Money works differently in communities traditionally excluded from formal banking, which makes designing products that really serve their needs a very different kind of challenge. People who live in the last mile often prefer cash because it’s physical. They can see it, touch it, and access it at any time.

While digital money offers many benefits, such as securely sending money over long distances and accessing new forms of credit, many don’t trust it because the places where they can access digital currency have often been too far away.

In 2017, over 500 million adults lived more than three miles from a financial access point in eight emerging markets studied by the Gates Foundation. This may not sound like much of a barrier, but for those living in the last mile, it means having to close their shops, lose a day of earnings, arrange family care, and pay for travel, which can be time-consuming and difficult, especially during rainy seasons. For low-income people, the inaccessibility of financial services has been a deal-breaker for adopting digital money. On the flip side, banks, telecoms, and other companies struggled to reach these customers because their products were not inclusively designed for them, and their distribution models failed to scale in rural areas.

Amid these myriad challenges, IDEO and the Gates Foundation saw an opportunity to introduce innovative ways to provide access to digital financial services even in the most remote areas of the world. And to make bold new bets: Could we design new digital experiences centered around the financial needs of people in the last mile? What would happen if we mobilized hundreds of actors to develop new ways to address financial access at the last mile? What if we took the most exciting financial innovations that worked in East Africa and piloted them in South Asia—and vice versa?

Working with more than 70 partners, including local startups, corporations, including Google, Unilever, Telenor, Standard Chartered, and BNI, as well as IDEO.org’s Women & Money program, LMM adopted a collaborative, ecosystem approach to drive and scale new digital financial products and systems.

A few of the life-changing innovations launched by LMM and its partners include:

• Finja’s intuitive small-business app that helps micro-merchants in Pakistan access flexible, interest-avoiding Islamic credit  to order products from fast-moving consumer goods companies like Unilever. Finja now serves 45,000 merchants and reaches 10.2 million customers.
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• Accessing government benefits can be a challenge, especially when it’s through a mobile phone, so IDEO helped Indian startup Haqdarshak develop a robust digital experience for its 52,000 community agents to facilitate access for low-income people. The agent network—70 percent of whom are women—now serves more than 7.6 million families and has unlocked $2.2 billion in social benefits for those who need it most.
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• Making micro-credit nearly instantaneous was a solution that startup Kuunda offered to financial agents in Tanzania. IDEO helped adapt the product to deliver working capital for merchants in Pakistan. Today, Kuunda continues to grow across markets in Africa, totaling 6.1 million active users and distributing $1.1 billion in loans globally.   

While the LMM program officially concluded in 2024, lessons, tools, and case studies from the program are accessible on IDEO’s Financial Futures website. Those looking to catalyze equity and inclusion in digital financial services for the last mile can consult LMM’s Financial Confidence Playbook, the open-source Digital Confidence Toolkit (created in collaboration with Google), or the Gender Evaluation Framework, among other helpful resources.

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Over 1.3 billion people worldwide in poor and rural areas are excluded from formal financial services, including savings accounts, credit lines, and insurance, making it harder for them to move out of poverty.

34M

underserved users reached by 100+ new financial products, pilots, and prototypes

70+ LMM partners

including Google, Unilever, Grab, Standard Chartered, Cargill, Airtel, Celo Foundation, and BNI

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Multinational CPGs excel at creating popular, mass-market products for large countries. When they enter smaller countries like Peru, they often parachute their brands onto store shelves and skip consumer product testing altogether, largely relying on brand recognition to drive sales. This oversight presented Alicorp and IDEO with an opportunity: flip the script and invite young Peruvian women to work together with them to create a new hair care brand from scratch. Over the course of a four-year transformational journey, IDEO worked closely with Alicorp, adopting a “learn by doing” approach to foster a culture of innovation, launch a new brand, and drive growth for the company through consumer-centric design.

The collaboration began with an inspirational trip 10,000 miles away to Seoul, South Korea, the epicenter of global beauty trends. To expand their thinking, the Alicorp/IDEO team received K-Pop glow-ups and explored other cutting-edge beauty experiences. They were inspired by the Korean market’s unwavering focus on meeting the particular hair care and skin needs of Korean women.

