Increasingly, digital spaces are proving detrimental to youth mental health. By co-designing with youth, Kooth and IDEO set out to flip the script, creating a positive digital space for young people to safely explore their mental wellbeing. 

When Kooth, IDEO, and Blackbird, IDEO’s longtime development partner, first started working on the project, the window of opportunity was narrow, and the stakes were high. The group was up against a nine-week deadline to create a working proof of concept app. Also on the line: a $188 million contract with the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS)—one that would open an entirely new line of business for Kooth. 

The app needed to do more than demonstrate functionality—it needed to prove its value. To ensure that they were creating an asset that truly fit the needs of young people, the team turned to an initial cohort of 13-25 year-old co-designers who explored early features, created video diaries, and shared their questions about and experiences with mental health. These young people often gravitated toward self-service tools that helped them take action based on their feelings. With their feedback, the team created new expressions of clinically-validated behavioral health tools like journaling, breathwork and white noise—and built novel tools, such as Starboard, an expressive drawing tool and a nod to art therapy. 

The team took inspiration from content the co-designers liked to consume, such as story-driven video games that enable freedom of exploration, deepened by a unifying mythology. That led them to a constellation theme, which made the experience more intriguing and playful. The co-designers also recommended a dark color palette, because they preferred exploring the app at night. 

With these insights, the team refined the proof of concept, and then conducted a one-week pilot with another 50 young people across California. Their positive feedback gave the State the confidence to invest in a $188 million, four-year contract for Kooth to bring the app to a platform at scale. 

Over the next year, the team engaged another 150 young people to help design, shape, and test the app. At the same time, Kooth and IDEO created a clinical oversight group, which included a pediatrician, therapists, and other clinical specialists. This group anchored the platform in the practices of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), cultivating psychological flexibility—the mindful acceptance of positive and negative emotions. Young people are invited to complete short reflections and surveys throughout their journey with the app, which includes rigorous, science-backed measurements to assess the therapeutic benefits.

Behind the scenes, the team developed a clinical-facing service and digital platform that empowers Kooth’s peer specialists, social workers, community curators, and clinicians to support the youth experience, all while protecting privacy and confidentiality. They also navigated a complex landscape of state requirements and government legislation, ensuring that the platform could cover topics like substance abuse and gender identity, and that users could access coaching within 24 hours, and choose from a diverse set of experts. 

The last step was to select a name that worked across multiple languages, trademarks, and competitor branding, and didn’t come off as a mental health service, something the youth co-designers believed was critical. IDEO and Kooth landed on Soluna, a name that alludes to the app’s presence in both the bright (“sol” for sun) and the dark times (“luna” for moon). 

Now, Soluna is available for free to all youth in California, and the state has set ambitious targets for reaching all young people at scale. Soluna is a living platform that will continue to receive product and design updates for years to come, all deeply rooted in youth co-design.

The US Surgeon General named mental health “the defining public health crisis of our time,” and cited social media, online bullying, and the isolation exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic as major drivers that have significant negative outcomes for youth.
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In California alone, more than 284,000 youth cope with major depression. 66% of kids with depression do not receive treatment. Between 2019-2020, the suicide rate for kids ages 10-18 increased by 20%.
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In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Master Plan for Kids’ Mental Health set aside $4.6 billion to increase access to mental health and substance abuse support, the largest commitment to youth mental health ever made by a state.

94%

of proof-of-concept app users would recommend the Soluna app to a friend, and believe that engaging with the app would be a positive addition to their daily/weekly routine

6 million

young people in California had access to Soluna at launch in January 2024

Creating a better cervical cancer screening experience is an important mission, but also a challenging one. Not only would Teal have to address the regulations that face healthcare device companies, it would also need to build a comprehensive telehealth platform and a physical product—a wand that could easily collect an adequate cell sample, even in the hands of an untrained person. 

The first challenge was to create the wand. The device would need to do a lot: It’s impossible for a person to see their own cervix, so the user would have to be able to find the cervix blind, collect the sample themselves, and remove the wand from their bodies without contaminating it on other parts of their anatomy. Because this is something users are likely to do in their bathrooms, where there is no space to lie down, they would need to be able to use the device while standing—and with one hand. From the beginning, the IDEO team set out to design functional, testable prototypes to make sure the idea was viable, and incorporate diverse voices into the research process, including trans, minority, and disabled women. 

