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

Well, not complete strangers. They had shared an unusual experience, designed by IDEO, over the previous five weeks: The Department of Super Secrets.

When COVID-19 shut down elementary school buildings, it shut down opportunities for young students to build soft skills like empathy. It also severed personal contact between seniors and other human beings, leaving many confined and lonely.

Alongside teachers and students at Mineola Union Free School District in Mineola, New York, IDEO took on a project to design a program that would help 4th graders build empathy by connecting idle students with isolated seniors. We thought it would be a simple, playful opportunity, but in the end, we found a powerful tool for connection that might be scaled to bridge any number of social divides.

What’s the key? Well, that’s a secret.

Connections grown in isolation

The IDEO team decided that instead of trying to compensate for the limitations of quarantine, we would embrace those constraints and make them the centerpiece of the experience.

People can’t meet face-to-face? Perfect. We’ll beat quarantine at its own game. Neither partner will know anything about the other. No names, no ages. They’d have no clue about the other’s most basic biographical information, like age, race, gender; instead, this would simply be two human beings building a connection by sharing stories of their hopes and fears. A relationship built on meaning rather than appearance.

Thus, the Department of Super Secrets was born—an IDEO twist on the pen-pal relationship. Our heroes picked secret super aliases and we paired them up: one student with one senior citizen. Over five weeks, the partners were prompted to share five specific secrets designed to be low stakes, but highly personal, carefully crafted to spotlight character, values, and feelings. This was a delicate tightrope walk, asking them to offer up something meaningful without being invasive or uncomfortable. We designed the prompts to build on each other, gently establishing a bond through vulnerability and reflection.

Every secret was shared in two ways, with words and images. We wanted the partners to spend energy reflecting on their own lives so they could benefit as much from the telling as the receiving.

You know what was so wonderful about it—I had been cheated all these years not remembering that image of my brother and I playing under the table. I wouldn’t have [remembered it] if we didn’t do this.

MARVELOUS MUSEUM MAVEN, SUPER SECRET SENIOR

The secrets were exchanged through actual mail, not email. This slower method gave the partners time to explore their memories, express themselves deliberately, and—in a situation where days begin to blend—gave them something to look forward to. The tactility of cards filled with handwritten words and pictures turned them into a gift; it made the receiver a caretaker, safeguarding moments of someone else’s life.

Friendship across distance and decades

We wanted our participants to build a connection, not just exchange information. This was not about grown-ups humoring kids, or kids humoring grown-ups—this was about two experiences at either end of a spectrum, sharing a window into their point of view.

As part of the final exchange, each partner used what they’d learned about the other to create and send a gift to their anonymous pal: a superhero mask based on the shared secrets. And then the Department of Super Secrets hosted a reveal party. Partners came together on a video call, each wearing their newly gifted masks. Although they had been exchanging stories for weeks, this was the first time they saw the face behind the feelings. This was the first time Super Potato met Fantastic Fixer, and it was lovely.

Visit the Department of Super Secrets to meet the 4th graders and senior citizens behind the masks

Before and after their experience, we asked the partners to answer a few questions meant to gauge their empathy. Turns out the numbers support the anecdotes: Their time with the Department of Super Secrets seems to have genuinely increased their empathy scores, especially their ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes.

So what went right? We built the Department of Super Secrets by combining three key elements:

1. Anonymity: character vs. characteristics

No one in the world is more perfect for you than the mysterious stranger sitting alone in the coffee shop. The less we know about someone, the easier it is to dress them up and see them exactly as we wish. That’s why we sidestepped the introductions, the descriptions of hair color, and the family history. We wanted each side to begin by speaking across the mysterious absence created by anonymity to someone they assumed was a kindred spirit, ready and excited to connect.

We’ve all seen enough awkward hugs and pinched cheeks between kids and elderly relatives to know these two groups don’t always dance to the same beat. If the relationship began with the mental shorthand of “old” and “young,” there would be silent assumptions on both sides. Confirmation bias would run wild.

We used the freedom of anonymity to create rapport so partners would speak their truth honestly without tailoring it to their audience.

2. Story: introductions from the inside out

My name Is Ben. I once had my heart broken.