Back in Peru, the team conducted multiple rounds of in-depth interviews with young women, teenagers, beauty influencers, and experts across the country. They learned about their beauty goals, personal care routines, and “mixto” hair texture. They heard about women’s struggles with regional weather—the Andean region’s extreme dryness versus Lima’s humidity and the city’s hard water. The research revealed that Peruvian women wanted natural products that worked hard, wouldn’t harm their hair, and celebrated what made them unique. They wanted a brand that spoke to them honestly and authentically. That represented and empowered them. That didn’t overpromise, underdeliver, or hold up European and American beauty ideals that didn't resonate with Latin American women like the multinationals did.

Armed with these insights, the Alicorp/IDEO team developed tangible brand prototypes for women to respond to during successive rounds of user research, including in a beauty pop-up store in Lima. The team shared various bottle types, ingredient mixtures, and brand positioning options. Should the new brand’s personality be an outspoken feminist or a gal pal? Au naturel or sophisticated? The iterative feedback cycles informed everything from brand strategy and ingredient recommendations to product line-up, brand and product naming, launch strategy, and digital activations.

The final design, Amarás (“you will love”), is a personal care line that centers the needs and aspirations of Peruvian women. Hitting shelves in 2022, its shampoos and conditioners feature local, bio-diverse ingredients, including mangoes, macadamia nuts, and goldenberries, that help address the specific hair texture needs of women in LATAM and the climate realities of the Andean region. The brand’s launch campaign included TV and print ads featuring Peruvian models from every region as well as commissioned murals celebrating local beauty by artists across Peru. Most notably, the unapologetically authentic Peruvian hair care brand became a TikTok sensation, garnering over seven million organic views and more than 300 viral videos from enthusiastic new fans.

Three months after its launch, Amarás seized a 7.5 percent share of the personal care aisle—a remarkable goal it had set for year three.Since then, Alicorp has continued to expand its creative capabilities, designing personal care products tailored to the cultural and beauty needs of Latin American consumers.

Alicorp launched numerous successful brand extensions across its food and home care categories, but was unable to crack the $340M USD hair care product market in its home country of Peru.

7.5%

Amarás’ share of the Peruvian hair care market 3 months after launch—a goal Alicorp had set for year 3

7M+ organic views and 300+ organic fan videos

created on TikTok during Amarás’  launch campaign

Thirty years ago, China-based Jack Technology started as a home sewing machine manufacturer. A decade ago, the innovative global leader began investing in robotics and exploring AI, a decision that positioned it well to address today’s urgent need for smarter manufacturing solutions.

Believing that a new, strategically positioned sub-brand could draw in larger, more premium global manufacturing customers, Jack Technology and IDEO set out to understand their needs. IDEO began by visiting more than a dozen garment factories across China, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, conducting in-depth interviews with factory managers, industrial engineers, pattern-making leaders, and frontline workers. It soon became clear: the apparel manufacturing industry is at a critical juncture. The way apparel manufacturers navigate the promises of intelligent technology—while addressing deep-rooted structural issues like labor shortages and working conditions—will shape the industry's development for years to come.

For premium clothing brands, garment factory compliance and worker well-being are priorities when selecting production partners, so many owners proudly showcased their improvement efforts. They discussed investing in quieter machines and air conditioning, enhancing lighting, adding greenery, and implementing no-overtime policies. Amid rows of identical sewing stations, the IDEO team noticed small human gestures, such as a small vase of flowers. As one operator said, “I just want to uplift myself during work.”

The research helped IDEO identify a core opportunity for differentiation. Create human-centered products and services that further enhance working conditions in large apparel factories, strengthen their ability to attract and retain talent, and drive the industry toward a more sustainable future. Through multiple rounds of co-creation with the Jack Technology team and key apparel-sector stakeholders, a clear brand direction for Aitu began to take shape: “Smart Machines, Uplifting People.”