Because the product is meant for people who aren’t medical professionals, the team worked to design something as simple, intuitive, and unintimidating as possible. They used a 3-D printer to create multiples of every prototype, autoclaves to make sure that the designs they were creating were sterile, and leaned into shapes women are already used to, like the cylindrical shape of a tampon. The wand they created has that same basic form, but with a soft sponge that the user can deploy with the turn of a dial to collect the sample, then close to protect it from contamination on the way out of the body.

With working prototypes in hand, Teal set out to test their efficacy. In an initial study with 220 participants varying in age, race, socioeconomic status, and geography, Teal found that not only were participants able to successfully self-collect samples, they also preferred them over the speculum, the device doctors typically use during a screening. Some 92 percent said if they knew the results were equal they would prefer self-collection, while 87 percent reported they would stay current with screening if Teal Wand was an option. Self-collection took the vast majority under two minutes to complete, and 97% of study participants reported it was very easy or easy to use. The Teal Wand recently received a patent for its unique design.

The IDEO team also worked on the packaging and unboxing experience, which plays an important role in supporting the user through the self-screening process. The team built in thoughtful design cues to give users reassurance that they are using the wand correctly, and to provide the same level of confidence they would have in the results of an in-clinic screening. 

In January 2023, Teal raised an $8.8 million seed round from Serena Ventures, Emerson Collective, and Metrodora, and later that year, launched a nationwide clinical trial with leading health organizations including Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, the University of Colorado, Washington University, and others. In 2025, The Teal Wand became the first FDA-authorized device for at-home cervical cancer screening, with virtual medical provider support. Today, it's available in all 50 states. i’s an enormous step toward its North Star: catching cervical cancer earlier and saving lives.

Cervical cancer is nearly 100% preventable when it’s caught early, yet one in four women in the US are not up to date on their screenings.
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More than 12,000 people in the US are being diagnosed with cervical cancer every year, and more than 4,000 people die of the disease, which disproportionately impacts Black, Asian, and Hispanic women.
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More than half of cervical cancer cases are found in women that are not up-to-date on their screenings.

97%

of clinical study participants said the Teal Wand was very easy or easy to use.

87%

of participants said they would be more likely to stay current with screening guidelines if Teal Wand was an option.

94%

of participants said they would choose to collect their own sample from home rather than the current standard of care where a clinician collects it in-office.

2025

The Teal Wand becomes the first FDA authorized device for at-home cervical cancer screening, with virtual medical provider support.

Cities United already had a strong foundation with its stated mission, vision, and values. IDEO brought those to life with a new visual and verbal brand identity system that celebrates Cities United’s inclusive approach to building relationships and reimagining public safety.

To help Cities United with its verbal identity, the IDEO team defined the organization's voice, tone, and key messages, making it easier to tell its story more consistently and clearly, a crucial step toward engaging stakeholders.

To define the new visual identity, the team created a new logo, a letter C composed of interwoven shapes that represent the three tenets of their vision—“safe, happy, and hopeful;” a new design language that references city grids; and a typographic system anchored by the typeface VTC DuBois, inspired by W.E.B. DuBois’s own custom lettering and designed by the Black-owned Vocal Type Co. The team also designed a color palette that embodies the textures of city life with hues reminiscent of asphalt, sunrise, and brick. 

To amplify the refreshed branding, the team designed a new responsive website, citiesunited.org. The intuitive site shares the organization’s mission, resources, ongoing projects, and partner network, inviting stakeholders to join in their transformative work. IDEO also created a video to humanize Cities United’s mission and showcase its nationwide impact. It underscores the unity, resilience, and hope embodied by the organization through a chorus of voices.

This comprehensive rebranding widens Cities United’s reach and impact, helping the organization share its goal of creating safe, healthy, hopeful communities for young Black men, boys, and their families, and reintroduces the organization to a national audience. 

The Cities United work was supported by IDEO’s Racial Justice Impact Fund, part of a commitment IDEO made in 2020 to ​​address systemic racism and advance equity within our own organization, our client work, and beyond.

Cities United is committed to reducing the epidemic of homicides and shootings among young Black men and boys ages 14-to-24 by 50%.

Between 2009 and 2019, the number of Black children who “did not go to school at least one day in the past month because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school” increased by 84%, according to Cities United.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for Black men and boys from birth to age 44, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2023 SF Design Week Award

In recognition of IDEO’s brand work with Citizens United

Sleep is a critical resource for shift workers—and their employers, too. Together, IDEO and Somni worked directly with people with acute and chronic sleep challenges to create concepts that could support their sleep goals, and provide employers with the means to improve employee health.

