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.
  ‍
• 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.
  ‍
• 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

‍

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

Some of these you may know, but others may surprise you. These six hard and soft skills are not just things to look for in a data science hire, but are also things to cultivate in yourself to prepare for a successful and fulfilling career in data science. We made this list to help identify ideal students for our data science bootcamp, people who will make great students and great hires.

1. Statistical thinking

Data scientists are professionals who turn data into information, so statistical know-how is at the forefront of our toolkit. Knowing your algorithms and how and when to apply them is arguably the central task to a data scientist's work. However, to do this well can be an art and a science.

A good data scientist can model any data he is given and implement a toolbox full of algorithms to make statistically-informed predictions and recommendations. A great data scientist can smell something 'fishy' in the results she gets, senses that he needs to ask the client or stakeholder a few more questions before retreating to the code cave, and can make the difference between a game-changing insight and an expensive blind hunch.

Cultivating statistical thinking: Quantitative thinking sinks in the fastest when it is relevant to you. At Datascope, we keep our statistical thinking sharp by calling each other out on our bold claims, sometimes making friendly bets, and figuring out how to resolve it with statistics. For example, here’s one you can try on your friends: how many wikipedia articles contain the word “the”? All of them? Nearly all of them? We put the over-under at 90%, wrote a script to calculate the wikipedia document frequency of the word “the”, and shocked ourselves to find out the word “the” only appears in 85% of wikipedia articles.

2. Technical acumen

Data scientists write code and work with teams to produce tools, pipelines, packages, modules, features, dashboards, websites, and more. We write code on the back end and the front end. We do structured and unstructured. We sift through unfamiliar formats and legacy code, and "roll our own" tools when we can't find the solution we need.

A great data scientist has a hacker's spirit. Technical flexibility is as important as experience, because in this field the gold standards change with an alarming rate. Data scientists work together, love open source, and share our knowledge and experience to make sure that we can move at the speed of demand. If your data scientist is a quick study, you've made a sound investment beyond the current trend cycle.

Cultivating technical acumen: Write code, every day if possible. Learn about the tools you want to use, but don’t just read about them, try them. Follow a tutorial. Change it and see what happens. Break it. Check out someone’s projects that are written in a language you don’t know. If you read about a new tool or service that interests you, start by just making a “hello, world”. Work in small bites.

3. Multi-modal communication skills

When the analysis is finished running, most of the time the results aren't pretty. That's not to say they are unhelpful, but they are often trapped in opaque readouts, or in plots that are sensical to the expert's eye but hieroglyphics to the rest of the team and stakeholders. Algorithmic output has to be interpreted and communicated to make the leap out of the data science team and into the hands of the rest of the company to be put to service in alignment with their usefulness.

A great data scientist can contextualize and translate a problem and its solution to interested parties of wildly varying backgrounds using common ground, metaphor, skillful listening, and storytelling. This includes the written communication that goes into a statement of work or a report, visual communication for clear and intuitive plots and visualization, and spoken communication for presentations, project specifications, check-in meetings, and iterative design. If your data scientist can stop a meeting when it's clear that not everyone is on the same page, draw a sketch on the whiteboard and elicit consensus from a diverse team, you have a deeply valuable person on your team.

Cultivating multi-modal communication: Practice writing and talking about your technical projects to “normal” people. Edit yourself down to the important parts. Learning to edit yourself is key. Practice visual communication with “crayon wireframes”—we use these all the time, and they help us to think visually and iterate quickly. Sketches are also a great way to gut check if everyone is on the same page. If the words you’re saying seem to match each other, but the pictures don’t jive, you may have nipped some future problems in the bud.

4. Curiosity

So your data scientist is a technical and statistical whiz who can explain a Markov chain to a supermarket checker. What else separates the elite? The first of our trio of invaluable soft skills is curiosity. Many who are drawn to data science find most alluring the opportunity to work on a constant stream of new and challenging puzzles. They are people who have been asking "why" and "how" since their mouths could form the words.

