From the tabula rasa to the palimpsest: a new way to access our creativity

A reconceptualization of the AAC using lessons learned from Ron Suskind’s “Affinity Therapy” and technological interventions that create more comfort, autonomy, and empathy for children with autism.

AI as Normal Technology and the management processes that need to evolve

Using AI to lighten the load of community care, strengthening the threads that hold us together.

Innovation requires stepping out of your comfort zone. These are some concrete practices for how to get comfortable working in new ways.

Grishma Rao and Jenna Fizel reflect on their SXSW talk where they had participants make a book using a suite of custom AI tools.

Is a city a skyline or its subtext?

You're playing a digital game where your only job is to move a circle across the screen. There's just one catch—you have to wait.

Rediscovering the power and ethics of craft

We spent two weeks researching how dating could feel more social, intentional, and community driven.

Courage is about staking your life on a possibility.

The different typologies of finding things

Past, Present, and Future of Search

How we got an LLM to facilitate group authorship of a manifesto about AI tools.

On retention and intimacy in a non-boring sense.

Unlearning Through Constraints

Figproxy enables rapid prototyping of tangible user experiences by allowing Figma prototypes to talk to the external world. This article dives into what it is and why I made it.

IDEO Play Lab's Kezie, Lauren and Keren share insights on how to prototype, position and world build with AI-enabled experiences

Three Principles We Applied When Designing a Holiday Card With Gen AI

Part 2 from our series on Play x Work: Setting teams up to feel seen

Decoding the essence of memory with AI in scent replication

Strategy can be playful, too, y'all

Emotional resonance in AI-Generated film and sound

Part 1: Setting teams up for Success

Grishma Rao talks with Thomas Overthun about his design legacy

If you compare a refrigerator from 100 years ago to today, things don’t look that different. In part 3 we address the barriers to novel refrigerator design and share our process.

In the future our appliances will be able to work together and work differently, supplying us with greater functionality with a much smaller impact on the environment. This installment is about one way this might play out.

This series starts with the challenge: How might we help balance the load on the electrical grid to reduce carbon emissions?

Letting in the angels, spirits, subconscious, muses and dreams

Thinking about the conditions for creativity to thrive

The idea of “Folk AI” has been around for awhile. What happens when anyone can create their own personal AI applications? So, here's an AI Chrome plugin that reveals the subtext of websites

These parrots get shit started.

Understanding how the first digitally-native generation engages with AI through a tried-and-true Play Lab method: roleplay. This allowed us to think beyond current technical constraints to think about what Gen-Z really wants from this technology.

What if you could learn everything you wanted to know about a product just by asking it directly? What would you ask for a pair of jeans, if these pants could talk?

Apprehension about AI is everywhere, but few industries are passing judgment and regulation as quickly and decisively as education.

In June, the National Eating Disorders Association decided to shut down an AI-powered chatbot called Tessa. “She” was supposed to serve as a 24-hour counselor for people dealing with eating disorders. Instead, psychologists and activists found Tessa was offering dieting tips.

How we brought a beloved technology back from the dead with AI-generated imagery to envision the future of downtown Washington D.C.

Getting AI to pronounce names correctly.

At a nondescript payphone booth in Chicago, at the corner of California and Fullerton, there’s a strange payphone that allows you to talk to a robot from the future.

Everything that surrounds us tells a story, from architecture to the furniture we use to the utensils we eat with and the fashion we wear. Materials help shape those stories, communicating how it’s meant to be used and how it needs to be cared for. Industrial Designers must consider material properties, colors, function, lifespan, and cost-effectiveness when bringing a physical design to market. And digital creators must think about the physical properties as if they were in the real world. At the moment, the only creative constraint is we’re limited to using the materials we know exist. But what if we could wave a creative “I-wish-wand” and design a material first?

So, what would a physical AI camera look like, anyway? Would it have a lens? How would you interact with it? How might AI play a role in the design process? Could it design itself?

Accessing Knowledge Beyond the LLM (aka Grounding an LLM)

Answer: To Be My Sycophant and Publish a Book

Capturing vibes, not photons

How To Use GPT-4 To Improve Your Personality

The Importance Of Explicit Prompts And Generative AI

Call today and get an AI safeguard for free

Or How Generative AI Can Make Ted Lasso Your New Chat Moderator

A design researcher, a business designer, and a data scientist were sitting at a bar. It sounds like the setup of a joke, but the conversation was actually quite serious.

We’re in the midst of a revolution. Intelligent machines are able to augment our humanity in ways that seem lifted straight out of science fiction. Self-driving cars, bipedal and quadrupedal robots, and even our thermostats learn from us and get smarter over time.

The chaos began the day we moved into our new building. A little plot of land outside was the scene of the terror. Not only was our Cambridge parking lot too small for the number of people in our office—21 spots for about 60 employees—getting spaces for clients was a pain, there was a pile of poop in spot 16 that even a car couldn’t clear, and a neighborhood transient liked to sleep in spot 20. Instead of managing the workings inside the office, our employee experience team was suddenly tasked with assigning parking spots. It got so bad they were often working as a valet service in addition to their day jobs. So we built a bot to do it for us.