Obesity exists at the complex intersection of a clinical condition and a cultural force. Clinically, it comes with a diagnosis and treatment plan. Culturally, it is influenced by beliefs, identity, and self-worth, making it deeply personal and often taboo. Families, healthcare providers, and experts tend to avoid the fraught “o-word,” opting for euphemisms instead. For families on Medicaid, these challenges are even more pronounced. Award-winning health-tech startup Clarity Pediatrics, together with designers from IDEO, IDEO.org, and with support from Rise Together Ventures, sought to uncover the obstacles to healthier lifestyles and create a free report for US pediatricians who want to bend the curve on the childhood obesity epidemic.

Research with kids and parents on Medicaid in Dallas, Texas, and California’s Bay Area, along with interviews with healthcare providers and experts across the country, uncovered stories of stigma and frustration. Parents spoke of the daily challenges of balancing multiple jobs, sourcing affordable healthy food, and finding time to make necessary lifestyle changes. They described rushed pediatric visits that left them with unclear next steps and feelings of blame. Provider conversations echoed these struggles, noting time constraints and limited follow-up options.  

Ultimately, food had become a daily torment for these families. Eating was unavoidable and also one of the few affordable indulgences low-income parents were able to provide. Once kids left their own homes, they were surrounded by unhealthy temptations, making it feel impossible for parents to maintain control. The popularity of costly new weight-loss medications and surgical procedures added another layer of complexity for families who had been underserved by—and therefore distrustful of—America’s healthcare system. With so much of the responsibility placed on parents to self-direct care, inequities deepened, adding to the burden of families already at a breaking point.

To design a path forward, IDEO and IDEO.org mapped a family’s needs before, during, and after pediatric visits. This work revealed critical parts of the journey where families needed more support: recognizing early signs of obesity, navigating provider conversations, and sustaining healthier habits at home.

These insights informed a theory of change framework that provides actionable guidance for stakeholders involved in obesity care. Grounded in three opportunity areas along the patient journey—building awareness, confidence, and capacity—the framework highlights how trust, dignity, and systemic support can lead to lasting outcomes.

IDEO and IDEO.org also developed 10 user-centered concepts spanning digital, physical, and service offerings to reduce stigma and empower families to sustain healthier lives. These ideas address dignified diagnoses and structural inequities, among other pressing issues. Complementing these concepts, IDEO created a short documentary of a mother discussing her family’s experience navigating childhood obesity to help pediatric providers—many of whom have had very different lived experiences from the families and patients they serve—better understand the realities of the daily struggles of many families on Medicaid.

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Designed for the public good, the interactive website and free downloadable report, Reimagining Childhood Obesity, contain research findings, design recommendations, and a theory of change framework. The goal: provide practical, actionable guidelines for pediatricians, educators, healthcare organizations, and innovators to meet families and kids where they are and support them as they move toward a healthier future.

21% of US children are obese. 40% of Latino youth are either overweight or obese.

26% of kids on Medicaid experience childhood obesity, compared with 11% on private insurance.

525,600 minutes: Total time per year parents spend caring for their children. 17 minutes: Average time a pediatrician spends with a child during their annual exam, a small window to address a complex chronic condition such as obesity.

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user-centered ideas to help pediatricians reduce the stigma of childhood obesity in an accessible report

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opportunity areas for building trust with young patients and providing family support

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With its reach, Acer saw an opportunity to power positive choices in the billions. ‍

But new products and services won’t succeed if consumers don’t want them, no matter how sustainable they are. A few years go, the Harvard Business Review’s report, "The Elusive Green Consumer," found that about two-thirds of those surveyed said they wanted to buy brands that advocated sustainability. But only a quarter actually did.

Meanwhile, the market for climate era products is only growing: In 2022, Forbes found that nearly 90 percent of the Gen X consumers they surveyed said they’d be willing to spend more on sustainable products, compared to just over a third two years before. The desire was only higher among Millennials and Gen Z; they just didn’t like what was on offer.

To drive sales and growth, and meet its sustainability commitments, Acer needed to capitalize on desirability, deepening the connection between Acer’s sustainable options and consumer needs, lowering the barrier to purchase. To that end, Acer and IDEO created the Acer Climate Lab, a cross-organizational team and initiative, to launch the company on a transformative journey to deepen the connection between Acer's conscious technology and the realities of people's lives and needs across four strategic areas.

Together, the combined team conducted extensive research to better understand consumer attitudes and behaviors toward sustainable products, and identified everyday areas where Acer’s conscious technology might be able to have the most significant impact: living, working, moving, and learning.

• Living: Envisions homes as hubs of energy efficiency and climate resilience, leveraging technology to optimize energy use, enhance air quality, and enable proactive climate management. These concepts include technologies like smart energy systems, adaptive air solutions, and integrated home management platforms explore how technology can support sustainable daily living.
  
  
• Working: Reimagines the workplace with flexible, sustainable technology solutions that prioritize resource optimization and circular practices. Concepts such as Acer Loop could provide a subscription-based model that ensures access to the latest technology, supports remote work, and reduces electronic waste through effective recycling and rehoming practices.
  
