Over more than a century of leadership in the food and beverage industry, The J.M Smucker Company has expanded its range of products to maintain its relevance and address market demand. Today, the company leads numerous categories, with beloved products like Jif, Milk-Bone, and Folgers, which are the top choices of millions of Americans. By growing and diversifying their brands over the decades, Smucker has successfully weathered major shifts in consumer habits and technology. Today, though, CPG companies are experiencing unprecedented disruption, and leaders at Smucker understand that the escalating pace of change will require more than just new products.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company recognized the need to identify new market opportunities and establish practices that put innovation and growth at the heart of their business. And he saw the potential to bring those goals to life through his relationship with IDEO.

WATCH: Balancing innovation and efficiency through design has helped Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement at The J.M. Smucker Company, brave the unfamiliar, transform organizations, and ultimately bring game-changing ideas to market faster.

Geoff has stewarded a close partnership with IDEO for over a decade and throughout roles at numerous organizations. Together, Geoff and IDEO have worked on 25 projects, beginning while Geoff was VP of Marketing at Big Heart Pet Brands, and continuing on throughout his career at The J.M. Smucker Company. By working with IDEO to adopt a design thinking approach, Geoff has enabled collaboration across teams and empowered his organizations to find new ways of working that result in measurable business impact. For The J.M. Smucker Company, the partnership has brought creativity and human-centered design to the forefront of its operations, strengthening its ability to bring new products and brands to market and create a pipeline of growth.

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company has shifted to embrace growth and innovation as a mindset throughout the organization to bring more consistency to the innovation process.

Looking to the past to creatively connect with the future

As an example of this, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company suggested to IDEO that they explore how Folgers, America’s leading at-home coffee brand, might resonate more deeply with a millennial audience. Design research revealed that the mindset of today’s millennial coffee drinkers aligned with Folgers entrepreneurial brand roots. The teams collaborated to create a new concept: a brand called 1850 and an end-to-end, go-to-market product experience, including packaging, retail, and merchandise. 1850 hit shelves in 2018 and has since been reported by IRI Advantage as the top launch in the Coffee Category for 2019.

Frankly, I don’t think innovation gets any easier. You just get a little more comfortable with the discomfort, and that’s when the work starts to get consistently better.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

Creating an innovation pipeline that’s inspired by consumers’ needs

With 1850 underway, Geoff and The J.M. Smucker Company continued to invest in human-centered design to drive new offerings. The next collaboration with IDEO explored how Jif, the iconic peanut butter brand, could extend beyond the jar and become more readily accessible and appealing to busy parents who want to feel confident about the snacks they give their kids.

The design team was moved by the challenges that parents face: They want the best for their kids, but struggle to choose between what’s wholesome and what’s convenient on a daily basis. The ideal foods are filling, nutritious, and energizing, but often take more time to prepare and aren’t backpack or carpool-friendly. On the other hand, more convenient options tend to be full of empty carbs. Based on this insight, IDEO and Jif decided to tackle the snack-time parenting struggle. The IDEO and Jif teams worked side-by-side to prototype multiple product ideas and formats and tested them with on-the-go families to ultimately create Power Ups.

Available at over 200 retailers worldwide and online at Amazon, Jif Power Ups make wholesome, delicious grab-and-go snacking possible for kids and parents alike, across products ranging from Soft Baked Bars to Creamy Clusters, which are filled with peanut butter and rolled in whole grain oats. All are made with peanuts as the first ingredient and contain no high fructose corn syrup. Since going to market in 2018, Jif Power Ups has been named the top innovation launch in the Snack Bars category by IRI Market Advantage.

Design thinking underpins everything we do.

Geoff Tanner, Senior Vice President & Corporate Officer, Growth & Consumer Engagement, The J.M. Smucker Company

WATCH: The J.M. Smucker Company is on a transformational journey, committed to three pillars of growth: Lead in the best categories, build brands consumers love, and be everywhere.

