The challenge

Creative technologists at IDEO were distributed across studios and disciplines. People were exploring emerging tools, but the work remained easy to miss, hard to join, and dependent on individual networks. There was no formal mandate, staff, or budget for building a shared practice.

The opportunity was to create enough structure for a community to persist without turning experimentation into another centralized program or asking permission for every new idea.

My contribution

I co-founded Digital Dream Lab and served as its creative technology director. Starting with no dedicated budget, we grew a network of more than 50 members across four studios and programmed over 40 events and initiatives.

I helped build the community through multiple forms of participation:

• Produced hands-on experiments and public installations, including the Butterfly Wall and Form and Function.
• Shared the community’s work through Dream Zine, showcases, and gatherings.
• Created lightweight leadership roles that let members propose work, find collaborators, and carry programs forward.

The hardest leadership moment followed Onion Garden, a public experiment that failed in ways the community had to acknowledge. I helped move the group from defensiveness toward accountability and repair, turning the experience into the Repair Kit: a practical resource for approaching public creative technology with more care.

The impact

Digital Dream Lab grew from an informal idea into a 50-plus-person community with a recognizable practice, recurring programs, and artifacts that continued beyond their original teams. The Butterfly Wall remained active years later, and the community evolved into IDEO’s Emerging Experiences Lab.

The durable result was an operating model for grassroots innovation: visible invitations, small experiments, shared authorship, and enough ritual for people to find one another. Its credibility came from successful installations and from showing that a creative community could learn publicly, repair trust, and change how it worked over time.