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: Part 1

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

Rapidly prototyping a budget horoscope with AI

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Getting AI to pronounce names correctly.

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.

How I made a payphone that talks to the future.

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?

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?

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the top floor of London’s Design Museum, as dozens of visitors walk by and the rain hits the windows, a woman speaks with an AI bot called Spirit. It asks her how many partners she would like to have if she can live until she is 150. She giggles and answers. “Just one—and that is because my husband is next to me.” According to Spirit’s analytics, her answer is 33% sad and 12% joyful.

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.

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.

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.