D4V is a Tokyo-based early stage Venture Capital in partnership with IDEO. Two years ago, D4V invested in healthcare startup Ubie, which develops a service called AI Monshin Ubie. The digital service was created with the goal of reducing the burden on healthcare professionals working long hours, under harsh conditions. AI Monshin Ubie automates a number of patient registration and documentation processes through digital tools, enabling doctors to spend less of their time on manual paperwork, and to dedicate their valuable skills and attention to the patients themselves. Currently, the service is installed in 200 medical institutions in 41 prefectures across Japan.

With AI Monshin Ubie, patients fill out preliminary forms on a tablet, rather than paper, entering information about their health history and current symptoms directly into their digital medical record. As patients fill out the questionnaire, the Ubie AI generates questions in real-time according to patients’ responses, which results in more appropriate and accurate data. The patient’s responses are automatically formatted for the doctor to review prior to and during the consultation. As a result, doctor consultation times and facility operation times are drastically reduced.

With the Coronavirus raising fears of a possible health system breakdown, Ubie has made improvements to anticipate and possibly prevent in-hospital infections. Until recently, Ubie’s services have been primarily used by large hospitals; but in light of the global health crisis, Ubie approached D4V—who partners with IDEO—to help rethink the onboarding experience and quickly facilitate the introduction of AI Monshin Ubie in regional clinics across Japan. D4V and IDEO have been working with Ubie for many years to collaborate in various areas, including UX, rebranding, international research, and more. Therefore, they had a foundation of knowledge from which to build these new features.

Typically, AI Monshin Ubie has been introduced to new hospital clients through direct, in-depth instructional visits from Ubie sales staff. This approach has worked well for rolling out the product to Japan’s 8,000 large hospitals; but for the 100,000 smaller clinics, Ubie needed a more efficient onboarding method to enable staff to get set up smoothly and independently.

During research, D4V and IDEO team members engaged with many different clinic staff members, including full-time doctors, part-time doctors, nurses and receptionists. The researchers found that staff tend to react skeptically to new tools and services, with a common preconception that they will add to their workload. One clinic director’s first impression of AI Monshin Ubie was, “It looks complicated.” But once he actually used the service, he realized that it was very user-friendly.

The team quickly understood that it was important to remove preconceptions by clearly communicating Ubie’s benefits and ease of use. They created a two-minute animation and designed three separate guidebooks. The animation adopted a friendly tone and expressed empathy for doctors, staff members and patients, highlighting how Ubie can bring benefits to each of them. The animation showed how Ubie fits into the existing workflow and explained complex systems in a straightforward and accessible way.

WATCH: A short video clip explains the benefit of their product and service to avoid the users’ concerns in advance.

The guidebook for doctors and directors explains how Ubie’s AI smooths the patient consultation experience and greatly improves the quality of medical care. It also introduces concrete how-tos around set-up, implementation, and ideal workflow. FAQs were also included, addressing concerns about whether or not elderly people would be able to use it.

Ubie business development leader Kenji Yamada says, “D4V and IDEO have a deep understanding not only of design, but of our entire business. They provide inspiration by bringing experience and knowledge that comes from working with other industries and clients outside of healthcare. We appreciate that they can share the knowledge that they’ve obtained with our business.”

Read the Japanese-language version of the Ubie case study here.
When You Feel Unwell, Ask Ubie: Check your symptoms for free
Learn more about Ubie: Global Company Website

In the emergency room, an intervention that’s administered too slowly could cost a patient their life. With COVID-19 fueling a surge in acute respiratory conditions, intubation—a procedure that involves inserting a tube through the mouth or nose and into the airway—is more common than ever. For patients struggling to breathe, the tube can be connected to a ventilator that pumps oxygen to the lungs, keeping them alive.

While a laser-focus on the present is critical for successful patient outcomes, hospitals and physicians often don’t have time to look ahead and anticipate the future of the operating room experience. As technology rapidly improves, there is a ripe opportunity and pressing need to evolve medical equipment to be more innovative and intuitive. Verathon Medical, a global medical device manufacturer, is supporting health care providers at the cutting-edge of care.