A good data scientist will take a request, implement it, and deliver the prediction or analysis with confidence. A great data scientist will come back asking for access to more data, or to interview users, or to try something new in the next iteration, because something he did triggered that curious itch. Curious data scientists might have a disdain for machine learning competitions because they can't access all of the levers and choice points to ask questions and dig deeper. Masters of curiosity are quick to question their own assumptions.

Cultivating curiosity: Are there stupid questions? Actually, probably… yes. But who cares? In our experience they are largely indistinguishable from really great questions that no one has bothered to ask yet. So we don’t discriminate, and we ask many many questions that may or may not be stupid. Ask enough stupid questions and eventually you’ll land on something brilliant. Seek out people different than you to talk through ideas. Let your mind wander. Raise your hand and ask questions. And never assume that the experts see everything that you do -- don’t ignore that inner voice when it’s telling you something isn’t adding up. You might ask a stupid question (and learn), or you might ask a brilliant one (and discover).

5. Creativity

Creativity goes far beyond the obvious applications in communication and project design. Of course, a data scientist who can create an attractive and easy-to-grasp report or visual out of results that would take a couple of master's degrees to fully understand is a skill with enormous returns. Creativity provides the fuel for skillful communication, and that is not a hard sell.

Beyond aesthetics and communication, however, the best data scientists are creative problem solvers and have a peculiar relationship with the word "no." Your data scientist really wants to include those user-level data sets in the algorithm, but they are locked down in another silo within the company? She figures out a way to model their effects from the population statistics, or she generates a simulated report using dummy data to convince the c-suite that building a bridge between departments is well worth the risk or effort. The client wants to know how much foot traffic their potential new outlets will see, next Friday, and those data don't exist or aren't available? He uses publicly available transit data to build informed estimates and proposes a small and inexpensive sample-gathering project to build a turnstile-count-to-total-pedestrians conversion heuristic.

Great data scientists get annoyed by “no,” so annoyed that they find a way to get around it, over it, or through it, or they back up and take another path altogether. Design constraints are infuriating and intoxicating. A data scientist who says "no," followed quickly by "wait, hold on… let me think," just might be a great creative thinker.

Cultivating creativity: When you have an idea, do it, and let go of judgment. Foster an environment that invites questioning, thinking outside the box, and a “yes, but” conversational atmosphere. Creativity is ingrained in culture: give people around you the safety to “fail,” without judgement or criticism, and they’ll likely grant you the same. When you’re surrounded by people thinking and working creatively, you’ll find your own creativity flourishing, too.

6. Grit

In all of the characteristics and skills above, we've talked about technologies that appear, demand attention, and fade faster than songs on the top forty, messy data that should but don't quite fit into the model the client had in mind, dead ends, wrong turns, roadblocks, and red tape, teams full of mixed agendas and personalities; budgets, deadlines, clients, teams, and contractors; and the unicorn-magician-programmer-statistician who is supposed to bring it all together. Those who survive have a healthy inner store of grit.

All of these challenges and roadblocks could drive a reasonable person to an unplanned leave of absence. Grit is that inner drive that pulls us over obstacles, recasts setbacks as design constraints, propels us through fear of failure, keeps us walking through actual failure, helps us to resist the impulse to take things personally, and brushes that dirt off our shoulders. When grit is working, we’re less competitive so we can encourage and learn from each other. We get the taste for tackling the new and the unknown.

Cultivating grit: Let go of perfectionism. We encourage ourselves to think of quick and dirty ways we can resolve problems or test solutions. We share our early efforts and listen to the feedback we get. Keep in mind that every expert has to start as a beginner, and a beginner trying to masquerade as an expert fools no one but himself. Don’t be afraid to let your warts show—what seems like a weakness, handled properly, is a powerful tool for leadership and growth.

What does it take to be a great data scientist? We thought long and hard about this while we were designing a data science bootcamp for Metis.

Read the article online at Harvard Business Review.