Guided by this human-centered ethos, IDEO helped build a comprehensive brand system for Aitu. The idea of “uplifting people” and showcasing garment workers’ professionalism and skill is expressed throughout all brand communications, the industrial design of its smart sewing machines, and the interaction and industrial design of a humanoid sewing robot.

In the eyes of factory workers, this is the new work experience Aitu brings to life. Compared with traditional bulky industrial machinery, the clean lines and soft edges of Aitu’s new AI-powered sewing machines feel more like the professional office tools found in bright, organized workplaces. Concave surfaces and soft materials diffuse glare from overhead lighting, reducing eye strain, while clear interaction logic and icon-based visuals accommodate operators with varying levels of skill and education. AI technology, seamlessly embedded in the machine’s core functions, automatically adjusts parameters for different fabrics and tasks, allowing operators to achieve high-precision results with less effort. A soft halo-like light glows whenever the AI-assisted function is active, fostering users’ trust in both the technology and the AI-powered sewing machine as a whole. When hundreds or thousands of Aitu machines are arranged together in a factory, the overall effect is a modern, professional, and high-end work environment.

Working closely with Aitu’s robotics team, IDEO’s final design challenge was to bring a human-machine collaboration to life through a full-scale AI robot, AI10. The robot has an elegant, biomimetic silhouette. Its fabric-like outer finish features design elements commonly found in garment making, such as cutting and stitching lines, giving the robot the approachable look and the feel of a skilled tailor companion who can assist with simple, repetitive tasks. When AI10 is in operation, a circular light ring gently pulses at the sides of the robot’s ears as well as on the paired sewing machine’s display screen, clearly signaling the robot’s activity to its human co-workers.

In September 2025, Jack Technology debuted its new Aitu brand, along with its first AI sewing machine and a humanoid robot prototype, at a launch event at Shanghai Tower and at the China International Sewing Machine & Accessories Show. IFA Berlin, Europe’s largest trade show for consumer electronics, honored Aitu with a Gold Award for AI Product Innovation for seamlessly integrating AI technology and industrial design. Jack Technology’s humanoid robot is expected to go into full-scale production in 2026.

Before AI, the apparel manufacturing industry had experienced little fundamental change since the invention of the lockstitch sewing machine nearly two centuries ago.

2025 Gold Award for AI Product Innovation

from IFA, the world’s largest home and consumer tech event

Alicorp has direct operations in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile, manages export operations in more than 30 countries, and oversees over 150 brands. While its AlaCena sauces are ubiquitous in South America, the brand’s North American market primarily consisted of purchases made via Amazon by Peruvians living abroad. To help the CPG giant expand meaningfully and sustainably onto US grocery shelves—and achieve its ambitious $50 million retail sales goal in five years—Alicorp and IDEO collaborated on multiple projects over a two-year period. The partnership began in early 2020 with consumer research and product strategy, ultimately leading to the development of initial product branding, positioning for launch, and an in-market pilot in late 2021.

‍‍Through a combination of large-scale digital surveys and in-depth, in-person and remote research interviews, IDEO discovered that AlaCena’s Tari and Uchucuta’s hot sauce recipes resonated the most with US consumers. Made from native Aji Amarillo and Rocoto chili peppers ground using a traditional Andean “batán” technique, consumers appreciated their complex flavors and enjoyed how they enhanced, not overpowered, everyday foods like burgers and fries. The sauces’ authentic Peruvian culinary roots were also a key differentiator. In addition to consumers, IDEO consulted with industry experts—including executives from large-scale grocery chains and chief merchants of leading big-box stores—to explore retail and marketing trends and identify potential innovation partners for Alicorp in the US.