Verathon approached IDEO to redesign the existing product system for laryngoscopies and bronchoscopies—procedures that examine parts of the throat through intubation. During these examinations, a tube with a camera embedded in the tip is inserted through the patient’s nose or mouth. The doctor can then see inside the throat on a video monitor, and therefore more easily and quickly intubate and perform the exam.

To create a groundbreaking device, the team observed over a dozen laryngoscopies, bronchoscopies, and intubations. They noticed that many anesthesiologists relied on fixed equipment during the procedures. For example, some had grown accustomed to looking over their shoulder—away from the patient—to view the monitor.

During interviews, physicians and residents expressed difficulties with the current technology, sharing that the small screens aren’t conducive to team viewing or student instruction, and they must often use a separate computer to record patient notes. Others reported frustrating workflows, needing to constantly divert their attention and move their hands between the patient, prep tray, monitor, sterile bin, and disposal bin. These inconveniences and inefficiencies are not only cumbersome, but can increase the risk of infection and fatality.

The team relied on these insights to start designing a next-generation product. Through sketching, storyboarding, and building in real-time alongside doctors and clinic staff, designers quickly teased out additional findings and validated concepts.

This work led to the creation of the GlideScope Core: an all-in-one, portable product system that supports both video laryngoscopies and bronchoscopies. The base of the device—a wheeled cart—has built-in storage units for tools and a disposal bin, offering more mobility and accessibility for medical professionals.

The product’s tagline, “see more, do more,” points to the improvements made to the video system, including a large 10- or 15-inch high-definition touch screen monitor. Displayed images can be enlarged and rotated 180 degrees for improved visualization, team viewing, resident training, and classroom demonstration. To help doctors keep both the patient and monitor in their line of sight, the detachable screen can be secured to an adjustable arm that can be positioned directly over the patient. Additionally, the monitor’s patient annotation feature gives staff access to more of what they need in one device.

The product has been especially valuable for providers and patients during the coronavirus pandemic, when it’s imperative for doctors to keep their distance from patients’ mouths and noses. The GlideScope Core’s movable, detachable, and large, high-definition monitor makes it easier to take this precaution and intubate more quickly. This usefulness is reflected in the 5-fold increase in cart-based device orders for Verathon. While most providers typically order anywhere from 1 to 20 devices for airway procedures, one hospital system requested 600 GlideScope Core systems to meet current intubation demands.

Through modern technology and a focus on human needs, the GlideScope Core supports improved patient outcomes and creates a more seamless operating experience for medical professionals. The product underlines the key but often overlooked fact that often, in order to ensure the healthcare industry is patient-centered, medical device manufacturers and hospitals must also focus on improving the experience of providers.

Healthcare is notoriously difficult to change. Rules and regulations present complex barriers; health practitioners and organizations often have entrenched ways of working; and lives are literally on the line. Despite these significant barriers, the leaders at Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) boldly committed to improving patient care through a new approach.

NWH is a community teaching medical center in Newton, Massachusetts. Because of its proximity to Boston—a city known for world-class healthcare institutions—NWH needed to differentiate itself. The hospital's new president, Dr. Michael R. Jaff, reached out to IDEO for help: "I knew that providing an unparalleled patient experience would set us apart from our competitors." But, Dr. Jaff’s particular approach was unique. He and Dr. Jodi Larson, Chief Quality and Experience Offer (CQXO), saw an opportunity to drive better patient outcomes through cultural and organizational change.

"You cannot learn any more than when you get to listen to your potential patients say why they would never walk into your place." —Dr. Michael R. Jaff

IDEO partnered with NWH for a year of work together, kicked off by defining the vision for NWH and ramping up to in-hospital prototyping and the launch of several new initiatives. A pilot project with the Women's Imaging Center (WIC) focused on solving departmental and employee challenges to provide a better experience for women getting mammograms.

