🪀 Michelle Lee: Partner & Managing Director, Play Lab at IDEO
A Summer Camp Conversation
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As part of The Summer Camp Series, this interview features a design, product and tech leader who leverages creativity, joy and play to spark meaning at work. Enjoy!
In This Edition
🧸 What We Can Learn from Kids and Toys to Transform Work
🪢 The Power of Creating Rituals with our Colleagues
🚌 Why We Should Foster Cultures of Learning
About Michelle
Michelle Lee is a Partner and Managing Director at IDEO, where she has applied her passion for play to leading interdisciplinary teams of designers and researchers in bringing engaging, interactive, and playful experiences to market. She believes in leveraging the principles of play to connect with people on a deeper emotional level that captivates, delights, and empowers.
Through her work, she has helped clients enhance workplace culture, championed responsible digital design, inspired underrepresented students to pursue careers in STEM, and supported organizations as they adopted practices in line with a circular economy. Michelle has shared her passion for play at SXSW, The Delight Conference, The Culture Summit, Circularity 23 and through numerous podcasts and articles.
What sparked your career passion?
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a National Geographic animal photographer and go on safaris! I would draw to bring new places, creatures and stories I dreamed up to life. I also loved putting together puzzles, and I still enjoy it! I was constantly curious to understand how things worked, an interest stemming from watching my grandfather take apart watches and put them back together. Meanwhile, my grandmother taught my brother and me how to sew — we would make puppets and put on shows together. Looking back, there were elements of design in all of these activities.
Today, design can be seen broadly as problem-solving, the creativity of dreaming up new solutions and turning those ideas into reality. However, when I went to college, the discipline of design was often divided into industrial design or engineering. Choosing mechanical engineering, I had the fortune of visiting IDEO through one of the classes I took my freshman year. It was my first introduction to the firm, and it was really inspiring to see a workplace with a community of designers and makers who were creating the most amazing products across industries — food and beverage, electronics, medical devices and more.
However, it wasn’t a straight path for me to join IDEO, I wandered into the toy industry first. At the time, it felt like a big detour, but in retrospect, it ended up being an era of my life that was highly transformative, influencing the way that I think and my specific approach to design. It's been essential in shaping the IDEO Play Lab and the work that I lead here today.
What is one project you are proud of creating over the years?
For the past several years, I’ve been the Managing Director of IDEO’s Play Lab. Its collective growth has been a major source of pride. The Play Lab started 30 years ago with industry leaders — Brendan Boyle, Adam Skaates and others — who established a strong foundation built on decades of toy invention.
In 2016, we saw the opportunity to bring play beyond kids and toys and that led to Design for Play — the consulting side of our Play Lab offer. We've built the team to become the amazing group of talent that we have today. Our portfolio shows why play needs to be part of the conversation when tackling big challenges across industries.
We’ve focused on education by building a “Magic School Bus” with the Verizon Foundation as a way to allow kids to role-play as scientists and engineers to become passionate about these roles in the future. In health, we’ve taken lessons from video games to build resilience around smoking cessation. The list goes on to include work in climate and sustainability, as well as the future of work, technology and more.
What can we learn from IDEO's Play Lab about how we communicate at work?
Play is the overlap of psychological safety, agency and joy. Psychological safety opens the door and enables you to feel comfortable in a state of play, agency gives you a role to play and joy keeps you engaged and inspired over time.
To create psychological safety, it’s important to create an environment where we're really listening and paying attention to each other — listening to what’s said and not said, demonstrating real empathy and vulnerability at all levels and treating people with respect. If we can do that, we have the ability to level the playing field, enabling people to show up in a shared space where everyone feels at ease.
Consider children on a playground — if kids feel comfortable with each other, they can engage in the highest level of play, having the most imaginative experiences and fun. This requires psychological safety. If you have a bully on the playground, it completely changes the dynamic.
For agency, we ensure everyone has a unique role on our team. We appreciate having traditional designers, but we also identify the special skills that each of them brings from their unique experiences as magicians, improv artists, opera singers and toy makers. By giving everyone a role, we give them agency to impact the outcome and to stretch each other's imaginations.
