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

We’ve brought back thousands of photos and videos and hundreds of Post-its. As we stare at the sea of notes, I feel stuck and a little panicked. Are there answers in this data soup?

This messy moment in the design process is called “synthesis,” when designers start to distill all our research into tangible possibilities. Synthesis can feel ambiguous, stiff, and chaotic all at once; the secret is to keep moving forward any way you can.

My way of conquering the chaos is a method I call “sketch synthesis.”

Here's my sketching process for this project, which you can adapt for your own team.

Step 1: Pare it down

First, I put the notes from each research interview, observation, or experience onto separate poster boards. Then, I took a step back and distilled the information from each of these boards into just four or five sketched post-its.

These sketches are from our interview with an extreme commuter. The express his ideal travel experience: an environment that brings the outside in and serves as an extended coworking space.

Sketches can feature characters, icons, or graphs—anything that provides a helpful cue for you. You don’t need to be a great artist to sketch. The idea is to summarize what you’ve learned visually, even if those visuals are stick figures!

Step 2: Cluster it up

Next, I took another step back and turned my individual sketches from each poster board into a series of sketch clusters, grouped around emerging themes.

This cluster is focused on the theme of "place." It's a mind map of sorts, featuring images that represent a range of experiences, interviews, and secondary research we uncovered related to the theme.

Don’t be afraid to discard the ideas that aren’t standing out. The aim of this step is to sort and refine what you’ve learned, using sketching as a filter.

Step 3: Talk it through

I invited the rest of the team to review the sketch clusters with me. Working together, we turned the clusters into concrete design questions that could help us get tangible, fast.

The goal is to share your sense-making with others to figure out if you’ve captured the essence of the research, or need to go back to your original poster boards and find the missing thread that ties it all together.

These sketch clusters helped the team gather our thoughts and articulate the questions we hoped to explore with our client in the next phase of the project. They captured our research insights and pointed the way to new transportation innovations.

For me, sketch synthesis is a way of bringing clarity and momentum to tough moments in the design process. Plus, drawings are a natural starting point for design, which the team can build on and our clients can easily understand.

Sketching also creates a common language for designers to communicate. At IDEO, people come from all around the world. On this team, I worked alongside designers from Germany, South Korea, France, and the U.S.

While I’m drawn to sketching, you might have a natural inclination to express yourself through role play, writing, film, or data. There are no limits to the creative problem-solving skills that might help your team synthesize.

The secret is to keep moving toward the answers, even when things feel messy—and to have a little fun along the way.

This post was adapted from a talk I presented for Mixed Methods, hosted at Airbnb in San Francisco.

It’s Monday morning and our design team is back after three weeks on the road researching the future of shared vehicles. We've soaked up a ton of inspiration by talking to transport experts and observing commuters.

As someone whose profession is to design new experiences with technology, I find this thought-provoking. It’s a current and widely-experienced example of something that has always been true of new technology: It has as much potential to have negative impact as positive. Which way it goes has always been more about the path that we put the technology on than the technology itself.

When I was asked to speak at TEDxGlasgow this year, I took the opportunity to explain how design can help. There are straightforward things that we can do to make sure that our technology brings out the best in us. Watch my talk below.

David Webster speaks at TEDxGlasgow.

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We all have love-hate relationships with those buzzing bricks of aluminum in our pockets. On the one hand, they have the incredible power to connect us to people, information, and knowledge. But on the other, that constant access can become constant distraction, detaching us from real moments that matter.

As an org designer, my job is to use the tools of design to enhance organizational culture, boost collaboration and teamwork, improve structures and processes, enable learning and development, and create a sense of purpose and belonging. Then, I sleep.

6:30am: Morning run

If I’m going to help inspire other people, I need to start by getting inspired myself. For me, that comes from running in Prospect Park twice a week. Being near trees elevates my mood and restores me. It’s the only time during my day in urban New York City when I can actually smell plants and dirt.

8:30am: The Book-lyn Bridge

I take the subway from Brooklyn, where I live, to our New York City office. I don’t mind the commute because I can read two to three books a week. It’s often a chance for me to dive into new perspectives on culture, leadership, and collaboration. Reading Jake Knapp’s book Sprint sparked so many ideas, I asked him to speak with our clients—and he did!

