IDEO and Fotile have had a relationship since 2009, working together on projects including a unified design language for product offerings, retail environments, and IoT strategy. For the dishwasher, IDEO and the Fotile research team came together for design research, shadowing Chinese families in different cities as they prepared meals from start to finish. Together they discovered that unlike in Western cooking, where several kinds of cookware are used for different dishes, Chinese cooks tend to use the same cookware to prepare all of their dishes.

That meant that the cookware needed to be cleaned several times during a single meal preparation, rather than once at the end. In this context, the sink serves different purposes over the course of cooking—it’s a place to wash and store prepped ingredients, rinse the cookware, and deep clean the dishes used in food prep and during the meal.

Based on this insight, IDEO made a list of product design recommendations that became Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher—a counter-level, multi-purpose appliance that specifically suits Chinese cooking habits. IDEO’s design guidance gave Fotile the confidence it needed to launch its product into the market, and served as a blueprint for the future iteration of Fotile’s Sink Dishwasher.

On March 25, 2015, six months after the project ended, Fotile launched the world's first sink dishwasher designed for Chinese families. Eight months later, its market share exceeded 30 percent, setting off a wave of innovation in the Chinese dishwasher category.

In 2016, Fotile introduced a three-slot dishwasher with an added compartment for cleaning fruit and vegetables—a direct response to a research finding that Chinese families are concerned about food safety. When this new model hit the market, Fotile’s dishwasher market share jumped to 41.1%. In China, Fotile is now synonymous with “sink dishwasher,” and the company has a widespread reputation among consumers as a symbol of a safe and healthy Chinese family kitchen.

Since its founding in 1994, Fotile’s Chairman, Mao Zhongqun, has made it his goal to “do nothing but build a high-end Chinese family brand.”

30%

Fotile Sink Dishwasher’s share of the market in China, just eight months after launch

41%

Fotile’s dishwasher market share after it launched a three-slot version in 2016

#1 selling brand

in the mainstream price segment of the Chinese dishwasher market as of August 2023

BoAo Group’s idea to design a new baby car seat was fueled by a newly revised minor protection law, which made using child safety seats mandatory beginning June 1st, 2021. As ZUOWE and IDEO looked around China’s emerging car seat market, the team noticed a singular focus on safety and safety features across most international and domestic brands. There was a clear opportunity for a new product that could meaningfully differentiate itself by not only providing safety features but also meeting the needs of modern Chinese parents.

To kick off the project, the IDEO team needed to answer two questions: What matters to the new generation of parents in China? And how will their style and approach to parenting affect their expectations for baby car seats? Taking into account the potentially different consumer needs in different geographies, the IDEO team headed to Shanghai, a city with more than 25 million people, and the city of Taizhou in Zhejiang province, which has a population of 2 million. They conducted in-depth home visits to local families, visited many brick-and-mortar mom-and-baby shops, and interviewed people like specialized nurses, parenting experts, and child psychologists. 

Despite the differences between the two cities, IDEO discovered commonalities during consumer conversations. Young Chinese parents were experiencing a perceived identity gap. As individuals, they felt they had distinct personalities and a clear sense of self. They actively expressed themselves through their clothes and belongings. But when they became parents, this sense of self weakened or disappeared completely.  Their identities shifted to being someone’s mom or dad overnight. This new generation was eager to show their unique approach to parenthood as they used to express their sense of self. But many products were designed for children, with little regard for parents. 

This core finding helped set the direction for the new baby car seat design and brand Maple&Co. However, there were still two significant challenges to overcome. One, IDEO needed to design a product with stringent technical regulations and standards on a tight timeline—ZUOWE wanted to launch the new car seat at an important industry trade show within the year. And two, the team had to help the organization transform its thinking and ways of working to be more consumer-centric.

BoAo’s strength lies in its 20 years of experience developing and manufacturing car seats for major domestic and international automotive brands. This gave the company an edge in overcoming technical barriers and driving mass production. But its engineering and manufacturing mindset had become a barrier to transforming into a D2C brand. With such ingrained ways of working, pivoting to a more creative process can be hard. 

To address this hurdle, IDEO set up co-creation workshops, bringing together ZUOWE’s newly formed baby car seat team and manufacturing experts from their factories to discuss design direction and details early on. The benefits of the collaboration were clear: It was easy to share feedback in a timely manner and make product design decisions very quickly. When IDEO presented a design that emphasized natural textures during a workshop on brand positioning, a member from Bo Ao’s manufacturing team said, “This feels very different. This could become a major selling point,” and that they had “never seen” anything like it done by other baby car seat brands.