When IDEO and Somni first partnered, the startup was an early-stage company, so the team started small, with focused sprints and workshops to redesign the core aspects of the company and product offerings. The team interviewed shift workers about their sleep patterns, which can vary quite a bit. Even when people keep to a specific schedule on work days, they often have to change their patterns on days off to spend time with family and friends, leading to a very disruptive sleep cycle. Research revealed that many third shift workers were dealing with sleep and health issues, but also a pervasive “machismo” culture,  pressure to “tough it out,” and a reliance on energy drinks to deal with lack of sleep. 

To address those issues, the team designed a digital experience for sleep cohorts, support groups where members could share their experiences and sleep strategies, and work with a coach and sponsor who already had been through the program. The platform analyzed workers’ data, and provided AI-enabled recommendations for improving their sleep. The big takeaway? Data by itself wasn’t necessarily helpful, and could be confusing for folks who were less digitally-fluent. Providing context, like a calendar that displayed sleep experiments at a glance, was crucial. 

The IDEO team also created a new user experience for a genetic testing program that could uncover factors associated with sleep issues. Somni aims to use a saliva-based genetic test to monitor for DNA damage caused by circadian disruption, then leverage its sleep improvement program to prevent further damage. Because biomarker testing is a differentiating offer for Somni, it was extremely important that the team get it right, both to make sure that users could understand its utility, and for Somni to provide real value. The design challenge was unique—and not just because of data privacy concerns. Presenting data about DNA damage in a non-human-centered way could increase the anxiety workers had around their sleep.

At the end of the project, Somni leveraged the insights the IDEO team surfaced to improve products like its sleep coaching service, and to refine its biomarker testing offering. Based on this work, Somni has also created a pilot with a Fortune 100 company, which is currently in progress, as it works to mitigate the ill effects of disrupted sleep for employees and the companies they work for.

In the short-term, circadian rhythm disruption leads to an array of jet-lag-like symptoms, and in the long-run, it may contribute to weight gain, obesity, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

It also impairs people’s ability to work, affecting productivity, creativity, and the overall work environment. Productivity loss can lead to employer baseline healthcare costs that are 26% higher, and over time, insomnia can result in an average cost of $4,267 more per employee per year.

In June 2019, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified shift work as a probable carcinogen.

75%

user retention in Somni's sleep program

$2,450

savings per year per employee for users who complete the program

33%

improvement in sleep quality, and 41 more minutes per night

Zimbabwe-born Natsai studied architecture at Edinburgh University, then at Central St. Martin’s Material Futures course. There she learned about synthetic biology, and met Dr. John Ward, a professor from UCL’s microbial molecular biology lab. He became a supporter of her scarf project, called Fold.

Natsai is at the forefront of an emerging field, biodesign, that aims to tackle the climate change problems caused by textiles and farming. Fueled by advances like the gene editing technique CRISPR, which is making designing with DNA simpler and cheaper, scientists and designers are looking to harnessing nature itself to ‘biofacture’ everything from leather, to meat, to medicine.

Companies like Bolt Threads are spinning synthetic spider silk, while Modern Meadow is growing meat in labs. Meanwhile Autodesk is creating design tools for the field—think AutoCAD for DNA.

Natsai joined IDEO’s London studio as part of our two week-long Fortnight residency, collaborated with the community here, and shared the resulting scarves. As part of her final presentation, she brought to life the potential of biodesign with a series of five tweets. Here, she explains the speculative future they’re framed in. It is a future in which synthetic biology is shaping brands, products, businesses, and people’s behavior.

Future Craft

“Hyper-specialized hybrid technologies signal the rise of the niche maker. #DIYbio #biomakerspace”

Natsai: I’m really interested in the dialogue between craft and technology. This tweet depicts my own reality: my craft is so specialized that I have to design the tools to create it, and I also have had to learn how to maintain the life that co-creates it, without any precedents to learn from. Imagine a world where our materials are alive or derived from living systems. Every maker will intimately know the biochemistry of their chosen species, and will find new ways of transforming those organisms’ behaviors into truly unique products and processes. We’ll be using other living systems and even amalgamating layers of digital technology to biofabricate.