Fueled by this potential, the WIC team redesigned key work processes and created a set of experience principles that inspired new service prototypes. Guided by principles like "Express mutual gratitude" and "Honor every voice," the WIC team tested ways for patients to acknowledge outstanding caregivers and created tools to gather better feedback from patients and adjust quickly. The experience of designing better services inspired the WIC staff to become ambassadors for the power of design thinking across other departments inside NWH and they continue to build on the work through new prototypes and experiments.

Next, IDEO partnered with NWH’s ambulatory surgery group. They took an analogous research trip to Boston’s Logan airport to see with fresh eyes how other high-touch customer service organizations provide customer value in a complex setting. Insights from the trip were applied through live prototyping of several new experiences inside the hospital, including a pre-surgery visit summary and pre-operation care carts.

Analogous research helped us realize that we can learn from other industries and incorporate some (cool) best practices if we allow ourselves to get over the ‘that would never work in the hospital’ mentality. - Dr. Jodi Larson

One of the most impactful prototypes was Care Modes, a tool to empower the NWH care teams to tailor their approach and interaction with patients based on the patients’ unique needs, beyond simply their clinical requirements. Four distinct approaches were identified for engaging a patient before surgery—Explain, Partner, Embrace, and Encourage. The Care Mode is determined based on the provider's understanding of a patient's degree of self-advocacy and their confidence that surgery is the best solution to their issue.

Historically, care providers have been trained to deliver consistent care above all else. However, Care Modes powerfully acknowledge that patients respond differently to different types of care. The Care Modes empower the team—from surgeon to nurse to anesthesiologist—with a clear framework for how to interact with and provide care for patients so they feel most comfortable. Based on the prototype's success with patients and impact on the staff culture, NWH has incorporated Care Modes into EPIC, the hospital's electronic medical record.

The importance of being patient-centered has been central to the healthcare conversation over the past thirty years; but new explorations reveal that there’s far more potential for innovation and improvement when the provider experience is considered in tandem with the patient’s. Each enables the other, and design for both together yields stronger solutions and better outcomes. IDEO's work with NWH demonstrates this vital shift in user-centered healthcare—one can't design services and experiences for patients without designing for their providers’ culture as well. When these go hand-in-hand, meaningful institutional change in healthcare is more than possible.

The mission of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) is to inspire children to achieve their full potential in the fields of science, technology, medicine, and engineering. Leaders at MSI realized they needed to drive day-to-day operations and maintain historic exhibits while focusing on where to go next. To prepare for its next decade, MSI worked with IDEO to create a new business focus to support the museum’s aspirations for the future. The plan would allow MSI to respond to the demands of the marketplace and raise the funds to get there.

At the beginning of the project, MSI laid out its priorities: improve equity of access, enhance the museum experience, and create a more innovative culture. To dive into each of these areas, IDEO conducted immersive research with families, teachers, donors, and staff.

IDEO brought together 60-plus donors, board members, and staff members to engage in a design thinking exercise to unpack and address the tensions that come with choosing a new strategic trajectory. Instead of having a standard ballot vote, the IDEO team encouraged participants to get up and vote with their feet, helping the group of stakeholders physically align on the museum’s new direction.

At the end of the research and prototyping phases, MSI and IDEO developed a vision called Provoking Minds, Inspiring Futures, creating six detailed design briefs to equip MSI teams to bring initiatives forward. The briefs laid out everything from recommending a new Department of Next, dedicated to ensuring that the future is at the heart of everything the MSI does, to MSI Runway, a place for experimental, small-scale, and limited-run exhibits. The ideas were brought to life with an interactive exhibit, built quickly with everyday materials like plywood and circuit boards, to demonstrate that creating an inspiring vision of the future doesn’t have to be an expensive endeavor.

The team also focused on insights that highlighted accessibility issues some families brought up early in the design process—travel across the city via public transportation can be lengthy, and the cost of admission to special exhibits could be prohibitive. To address these concerns, IDEO came up with the Mission Accessible brief: Inspired by casino buses, MSI bus stop signs would be posted in various low-income neighborhoods, signaling a way to take kids and families to the museum for free.

