Experiments around global youth insights, applied game design, prototyping and experiential world building

Writers

We Made A Game to Test Your Patience—An IDEO Playable Experiment

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.
Mar 26, 2025
8
min read

Game Design Principles to Improve AI-Enabled Experiences

IDEO Play Lab's Kezie, Lauren and Keren share insights on how to prototype, position and world build with AI-enabled experiences
Feb 13, 2024
5
min read

Behind the Scenes: Making an AI-Infused Holiday Wishing Well

Three Principles We Applied When Designing a Holiday Card With Gen AI
Feb 6, 2024
3
min read

Playful Rituals, Stronger Teams: Lessons from IDEO Play Lab

Part 2 from our series on Play x Work: Setting teams up to feel seen
Jan 25, 2024
11
min read

4 Tools to Playfully Bring Strategy and Rigor to Your Design

Strategy can be playful, too, y'all
Dec 15, 2023
4
min read

What game design can teach us about leading teams at work

Part 1: Setting teams up for Success
Nov 29, 2023
6
min read

The Power of Roleplay: Designing Gen AI Products That Pass the Gen Z Vibe Check

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.
Sep 12, 2023
4
min read

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.
Aug 8, 2023
4
min read

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.
Sep 14, 2020
6
min read