  
• Moving: Focuses on the transformation of urban mobility by integrating technology into systems that promote sustainable transportation. Concepts could include e-mobility hubs that highlight how urban spaces could offer seamless access to shared, low-emission travel options, reducing reliance on traditional carbon-heavy methods.
  
  
• Learning: Explores pathways to sustainable education by imagining environments where technology supports circularity and accessibility. This includes ideas like refurbished devices for students, repair and reuse programs, and educational spaces designed with climate-positive principles, nurturing eco-conscious habits in future generations.

Together with Red Peak and Sid Lee, the team launched the culmination of the work at COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, positioning Acer as a pioneer in climate positive technology. The exhibit included immersive experiences and interactive displays demonstrating how Acer's sustainable solutions seamlessly integrate into everyday life. Visitors could engage with scenarios depicting sustainable living, working, moving, and learning, emphasizing the practical benefits of Acer’s innovations.

Acer's journey through the Climate Lab project underscores a commitment to sustainability that goes beyond mere compliance. With this new cross-business team tackling the real-world barriers faced by consumers, Acer is paving the way for a more inclusive, sustainable future. This initiative not only aligns with global climate goals, but also sets a precedent for the tech industry, demonstrating that with the right approach, sustainability and innovation can go hand in hand.

In a survey, 65% of respondents said they want to buy brands that advocate sustainability, yet only about 26% actually do. 

Nearly one in two consumers say they either don’t know what information to trust, or that nothing can influence how much they trust a business’s commitment to sustainability.

1 cohesive strategy

for climate era products across 6 different fields

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With the introduction of generative AI, Ethiqly and IDEO saw a unique opportunity to help teachers, by cutting down the time it takes to provide each student with feedback on their writing assignments. But to get there, they had to learn from the experts themselves. To kick off the project, the team headed into the classroom to co-design with students and teachers.

One of the first problems they discovered? Traditional methods of grading essays are laborious and inefficient for high school teachers, who are already notoriously busy and overworked. What teachers really wanted was to spend time giving each student the personalized feedback that helps them grow. Meanwhile, students really struggled to get started on their writing assignments, overwhelmed by looking at a blank page.

Together, the team started to think about how it could harness AI to make personalized instruction more accessible for all students, helping teachers provide better feedback at scale, and giving students the support they need to not only get started on their writing assignments, but improve their work. 

With insights directly from students and teachers, the IDEO team built working prototypes, allowing them to beta test the product in schools, and demonstrate value to investors. They also developed a brand identity and style guide for launch, which came to life in a pitch deck, landing page, and other brand expressions.

The resulting product is a sophisticated blend of AI technology and user-friendly interfaces that empower teachers and inspire students. The goal isn’t just to get to a finished essay, but to assist students in developing critical thinking skills. Ethiqly's tools help students organize their thoughts and get writing by providing contextual prompts and suggestions—without doing the work for them. And the AI assistant supports teachers by suggesting comments based on evaluation criteria they have set, and teachers choose which feedback is relevant for their individual students. Students never see it without teacher approval.

As one teacher told the team, “With leveraging AI more in education, there’s this fear that it’s deprofessionalizing the field or it’s a direct replacement of a teacher in a classroom. I think it gives us meaningful data, so that we can actually teach the way that we want to in order to support our students.” Now, Ethiqly is in use in classrooms in 25 countries, positively impacting students across the globe.

Teachers know 1:1 interaction is key to student success, but an EdWeek survey found only 46% of teachers’ time is spent teaching, while 25 hours/week goes to other tasks like grading and making lesson plans.

25 countries…and growing

Ethiqly’s reach in classrooms around the world

Designing a piece of a city, like a park, doesn’t start with a blank slate. There are always traces of the past and the present, and the lived history of its residents.

To create a full picture of that story, the IDEO team built workshops for the community centered around questions about the unique experiences of living in Frisco. They invited them to reflect on the communities they grew up in, the city of today, and the public spaces that have played formative roles for them. 

From their answers, a common value emerged: heritage. Frisco is a rapidly growing city, with residents whose families have lived there for centuries living side-by-side with more recent neighbors from diverse cultures and ethnic groups. Participants shared a vision of Grand Park as a unifying, shared space, a backdrop where many families can form foundational memories in Frisco.

Next, IDEO brought in multisensory design prompts to help participants further conceptualize the park. How did they want it to feel, sound, and smell? In the built-up, suburban city of Frisco, residents imagined a space that was less planned, enabling guided wandering and exploration. They also hoped that the park would inspire loved ones and descendants to feel a sense of curiosity and wonder.

At the end of workshops and sessions with community groups, the IDEO team took Polaroids of participants, asking, “What’s one word you want to describe Grand Park in the future?” Those words informed the collective vision that IDEO delivered to the city of Frisco, which included spatial concepts, user journeys, and branding for the park, all designed to showcase its unique landscapes. In January 2024, Frisco City Council approved the vision statement, and officials expect to break ground in the second half of 2025.

The population of Frisco is growing rapidly; its population is up 516% since the year 2000.

At more than 1,000 acres, Grand Park in Frisco is even larger than Central Park in New York City.

Less than 1% of Blackland Prairie soil remains in the region, and some of it is in Grand Park.

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Frisco residents were engaged in the process, from City Council members to high school students

200+

respondents shared anonymous feedback on what they imagined the park should be

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.