The J.M. Smucker Company has experienced accelerated growth and speed to market by testing bold new ideas and evolving the role of innovation at the company. Design thinking and consumer empathy have permeated the organization’s new product development process, making it easier to uncover sharp, human-centered insights that lead to thoughtful and uniquely differentiated brands in a competitive, ever-shifting, and overcrowded industry. The work has fueled Geoff’s vision to inspire a culture of innovation at the company so that it can move at the speed of consumers and remain a best-in-class family of brands for future generations.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Oakland, California. A line of lunchtime diners snakes out the door of dosa by DOSA. Upon entering, eaters are greeted by the smell of tangy dosa—a large paper-thin crepe made from a fermented batter of rice and lentils—and sweet, spicy chai. Turquoise chairs pop against a floor-to-ceiling mural by Oakland artist Namita Kapoor that transports diners to Chandni Chowk, one of the busiest markets in Old Delhi, as if enjoying their food at a local vendor.

In 2003, Emily and Anjan Mitra spent their honeymoon in India, savoring the street food of Anjan’s childhood in Mumbai (often still called Bombay). After returning to San Francisco, they found themselves longing for those distinctive flavors and dishes. Realizing that most Bay Area diners had never seen nor tasted these foods, Emily and Anjan founded DOSA, an upscale, full-service restaurant that introduced the Bay Area to Southern Indian cuisine. Locals came to try the unique, plant-forward dishes, and left with satisfied bellies and a broader understanding of Indian culture.

The entrepreneurs envisioned a brand extension of DOSA: a counter-service restaurant that could scale nationally. The hospitality venture, called dosa by DOSA, would offer healthful Indian street food made from local and seasonal ingredients. Emily and Anjan also set out to expand their existing product line-up—including cold lassi beverages, simmering sauces, and grab-and-go-meals—to national grocers and retailers and needed launch-ready packaging that was convenient, eye-catching, and environmentally-friendly. The new expression would enable consumers to experience dosa by DOSA and Southern India in a variety of forms and places. Emily and Anjan partnered with IDEO to establish a cohesive and consistent brand experience, from the restaurant and to-go meals to retail stores and mobile delivery.

In close partnership with the founders, their staff, Feldman Architecture and MPADA, IDEO set out to bring dosa by DOSA to life and help it scale through brand, environment, and experience design. This included creating everything from the logo and packaging to the menu and operations strategy, with each element tying back to the founders’ vision of sharing Indian heritage and traditions through cuisine.

The group began by seeking cultural inspiration for dosa by DOSA’s brand identity system—the logo, colors, values, fonts, and messaging—to guide future designs. They were inspired by Indian truck drivers who decorate their trucks with garlands, signs, or flags that engage other drivers or bring luck. The dosa by DOSA logo design and its wood-cut typeface are inspired by the dimensionality of this homespun art form, while the vibrant, eclectic colors reflect the streets and textures of urban Mumbai.

The goal of opening people’s minds to Indian cooking and culture extends to the packaging, which meets customers’ needs and playfully educates them. The food containers—made from recycled and compostable material—feature brightly patterned labels reminiscent of the trucks. Some have built-in compartments suited to multiple dipping chutneys, making it convenient to sample a variety of Indian flavors. Paper tray covers resembling Mumbai newspapers offer eating tips like “Be civilized. Eat with your hands,” encouraging diners to experience an Indian custom.

The vibrant brand comes to life across an array of packaging, including cold cups printed with the phrase “thanda thanda pani”—meaning “cold cold water”—which comes from a popular Indian parody of the Vanilla Ice song "Ice Ice Baby."

To design the diner experience and restaurant environment in a way that invites curiosity about the culture and cuisine, the team started with diners: They identified key moments in their experience like entering, waiting in line, and paying. The floor plan, furniture, lighting, signage, and menu were designed around these touchpoints. For example, while customers wait in line, they can watch dosa being prepared, as if they’re eager and hungry travelers awaiting street food.

The dosa by DOSA menu includes distinctive items like coconut kale mung bean salad and hot masala chai made with caramelized milk—the way Anjan’s mother prepared it. To help the restaurant scale, the team created a preliminary furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) budget, 3D renderings of the space, and an operations strategy for the founders and their employees.