Based on the research, IDEO recommended a few changes to ensure a successful launch: Lead with the Tari brand, which was the most memorable and easiest to pronounce, and position it as an “everything sauce.” Change the packaging from a large plastic pouch to a smaller squeeze bottle to better align with consumers’ expectations and stand out on the inside of refrigerator doors. Adjust the product formulation to appeal to mainstream consumers looking for cleaner labels. And visually celebrate Tari’s Peruvian roots through bright colors, traditional textiles, and a llama, an animal closely associated with the Andes Mountains. In addition to these recommendations, IDEO provided a comprehensive go-to-market retail strategy that included potential US regions for launch, retail brokers, distributors, manufacturers, and R&D and pilot retail lab partners, as well as job descriptions for a new North American-based sales team.

While Alicorp worked on reformulation and packaging strategies, IDEO refined Tari’s initial branding strategy. Steeped in Peruvian aesthetics, the brand’s new look and feel featured a vibrant color palette, geometric patterns, and—of course—a friendly llama icon, which could also be found on all in-store point-of-sale items IDEO designed for Tari's pilot launch in late 2021.

The successful 12-week in-market pilot in Tom Thumb grocery stores gave Alicorp the confidence to have its in-house design team make the brand even bolder and more eye catching, and to launch two flavors, Amarillo Pepper and Rocoto Pepper, on Amazon and in over 50 retail stores in late 2024.

Since then, the popular sauces consistently rank among the top 50 percent of the fastest-selling products on US shelves, with 80 percent of sales revenue representing new business. In 2025, Tari expanded its offerings with three additional flavors: Zesty Verde, Tropical Kick, and Smoky Heat. Today, Tari is in transit to 3,000 major grocery stores, including Wegmans, Meijer, Central Market, and The Fresh Market, as well as available for purchase on Amazon.

Alicorp had a vision to expand its beloved and delicious hot sauces to the US market, but needed help fine-tuning the brand and product for an American audience.

3,000

major US grocers, including Wegmans and Meijer, have signed on to sell Tari hot sauces

80%

of Tari’s sales revenue represents new business, a significant expansion of the overall category

Ranked in the top 50%

of the fastest-selling products on US grocery shelves

1. Choose your creativity apps wisely

Try as many as possible, then edit them down to the few you use regularly and that can fit on your home screen.

If you're a writer, there are many notes apps that offer distraction-free writing (IA Writer, Daedalus). Day One is a great choice for people who use journaling as a creative practice. For photographers, there are a wealth of tools (pro-quality editing apps like VSCO, exotic image-modifiers like Prisma). My personal favorite is Over, which allows you to add text your photos via a simple, fluid interface.

For those running brainstorms in the non-digital world, 3M's Post-It app is a surprisingly effective way to capture a wall full of notes, then reorganize and export them to others apps. For doodlers, Procreate is the gold standard. (You might prefer to use this app on an iPad, unless you have eerily-thin fingers).

2. Curate inspiration feeds

Aside from tools, you’ll want apps that supply a steady stream of inspiration. Some obvious ones: the Kindle app for reading, Audible for audiobooks, and a well-designed podcast player (we recommend Overcast). Other good sources of waiting room material are the various read-it-later apps, such as Instapaper or Pocket, and if you’re still reading this post, the Longform app. One note of caution here: don’t overwhelm yourself with a pile of material that feels like work to get through. Delete regularly.

3. Audit your distraction

Ok, time to get real. How are you really using your phone? Are there certain apps or websites that you check repeatedly every day? Do you have habits that are vaporizing your time (We're looking at you, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit).

If so, engineer some limits on usage. One simple approach is to put all the apps that distract you on a separate screen, or even to hide them away inside a folder—putting a bit of friction between you and your addiction. Use that brief moment of additional swiping as a reminder to ask yourself whether you *really* want to go down the rabbit hole. Might there be something better to do with your time?

4. Support your focus

When you do decide to commit to a creative task, there are a number of apps that can help support you. Many swear by the Pomodoro technique, which involves a commitment to focus for 25min chunks, with 5min breaks in between. There are many Pomodoro timers in the app store, though Apple's stock clock app works just fine, too.

If you’re easily distracted, try a white noise app. Rain Rain provides a vast array of variations on the sound of raindrops falling from the sky, alongside airliner and washing machine soundscapes.

