EDGE(s) of IDEO

Play

11.29.23

Keren Wong

Kezie Todd

Matt Hovde

What game design can teach us about leading teams at work

Part 1: Setting teams up for Success

min read

Everything

11.28.23

Grishma Rao

Thomas Overthun

Thomas Overthun’s Design Dimensions

Grishma Rao talks to Thomas Overthun about 30 years of design at IDEO

min read

Climate

11.28.23

Words by Dave Vondle, industry advice by Kipp Bradford, concept design by Dave Vondle and Daniel Huang

Daniel Huang

Dave Vondle

Design for a Cooler Tomorrow: Part 3 of 3 - Why Haven't Refrigerators Changed?

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.

min read

Climate

11.20.23

Words by Dave Vondle, industry advice by Kipp Bradford, concept design by Dave Vondle and Daniel Huang

Daniel Huang

Dave Vondle

Design for a Cooler Tomorrow: Combatting Climate Change with a Next-Gen Refrigerator - Part 2 of 3

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.

min read

Climate

11.8.23

Words by Dave Vondle, industry advice by Kipp Bradford, concept design by Dave Vondle, Hal Monson, Nat Steinsultz, Vlad Seghete, Chris Gold, John Grimley, Jamie McCoy, Rob Rehrig

Dave Vondle

Design for a Cooler Tomorrow: Combatting Climate Change with a Next-Gen Refrigerator - Part 1 of 3

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

min read

Everything

11.7.23

Andy Reischling

How do we discover new things?

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

min read

Everything

10.30.23

Andy Reischling

Can You Create A Renaissance?

Thinking about the conditions for creativity to thrive

min read

Emerging Technology

10.14.23

Daniel DeRuntz

pr;dr™️

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

min read

Emerging Technology

9.25.23

By Alireza Karduni, Tais Mauk, Angela Kochoska, Brian Lange and Peter Winter

ALIREZA KARDUNI

Tais Mauk

peter winter

Warming up to AI

Everyone on the call was holding up drawings of their dream treehouse. At IDEO, this type of thing isn’t totally unexpected; this is an example of a creative warmup, a short activity that gets everyone making and sharing in order to build creative energy and psychological safety amongst team members at the beginning of a meeting or working session. What was unusual this time was that an AI-powered parrot named Doodling Dave suggested we start our meeting this way.

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Climate

9.22.23

Words by Savannah Kunovsky, Alex Gallafent, and Bryan Walker & Visuals by Stephanie Sizemore

Savannah Kunovsky

How AI can help us solve the climate crisis

The problems we’re being asked to solve are changing. It’s less about helping partners innovate in incremental ways, and more about big transformational shifts in how we live and work. Two of those shifts: generative AI, and our rapidly changing climate.

min read

Play

9.12.23

By Keren Ruth Wong, Takashi Wickes, Lauren Lin & Matt Callahan

Takashi Wickes

Keren Wong

The power of roleplay: designing Gen AI products that pass the Gen Z vibe check

From safety and privacy concerns around Snapchat AI to hallucinating chatbots, these “creepy” occurrences highlight the increasing sense of worry and backlash many of us feel around the rapid pace of AI development.

min read

Emerging Technology

8.18.23

Jenna Fizel

Zoey Zhu

peter winter

If these pants could talk

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?

min read

Play

8.8.23

Words by Diana Tobey, Keren Wong, and Tomoya Mori

Keren Wong

Diana Tobey

The Insight That Could Change How Schools Think About AI

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

min read

Emerging Technology

7.28.23

Words by Savannah Kunovsky, Evan Burton, and Esha Reddy

Savannah Kunovsky

A Legal and Ethical Framework For Gen AI

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.

min read

Emerging Technology

7.20.23

Jenna Fizel

How AI and View-Masters are Helping Us Reimagine the Future

The Federal City Council approached IDEO to lead a futuring workshop on reimagining Washington D.C.’s downtown in the post-COVID era. With many government employees now working remotely, the central business district’s identity needed to change. The goal of this workshop was to generate innovative ideas to sustainably bring people back and establish D.C. as a model post-COVID global city.

min read

Emerging Technology

6.11.23

Daniel DeRuntz

What’s in a /ˈneɪm/?

Getting AI to pronounce names correctly.

min read

Play

5.31.23

Words By Wendy Wang, Angel Napit Annunciacao, Matt Callahan and Lauren Lin, Visuals By Jeremy Chen

Jeremy Chen

WENDY WANG

Will AI interfere with relationships? Gen Z thinks so.

Earlier this year, Snapchat introduced My AI, a relentlessly cheerful chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT technology. The avatar, pinned to the top of your chat feed, was ready to respond to every passing thought, be your 24/7 rant buddy, or even…your new best friend.