A year after working together, ZUOWE Technology launched Maple&Co and the new Maple baby car seat across its main e-commerce channels. Modern and minimalist in soft natural colors and wooden veneers, Maple appeals to the aesthetics of young parents in China. Despite a series of micro COVID outbreaks in China, within three months, Maple had already achieved better-than-predicted sales and received favorable comments about the look and quality of the car seat from parents. Fast forward two years, additional collaborations with IDEO have enabled the young startup to grow its child travel portfolio from a signature car seat into a more holistic offering that includes highly functional, fashionable, and adaptable car booster seats and strollers that thoughtfully address the needs of modern Chinese families across various life stages at home—and on the go.

China's minor protection law mandated the use of child safety seats beginning June 1, 2021.

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Despite incoming regulations fueling a surge in purchases, car seats on the market rightly prioritized safety but did not consider the emotional needs and lifestyle preferences of a new generation of Chinese parents.

1 year

after the project ended, a new, differentiated baby seat product and brand, Maple&Co, launched

Top 6

during the 2023 “Double 11” shopping festival, Maple&CO secured the 6th spot on Tmall's new brand pre-sale list

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“Over a year ago, I had to take my cat to the vet for an unexpected and expensive surgery,” says one Card Member. “To be honest, I still don’t know if I’ve paid the bill off.”

Many crave the flexibility to pay for large purchases over time, but also want to avoid the pitfalls of debt. Others rely on debit or cash for small items—no one wants to accumulate interest on a cup of coffee, lunch with a friend, or box of Kleenex—but then miss out on valuable rewards.

American Express worked with IDEO to help them attract new customers by understanding what financially stable young adults wanted in a credit card. The team began by interviewing more than 120 millennials to understand their payment behaviors around debit and credit, and how they think about borrowing and spending.

One person described the monthly panic of receiving his bill—described as “statement shock”—and his habit of making multiple payments before his billing cycle closed to ease this anxiety. Others were wary of credit because of a large veterinarian bill or financial mistakes made in their 20s, and relied on debit because it felt safer than accruing a balance to pay off. Overall, the team learned that many consumers experience anxiety about paying their bills. And while financial products that offer more flexibility and control have been needed for years, they are especially valuable in times of economic uncertainty like today.

Based on this research, IDEO prototyped, iterated, and refined two concepts, with frequent feedback from users and the client. Called Pay It Plan It, this feature offers financially responsible consumers more transparency, confidence, and control.

Pay It allows Card Members to quickly pay for small purchase amounts under $100 with a few taps in the American Express mobile app. When that purchase shows up on their account, they can choose “Pay It” and still earn rewards on the purchase. This ensures Card Members can take advantage of rewards while lowering their monthly bill by paying for smaller items throughout the month.

With Plan It, Card Members can split up larger purchases of $100 or more—like an emergency trip to the vet or a new sofa—into equal monthly payments, with a fixed fee and no interest. When the purchase appears in their account, they can select “Plan It,” and will be offered up to three monthly payment plans, ranging from three to 24 months. Each plan comes with a fixed monthly fee and no interest. Card Members know exactly how much they have to pay each month, so there are no surprises. And if they pay the purchase off early, they no longer have to pay any future plan fees.

The design of Pay It Plan It did not come without challenges: Bill pay is critical, complex, and highly regulated. Pay It Plan It required a significant internal financial and technical investment, which was achieved after IDEO shared many of the emotional, compelling stories from credit card users with leaders at American Express.

The team worked closely with the American Express regulatory and digital teams to ensure compliance and seamless integration into the mobile app and website’s user experiences and interfaces. To heighten the sense of competence, control, and transparency for users, the designers focused on small interactions like status animations, proactive suggestions, and straightforward language. These interactions help Card Members anticipate upcoming payments and clearly understand Pay It Plan It.

Plan It was designed with transparency, control, and accessibility in mind: The payment plan fee is displayed in dollars to give the customer certainty over their total costs.