Service Design

“Who owns your wardrobe? #panasonic4nike”

Natsai: I had a conversation with a colleague about how one might go about democratizing the production of ‘bio-factured’ products. At the time I was thinking about how to streamline the process for scaling up this technology, but he challenged me to think about new models of distribution that tap into DIY culture. Ultimately, his question was: if you can grow your own textiles, then who owns your wardrobe? The hashtag #Panasonic4Nike points towards a future that sees unlikely stakeholders coming together to offer true innovations in designing the products we use, as well as the services and hardware that enable us to do this in a personalized way.

Convergence

“Digitized biology has democratized the creation of complex biological consumer products. #autodesk #synbio #AI #IOT”

Natsai: I understand that not only do I work with a pigment-producing bacteria, but that medium is also a biological sensor. Producing pigment signals a crucial stage in the bacteria’s life cycle. This made me ask: how could we harness living sensors and build them into our everyday environments? The notion of technology convergence is definitely something I see happening further into the future. Wearable technology, household electronics and the Internet of Things, in my view, will expand and come together to create mutually-beneficial ecosystems of bacteria and digital technology.

Metabolic Materiality

“Biofacturing process & biological characteristics of an organism now define a brand’s identity and its business model. #bottomupprimacy #IP”

Working in a fashion context, I am hyper aware of how a brand’s identity communicates. The product itself needs to hold true to the values of the brand. This is the part that gets tricky working with a living technology: at some point I relinquish control to my bacterial colonies to finish the garments—conceptually speaking, I provide the structural parameters. The lack of control is a challenge and an opportunity to design interventions that end up in line with the brand identity. Creativity therefore becomes crucial, to push the aesthetics and craft processes in the development of each garment. Although it’s true of any industry, fashion is a particularly interesting space to consider a business model based on that uniqueness. Even before we think about synthetic biology as a way of manufacturing, designers can and should push innovation beyond a simple “genetically-modified organism 1 fixes problem A.”

Beyond Monoculture

“Happy Kombucha shares rally as merger with Kvadrat announced. #symbioticventures #closedloopsystem”

This really looks at future business models and ecosystems of information and skill exchange. Happy Kombucha actually exists and it’s my go-to for food and beverage bacterial cultures in the UK. They mainly sell starters and toolkits for brewing your own kombucha, kefir water and kefir milk. This tweet is a little tongue-in-cheek: it imagines that their business strategy has evolved to sell the SCOBYs (the symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that ferments tea, to make kombucha) as fabrics, leading to a merger with major textile manufacturing brand Kvadrat. It also speaks of the current and future reality of the trade of living organisms.

IDEO Fortnight with Natsai Audrey Chieza from Alexandra Whiting on Vimeo.

Vivid pinks, blues, greens and yellows form beautiful, organic abstract shapes on Natsai Audrey’s delicate silk scarves. But they’re not drawn by her, or silkscreened in a print studio. Instead, the shapes are the life and death of streptomyces bacteria writ colorful on silk, folded into a petri dish, in a lab.

Being a design researcher, I’m constantly conducting real-world research on a subject area or problem. Researchers travel widely, and spend weeks interviewing, observing, shadowing, and prototyping. But even when a trip seems full of scheduled activities, there should always be room for opportunistic inspiration. Because that is the thing I value the most.

I am an inspiration hunter. When I see 45-minutes of travel time between interviews, what I actually see a window of opportunity for a real-world experience. As well as naked scrubbing, on recent research trips, I’ve subjected my teammates and myself to:

• Screaming like rabid fans to appear on a game show in Los Angeles.
• Having our fortunes told by psychics in Hong Kong.
• A workout class only described to us as “cathartic” and a “nonstop endorphin surge” in New York.
• Getting too close to the ring at a lucha libre match in Mexico City.

So how exactly can one justify this as inspiration? Well, it depends on your definition of inspiration. I like to see design inspiration as something that lives in the intersection of three things: Satisfying a curiosity, Defying the expected, and Touching an emotion.

1. Satisfying a Curiosity:

How many times have you thought to yourself, I should take that Cantonese / personal finance / fermentation course in my free time? When you’re working a design project, you’re often looking to help others adopt a new behavior or learn a new skill. You can empathize with that experience by doing something yourself that gets you outside your comfort zone.

The Class, aka scream-cardio.

2. Defying the Expected:

Of course we should be inspired by new approaches, that’s what we’re here to design. But finding people or things that truly disrupt your equilibrium can positively influence a project in all sorts of unexpected ways.