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Emerging Technology

5.30.23

Words by Dave Vondle

Integrating AI into Immersive Interactive Fiction

How I made a payphone that talks to the future.

min read

Play

5.25.23

Words by Wendy Wang & Matt Callahan & Lauren Lin, Visuals by Jeremy Chen

Jeremy Chen

WENDY WANG

Gen Z to AI: Don't kill my creative vibe

AI helped you with your final paper and made your workout plan—why not have it help resolve a conflict between you and your friends, or help you pick your career?

min read

Emerging Technology

5.22.23

Jenna Fizel

Juliette Laroche

Designing Materials for Better Storytelling with Generative AI

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?

min read

Play

5.17.23

Words by Wendy Wang & Michelle Lee & Lauren Lin, Visuals by Jeremy Chen

Jeremy Chen

WENDY WANG

Is Gen Z ready to embrace AI? It's complicated.

Screenagers. Digital natives. The TikTok generation. It's hard to find an epithet for those born between the mid 1990s and early 2010s—aka Gen Z—that doesn’t call out a dependency on technology. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume, then, that those between the ages of 12 and 25 would glom onto everything generative AI.

min read

Emerging Technology

5.17.23

Daniel Huang

Jason Robinson

AI camera designs itself, (kinda).

Two Industrial Designers pick up the challenge to imagine a physical version of a Generative AI-enabled imaging device. What if I type more here?

min read

Emerging Technology

5.12.23

Daniel DeRuntz

What’s Up Doc?

Accessing Knowledge Beyond the LLM (aka Grounding an LLM)

min read

Emerging Technology

5.8.23

Daniel DeRuntz

What do you want, [AI]?

Answer: To Be My Sycophant and Publish a Book

min read

Emerging Technology

4.28.23

Jenna Fizel

Vibe Camera: AI creates an impression

Capturing vibes, not photons

min read

Emerging Technology

4.7.23

Daniel DeRuntz

Smile

How To Use GPT-4 To Improve Your Personality

min read

Emerging Technology

3.24.23

Daniel DeRuntz

Parking Lotbot 2.0, pt 1

The Importance Of Explicit Prompts And Generative AI

min read

Emerging Technology

3.21.23

Daniel DeRuntz

Crit-Bot Hotline

Call today and get an AI safeguard for free

min read

Emerging Technology

3.17.23

Daniel DeRuntz

Future of The Comments Section

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

min read

Emerging Technology

3.1.23

Daniel DeRuntz

Savannah Kunovsky

Alicia Duvall

5 Ways We're Using AI at Work

Are you using ChatGPT yet? If the answer is no, keep reading. For anyone whose day job involves creating things—proposals or presentations that require fact-finding, writing, imagery, and video—it's changing how we make stuff. Love it or fear it, generative AI may be our new co-worker. And to ensure this co-worker is ethical, friendly, and aligned with our intentions, we must first explore it.

min read

Play

9.14.20

Dave Vondle

Designing a Video Game on a Very, Very Small Scale

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.

min read

Emerging Technology

5.8.19

Words By Ovetta Sampson & Michael Chapman

AI Needs an Ethical Compass. This Tool Can Help.

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.

min read

Emerging Technology

3.26.19

Words By Gabriel Mugar Visuals By Chris Ancheta

Why It's Important to Say Please and Thank You to Robots

In November, we shared the story of Lotbot, an AI Slack bot we built to manage parking spots at our Cambridge studio. Long story short: In building Lotbot, we utterly misjudged its personality and found ourselves on the wrong end of a tiny tyrant.

min read

Emerging Technology

5.7.18

Words By Dean Malmgren & Jure Martinec

What the AI Products of Tomorrow Might Look Like

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.

min read

Play

10.18.17

Words By Steve Moore

A Toy Designer Shares His Secrets for Killer Halloween Costumes

It’s spooky season, and we’re feeling that familiar dread of what to wear, what to make, or even where to find inspiration flood in. At a company where design is close to a religion, coming up with an eye-popping costume is the Holy Grail.

min read

Journal

12.7.16

Words By Neil Stevenson Visuals By Matt Brown

5 Creative Exercises from the Surrealists

There is more to surrealism than Salvador Dali's mustache or people wearing lobsters on their heads. The movement, started one hundred years ago, was founded on the idea that creativity could be accessed by lessening the controls of the conscious brain, and giving free rein to the unconscious. Today's neuroscience supports their thinking: There is evidence that imagination and day-dreaming takes place when we are not focusing our conscious attention.

min read

Emerging Technology

11.25.16

Daniel DeRuntz

We Built a Bot to Assign Parking Spots. It Fought Back.

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.

min read

Climate

1.21.15

How We Did It: Buildings Tell Us Just How Green They Really Are

I've always had a layman's interest in architecture and in LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification program for sustainable buildings. I’m a software developer, so designing buildings is well outside my area of expertise.

min read