Initially, the team set out to create a new credit card with the needs of young adults in mind. But IDEO and American Express realized that Pay It Plan It could be scaled across existing credit card products to ultimately benefit and attract more Card Members. Now, almost all U.S. American Express Consumer Card Members have access to Pay It Plan It through credit cards, co-branded cards, and the well-known Green, Gold, and Platinum Cards. Since launching in 2017, Card Members have created nearly 5 million Plans, totaling nearly $4 billion in purchases, with an average Plan size of $789. Millennial and Generation Z Card Members have created approximately 44 percent of these Plans.

The flexibility and control offered through Pay It Plan have earned American Express positive press, including a call-out in The New York Times for being among solutions that “make it easier for their customers to borrow money, and to manage their monthly cash flow.”

At first glance, design-led innovation may seem difficult to achieve in large, established organizations like American Express, operating in a highly regulated and deeply rational industry. But the IDEO and American Express team successfully found ways to introduce new behaviors like rapid prototyping, cross-discipline collaboration, and leading with emotional customer stories within the existing organizational culture and structure. American Express has since established a permanent Pay It Plan It team dedicated to evolving the feature. Made up of employees across departments, this points to a new and collaborative team structure for the company.

By seeking to understand the human behind the Card Member, American Express has transformed credit and financial services for the better, helping both to be defined by empathy, utility, and transparency.

For more than two centuries, The Times held a strong reputation as a storied British newspaper. Then came the digital deluge. Publication after publication began adopting a relentless online publishing schedule aimed at capturing eyeballs and subscribers, and guarding against waning advertising sales and print readership. But The Times and its sister publication The Sunday Times thought there might be a different way forward.

As Editor John Witherow explains, “the power of an edition” had long endured at The Times, but began to erode amid a round-the-clock breaking news cycle. Witherow didn’t want to do away with editions, but rather to update the model for the digital age. Times owner News UK approached IDEO in 2014 to explore exactly that: what the edition of the future might look like and how its design could drive revenue and subscribers.

IDEO’s research and design phase included interviews with readers, journalists, editors, and marketers at News UK. The team found that people’s reading modes vary—some reflecting new digital behaviors and others adhering more closely to paper-reading styles.

Readers, the team learned, chose The Times for its editorial opinion: a perspective that cuts through the overwhelming flood of information. They viewed the daily Times and weekend Sunday Times as one paper, despite the organizational distinction. And they were proud of their choice, valuing the papers’ consistency, trustworthiness, balance, and authoritativeness. Readers wanted these qualities distilled in a digital edition, whether on a smartphone, tablet, or on the web.

Those insights led to strategic recommendations spanning digital products, editorial, advertising integration, online membership offers, and social sharing. But the boldest among those was a publishing strategy that seemed to run counter to media trends: abandoning a real-time approach in favor of publishing separate digital editions.

The Times in March 2016 introduced an editions-based publishing schedule, with new editions available across all platforms four times each weekday: overnight, 9am, noon and 5pm; the weekend schedule shrank to three editions. A year in, they had broken that schedule fewer than a dozen times—making exceptions for major moments like the terror attack in central London and David Bowie’s death—but even in those cases, The Times refrained from incessant updates, instead resuming its regular pacing.

“The way we’re publishing now, taking our time over news...taking a more considered view of the world, it’s helped us offer something different from everything else,” digital news head Alan Hunter told Digiday in 2018. Readers demonstrated that this different approach was something they’d been wanting.

In the first half of 2016, new paying-subscriber sales were up 200% as compared to the same period in 2015. At the end of June 2016, there were 413,600 subscribers to The Times and The Sunday Times, up 3.4% from a year prior. Of those, 182,500 were digital-only subscriptions—a 6% rise and a notable figure given how much online news can be obtained for free.

Through collaboration with IDEO, News UK's own digital teams capabilities grew, enabling them to implement and evolve their new digital strategy. The capabilities of the newsroom grew, too: “The decision to move to four editions a day has freed up tremendous resources to focus on big stories,” says Emma Tucker, Editor of The Sunday Times—the kind of stories that "supercharge engagement." The approach is working: By August 2019 digital subscriptions had increased 19% year-on-year to 300,000, showing the progress the legacy publisher has made in attracting readers to its online proposition. Total subscribers for the two titles' print and digital products now stand at 539,000, and their websites total five million registered users.

More than 230 years after its first edition was published, the new Times has established solid footing in the digital age and designed its own future—one based not on the habits of its competitors but on its legacy and the reading behaviors of its audience.