Leaders now look to innovation as a principal source of differentiation and competitive advantage; they would do well to incorporate design thinking into all phases of the process.

~Tim Brown

Want to dive deeper? Learn more about design thinking with IDEO U.

In an article for Harvard Business Review, IDEO CEO Tim Brown shows how thinking like a designer can transform the way we develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.

“While I had done a good deal of research and was familiar with evidence-based design in an academic setting, I had little knowledge about design-related career paths,” she explains, a scenario she sees as typical for a lot of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) students. “I think there are only certain paths presented to you as viable,” she says, “which is unfortunate because I think a lot of the systems and things that need redesigning disproportionally affect people of color.” And yet less than three years later, the public health and sociology major would find herself working on an IDEO design-research team.

She got there viaColor by Design (CxD), RepresentEd’s newest fellowship designed for BIPOC in partnership with IDEO. The first cohort of design-research fellows will finish the program in June, and the experience has been groundbreaking: for IDEO and, we think, for the fellows, fewer than five of whom came to the fellowship with any previous design experience. That’s, well, by design.

“The program is about increasing access to design—not just to IDEO but the design industry as a whole,” says RepresentED CEO and founder Rashida Hanif. “CxD has served as a proof of concept that someone can go from zero design knowledge to designer and bring value from day one.”

After completing a three-month part-time professional training course that ran from September through November 2021, the 14 fellows have been integrated as full members of the IDEO community during their six-month fellowship. They’ve been working alongside IDEO employees on key client projects, among them engagements with a major tech company, projects around access to abortion, and the reimagining of the student experience at colleges like NYU.

They’re a month away from wrapping up, and IDEO had planned to keep the ball rolling by launching the application process for the next round of fellows this month. But we’ve decided to take a beat and will be postponing the next cohort until 2023. It’s not hesitation, it’s preparation. Together with RepresentED, we have a shared eagerness to keep growing and expanding, but that’s paired with a shared commitment to scale the program in a thoughtful way.

So many rich learnings have emerged since September. Rather than try to synthesize them and make adjustments in real time, we want to spend more time with our questions and give ourselves space to put our insights to work.

One of the biggest ones is that the fellows only participated in design research. We want to expand and scale CxD to other disciplines—perhaps communications design and experience design—and other divisions of IDEO have made it clear that they’d love to welcome fellows of their own. The opportunity is there, but it’ll take some additional work to put the pieces in place.

We’d also like to finesse the bootcamp aspect, the three months of training that precede the paid, full-time fellowship. As it stands, the bootcamp is largely focused on design thinking as a whole, with modules about design research, methodology, etc. We realized some of our fellows need deeper design research support, and we’d like to get ahead of that earlier in the bootcamp.

Getting the foundation right is important, and we are glad to be able to provide it. One fellow in this cohort was a freelance graphic designer who worked as a bartender. He told me CxD has changed the trajectory of his career and his life—and that’s a real gain for the industry. The fellows may not have deep design backgrounds, but they bring rich and varied experience to the table. Another worked as a doula and felt ready for a career change. Yet another worked on the White House’s National Economic Council. Others did content marketing for international fragrance companies, spearheaded community initiatives to inspire change, and co-founded creative agencies.

The reality is that if not for a program like this, IDEO would have probably overlooked their applications. There are so many barriers to entry within the design industry, and Sasha puts it so well: “It’s not that the fellows don't have experience that would make us successful designers, but that what is seen as relevant experience is often so narrow.” RepresentED has an uncommon ability to take a wide view, which has in turn allowed us to welcome folks whose perspective is missing.

The design industry has long been a homogeneous one (IDEO is no exception, with a U.S. community that is still only 5 percent Black, less than 1 percent Indigenous, and less than 7 percent Hispanic/Latinx.) We needed to expand access, and RepresentED excels in recruiting non-traditional candidates and among communities of color.

