在するヒエラルキーには、あえてそれが逆転するような場を作ることで、新しい考え方を取り入れる余白を生むことができる。

"階層やサイロ化が強い組織構造では、相互理解、相互の尊重が生まれるような環境づくりが必須だと思います。そのためにあえて、既存のヒエラルキーをひっくり返すというのも手。一番若い人が上司にリバースメンターシップをするとか。会議では発言しにくい人から発言してもらうとか。"
-Michael Peng, Moon Creative Lab, Chief Creative Officer

自主練できる場をつくる

現状に問いかけ、自分なりのアイデアを考えることにハードルを感じる人が多いため、まずは安心できる場（いわば自主練できる場）で試行錯誤し、自分なりに考えるきっかけを作ることが必要である。自分のアイデアに自信を持つことで初めて、それを周囲に共有することができる。

"クリエイティビティは、敷居の低い場所でないと発揮しにくい。新たにチャレンジする人が、簡単な実験をまずキッチンのようなパーソナルな場所で始めることが多いのも、まさにそういうこと。キッチンで練習して大丈夫だと思ったら、初めて外に出て試すことができる。"
-デザイン教育者（米国）

個人の任務の目的・役割を明確化する

「なぜ何のためにこの仕事をやっているのか分からない」といった、主人公がいない仕事が多い。仕事の任務やそれぞれに期待される役割を明確にすることで、仕事が自分ごと化される。それなくして、人々は自分なりの問いを持ち続けることはできない。

“個人に任されている任務、役割を明確化することで、より自分ごと化された問いをたてやすくする。何のためにやっているのかがクリアになると、どんな創造性を発揮する必要があるのかも明確化される。”
-株式会社NTT ドコモ イノベーション統括部 グロース・デザイン 担当部長　笹原 優子

「水」を探し求める虫たちの物語

調査の結果浮かび上がってきた問題意識や提案を、ストーリーを通じてより年代を超えてわかりやすく伝えるため、ピクチャーブック「新たなはじまり: Between Water and Insects」も作成しました。

日照りに悩まされ、枯れ果てたとある虫たちの村。豊かだった頃の時代を思いながら、伝統的な雨乞いの儀式を行いますが、雨は降りません。そこで、ある冒険家が外の世界に「水」を探す旅に出ます。果たして冒険家は水を見つけることができたのでしょうか？

日本の組織をとある虫の村に、組織風土を村の土壌になぞらえて作成したストーリー。レポートと合わせてぜひご覧ください。

→ピクチャーブック「新たなはじまり: Between Water and Insects」

個の創造性が発揮される日本社会を目指して

IDEO Tokyoは、日本の変化・進化の触媒となり、クリエイティビティを開花させることで、新たな価値を創造していくことを志しています。どのように個の創造性を解放する環境づくりに取り組むべきか悩んでいる方々をはじめ、さまざまな方に読んでいただきたいです。このレポートを一つのきっかけとして、皆さんからフィードバックをもらいながら本書をアップデートし、日本の「創造性」に関する議論を加速させ、個々の創造性が発揮される社会となるための具体的な活動に結実させることを願っています。

またレポートの内容を踏まえ、組織の中で対話を促すツール「創造性の土壌を作る問いかけ」も公開しました。このツールには、下地作りと仕組みづくりの計20項目について、チームでの対話を始めるための3つの問いかけがそれぞれ用意されています。ぜひご自身の所属するチームで取り組んでみてください。

詳しい調査の概要については、経済産業省のホームページをご覧ください。
→創造性人材の育成支援

IDEO Tokyoは、経済産業省と協業し、創造的組織の開発及び創造性人材のキャリア形成に関する調査研究を実施しました。その結果をレポート「進化し続ける組織へ 〜個と個をつなぎ、創造性を解放する〜」として公開しています。

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

‍

My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.