Finally, joy keeps people coming back. This can take many shapes. Joy can surface as a source of inspiration — playing games together, taking a field trip, inviting employees to share a weekend highlight at the start of a meeting or creating an internal communications channel where they can share what’s inspiring them in the world. Joy is also about celebration. It's very easy to jump from project to project, but we need to make sure we also take time to stop and recognize the contributions that everyone's making.
What rituals have you created that could help us approach work with joy and play?
Rituals are a way to create a regular heartbeat within your organization — the inspiring moments that everyone can depend on with regularity. By establishing psychological safety, rituals free up everyone to play and be more vulnerable with each other. Rituals can be big or small, and happen at different cadences — daily, weekly, monthly or annually. The end result is that the team shares an experience and emotion together. These are a few of the rituals that I practice with my team:
Creative Warm-Ups: In sports, athletes typically warm-up before a game. These exercises don’t only warm up our muscles, preparing us physically, they also prepare us mentally as we head into an unpredictable and potentially stressful situation. I’ve greatly admired the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport for their work, which includes the benefits of warm-ups.
This same approach can be applied to creativity. We believe that creativity is a muscle and similar to other muscles in our body, it's hard to just jump in and be creative. Before a meeting begins, warm-ups are a way to prepare us to get imaginative and think in a more divergent manner. Some of our favorite warm-ups include simple art activities like quickly crafting your favorite animal out of a piece of paper, imagination activities like pretending to blast off on a journey to the moon and back or curiosity starters like asking as many questions as you can about an everyday item like the number two pencil.
Playful Meeting Themes: We rotate who leads meetings by spinning a wheel at the end of each meeting to assign who runs the next one. People pick a theme for the meeting or when two people run a meeting, there’s a mash-up of themes. For example, I co-led a meeting with a colleague who loves anything cowboy-themed. I chose space. Together, we hosted a Space Cowboy meeting, which was really fun.
Gratitude and Celebration: At the end of meetings, we generate joy by shouting out someone on the team who has done something we're grateful for that week. At the end of the year, we have an “Annual Trophy Toast” where we pair people up as secret snowflakes (it’s a surprise match). Each person presents someone else on the team with a trophy celebrating them. With a small budget for designing and building the trophy, we’ve seen some incredible creativity with trophies made from toy parts to handmade “sand” castles to songs and more.
Environment: From the clothes we wear to the spaces where we work, the environment we inhabit plays an important role in building camaraderie. My team has Play Lab jackets that are covered with paint splatters, which lead to a shared identity. We also have bins of materials that contain mechanical parts — motors, gears, bellows — as well as rhinestones, playdough, balloons and glitter. This lab fosters a feeling of being in a maker space where employees are encouraged to dream and to invent. (Author note: During our interview, I got a tour and it was really incredible to see this space!)
Finally, one of my personal rituals is that I switch out my shoes every day when I come into the office. I'll commute with my sneakers and change into my heels in the morning. It's a little something that reminds me of Mr. Rogers. It puts me in a different mindset, building excitement for the day ahead. Experiences like this are important to help people transition into their days.
How do you continue to learn?
I’m inspired by my coworkers on a regular basis — they bring their hobbies to work by sharing magic tricks, improv exercises, opera and so much more. In addition, I have two amazing children who are always introducing me to the latest trends and games. My son loves Greek mythology and we started listening to the Greeking Out podcast together. I love learning from stories that are told from ancient times and still apply to today.
I also finally started playing the guitar, which I’ve carried around for decades. When I couldn’t go out to hear live music at the start of the pandemic, I decided to make my own. I’ve been appreciating it as a learning opportunity and have really enjoyed the process of picking up new songs — how it’s messy at the beginning and slowly becomes more comfortable as the notes start coming together.
I'm blessed to be in a job that encourages learning as I take on new projects, challenges and industries. IDEO fosters a culture of learning — internally with IDEOers, but we also bring our clients along for the whole process, through all the early Post-it notes and the rough prototypes. It’s critical for a learning mindset to be comfortable showing what’s under the curtain as creativity comes to fruition. It may not look perfect from the start and can get a little messy, but this experimentation is key to arriving at more innovative solutions.
For me, play and learning go hand in hand. Play is what makes learning fun, and it’s that joy that keeps us engaged and sustains our growth.
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