During the project, the IDEO team identified some low-hanging fruit, like rethinking ticketing and improving the student field trip experience, and helped the museum create cross-functional innovation teams to apply design thinking skills towards solving those challenges. They researched, brainstormed, and pushed forward new concepts, meeting weekly to share and build on ideas. At the end of the four week period, each team prototyped their ideas—new outdoor programming, software tools for visiting tour groups—and pitched them to each other.

In 2019, two years after the conclusion of the project, the collaboration paid off. With its new strategic plan and additional resources, the museum has renewed its commitment to serving youth, and MSI’s team, including donors, are aligned on a collective vision of the future. MSI raised more funds than in any previous year, including the single largest gift in its history—$125 million, nearly half of its $380 million fundraising goal—that will help ensure the years ahead.

Designers often have the biggest impact when they reimagine the relationship we have with everyday utilities, like those in the kitchen. Decisions as straightforward as the height of a stool can change the fabric of everyday life.

One great example is Austrian designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the woman who arguably had more impact on modern kitchen design than anyone in history. In celebration of International Women's Day and as an homage to my own grandmother, I wanted to tell her story.

The “fitted” kitchen

I discovered Schütte-Lihotzky on a recent visit to The Design Museum London, when I went to see the “Designer Maker User” exhibit. I'd never heard of her before, but she is credited with creating the first modern, efficient, "fitted" kitchen in 1926. A "fitted" space means that units are attached to a wall rather than free-floating. It was the first time someone thought to design for cooks instead of home builders.

Schütte-Lihotzky worked in the Municipal Building Department in Vienna, which controlled all aspects of housing, but as a newly-graduated architect, she had little experience with cooking. Instead of letting that naiveté hold her back, she embraced her beginner’s mindset and embarked on an early form of design research, interviewing and observing women in their homes and using film to conduct time-motion studies.

She found that women were spending their entire day preparing, cooking, and cleaning. This endurance activity started with trips to the local store, as fridges and storage units were not the norm and food would spoil within a day or so.

To add to the challenge, the stove, sink, and pantry were installed without any consideration for food prep workflow or the relationship between tasks, and work surfaces were installed at varying heights, putting strain on women’s bodies.

From her interactions with everyday cooks and the application of factory-line principles popularized by Henry Ford, Schütte-Lihotzky introduced her replicable, affordable, space-saving, and egalitarian “Frankfurt Kitchen,” named after the New Frankfurt initiative to address the city's shortage of public housing in the 1920s.

Each kitchen came with a swivel stool, a gas stove, built-in storage, a garbage drawer, and an ironing board. Schütte-Lihotzky used resilient materials like oak to repel critters from getting into perishables and installed aluminum storage bins for staples like sugar and flour. The main objective was to free up hours each day for women to devote to other pursuits.

Within a few years, 10,000 of Schütte-Lihotzky’s units were installed in apartment buildings across Frankfurt, and her design became the model for all subsequent Western kitchens. Her work reframed women’s relationship with cooking and set in motion a radical wave of change.

My grandmother, Ruth Kandel, who was born in Frankfurt just as Schütte-Lihotzky's work started getting acclaim, would often tell me about her upbringing—that her purpose in life was defined by “Kirche, Küche, Kinder” (church, kitchen, children.)

While she loved her husband and children dearly, she also dreamed of becoming a lawyer or a social worker and contributing to the world beyond her kitchen. I feel extremely blessed to have had women like Schütte-Lihotzky blaze the trail through design, freeing up my time so that I’m able to embody my grandmother’s desire to go forth and create.

Can the design of today’s food liberate us further?

Now that I’m at IDEO, I have the opportunity to carry Schütte-Lihotzky’s work forward. We partnered with IKEA to think about the future kitchen—how we might design it to be more efficient and use less energy while making it easier for home cooks to feel confident about preparing healthy food.

We also worked with a startup called INFARM to design modular, stackable units that use far less soil, water, and space to grow food at an optimal light and temperature. Because of the compact size of the units, you could install one in your own home kitchen, or stack them up to feed thousands of employees a day during winter months when produce typically has to be shipped in from far away. Good for cooks and good for the planet.

People used to say that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. Today, thanks to pioneers like Schütte-Lihotzky, a woman’s place is anywhere she wants to work.

