Since our first annual show in 2023, each collection has served as an opportunity to memorialize what AI is at that specific point in time. By wandering through our archive of past shows, you can trace AI’s evolution through the prototypes and provocations of our contributors. The format of the show also acts as a time marker; what began as a video series has since transitioned into an interactive web collection, and now enters the world of 3D rendering as models like Claude Fable allow for the creation of spatial environments with a single prompt. This year, we’re leaning into the nostalgia of the digital spaces we grew up exploring, like Super Mario 64, Kid Pix, and Runescape. The show is presented as a collection of floating objects suspended overhead; each object belongs to an IDEOer, capturing an artifact from this particular moment in AI.

This year’s theme, Forecasts, draws from the mounting tensions in recent discourse around AI. Depending on who you listen to, we’re either on the precipice of a technological utopia—an eternally blue sky—or humanity is doomed. We don’t pretend to hold the answers, but this much is clear: AI is being developed, and it will bring transformative change to our personal and collective lives. And we believe human-centered design needs to be part of that development. Because the frontier doesn’t just need to be paced. It needs to be reshaped with intention—to center not only what technology makes possible, but what people actually need from it.

One of the ways we grapple with that responsibility is through play. At IDEO, play is often how we enter serious territory: by leaving our assumptions at the door, giving ourselves room to explore, and leaning into childlike wonder and curiosity. It gives us a way to engage with something consequential without becoming paralyzed by its weight, and find possibility in places that otherwise feel dark. The AI Variety Show grew from that impulse. Through experimentation, each of us gets to form a personal opinion on AI that comes from our own experience. We discover where it helps us express something we couldn’t before, where it disappoints us, and how we might reimagine its design. Each experiment is its own localized weather report—a reflection of one person’s point of view. We’ve carried that idea into the show’s website itself, giving you a character POV and mirroring the weather wherever you happen to be viewing it from; if it’s raining where you are, it rains here too. 

As we gather these individual projects into a shared collection, we can then start to see beyond our own experience. A concern we thought was ours alone might turn up across several projects. Something one person finds exciting might be exactly what troubles someone else. The show gives us a way to surface those patterns and use them as a catalyst for conversations around AI. It helps us make sense of our collective hopes and fears, and clarify what matters most to us. From there, we can bring those convictions back into our work and let them meaningfully shape what we put out into the world.

“Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us. We’re living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade.” -  Donna Haraway