10:00am: Get the gears turning

Once I’ve settled into our studio in the West Village, I lead a quick morning standup in our project space with my teammates before our clients join us. We often work side-by-side with our org change clients, either by hosting them in our project space or by going to their offices (or both!).

11:00am: Disrupt your wallet

In this project, we’re helping our client organization launch an internal user-centricity team. This team will help train employees to better understand the way their customers feel about and use their products. Today we are kicking off a workshop with a new group of employees. To teach them about human-centered design, we’re doing an exercise where they split up into pairs and redesign each other's wallets. If you want to improve an object that people carry with them all day every day, you’ve got to listen closely to their needs and idiosyncrasies.

12:30pm: Lunchtime making

Every Thursday at lunch, the entire studio comes together for a craft project to engage our senses and inspire us. We call it “Maketime.” Today, our clients are joining us to do blind contour drawings. My colleague Loren is leading the session. We sit at tables facing another person. Loren asks each of us to draw the person across from us without looking down at our paper and without lifting up our pen. Then we share our drawings, laughing at the results. This technique helps build hand/eye communication.

2:30pm: Remote synthesis

So much of org design is about communication. But many companies have teams that work remotely. This client's core team is based in the tri-state area, but the extended team is farther away. So, this afternoon, my teammate Nili and I are leading a session with our extended client team to synthesize the research we’ve done together. We’ve designed a series of concepts and tested them out with employees in the organization. Based on that feedback, we’re positioning the concepts on a 2x2, where one axis shows how desirable the concept was for employees, and one axis shows how feasible the concept was to implement.

3:30pm: Meet them where they are

We head out to the client’s office to meet with the core team. In order to make sure we’re practicing the collaboration that we preach, we make sure to spend part of the week in the client’s offices, instead of always asking them to come to us. We request a reserved workspace so we can all sit together. We’re discussing how we’ll set up this new user-centricity team: who will be on the team, what roles and responsibilities will they have, how will they work together, and whom will they need to hire.

4:30pm: Getting physical

If you haven’t noticed yet, much of my day revolves around communication and inspiration. I love that organizational design involves getting deeply curious about how a company works (informally and formally) both by listening to teams as they collaborate and by watching for the intangible behaviors that come out in meetings and hallway conversations.

One of my favorite activities to do with clients is Creative Tensions. We put a slide on the screen that prompts them to make a choice. For example:

“Purposefulness: When it comes to meaningful change that leadership and employees want to make in the world…”

There’s lack of clarity or disagreement <------------> There is alignment

We ask people to move with their bodies to one side of the room or the other to articulate their answer. All of a sudden you can physically see all the spectrum of ideas and philosophies in the room. Then, we ask a few people to share why they are standing where they are standing.

5:30pm: Write it out

After a full day of collaborating, observing, and facilitating, I’m back at the office to write an article with my colleague Hailey. Since organizational design is a new field and can feel like a black box (even to other designers at IDEO), we are always thinking about ways to share how we work. We're working on an article about using metaphors to uncover organizational dynamics (a colleague snapped this photo for the cover of the emo rock band we’ll start one day).

6:30pm: Signing off

One more check in with the clients over Slack, and I’m headed home. Eat, Sleep, run, org design. Repeat.

When people ask me about what I do for a living, I say that I help people and teams do their best work. But that’s a little vague, so here’s the nitty gritty...

I didn’t start out working at an enlightened company—I started out working in the art world, in upscale art galleries, private art clubs, and various museums. My surroundings were beautiful, but I was miserable. The politics and sexism were intense. I never felt like I could speak my mind.

Luckily, I eventually landed at IDEO. For the past 10-plus years, I’ve helped create events, experiences, and rituals that keep our studio culture healthy and our designers happy. Now, I’m Co-Director of the experience team in Chicago. Our mission: Design for belonging.

My team and I use tools like our studio space, food, events, experiences, and rituals to help make everyone who comes through our doors feel welcome, supported, and empowered to do the best work of their lives. We do things like throw spur-of-the moment pop-ups that break up the afternoon, and plan group lunches so people will eat together—like a family—instead of having sad lunches alone at their desks. We even plan crafting sessions and inspirational field trips.

Not convinced that thoughtful extras like spa water and storytelling events can actually help fuel the ideas that drive revenue? Consider the case of Uber.

Remember Travis Kalanick, the former CEO?