Here's an example: When I was working as a chef in fine dining, I set out to reinvent a classic—my all-time fave—the bagel, lox, and cream cheese sandwich.

My former boss, Chef Joan Roca, once told me that his most prized dining experience was when he ate the best version of a beloved dish:

"For me, there is nothing like eating the best bowl of spaghetti Bolognese I've ever tried—I don't care if you've come up with the most revolutionary dish made from watermelon and chicken feet, it just doesn't resonate in my memory banks like the familiar flavors of Bolognese do."

The process of reinvention or "deconstruction" is fairly common practice in the modern kitchen. Once you've deconstructed something, it unlocks myriad ideas. Here's what design thinking looks like in the kitchen, as expressed through a new version of the classic breakfast sandwich.

1. DEFINE THE DESIGN CHALLENGE: REINVENTING THE BAGEL SANDWICH

Bagel, lox, and cream cheese immediately transports me to the kitchen table at my Nana's house on a Saturday morning. The flavors are classic, yet sophisticated; a perfect dish to deconstruct for a modern appetizer.

To help you play along, here's a brief definition of deconstruction in the chef's world. The concept, which was made famous by catalan chef Ferran Adria, is to reimagine the elements of an established dish in order to create something new. I love deconstruction because it allows me play with one of my favorite elements of cooking and eating—memory.

2. DESIGN RESEARCH

The next step in recreating the bagel, lox, and cream cheese sandwich was to look into the origins and variations of the dish. I wasn't surprised to learn that the word "Lox" stems from the Yiddish word for salmon, “laks”. (There are Scandinavian roots, too, where fishermen preserved salmon in saltwater brine).

What I didn't know was that in 1869, the transcontinental railroad began transporting barrels of salted salmon—giving rise to its popularity in New York City, especially among the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came over to the U.S. with a taste for cured and smoked fish.

As for the remaining ingredients: Bagels were first seen on the silk route in China, and then refined in Italy in the 14th century. My polish grandfather told me he used to buy "hard bagels with a huge hole" as a child in Radom, Poland. Capers came from Italy, cream cheese has roots in Britain, and tomatoes came from the new world.

So, none of the key ingredients to the sandwich come from New York City, but it was New Yorkers who put them together. The fact that the combo wasn't "old country" made me more relaxed about reinventing it—at least I knew that my version wasn't bastardizing some 1000-year-old dish, the dish itself had always been a food bastard.

I realized that in order to successfully transport myself back to my grandmother's kitchen table, I had to leave the core elements in their original, unadulterated form somewhere in the dish.

I looked at more than 50 restaurant versions and cookbook recipes for bagels, lox, and cream cheese. Then, I extracted all of the possible elements and techniques that went into the sandwich.

The ingredients included: lemon, lime, chili pepper, black ground pepper, white pepper, cayenne pepper, red onions, white onions, radish, avocado, cucumber, butter, cream cheese, capers, caperberries, olives, pickled scallions, hard boiled egg, chives, dill, tomato. I looked at the whole spectrum of preparations that were applied to each ingredient on my list: fried, scrambled, or hard-boiled eggs; raw, baked, or smoked salmon; pickled or marinated vegetables. There was an almost endless variety of combinations!

3. SYNTHESIS

I created a spreadsheet with the list of ingredients and techniques I'd compiled in my research. The lefthand column listed each possible ingredient; the middle column listed the traditional preparations for each ingredient; and the righthand column listed the options for modern techniques that could be applied in place of the traditional ones.

4. ITERATION (AND FAILURE)

I began to deconstruct the dish ingredient by ingredient, deciding if and how I was going to affect each preparation and presentation. Sometimes I chose dramatic changes like converting drops of lemon juice into an icy lemon granita or transforming smoked salmon into an aerated mousse shot from and ISI foamer. But I also used more common techniques: an alternative cut on a cucumber, dehydration of fresh onions to make chips and powder; crumbled and sautéed bagel in olive oil. Some ingredients were left untouched like the black pepper or some were simply substituted like using marinated cherry tomatoes instead of sliced tomatoes.

I prototyped 10 to 12 iterations of each ingredient before settling on a final version. Conceiving a modern version of the dish that triggered my childhood memory was a bigger challenge than I had imagined. The first 4 to 5 prototypes sacrificed flavor for fancy techniques. One of the versions I came up with was just a bunch of powders—terrible!