The dosa by DOSA flagship launched in January 2018 in Oakland, California. The IDEO brand guidelines have enabled the dosa by DOSA team to independently and easily shepherd new product lines to market, including salads, wraps, curry bowls, samosas, and simmer sauces. The brand’s packaged food launched in over 200 natural food stores in 24 months—including over 100 Whole Foods locations—as well as online retailers and delivery services like Good Eggs and Caviar. These items and the restaurant have helped Emily and Anjan realize their vision of bringing the flavor and spirit of Southern Indian cuisine to new communities around the world.

In recent years, due to shifts in Japan’s demographics, the food industry has faced challenges such as a decrease in market size and a shrinking number of producers. As a result, social impact opportunities abound in this field.

When Japanese software company NJC (Nippon Jimuki Co. Ltd.) approached IDEO seeking to identify new business opportunities that would build on the company’s core strengths, the food and agriculture industry rose up as a promising area of focus.

NJC is a well-established software company that has spent over 50 years helping to build backend business systems for small to medium enterprises. NJC works across healthcare, retail, and food and beverage, computerizing core processes to support and improve operations.

In partnership with IDEO, NJC explored its strengths and potential as an organization, as well as the ideas and visions of the employees, and emerged with the goal of using their capabilities to address large-scale issues facing regional farmers.

During research across Japan, local growers described challenges with multi-layered supply chains and analog systems, which led to “overwork for minimal profit,” as well as a gap between supply and demand. Because agricultural wholesalers lacked clear information in advance on the status of crops or the volume to be harvested, they struggled to negotiate with buyers, which led to wasted food On the other hand, the farmers who grow the crops are engaged in manual labor, and do not always have the energy to focus on business aspects such as efficiency or the pursuit of increased profitability, which leads to a diminished interest in farming among young people.

One question that emerged through research was why agricultural producers weren’t utilizing IT. This evolved into “How can profitability be improved for all stakeholders?” and, “How might we create a system that will provide useful data without creating a burden for either farmers or agricultural wholesalers?”

The result was fudoloop.

fudoloop is an app that enables farmers and wholesalers to conduct business more profitably by bringing transparency to the fluctuating produce market. Through fudoloop, wholesalers receive information from farmers a day in advance, and can coordinate the various requests of buyers, such as order size, production location and other special requests. As a result, wholesalers can function as “community managers,” doing business with both producers and buyers at a more appropriate price point.

NJC aims for fudoloop to be the first step in a cycle that brings value to all stakeholders, from farmers to wholesalers, retailers and even customers, by redefining the “middleman” role of produce wholesalers.

The population of Tokyo’s metropolitan area is twice as big as New York, and the daily influx of workers from the suburbs increases that number sixfold. Congestion on trains traveling through the center of Tokyo during commuting hours is said to reach somewhere close to 200 percent of the trains’ capacity.

East Japan Railway Company (known as JR East) is the world’s largest railway company by revenue, operating 12,000 trains daily and serving 6.4 billion passengers per year.

In March 2014, JR East leveraged their extensive operations and passenger data to publish a consumer app that provided train location information, congestion status, air conditioning temperature, and wayfinding tools.

The app was downloaded more than 3.8 million times; however, its features and usability proved unsatisfactory to users. In an attempt to be comprehensive in addressing passenger needs, the app was weighed down with data and worked sluggishly. Competitors’ apps were named above JR East in customer satisfaction surveys, highlighting the company’s need to address the tool’s usability.

JR East’s Technical Division approached IDEO to help design an attractive and consistent user-centered experience through its digital ecosystem. With a team of interaction designers, they launched a project to create a new version of their app.

During the research phase, the IDEO team observed passengers’ behaviors and decision-making processes and noticed that people were using several apps at once to get more personalized and complete information.

The team created a set of paper-based prototypes to test how users would react to various functionalities. Surprisingly, users ranked versions with limited functionalities higher than those with a broad range of features.

This insight informed a new prototype that enabled a customized user experience based on traveler needs. Wayfinding proved to be the most frequently selected feature, so the new app was designed around helping passenger navigate during their trips.