Which of those two offerings is more likely to create a bond between us? Ironically, the things that shape us most distinctly—our stories—are also the things most of us have in common. At the very core, we all share the same stories, but told in our own unique ways. Your parents may not have named you Ben, but you probably know what it is to cry into your pillow.

We used story as a sneaky back door to help Super Secret partners appreciate each other's identities once we dropped the anonymity. By the reveal party, they had connected enough through the shared stories that when they discovered each other’s identity, it enriched their idea of who a young or old person could be.

3. Play: lighten the mood, deepen the conversation

As I’ve written elsewhere, play is powerful. It lowers the bar for self-judgment; it can function like oven mitts for handling sensitive subjects; it can encourage us to stretch our everyday thinking and see possibilities we might have otherwise missed. Fun is a fuel.

We could have said, Hey, this is a school project to build empathy. Bo-ring. Instead, we led with the language of secrets, superheroes, and surprise to elevate it to something memorable, meaningful, magical.

Play allowed the partners to share vulnerable stories in a safe way. One prompt—"Share the secret of your most embarrassing moment"—became a funny way of sharing values, fears, and anxieties. Because underneath the slipped bathing suits or milk-spewing nose is the nature of what you find embarrassing, and that tells a lot about a person. Is it failure? Public or individual? Loss of control? Misunderstanding? Fear itself?

Sharing a moment you wish had never happened is an act of trust and bravery. Receiving someone else’s story is a way to remember you are not alone in the world as a flawed human being.

Play allows you to do both with a smile.

The next adventure…?

While this began as a way to enrich the lives of kids and seniors, it turned out to be a powerful way of sneaking behind the unrecognized biases, the mental shortcuts that are the unacknowledged guardrails of our day-to-day thinking. What if we expanded the experience to bridge other divergent points of view related to politics, race, economics, gender, geography, or religion?

We’d love to find situations to use the Department of Super Secrets to help people hear each other in a new way. Our hope is that this combination of anonymity, story, and play can help any two strangers find common ground whether they be superdelegates or super potatoes.

*Names and details have been changed to protect secret identities

When Super Potato* met Fantastic Fixer* for the first time, she asked if Fantastic Fixer’s puppy was feeling better. Fantastic Fixer wanted to know about Super Potato’s recent birthday. There were no awkward silences, despite the fact that Super Potato was nine and Fantastic Fixer was closer to 79 and they were, until this very moment, strangers.

This year, in light of our collective Zoom fatigue, services have been shortened to just a few hours, which is already pushing the shredded edge of our online attention span. After seven months of pandemic, mass unemployment, racial justice reckonings, and school closures, it’s hard to abstain and reflect on your own transgressions when all you want is comfort food and a hug. Knowing that, the Union for Reform Judaism, leading the largest, most diverse Jewish movement with nearly 850 congregations across the U.S. and Canada, asked IDEO to help design a few offscreen moments as supplements to the synagogues' videotaped services.

To think beyond the Zoom and understand what people are craving this year, we joined Mobius for a workshop with community builders like the founder of The Dinner Party, interviewed rabbis who have responded to modern yens with yoga and dance parties, talked to a “ritualist” about how to design a memorial, and met with the creator of This Human Moment, an immersive online experience. Our collaborators at the URJ, Amy Asin, Rabbi Leora Kaye, and Rabbi Esther Lederman, along with staff from the Righteous Person’s Foundation, which provided funding for the project, helped us ground modern exercises in a 3,000 year-old tradition—pouring old wine into new bottles.

We learned that what people need right now is to feel supported and comforted by some semblance of normalcy—a holiday that feels more like getting into a warm bath (or a mikvah, where you immerse yourself in water, as we learned from the URJ’s Rabbi Leora Kaye) than like a wake-up call. We learned from speaking to congregants that they don’t just come to temple for services, but for the casual synagogue interactions. It's a chance to see Mr. and Mrs. Riley, that lovely old couple who are somehow still alive, or family friends you haven’t had the chance to call, or that old school crush who still causes your stomach to flutter once a year.