As a designer who loves to cook, I’m intrigued by the way kitchen design has enabled me—and generations of women who came before me—to spend less time preparing and more time enjoying the food we make, so we can move on to other things.

Small cities provide the character that comes from not having the world’s largest corporations on their hips. Communities are close-knit and form at a slower, more intimate pace. And cultural spaces in those locales are stronger for being able to bring people from diverse backgrounds together to have a dialogue that goes beyond a town hall meeting.

Designing a design community

After graduating from Florida State University and working professionally in Tallahassee, I started to realize that there were a lot of talented folks who were brought up in the community only to eventually light out for a larger zip code—taking their skills and passion with them. At the same time, I saw the community starting to rally around Domi Station, its growing co-working space and tech incubator,.

Wanting to pull those threads together, I quit my job at the large ad agency where I worked to form a creative collective called Foremost, which does international design work and supports local startups and events to help grow Tallahassee’s design community.

Today, when I’m not busy with my day job designing emerging technology at IDEO’s CoLab, I volunteer with Foremost. Our latest project, led locally by my business partners Jake Kiker, Lucas Lindsey, and Micah Widen, is a physical space created for the local community. We call it Happy Motoring.

Finding our station

It all started with an abandoned Esso gas station on the Southside of Tallahassee. I was ecstatic when Foremost bought it in 2015 to create a community space. The mid-century design of the building was (and is) beautiful, something to be preserved, and we knew that creating something locals would get excited about meant bringing them in as co-creators.

So we organized an event where Southside inhabitants could tell us what they wanted, inviting our friends at Street Art Tallahassee to put together a pop-up gallery and Juniors Roasted Coffee to host a campfire that would bring people together.

A shared vision

Part of what I wanted to do in creating Foremost was to show the city how many talented creatives live here. So, for the community event, I rallied five of the best young artists I knew in the illustration scene to battle it out in a Battle of the Boards (based on Ink Wars, an awesome event series put on every year in Georgia at Creative South.) The illustrators were each given an inspirational word and an hour and a half to fill an eight-foot board. The theme was "knockout."

We reserved two of the boards for the Southside community to write down their ideas—big, small, impossible, and plausible—about what the space might become.

Video by Conner Hill.

Building community comes from listening to diverse voices. Too often, we divide ourselves into bite-size neighborhoods or groups that lack a space for hearing each other out. We hope Happy Motoring will become that space—by giving everyone a chance to contribute, we’ll have all of the pieces we need to start building something local and real.

Want to do the same in your hood? It might be easier than you think. Organizations like the Knight Foundation fund grassroots urban innovation in cities. You can start small—create a meetup group, find someone with an empty lot and start a weekend market, or invite some food trucks and organize pop up events. Plant a community garden. Hold group bike rides. Whatever feels right to gain trust and start a dialogue in your hometown.

And if you’re interested in joining the next event in Tallahassee, be sure to follow our updates and join us for Happy Motoring Station’s official launch on March 8, 2018!

‍

When you hear about “design hubs,” your mind may not instantly jump to Tallahassee. But small communities have just as much passion for design as larger metropolises—they just lack the resources to attract the same attention. Though I live in a big city now (Boston), I learned a lot about the importance of community from working and growing up in small towns in Florida.

Sure the game is fun (although neither of us is very good), but what interested us more were the distributed locations of the courts around the city. Spread out across the city like sprinkles on a hipster cupcake, these tennis courts would be a great new way to explore San Francisco. And it would keep us busy for at least the next couple of years of Saturdays.

There was only one problem. I couldn’t find a decent tennis map of San Francisco. I wanted a map that was useful, of course, but also one that was well designed. So I decided to make one myself and give it to my wife as a birthday gift, with the goal of making it attractive enough that she would agree to hang it on our wall, but also useful enough that we would actually make it a centerpiece of our new Saturday hobby. And lastly, I wanted to visualize the MUNI bus routes to each court (since—oddly—riding the bus is another avocation that my wife enjoys).

My starting point was the only map I could find—a fantastically unattractive google map that shows the tennis courts of San Francisco in 2003 graphic design glory.