The deposed chief executive set the tone for the company’s culture. Under him, Uber flouted local laws and criticized competitors in its quest for success. Thanks to the company’s pervasive “bro” culture, sexual harassment and discrimination were rampant. Employees were pitted against one another, and management turned a blind eye to infractions from top performers.

Contrast Kalanick’s approach to leadership and culture to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who took the company’s reins in 2014. He inherited a company lacking innovation—and relevance. Microsoft’s stock performance was flat. His goal was to shift the culture from “know-it-all” to “learn-it-all.” “Microsoft’s culture had been rigid,” he wrote in his book, Hit Refresh. “Each employee had to prove that he or she was the smartest person in the room. The culture change I wanted was centered on exercising a growth mindset every day.”

Three years later, not only are employees happier, more innovative, and empathic, but the company has generated more than $250 billion in market value—more than Uber, Airbnb, Netflix, Spotify, Snapchat, and WeWork—combined.

As an experience director, I’m laser-focused on making sure employees feel safe to fail and explore, that they feel connected to others, and that they have what they need to solve problems and come up with innovative solutions. My job is to set the conditions for great work.

So how do you actually do that? Here are five ways to jump-start your company culture.

1. Define and build on your company’s cultural values

Values are the compass that an organization uses to select staff members, reward current employees, and make business decisions. If you’re just starting a company and need to define your values from scratch, Greenhouse, the company that designed the recruiting software IDEO uses, has a helpful culture mapping exercise to help get you started. Need further inspiration? Check out Google’s values: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” “It’s best to do one thing really, really well.” “Fast is better than slow.” “Great just isn’t good enough.”

2. Leverage naturally-occurring behaviors

Put on your anthropologist hat. What interesting or unusual things are people already doing around the office that you could build on? (It’s faster and easier to build on existing behaviors than to encourage new ones.) At one company, I noticed people were wary of talking to strangers. Unfortunately, since it was a co-working space, almost everyone was a stranger. I also observed that people would use the kitchen as a shortcut to the bathroom, and that it was a neutral zone—no one group owned it. High foot traffic + no ownership = opportunity to spark casual conversation and community! You can do what I did—look for unused spaces in your own workplace and use questions on Post-it Notes to spur random conversations—or move shared resources like printers or snacks to the middle of the space instead of tucking them away in a corner.

3. Identify and empower cultural mavens

As an experience director, I’m always look for new collaborators. Though some cultural experiences can come from the top down, others work better when they come from the bottom up. They feel more authentic. I’m always trying to identify new cultural mavens within our organization, and I empower them by giving them some time, money, or resources to bring their ideas to life. For example, at IDEO, we noticed a few of our designers were natural teachers and always went out of their way to show others how to learn a new skill. This aligned perfectly with two of our company values—“Learn from Failure” and “Make Others Successful”—so we gave those designers a budget and set them free to build on their ideas. Now we regularly have Nerd Nights where people learn to code, and Shop Class where we make things like concrete planters and leather wallets.

4. Prioritize face-to-face interactions

Digital tools are efficient, sure, but the only way to build authentic, human relationships is face-to-face. Period. When you find yourself using a digital tool to communicate with an individual or a group, think: Could this be done in person instead? Am I hiding behind this tool, this emoji? Encourage others to get out from behind their screens, too. One easy way? Get people to eat their meals together.

5. Design meaningful rituals

We participate in rituals in institutions, politics, and religion all the time. But they’re not commonly talked about in the world of business, even though they’re a simple way to make cultural values tangible. At IDEO, I was part of a team that started IDEO Stories, a Moth-like live storytelling event designed to help teach our designers how to tell better project stories. After the first event, it became clear it wasn’t just a good way to learn a new skill—it was a way to celebrate an individual’s unique backstory and unite the community.

For the last seven years in Chicago, we’ve also held an Annual Studio Awards party, an Oscars-inspired evening where the community votes on award-worthy project work from the past year. Categories are tweaked each year to incentivize emerging behaviors that are beneficial to our business.

Have ideas for rituals of your own? Share them with us on Twitter, so we can inspire each other.

Often, people want to write culture off as a slew of perks you might find at tech companies. But really, culture is about creating an environment that makes it possible for people to work together to come up with innovative products and ideas—the same products and ideas that drive revenue.

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.