For a slightly less boring selection of background sounds, fire up Spotify and search “ambient playlists”. Brian Eno's Music For Airports is an excellent writing companion.

5. Change your morning ritual

With all your apps organized on your phone, you should be all set for a more creative relationship with your device. You only need one more thing: discipline. One trick is to think about your "first apps.” When you grab your phone in the morning or after getting on the bus, what are the first apps that you open? Do you have a set pattern? Are those really the apps that you want to be opening or are you a slave to habit? Try opening a creativity enhancer first and see how that changes your perspective for the day.

And sure, we know you're not going to write a novel while waiting in line for an ATM. But instead of losing yourself in a Facebook fugue state, maybe you could take a minute to construct a groove in Figure, or play around with a photo in Prisma. There. Didn't that feel good?

Illustrations by Felicia Chiao.

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Is the iPhone the greatest tool for creativity ever invented, or its worst enemy? The answer is... both. On the one hand, the smartphone is the Swiss Army Knife of writing, research, photography, and planning tools. On the other, it is an attention-sucking black hole, consuming all of your free time in a gaming and social media vortex. Here are a few ways to make that computer in your pocket best serve your creative goals.

That's starting to change. With 76 million Baby Boomers gazing down that long, winding road, aid-in-dying laws gaining ground (California's passed in June of this year), and an epic list of recent bestselling books on the topic, many written by doctors, death is having a moment.

Which led us to ask: How can design play a role?

To find out, we teamed up with local hospital network Sutter Health, the Helix Centre in London, and the Ungerleider Palliative Care Education Fund to launch OpenIDEO’s End of Life Challenge. Thousands of people around the world participated, submitting ideas for tools, services, and platforms that might improve the way we prepare for and navigate the end of life.

Some incredible ideas came across the transom. Imagine the relief of a soundscape that cancels out the maddening noise of bleeping machines in hospitals, or a digital platform that provides respite vouchers for family caregivers who desperately need a break.

Struck by the volume of ideas the challenge generated, we wanted to make sure the momentum didn't end there. A team formed to send out a call to a loose network of healthcare professionals, designers, artists, storytellers, organizations, and individuals to see if it made sense to join forces and build a public event.

Re:Imagine End of Life kicks off Monday evening, October 24th, 2016, and runs through the week in San Francisco. With multiple events every night in San Francisco and the East Bay, there are plenty of opportunities to join the conversation.

Tonight (10/24), at Grace Cathedral, Dr. BJ Miller, Dana Cho, and I will lead a workshop on how design can play a role in the way we die. OpenIDEO Challenge participants Brad Wolfe, Ken Rosenfeld, and Yoko K will share the ideas they are developing.

Other highlights include:

• Death over Dinner at the Battery
• An immersive VR art experience
• How Doctors Die, with Dr. Ira Byock and Dr. Joon Yun
• An evening of stories and music with You're Going to Die
• Open conversations at Zen Hospice Project

Want to know more? The event's organizers can be reached at hello@letsreimagine.org.

No one knows when it will happen. Could be 30 years. Could be next week. What we do know is that we are all dying. And that how we die—perhaps the most important event human beings share—is something we never talk about.

Featuring commentary from leading thinkers in art, philosophy, business, and design, the publication draws out the modern day relevance of the period’s most iconic paintings. Paul's essay reflects on Pieter de Hooch’s work, "A Mother Delousing Her Child’s Hair", also known as “A Mother’s Duty.” I asked him to tell us more about the book, and why it should be on every designer's wish list.

How did you get involved in the book?

Marcel was an artist-in-residence at our San Francisco office. He’s a world-class designer and we learned a lot from him. Later, his team approached me about this project. They sent me a list of paintings and asked if any of them sparked anything for me. The de Hooch was the first piece I saw and I picked it straight away. At IDEO, we often take shocking or not-beautiful things and make them poetic. So a girl having her head deloused immediately struck me as a great human truth. I love that de Hooch has made it beautiful and celebrated it and used all this classic technique around it.