A tennis map of San Francisco in all its 2003 graphic design glory.

But this was a start! I downloaded it as a KML file. What’s a KML file? It stands for “Keyhole Markup Language” (I have no idea what this means), but what it does is important. With a KML file of the tennis courts, I could manipulate the data file in ArcGIS or QGIS, two enormously powerful pieces of cartography software. For anyone looking to get into amateur cartography, I strongly recommend GQIS. It works on a Mac (which ArcGIS doesn’t) and its cost (zero dollars!) outweighs its bugginess.

My next stop was DataSF.org, which has lots of great open source data, including maps of the city. What I was looking for here was something called a Shapefile, a geospatial data format that nerdy geographers use. I found one corresponding to San Francisco neighborhoods and another for San Francisco parks. Lastly, I found one for the MUNI bus routes of San Francisco.

Next it was off to QGIS to combine my various datasets into a single map.

First there were neighborhoods, then tennis courts, then parks, then bus lines.

With a couple of tweaks, I was able to label the tennis courts and isolate the MUNI bus lines according to route number, so that it looked less like a giant red spider web.

There are many a professional cartographer out there who would have kept playing in QGIS to make their map a bit prettier. But I’m a designer, and the sooner I’m able to get out out of QGIS and into the Adobe Creative Suite, the happier I feel (and the higher likelihood that the final design of the map will be something that someone is willing to hang on a wall). Luckily, QGIS has an option to export a file as an SVG file (a vector format that can be opened by Illustrator).

Post-export, the file looked like this.

You wouldn't hang this baby on the wall?

Wait, what? Why does it look worse? Totally natural and easily fixable. I isolated each layer (parks, tennis courts, MUNI Lines, neighborhoods) and then got to work playing around with colors and stroke weight and other good stuff, all of it so much easier because I was working with a piece of software most designers are familiar with.

At some point during this process, my day job at IDEO led me to Amsterdam. While there, I was inspired by the fantastically-designed Dutch train maps and a pro tip from my graphic designer colleague (Anthony Stimola) that the Dutch font of choice is DIN. Back in front of my computer, I created a look and feel for the map inspired by my travels.

A trip to Amsterdam inspired the look and feel for the finished map.

Next up was the laborious process of determining which bus lines one could actually take to each tennis court. My approach was 100% analog, starting from the top of the alphabetical list of tennis courts (Alamo Square) and marching straight through to the end (Youngblood Coleman), noting all of the bus lines that had a stop within reasonable walking distance to a court. I discovered that Helen Wills court in North Beach takes the prize as most MUNI-accessible tennis court (it's served by nine bus lines!), while five tennis courts around the city are served only by a single bus line.

The painstaking work of manually matching tennis courts to nearby bus lines.

Lastly, I considered how this map would be used. Of course I was hoping that my wife (and others) would find it attractive enough to hang on a wall in full analog glory. But this is 2018, and in order to be useful, the map also needed some connection back to the digital world. I added GPS coordinates and a clickable URL link to a Google Maps location for each tennis court.

A detailed view of the court's location and the corresponding bus routes

That’s it! My wife was happy with her birthday gift, and agreed to hang it on our wall. This past weekend, we used our new map to find the McCoppin Square court in the Sunset neighborhood. A few minutes after we started playing, two women arrived. Unfortunately, they would need to wait until our 30 minute time limit had elapsed. Eager to play, they asked us if we knew of any other tennis courts in the area. In fact, we did. I texted her a PDF of my new map and off they went to a nearby court. Hooray for the power of a good map!

My wife and I are city people, and our only family car is a Vespa that is much too slow to cross any bridges. So most weekends, if it’s nice out, we’ll chart an urban hike through San Francisco, targeting a different neighborhood and a different park. This has kept us occupied for the last few years. But they don’t call it the 7x7 for nothing—San Francisco is actually a small city. So my wife and I have started to play tennis.

7:10 AM: A Reluctant Jog

I run to Fort Greene Park, where I’m rewarded with a Seurat-like tableau of what seems like all the dogs in Brooklyn. I’m not a jogger, but I’m doing a six-week food-and-fitness challenge with coworkers. I'm grateful for the peer pressure, because it may be the only thing keeping me going.