Finally, I realized that in order to successfully transport myself back to my grandmother's formica kitchen table, I had to leave the core elements—bagel, lox, and cream cheese—in their original, unadulterated form somewhere in the dish.

5. IMPLEMENTATION

My final version of the dish was a fluid mix of old and new: the presentation and techniques of the dish placed it strongly in the modern kitchen while the flavors remained old-world.

The final version included smoked salmon, toasted bagel, cherry tomato, fresh dill and Philadelphia cream cheese. It also featured smoked salmon rillettes; sieved egg whites and yolks; a Meyer lemon granita; dehydrated purple onions; powdered chives, powdered tomato, and powdered lemon zest (some of the powders made the final cut!); sweet, fried capers; cucumber ribbons, pickled shallots and nitro-dill cream cheese (cream cheese of the future).

When I sat down to enjoy the dish, I could almost hear my Polish Nana telling me, "Ess, mein shayna yingele, ess." (Eat, my beautiful child, eat.) And so I did.

Hi, I'm Danny, the culinary resident in IDEO San Francisco's Food Studio. I've been cooking professionally for many years, and now that I'm here, I've discovered that designers and chefs have a lot in common. We both sketch out initial ideas and then iterate quickly until the product is tasty and ready to consume.

What does the Imagination Institute do?

We are looking at how we measure imagination, so we can explore ways to increase it. The other part of our activity is studying how imagination plays a role in different fields. For this, we’ve been running events (like the one you attended) in which we gather leaders in domains such as education, futurology, psychology, physics, even comedy.

Why pull from different disciplines?

We want to understand what kind of mind is best suited for creating progress within these specific fields. The hope is that we could get some idea of how to develop that kind of imagination in schools. In the school system at the moment, it’s one-size-fits-all. But individual differences matter!

What would you teach, if you were trying to get more creativity into schools?

The value of personal expression. There are so many forces in our lives that put other people’s words in our head. But creativity research findings show how important it is to be able to insulate yourself, and not be contaminated by other selves. Often the best way we can help others is by developing our highest potentialities to their fullest, and schools are doing a pretty crummy job of that at the moment.

Business leaders want the outputs of creativity, but they often have an unconscious bias against creative behaviors and personalities

How do you continue to be inspired by others without losing yourself?

If you are secure in your sense of self, you can be open to new experiences. It’s the people who have the most fragile egos who are insecure and not creative because they are so scared that they could be wrong.

Tell me more about openness to experience. You mention that a lot.

Openness to experience is a personality trait that can be measured. It has been shown to be the number one predictor of creativity. To be creative, you need to constantly be growing. Openness allows that.

Who’s your psychology hero?

I am hugely interested in Maslow and the humanistic psychologists of the 50s and 60s. When they talked about creativity, they viewed it as the height of being. All these ideas are so relevant today, in our age of constant anxiety, with all the pressure to pay attention to other people’s goals.

What’s your take on creativity?

It’s a very vulnerable way to be—to be curious, and a little crazy.

Embracing the messiness of your mind.

Business leaders ask for creativity, but I think people are actually conflicted about what they really want. They want the outputs of creativity but they often have an unconscious bias against creative behaviors and personalities.

Want to know more about how to flex your creative muscle? Go buy Scott’s book, Wired To Create.

I came across psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman at an event hosted by the Imagination Institute, where Kaufman is scientific director. Before being locked in a room for two days to discuss the philosophy and psychology of education, all participants had their brains scanned in an MRI machine. Only later did I realize this was typical Kaufman: He’s made a career of fearlessly mixing hard science with culture to create fresh angles on a question IDEO asks on a regular basis: How can we all be more creative?

Two weeks ago, I was witness to such a moment myself. A colleague and friend, the imaginative Mr. Brown, was doodling a mob of amiable monsters and charming creatures with ink, a brush, and some paper.

Pretty, yes. Cute, maybe. But it was when he was cleaning up that he came across a real gem: With ink-stained hands, he scrunched some paper towel to mop up the inky mess. He dabbed the offensive blob, gave a little twist and twirl with the paper towel, and lifted his hand away.

Underneath shone a ravishing vortex which drew one’s imagination into its depths. Not one to shy away from allowing his imagination to wander, he kept twirling, twisting, and whirling.