The ideas that emerged can be found at reflect.reformjudaism.org, and they don’t look much like your aunt Sheila’s seder table. They include ways to do a check-in on your spiritual health (as you might at an annual physical); ways to memorialize a person who died or an event the pandemic shut down or how to let go of a burdensome feeling; and a collage exercise that has you scrapbook the community you’re missing by congregating in digital space. And for those looking to know more about how the activities relate to Jewish wisdom and custom, the bottom of each page invites visitors to “Explore more and go deeper” with links to essays on ReformJudaism.org.

Each activity was designed to be radically inclusive—as welcoming to those who don’t know a single Hebrew word and don’t believe in God as it is to believers with scholarly knowledge. The experience is a la carte, customizable, and while housed on a screen, designed to be non-screen-based. As identity changes in America—where one-in-five Jews describe themselves as having no religion—it’s become increasingly important for Jewish organizations to offer those still seeking community and spiritual life a radically new way to engage. That’s what this is.

It’s been said that religion was the answer to a cry for help. Right now, everyone could use a little help. And awe. And beauty. And routine. Religious rituals were built to keep us in line, to keep us connected, and to keep time. Much of that has been broken by COVID. So the question for designers becomes, how might we, within the constraints of the day, mine a bit of gold that can fill in the cracks?

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Each fall, the Jewish High Holidays draw communities together for some of the year's most important rituals. Even Jews who don't attend their temple's regularly scheduled programming tend to make a point of spending a few days celebrating the new year and reflecting on the one that's passed. Now that we're socially distanced, how do we make sure the rituals are still observed? The experience of gathering and connecting still felt?

What they found through their conversations took them a bit by surprise. There was a deeper malaise afflicting everyone they spoke to—something under the surface, under the symptoms.

Loneliness.

Months into a pandemic, the isolation that’s always been below the surface is even more extreme. It was in this context that I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Murthy. We spoke about what leaders can do to facilitate connection, and why it is mission-critical for organizations to address loneliness and support relationship-building, even when we’re physically distant. Especially when we are physically distant.

I'm sharing some excerpts from our conversation here. I hope they inspire you and prompt useful explorations into the health of your communities.

Three types of loneliness

The feeling of being isolated from each other, Dr. Murthy discovered, is at the root of so many of our deepest ailments. He reminds us that we are social creatures, and that community heals us. Especially in these divided times, the way to a more happy and healthy society is both obvious and profound: human connection.

Connection in the workplace

Our professional lives—the experience of working and the quality of what we do—is heavily influenced by what’s going on in their rest of our lives. Yet there’s a hesitance to be vulnerable, share challenges, and ask for help. As a result, colleagues sometimes miss opportunities to help one another. It’s a loss, because through helping each other, we deepen our bonds. Empowering employees to help each other can be one of the most powerful ways for organizations to strengthen their teams.

The potential for something better

While our present moment lays bare how technology can isolate us and ideologies can divide us, it also shows us that new ways are possible now and in the future. My conversation with Dr. Murthy explored the role design can play in creating human-centered systems that make us all feel more connected—from the scale of individuals and teams, all the way up to systems, institutions and governments. We all have the power to design conditions that prevent loneliness, cultivate community, and foster good health.

The strain on our systems caused by COVID-19 reveals an opportunity to take new approaches to our work and our infrastructure— from how the government sets policies to how businesses empower employees. In rebuilding the world post-pandemic, we need to keep in mind the tangible benefits that human connection can support: mental health, physical wellbeing, academic and professional success. We can design policy to optimize human connection, ensuring our government recognizes these principles when thinking about housing, public health, or education, for instance. The question for leaders is, what changes are required to create connection and maintain cohesion, even as our structures and processes shift? The opportunity for leaders now is not to go back to how things were, but to imagine something better…and make a new “normal” built upon what supports us as, as Dr. Murthy points out, social creatures who need care and connection.

Original photograph by Meredith Nierman

There’s a story in Dr. Vivek Murthy’s book, Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, about the tour he made across America in 2015, while he was U.S. Surgeon General. One of my colleagues at IDEO, Ann Kim, served as his Chief Design Officer and joined Dr. Murthy’s team as they set out to learn about the health crises gripping the nation—opioid addiction, chronic disease, violence—from the people who were suffering the most.

As pixels become a hidden quality, what would it be like to expose and celebrate this tiny landscape? Maybe it’s some sort of nostalgia for the pixel, but I thought it would be fun to prototype a game where part of the gameplay is uncovering this “hidden world” of pixels inside these new displays—and so the world’s smallest pixel art game was born.