You say design acts as a witness to our smallest moments of triumph and tragedy. How do we witness increasingly broad challenges, like poverty and citizenship?

Tackling a big problem doesn’t mean you have to look for the big solution. It’s always the tiniest thing that begins the catalytic chain that unlocks things. I firmly believe that looking for the tiniest moment at the center of the human experience is the place to start. So you toggle back and forth and try to look for things that are both human and universal, and personal and individual.

I was in Kansas City the other day talking about the plight of the citizen, and at the same time we were telling very specific stories of people that we knew or had met that day. We were able to talk about citizenship at one scale, and still refer back to individuals. Nobody reacts to a segmentation study or a bar chart or a number, everybody reacts to a story. You have to find the meta in the micro.

Art does this, too. De Hooch does a fantastic job of telling a story in which I can recognize myself. I remember sitting there and the feel of my mother’s hand in my hair. I think design is about asking people to feel it in their own skin, remember their own experience. Good art makes you see yourself in the frame, and that is our work these days, too—to help join together small and big and to help people see themselves inside the big system.

What was your first impression of the book?

It’s beautiful. I think beauty is very important. Having beautiful things around you makes you feel alive. In the age of digital—which these days has become almost synonymous with disposable—it’s really nice to stop the train for a minute and put something in your hands that has heft, and is an extremely lavish, unapologetically gilded object. To me it’s like holding a piece of jewelry or going to the symphony. The sensorialist in me is awakened by this book and I’m very proud to have been included in it.

Paul Bennett has always had an appreciation of the Dutch Masters: “I love the craft of them, actually, the feeling of the pictures.” So, IDEO'S Chief Creative Officer jumped at the chance to contribute to designer Marcel Wanders' latest project, Rijks, Masters of the Golden Age, a lavishly gilded coffee table book that pays homage to the 17th-century masterpieces hanging in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour.

That was 10 years ago. I was in high school in China, where a comic dork looked like this:

That ego-crushing was followed by a lot of self-loathing and Cheetos. But over time, the taste of Cheetos grew flat, and my hands started itching to doodle in physics class again. I decided to follow the method the editor suggested:

Before long, I was running my first monthly series in a halfway reputable magazine. That helped me edge up in the high school popularity rankings, and I got a few messages of encouragement from reader forums. Above all, though, the method helped me get into a state of comic flow; nothing else mattered when I was drawing. Even when I was failing in life and full of self-doubt, I could always fall back on my sketchbook.

Which brings me to Lesson #1:

But even when you’re following a proven method and trusting the process, there are a few dangers to watch out for when embarking on graphic novel projects. The Pain/Gain index, for example:

If the difficulty index K is too high, terminate! There are four levels of challenge in a graphic novel project:

Creating anything that requires more cognitive load than watching Game of Thrones after a full workday is challenging to begin with, which leads to Lesson #2:

For me, it’s about rewarding myself with things I’m fond of drawing: intricate landscape, fashion, and action scenes. Since I suck at writing dialogue, I’ve kept it to a minimum, and substituted in symbols and visual cues.

Here are four other things I learned while making graphic novels, so you don’t have to go through the same pain:

I’m at work on #6 at the moment, which is the most fun.

Coloring under progress

It’s the last step in a graphic novel I’ve been working on about living in a dystopian San Francisco of the future, where the scarcity of organic food leads its residents to fight to the death at grocery stores. The story is a dramatized observation of the on-going identity battles most San Franciscans face today. It’s a place where one feels simultaneously insider and outsider. You can be both a picky eater and burrito consumer, the root cause and the victim of jacked-up rental prices, and equal parts poseur and satirist of hipsterdom.

“San Franciscocoa” depicts a mundane but impossible feat of grocery shopping—buying a bag of cocoa powder that’s going into extinction.

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“Sorry, but it’s simply not up to the publishable standard.”

The editor handed me back my work, which took hundreds of hours to create. There was a long pause.

“You should try more live sketching,” she said, lowering her voice to soften the blow. “Build a strong foundation before finding your personal style.”

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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.