“Our sweet spot is people who studied the social sciences and humanities, the ones always told, ‘What are you going to do with that major?’ The ones who are told they have to get a graduate degree, or go into academia,” says Rashida. “They often aren’t aware of how vast their options are and how to present their skills to the job market as viable candidates. English students are incredible writers. Anthropologists understand people and culture. Transfer students bring an amazing life context to the table. We teach them how to use human-centered design to their advantage.”

She thinks of these candidates in a striking and insightful way: “I often feel like we live in a society where we like to throw away the beautiful things. I see them as this collage of beauty. There’s more of that than there is of the status quo.”

And CxD is proving to be a viable way to shift that status quo. It has also shifted things in IDEO’s internal structure. The program touches so many different parts of IDEO—the marketing team; team building, which oversees project teaming and staffing; IDEO’s Research and Insights cohort; and IDEO U, IDEO’s online learning platform. In the process of building up the program we’re learning how to create more equitable structures and thinking about how we onboard employees differently, too.

The fellows very intentionally have a strong network of support. In addition to their interactions with the CxD leadership team, each is assigned a manager and a craft mentor as well as a steward, an IDEO designer who holds a non-evaluative role and creates a safe space for the fellow to take any challenges to. As Sasha puts it, “It helped with building creative confidence. The attitude is, ‘You’re supposed to be here, but if you have a question you know where to go.’”

As for Sasha, she spent 14 weeks on the IDEO design research team that partnered with a major baby retailer to reimagine the registry experience. “The video of a Zoom interview I led with a parent—the first interview I had led—was used continually throughout the project,” she recalls. “That always felt like a rewarding moment: being reminded that those were insights I helped to uncover and the affirmation it provided that I had done a good job.” She moves to a new project this week.

“I’ve developed confidence in myself as a designer. I’ve been equipped with this toolbelt of skills that will be useful no matter where I end up,” Orewa says of her experience. “Last week I had a call with someone who saw I was a part of CxD but had a background in public health and reached out on LinkedIn to ask questions. That makes me excited, that there are people like me who are learning that the opportunities are out there. It’s the ripple effect.”

The next CxD cohort will launch by the end of 2023. We will share updates as we get closer to the recruitment season. If you have any questions, please contact info@representedleadership.org.

‍

By the time Sasha Orewa graduated college in 2019, she had been exposed to plenty of things. Design research wasn’t one of them. Ditto UX, interaction design, or experience design.

What should a passenger’s experience feel like? How much space should be allocated to each passenger? What were the tradeoffs? The folks in marketing had one idea, while the folks in engineering had another. Spreadsheets were involved, but we weren’t making much progress.

Our project team didn’t have all of the answers either, but we thought of one way that we could help. We took over a section of our San Francisco studio and spent a week building a full-scale shell of a plane out of wood, foam core, and cardboard. Our intention was to create a dynamic space for physical and digital experimentation. We then invited our clients to host their next meeting inside the “plane.”

Once inside, the trade-offs were clearer. The team could picture what different seat configurations might feel like; they could move things around as they visualized various options. Prototyping revealed a level of granularity and specificity the team simply couldn’t access over Zoom or through conversation. What started out as a series of abstract questions suddenly became tangible.

When you work in the mobility space, the projects you work on are big—literally. It’s not just the size of a car, but the size of a train, an airport, even a city. While creating low-fidelity prototypes of products and systems of this magnitude might seem impossible, prototypes are a tried-and-true tool for learning about your customers and refining your product design. They are also equally valuable for learning, aligning, and collaborating as an organization. When it comes to larger-than-life challenges in the mobility space, here are three ways prototyping can help.

Prototyping breaks down barriers

Many established mobility companies have spent decades developing processes that have allowed them to build safe, high-quality products at scale. But those methods don’t always work when adapting to a rapidly shifting market. When it came time for our team to work with a leading automaker to rethink the future of the commercial van, we all knew it would demand new ways of working. Together with their team, we built a new collaboration space in the heart of their engineering building to shake people out of their usual workflow. The walls were covered with pictures of vans in action, quotes from potential users, and in-progress work. In the middle of the space sat “the rig,” a purposefully unfinished prototype van made from modular aluminum and hand-cut cardboard parts. This was far from the polished models of car shows.