Looking through the loupe

To start the project, I needed to see these tiny pixels up close. I bought a cheap jeweler’s loupe—basically a magnifying glass—and pressed it up against an iPad. Things looked promising with a 10x loupe. The level of magnification allows you to see the individual pixels, but still see a decent amount of the play area around the character. However, if your eye is pressed against the eyepiece of the loupe, it would make touch controls a challenge because you can’t see anything but the small area in the magnifying glass. To work with this constraint, I wondered if I could make the loupe itself the controller for the game.

The way iPads and most tablets sense touch is using a “capacitive touchscreen.” This type of display creates a grid of areas that hold electrical charge. When a fingertip touches the screen, the charge at and around the point of contact decreases, communicating where the finger is to the tablet. Electrically conductive gloves and styluses are able to work on these screens because they allow the properties of your finger to extend through the conductive material. So using the same idea as a conductive stylus, I put some aluminum tape on the loupe to transmit the capacitance from your fingers to the display. This allowed a player to move the loupe around the screen, and through doing so, interact with the game.

Exploring a tiny world

Next, I needed to develop the game. I borrowed from some of the classic role-playing-game tropes from games I played as a kid, building out a landscape that included many different climates—a desert, a lake, a forest, a deep forest, an ice tundra, and more. I created a tiny character that the player guided around the landscape by moving the loupe.

The idea is that the whole game is played on a single static overworld screen that never moves—you can explore an entire tiny world without ever moving more than a few inches. There are even a couple of fun ways the character interacts with the environment. For example, the player can force the character to fall into the lake, where he splashes around and quickly jumps out. I also created a hidden cave that shows how a game might work with inside and outside spaces that can be explored.

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the way the experiment turned out. There’s something about looking through the magnifying glass and into this new world that brings back some of the awe and wonder that came with exploring new worlds on my Nintendo when I was growing up—it just goes to show that screen technology doesn’t need to be pixel perfect to transport us.

Chart your own pixel territory

Want to try it for yourself? Here’s how to get your own version of this experiment up and running:

1. Build the loupe controller

Get a loupe, and some aluminum tape. I made two separate “T” shaped pieces of tape, and wrapped them around the edge of the bottom of the loupe. This metal transmits the capacitance of your body down to the edges of the loupe, simulating two-finger touch.

2. Load the game

There are two ways to do this. First, make sure you have Unity, then download the project from Github. You’ll also want to install the Unity Remote app on your tablet.

To quickly test the project, you can plug the tablet into a USB port on your computer and open the Unity Remote app on the tablet. In Unity on the computer go to Edit > Project Settings > Editor and select the tablet. Then press the play button at the top of the main Unity window and the game will appear on your device. This will let you try things out but it will be very slow to react and move the character because it’s running on the computer and sending each screen as an image over the USB connection. More detailed instructions can be found on the Github project page.

Alternatively, if you want to run the application natively on a device at a reasonable speed, you will need to follow the directions on building for mobile to set up your device with Unity.

Either way, once you’ve gotten the game up and running, you’ll have a good sense of the game mechanics and can go into the project to edit it to create your own tiny world—changing things like the landscape and character actions, creating new characters and interactive objects, and even extending it into an actual game. Happy exploring!

A quick shoutout to some of the great resources I used to create this demo:

• Tiled: A fantastic tool for creating tiled backgrounds for 2D games. This was extremely helpful for putting together the overworld.
• Tiled2Unity: This tool helps bring the tiled data into Unity seamlessly.
• opengameart.org: A great repository for free to use game art assets. My main tiles were modified from surt’s Blowhard Chronicles.
• rm2kdev’s 2D Unity RPG Development series: A super helpful video series on developing 2D games in Unity.

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When’s the last time you had to design for something as small as a pixel? In recent years, with the advance of retina displays on computers, tablets and phones, it’s easy to forget that pixels are still the building blocks for everything you see on the screen. (These new displays still use pixels; they’re just so small they can’t really be seen.) In the past, user interface designers had to build to pixel-perfect precision to avoid blurry aliasing effects and issues with displaying fonts on lower-resolution screens; today, this is all but a thing of the past.

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.