7:45 AM: A Bristling Problem

As I brush my teeth and stare into my rusty medicine cabinet, I decide it’s time do something about the crowding in there. Since the space is so small, I probably can’t find an off-the-shelf fix, but maybe I can come up with a bespoke solution.

8:35 AM: Swift Passage

This sweeping view across the East River and the Manhattan skyline is my favorite part of the morning commute. It reminds me of the hope and excitement I felt when I first moved here 12 years ago. On the way, I steal some winter fashion ideas from my fellow commuters, noodle through a crossword on my phone, and listen to a podcast about the perils of multitasking.

9:10 AM: I Loaf This Place

IDEO New York sits on an invigorating corner of the city where tourists, tchotchkes, and street food collide with colorful chaos. Upstairs in the studio, the best part of the week awaits: A selection of delicious, crusty bread and a variety of spreads. It’s Loaf Day! Bonus: Someone has scrawled on the kitchen chalkboard: “Might as well face it, you’re addicted to loaf.”

10:00 AM: Team Standup

Our project is about investigating how cities and workplaces can support human potential and resilience. Today we’ve got a lot to do, including hosting some research participants in the afternoon. Deliberately coming together at the start of each day helps our team align and stay on track. In our project space, we take turns sharing our energy level on a scale of 1 to 10 and write a long punch list for the day.

10:30 AM: Download & Synthesis

We’ve spent the last few days traveling for research and speaking to lots of people in the field. We transcribe the important things we’ve learned, filling Post-it notes and boards with quotes and observations. We start move things around into clusters, looking for patterns that will lead us to insights. One theme we're seeing is how hiring systems often overlook valuable skills that are hard to quantify, kicking qualified applicants out of the process early. “So much of the hiring process is gaming to get past the system,” reads one quote.

11:30 AM: Scrappy Prototyping

We take a break and head to the office makespace. We think we might want to make something printed, so we grab some construction paper and markers and each create some prototypes. Should we make a gallery walk of posters? A tabloid-size newspaper printed on pulp? Maybe a giant book with an accordion fold!

12:30 PM: Fun With Lasers

It's lunchtime and I can’t stop thinking about the toothbrush situation. I make some quick sketches of a slot-in shelf that would allow the toothbrushes and toothpaste to sit above the floor of the cabinet, still be easily accessible in the short vertical space, and cover up the unsightly rust. I transfer the specs to Adobe Illustrator, grab some spare acrylic, and fire up the laser cutter. A few minutes and a little glue later, I’ve got a prototype of a tiny shelf that I can take home and try out.

3:00 PM: Learning from Users

As part of our research, we’ve invited a few people into the studio to share how they think about themselves in relation to their jobs. We take them through a hands-on exercise, asking them to pick objects that represent the key attributes and skills they value in themselves. As they describe their collections, we begin to see a rich picture of their work-life experiences and connections.

4:30 PM: Moodmaking

I gather visual inspiration for our deliverable. I troll design sites, look through books, and research brands and designers that have been on my radar recently. As I pin up images, I think about how the various elements of typography, color, photography, illustration, and scale could come together to create a unique look and feel for everything we’ll design for our client and the people they serve.

6:30 PM: A Melodic Exit

Time to head home. As he often does at the end of the day, Jared, our experience lead and sometime maestro, is slaying with some live guitar and singing. Today he’s accompanied by Kati on ukulele, and together they send us off down the elevator to the strains of "Wild Horses."

7:20 PM: Installation

It’s in! The tiny shelf is a big improvement, but in practice it’s still a bit tough to reach the toothbrush in the back. Next iteration needs more simplicity and maybe some better color matching. It’s back to the sketchpad for tomorrow’s prototype.

‍

When people ask me what I do for a living, what I really want to do is just show them. For me, graphic design is about finding the best way to bring ideas to life: posters, film, installation, animation, or even objects. So, a day at IDEO is following ideas wherever they may lead and getting distracted (I mean, inspired) along the way.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.