Although JR East had traditionally outsourced their app development, IDEO encouraged them to organize their own internal team. In cooperation with Pivotal—a frequent IDEO partner familiar with human-centered approaches—the internal team was trained in agile development and built the new app themselves. A prototype was released in November 2017 as “Go! by Train.” It was so successful in the market that the earlier JR East app was replaced entirely with the content of the new design.

JR East's internal development team was recognized by the company for their exceptional output, and will be integral to the company's human-centered digital transformation going forward.

It all started when we partnered with the American Refugee Committee (ARC), an organization that provides services to 3.5 million refugees across Africa and the Middle East. We teamed up to imagine a future where refugees have a voice in shaping the services provided to them, and are able to hold humanitarian organizations accountable for the services they receive.

The result was Kuja Kuja, a platform that has the potential to fundamentally shift the way humanitarian organizations serve refugees.

Kuja Kuja, a visual platform for tracking refugee feedback.

In a deep and humbling way, the friendships we made during those two weeks reminded us of how refugees, who are typically lumped together as a faceless, nameless group of displaced people, are smart, educated, optimistic human beings who've been brutally ripped from their homes by war and the vagaries of governance.

There are more than 65 million refugees and displaced people around the world today. That’s nearly 1 out of every 100 people on the planet. These people are no different from you or me in their need for safety, shelter, work—the most basic human rights.

On our last day in the settlement, at the end of the workday, we went to play ping-pong at a community center.

It was raining on and off, and there were a lot of people packed inside. There was a group of Congolese refugees breakdancing and practicing for a hip-hop dance competition. One of the dudes was beatboxing while his friends pop-n-locked and windmilled.

I started to beatbox with him and soon we had all kinds of people busting into our jam-circle to throw down raps in multiple languages—French, Swahili. It was the best example of getting close to the people you're designing for I could ever imagine.

I will certainly never forget that day. I glimpsed a world in which, if we were were all trapped in a room together, and broke out in song and dance, there would be no more war, no more displacement, no more refugees.

Back in August 2017, I was embedded at the Nakivale refugee settlement in Southwest Uganda for two weeks. I was there with Nathalie Collins from IDEO.org, to build a web application that collects refugee feedback and then visualizes that data in meaningful ways. Those two weeks could have been two months—Nathalie and I developed deep friendships with many of the refugees on the team. I'd been vocal-jamming earlier in the week with a pentalingual Burundian refugee and Kuja Kuja team member, and someone started videotaping...

More than 60 food, clothing, jewelry, and art vendors—including 25 IDEO designers—are stocked up to serve, while also raising money for the non-profit La Cocina. There's a little something for everybody, even...

1. The DIY Gardener

Plant your own succulent garden in a glass terrarium, or stock your home bar with cocktail mixers, artisan bitters, and local honey, courtesy of Radish.

2. The Girl Who Has Everything (She doesn’t have this.)

Jessica Hannah makes small-batch perfumes inspired by Hollywood classics and even the smell of worked leather. She also hosts regular workshops to help people craft custom scents from plant essences.

3. The Craft Brew Obsessive

You’ve tried microbrew, but not like this. IDEO designer Sean Hewens combines homebrewing with making fantastical maps—charting a fictional submarine race across the San Francisco Bay, for example—to create Bean Brew. Lucky drinkers (just 16 per micro-batch) answer a survey about the map on their Bean Brew bottles, and Sean turns the results into a one-of-a-kind poster.

4. The Jewelry Minimalist

Angular and understated, the gold-filled trinkets from Batsu Maru might be right for the best-dressed woman in your life.

5. The Upcycler

Waste not, want not. So says The Consistency Project, which sells vintage and customized clothing that’s been given a second chance.

6. The Recent Transplant

Bare walls? Why not fill them with whimsical, colorful, and soulful art from IDEO designer Felicia Chiao and illustrator Yoshi Yoshitani. Prints, postcards, art books, and coloring books are more than enough to liven up your space.

7. The Makeup Maven

Blood orange vanilla. Rose cardamom. Peppermint Eucalyptus. These aren’t flavors of bon-bon; they’re lip balms from METTA GOOD. The balms are made from beeswax and jojoba, coconut, and avocado oils, and METTA donates one percent of its proceeds to nonprofits.

