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Michelle Lee

Partner and Executive Managing Director at IDEO, leading the San Francisco studio and its Play Lab; former aerospace and toy industry engineer.

Sep 1, 2026

5:32
So could you just kind of dig into what do you mean by a play mindset in a professional working environment context?
5:41
Absolutely.
5:42
And I totally understand when people say, oh my gosh, isn't play just for kids? Isn't it fun? Isn't it frivolous? I think I've come on a whole journey myself of what play means because I got my start as an engineer.
5:55
My degree is in mechanical engineering.
5:57
And I started off working in aerospace.
6:00
And as part of that, I realized that that was actually not the role for me.
6:05
I know other people love aerospace, so I don't knock on it.

24 MINS LATER

29:59
What's your view on that?
146:34
Sure.
146:34
They have all the scientific knowledge, but they're also the ones going into the lab and running the experiments.
146:39
They can, like, sense what's happening.
146:41
They can smell it.
146:42
They can, like, visualize what's going on, and they can make changes as they see things, um, start happening inside the experiments.
146:50
Yeah.
146:51
That's what we're trying to capture, right? The ability to be really flexible, to actually reason about the science as, as it is happening, and also taking into account all of the knowledge that's come before us, all the scientific papers, all the different results-

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