Instead of putting this space under lock and key, the team put up posters throughout the engineering building inviting folks to join them. When that effort didn’t get much traction, a member of the team proposed an idea. He simply wedged the door open and posted a sign that declared: “open door policy.” The message was simple. We wanted people to build with us. And the people, and the ideas, followed.

Unfamiliar faces started to pop into the space and populate the prototype van with new mirrors, door handles, and smart sensors while other groups debated strategy across the room. What started with a single project space grew, eventually morphing into a dedicated innovation lab that is collaborating across the organization to tackle the future of mobility.

Prototyping challenges assumptions

Several years ago, IDEO worked with Toronto Pearson International Airport to revitalize the airport’s operations from the passenger experience to the baggage handling process. Baggage handling operations are particularly important, as they’re a key metric for measuring airport efficiency, service quality, and performance. They’re also very complicated. Baggage handling involves multiple organizations, thousands of contract workers, and even more suitcases, moving between planes and carousels all around the world.

As contractors, baggage handlers aren’t often brought into the process to help redesign operations. But their perspective is invaluable. So together, IDEO and Toronto Pearson decided to hold a “baggage olympics” for operations employees, passengers, and baggage handlers to test, build, and improve prototypes of early baggage handling ideas. They landed on a simple but effective solution: color-coded signs, clear iconography, and guidance on where baggage should be placed. Not only did the exercise streamline airport operations, but it also changed everyone’s idea of how different groups of people could work together and how operations should work in the future.

As Darin Juby, Director of Baggage Services, told IDEO: “The work to reimagine baggage handling taught us how to prototype and collaborate—it reprogrammed us with a new mindset and way of working. When the pandemic hit two years later, because we had laid the groundwork, we were able to pivot quickly and cost-effectively in the midst of an unforeseen crisis."

Prototyping reveals unexpected needs

Bringing in potential customers to test out prototypes is a pretty common practice among design teams. But often in the automotive space, users do not have a chance to interact with prototypes until much later in the design process. Even then, they are often restricted to testing out highly refined models in tightly controlled sessions.

It’s far more rare to bring parents and children into your design space and invite a range of stakeholders with different perspectives, hypotheses, and critical questions to watch them play in an early prototype firsthand. But that’s exactly what we did with our partners at one of the world’s largest automobile manufacturers.

While we had been talking about bringing people into the lab, it wasn’t until families were engaging with our designs that we realized just how eye-opening it was. In one session, we watched alongside marketing, design, strategy, and product development leaders as a family played a game in the front of the car. Halfway through the game, a child pulled her mom to the back for some one-on-one time, pretending they were looking out at stars.That seemingly simple interaction inspired our team.

The team renamed the prototype Stargazer, and it helped changed the conversation about these vehicles. Decision-makers for this vehicle portfolio were bringing an empathy for the lives of these users into meetings, and talking more about how to foster quality family time than vehicle features and functions. Seeing our prototype in action extended customer empathy and understanding beyond marketing execs, ensuring that teams across the multinational organization were considering user needs from the outset.

Prototyping unlocks possibilities

Throughout my work on mobility projects at IDEO, prototyping has been the best tool for shaking up entrenched thoughts about how teams should work together. It not only provides teams with an opportunity to test assumptions and generate radically new ideas, but it also helps spark alignment and build confidence across disparate stakeholders. In some projects, embracing prototyping has even led to the development of new ways of working and labs that live on far beyond the launch of a product.

For those tackling challenges within the mobility space, and are eager to experiment with prototyping, start small. Take over a conference room, invite different voices in, construct a cardboard model, and watch your organization transform.

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Late last year, we sat on a Zoom call with executives at an organization redefining commercial aviation. They had some critical decisions to make about their first commercial aircraft.

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.