3. Touching an Emotion:

Seek places, people, and experiences that bring out a real human emotion that you want to design for. Then surround yourself with what you find, as not to lose it. You might end up with entire mood boards or inspiration shelves from your trip, labeled “joy” and “empathy”. Keeping these artifacts in your workspace will let you feel what you first did.

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On a recent research trip in Asia, I found myself naked in a spa, being vigorously scrubbed by an elderly Korean lady. She removed whole layers of my epidermis, all the while grunting in disapproval. The experience was agonizing but also completely amazing.

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Now, two years later, we’re pushing the limits of our skills by building the project’s next iteration: Shrumen Lumen. This time around, we’re skipping flowers in favor of 12 to 18 foot-tall kinetic mushrooms. Thanks to a totally different geometry, this project is a lot harder to build. But with hard work from an enthusiastic team of volunteers and help from a Burning Man Arts grant and our Kickstarter campaign, the Shrumen Lumen will soon be ready for the Playa. Here is how we’re making it happen.

The vision

To kick off the design process, we looked back at what made Blumen Lumen work so well. Several principles stood out.

1. The flowers had a minimal footprint on the ground but created a huge interactive space.
2. The grouping of flowers was beautiful from afar, but people could also interact with a single flower.
3. The structure was scalable. We were able to build one prototype quickly to figure everything out, then mass-produce as many as we could afford, both in terms of time and money.
4. The flowers were quick to install, and packed up neatly in a shipping container.
5. Mechanical interaction made the flowers interesting during the day, while lights added a new element at night.

We folded a lot of those takeaways into the design, sketching out a garden of five mushrooms that are big enough to provide shade during the day, and can also change shape and light up at night. Just like the flowers, we wanted people to be able to interact with individual mushrooms, but also wanted to add an interaction point that controls all the mushrooms together.

Origami at scale

The geometry of the mushrooms is based on the folding pattern of an origami magic ball. The beauty of that structure is its ability to expand and contract; the challenge is that it’s much harder to control, and, as we found out later, much harder to fold at scale.

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We jumped straight into prototyping, and planned to use the same method we had used to build the flowers: Route the patterns in corrugated plastic, fold them so that they would “memorize” the fold lines, unfold them, then weld them together. But while each flower was made of only two 10 by five foot pieces, the mushroom heads were made of 12. We’d also never worked with this origami pattern at this scale.

Unfortunately, this fold pattern was much trickier. It took a team of eight people a full hour to fold the first three-piece sheet. The plastic also cracked in several places. To make the process easier, we changed the orientation of the corrugation by 90 degrees, and asked the router shop to make shallower cuts into the plastic. The new the fold lines made the pieces much stronger, and we actually managed to fold an entire sheet of 12 pieces (though it did take 10 people).

Setting the Shrumens in motion

To make the mushroom heads contract and expand, we needed to build a solid mechanical structure, kind of like an umbrella, that would connect the folded plastic to an actuator. We experimented with a 1:12 paper scale model to figure out where to attach the actuator, and prototyped the speed of the movement. Since there will be significant stress on this structure, all the parts had to be machined. We were extremely lucky to have Jim Feuhrer (and his five decades of experience in building) to help us create them.

Building a safe structure

Last time around, when the wind came up on the Playa, we could just close the blooms to prevent the flowers from tipping over. It’s much harder to make the Shrumens more aerodynamic, so they had to be carefully engineered to withstand 60-plus mile per hour winds. To hold the origami structure in place, we mounted 1 1/4 inch aluminum tubes around two aluminum hubs. One of the hubs is mounted to the top of the actuator and can move up and down, while the other one is mounted to the stem.

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The entire head assembly slides into a 6-inch, thin-walled steel tube that is mounted onto a 3.5-inch-thick wall pipe. Luckily, with some minor modifications and reinforcements, we were able to recycle the base we used for the flowers to anchor the system.

Designing the digital interaction

Not only are we installing 1560 LED lights in each mushroom, we are also designing ways for visitors to interact with the mushrooms. By standing on certain pads, burners can change the color and movement of the Shrumens. Each pad can also measure weight, so, for example, if two people hop on a certain pad, more of the structure will turn red.