8. The Pet Pamperer

Make your pooch look as posh as you do with colorful bandanas, bowties, and leash bags from The Foggy Dog.

9. The Happy Homebody

In her free time, IDEO.org senior designer Nicole Kraieski loves to throw down on her pottery wheel. She describes her tasteful tableware as, “ceramics made of clay by the Bay” in San Francisco.

10. The Eco-Chic Toddler

Apila Designs crafts organic cotton clothing—from beanies to onesies to leggings—for fashionistas ages zero to six. The screen-printed pieces are made in and inspired by Northern California.

11. The Avocado Lover

Pretty prints with a hint of snark—such are the whimsical greeting cards from Coffee n Cream Press.

12. The “Nasty Woman”

Give young women the gift of leadership by hosting a workshop with Girls Driving for a Difference. IDEO’s Katie Kirsch co-founded Girls Driving for a Difference in 2015 with the goal of helping middle- and high-school girls use design thinking to boost their self-confidence and improve their communities. The group offers a “workshop in a box” to get you started.

And remember, if you can't find anything off the shelf, there's still plenty of time to make your own gifts. Here's an impassioned plea for doing just that.

Design snobs are hard to shop for. But don't despair: We wrangled our favorite craftspeople for Wunderfaire, our annual winter celebration. The party is sold out, so we're sharing a sneak peek of gifts you can nab online.

The constraints and complexity of working on those challenges can be overwhelming. To help us all push through, we developed a few simple tools to keep in your back pocket. Here are three of them, drawn from the Design Kit Travel Pack, a new deck of bite-sized exercises we’re working on to help social impact organizations and busy professionals unlock their own creative genius.

1. Write a postcard from the future

In the social sector, the language we use is all about fixing things that are broken. We talk about reducing unintended pregnancies or increasing the number of people with access to financial services. It’s important work, but not always framed in the most inspiring way. Before you kick off a new project or initiative, take the time to paint a more audacious vision. Close your eyes, picture a time 20 years in the future, and imagine your work has been a resounding success. What does the world look like? How are people’s lives different? Be as specific as possible. Then, write a newspaper headline for a New York Times story capturing this impact and sketch an image to go with it. Share your vision with your team, and use it as your North Star as the creative process becomes more murky and new challenges emerge.

2. Take an inspiration tour

When we’re designing in conditions with tight constraints—like a tightly-packed informal settlement outside of Nairobi or a rural village in India—it’s vital that we understand and work within the local context. But to unlock fresh solutions, we also need to look elsewhere and gather inspiration from other (sometimes unlikely) places. To design your own inspiration tour, start by naming three adjectives you want your product, service, or experience to embody. For example, maybe we want the new health clinic we’re designing to feel safe, fun, and community-affirming. Then, quickly brainstorm 10 places, businesses, or brands that do this well in your city. (Examples: a sports team’s locker room, a Bible study group, a Weight Watchers meeting, a co-working space, or a comic convention.) Choose a couple of places that are most interesting to you and take a day to visit them in person. Note down your observations as you go, take photos, and look for clues about what might inspire your project. By casting off the constraints of the context you’re working in, you’ll start to see new possibilities.

3. Make time for retail therapy

When you’re feeling stuck and not sure which direction your project should take, try getting tangible (even before you might feel ready). One fun way to do this is a trip to your local hardware or container store. Give everyone on your team 15 minutes to explore the store and create their own scrappy set-up of the product or service you’re designing. Then, one at a time, walk each other through the prototypes you created. Forcing yourselves to use materials available in the store and using a timer helps narrow the scope of what you’re working on from a big, nebulous problem to an immediate and concrete one, often unlocking fresh thinking in the process.

Visit designkit.org to download a free PDF, or get your own hard copy.

When we launched IDEO.org six years ago, we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. The organizations we partner with are tackling some of the world’s toughest problems, like access to clean water, reproductive health, and the global refugee crisis—big, systemic challenges that have been around for decades.