Being the cheap bugger that I am, and living in a home filled with empty walls, when I spied these beauties I immediately requested if I could have one once he was done.

His inky booboos are now hanging at home—a prized possession.

It goes without saying that some of the best ideas were borne from a fortuitous mistake: Alexander Fleming had his mold, Archimedes submerged himself in a bath, and Spencer Silver accidently created the perfect adhesive for Post-it notes (IDEO thanks you, Mr Silver).

To better understand the madness of the focus group, I decided to do a bit of research on how it came to be.

The story begins in 1938, when a psychoanalyst named Ernest Dichter left Vienna to escape the Nazis and headed for the US. When he arrived in New York, he made an interesting career decision. Instead of helping individuals understand their problems, he decided to offer his psychoanalytic services to corporations.

One of Dichter's first clients was General Mills, which had a problem with its Betty Crocker cake mix. Its food scientists had formulated a dry mix that required only the addition of water. Once placed in the oven, it miraculously blossomed into instant cake. But after a good start, sales flattened. The executives were baffled: The product was more convenient. Why weren’t the housewives buying it?

Dichter gathered groups of women and put them through exercises derived from Freud’s methods of probing the unconscious, including free association and Rorschach tests. He explored their feelings about relationships and their role in the family. And then he started asking them about cake.

What he took away from these sessions was that cake was more than just a sweet baked product. It was loaded with sexual symbolism. He was particularly fascinated by the ritual of the wedding cake, which featured the husband taking a long knife and plunging it into the white cake.

His conclusions, like a good cake, were multilayered. First, the cake was symbolic of the wife’s relationship to the husband, and so she felt guilty making it by just adding some water to powder. Second, the sexually charged nature of the cake meant that it had associations with fertility, even childbirth.

Ernest Dichter and a Betty Crocker ad from the 1950s that anoints cake as the great unifier—almost as good as make-up sex.

His solution to these complex issues was simple: General Mills should remove the powdered egg from the formulation, and instead require housewives to add their own fresh eggs.

It’s hard to know whether the executives were swayed by Dichter’s Sexual Theory of Cake, or whether they liked the fact that removing the eggs would save money. Either way, they took his advice. And, sure enough, sales soared.

In the following decades, Dichter imitators turned his methodology into a hackneyed formula, and the focus group lost its way. We wondered if we could bring emotion and surprise back with a 21st-century reboot of the technique. Here are the five principles we followed:

1. Break the mirror

Hiding in a dark room behind a two-way mirror distances you from the consumer. If you want to find out what makes people tick, get eye to eye with them in the room. If you find this uncomfortable, suck it up: Discomfort is a sign that you’re learning something.

2. Lose the clipboard

The dynamic of “moderator and participant” creates an authority relationship in the room, which can lead to participants saying what they think they are “supposed” to say. Try having the questions served up differently—such as pulling them at random out of a jar. People will share more when they feel they’re having a natural conversation.

3. Think dinner party, not jury service

The original idea of focus groups was to create an environment in which people encouraged each other to share their feelings. Today’s sessions are often stiff and with the same amount of social interaction you’d expect from people doing jury service. So, do whatever you can to create a warm social environment. In our recent experiment, we started the session with 30 minutes of improv exercises, run by a trainer from Second City.

4. Record video confessionals

When Dichter ran focus groups, he would make all the interpretations and deliver a report to the client. These days, the client needs to feel some empathy themselves. The best way to achieve this is video, but an intrusive camera lens can cause people to clam up. We solved this by running interviews using a hidden-camera technique pioneered by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (see below).

5. Talk about the why

All the clever methods in the world won’t help if you don’t have the core goal in mind: understanding the motivations behind human behavior. We live in an age of data: We have more information than ever before that will tell us what people are up to. But the greatest inspiration comes when you can form theories about the why. Despite being more than a half century old, the focus group is still one of the best techniques for achieving this.

The Errol Morris–pioneered "Interrotron" puts interviewees at ease by giving them the impression they're speaking to another human, not a camera lens.

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Focus groups suck, right? Bored people sitting in front of a mirror, delivering canned opinions on demand. Everyone from Silicon Valley to Amy Schumer pokes fun at them. But it wasn’t always this way: When focus groups started in the 1950s, they represented an exciting new way to probe the emotions and motivations underpinning human behavior. How did they get so staid and safe?

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.