To make this work, we are using a network of Raspberry Pis in each stem. Powered by 12 volt batteries, the minicomputers control both light and movement. Each of the 1560 LEDs in the stem and cap are independently addressable, and the chip in each LED only uses one pin for data input and output, so they must be controlled with precise timing. The team chose to use a Pixel Pusher microcontroller because of its power (it can control 4000 LEDs) and built-in libraries. Processing, running on the Raspberry Pi, pushes color combinations and scenes. The Raspberry Pi also monitors the load cells, which are placed in those lighted platforms at the base of the mushroom. When visitors step on, these load cells can trigger the mushrooms to change shape or color.

The team

Of all the projects I’ve worked on, this one required the most manpower (by far). Thanks to 40-some weekend warriors—a mix of highly specialized experts and enthusiasts who picked up new skills like soldering, metal cutting, or drilling—Shrumen Lumen is about to happen. It has turned into a highly sophisticated installation, and I can’t wait to see it in the desert.

Special thanks to everyone who helped bring Shrumen Lumen to life: Ali Hasanbeigi, Anthony Wainman, Angie Kim, Annette Diefenthaler, Blake Durtsche, Bomani McClendon, Britta Durtsche, Dali Yu, Dave Sumberg, David Brody, David Good, Diem Ho, Gabrielle Fulco, George Joseph, Gilles Roux, Gina Romero, Hannah Williams, Henry Hsiung, Janko Potezica, Jazz Tigan, Jesse Silver (production lead), Jessica Pastor, Jim Feuhrer, Jimmy Chion, Joerg Student, Justin Chang, Kalan Kircher (digital lead), Lauren Fundora, Leo Marzolf, Nathalie Collins (digital co-lead), Nicholas Leverone, Nivi Ramesh, Olivier Notteghem, Peter Bronk, Rachel Frey, Remy Pieron, Sam Starr, Steve Moore, Victoria Cao

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Two years ago, I worked with a team of IDEOers and IDEO alumni to create an interactive art installation for Burning Man that we dubbed Blumen Lumen. Drawing inspiration from a foldable yurt I’d made for the art festival a few years before, we built massive, kinetic origami flowers that responded to their environment by changing color and opening and closing.

1. To create a happy group atmosphere… Hello & High Five

Everyone walks around the room in random directions. At intervals, the facilitator instructs them to interact with a person they are passing. At first, the instructions are to say, "Hello." Then, it’s a high five. And finally, it's a compliment about some aspect of their appearance. Even though you know it’s an exercise, it’s impossible to receive greetings and compliments and not feel a little better about life.

2. To get people into an agreement mindset… Yes, Let’s!

Stand in a circle. Someone suggests an activity by saying, “Let’s,” followed by a verb. For example, “Let’s ski!”

Everyone else loudly agrees together: “Yes! Let’s ski!”

Then, everyone mimes that activity, until someone else suggests a new activity. After a few minutes of this, it's much easier to hear ideas from other people and greet them with encouragement and agreement.

3. To stretch capacity for attention and focus… Red Ball

Stand in a circle. (Have you noticed that improv involves a lot of standing in circles?) Pick someone in the group, look them in the eye, say, “Red ball,” and mime tossing them the ball. They say, “Thank you, red ball,” to acknowledge receipt and then throw it to someone else. Once the group has the hang of this, you can add a green ball and blue ball. To make things interesting, these balls can be different sizes and weights. (They could even be a feral cat or a baby.) Pretty soon, the group will be highly alert to one another and focused on cooperating on the task at hand.

4. To free people of their inner censor… Ba Da Da

Everyone in the circle claps to create a beat. The first player says a word to the person next to them. They respond with whatever comes into their head. The entire circle then says both words and then adds, "Ba Da Da” (pronounced in the same rhythm as “potato”). For example, first person: “Crazy.” Second person: “In love.” Everyone: “Crazy in love, ba da da.” Then the second person starts everything again by saying a word to the next person in the circle. By doing everything to a rhythm, people are forced to respond in the moment and not overthink their choices.

5. To get everyone making eye contact and collaborating… Pass the Clap

Look into the eyes of the person next to you and without using words, coordinate so that you both clap together. That person then turns to the next person and does the same. Pretty soon, you’ll have a rhythm going and a clap will move quickly around the circle. See how fast you can go without losing rhythm. If you want to add some challenge, create multiple claps moving simultaneously in different directions around the circle.

Illustrations by Yoshi Yoshitani.

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More and more designers are using improv games in order to get groups in the mood to collaborate. There are many of these games, taught at places like Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade. We picked five simple favorites.

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.