Here are nine travel experiences we’d love to redesign:

GETTING THROUGH AIRPORT SECURITY

Taking our shoes off to go through security? Gross. But the most stressful moment for me is when my stuff comes out the other end of the scanner and I have to grab it in a rush because someone else's stuff is right behind and my toddler is running in the other direction. Then we waddle over to a corner with all our belongings splayed out and try to make sense of our luggage again. There has to be a better way!

Then there’s all the time wasted. Could there be a way to check wait times for security lines—similar to a traffic report—so I know how far in advance I need to arrive at the airport? IDEO designers are already working with the staff of a major Canadian airport to make their screening process smoother, faster, and less unpleasant. Let’s keep the good ideas rolling!
—Sally Sosa, IDEO San Francisco

THE PLANE BOARDING SHUFFLE

I’ve noticed a weird social phenomenon: Everyone gets up when the first people start boarding a plane, even if they have three boarding zones ahead of them. The zones are arbitrarily assigned based on when passengers checked in and how much extra money they wanted to pay—a legacy system based on someone's obscure definition of loyalty and status, plus assertiveness. That means that if someone in Zone 2 gets into an aisle seat, but I'm in Zone 4 and have the window, everyone has to get up, get out, shuffle down the aisle, let me in, and then sit down again. It's entirely inefficient. Also, if I have no overhead carry on and can breeze off the plane, facilitate that. I've never met anyone who actually likes this system. Airlines are leaving money on the runway—literally.
—Denise Burchell, IDEO San Francisco; Shuya Gong, IDEO Cambridge

Airbus' modular plane concept. Source: The Verge

FLYING ECONOMY CLASS

I used to work for Emirates, Singapore Airlines, and Qantas, so I have a vision for the ideal plane cabin. In economy class, you get shoved into an uncomfortable seat next to a guy who hogs the armrest. This is painful for people like me who usually take long-haul flights. (I fly 15 hours from Dubai to Sydney twice a year to see family.)

Why not reconfigure economy class with bunks for passengers on flights longer than four hours, so that people can actually relax or sleep? Do away with the overhead lockers, increase the checked baggage allowance, and allow passengers only one small carry-on unless they’re traveling with kids or a baby. Designate time slots for people to get meals, which they can order beforehand or through the in-flight entertainment system, letting flight attendants better organize their work. You could also automate the system of delivering meals to passengers instead of pushing a trolley down the aisle, which blocks me from getting to the bathroom while an indecisive passenger is trying to figure out if he wants a Sprite or a Coke.

While we’re at it, have a kids' section where they can play without annoying everyone else, and include something like the in-flight nanny service Emirates already offers. Have a nursing area where mums can feed their babies without people bumping past them, or change their babies without having to juggle the kid, a dirty diaper, a fold-down table, and a diaper bag in a bathroom without enough room to swing a hamster, let alone a cat.

Check out this image of a crew rest area on an airplane; the stewards have room to lie down and snooze, while not being dear on space. With just a little imagination, you could make these into seats that fold flat and include easy-to-clean access, since cleaning the airplane between flights takes longer than anything else. The specs of an Airbus A380 would make this setup totally possible!
—Asja Simunovic, IDEO Munich

Qatar Airways Airbus A350 crew rest area.

RIDING THE CROSS-COUNTRY RAILS

Two years ago, I took a long train trip from Chicago to New Orleans with my wife. She’s Danish. I’m Turkish. We have a lot of experience with train travel in Europe. It was shocking to see how sad train conditions are in the U.S. How might we redesign the experience of the Great American Railroad? We can utilize all our design chops—from data to spatial to UX—to do so. I’d love to take the lessons I’ve learned from IDEO’s relationship with Ford and apply them to train travel to make an impact on a more economically and geographically diverse community.
—Dogan Sekercioglu, IDEO Chicago

TRAVELING WITH A KID (AND A CAR SEAT)

It’s so annoying to travel with a car seat. I avoid it at all costs, and then end up trying to rent or borrow one, which is never convenient. It's also a pain when I want to do something like take the train into the city and then take a taxi to a part of town that’s too far to walk to with a toddler.

How about a packable, maybe inflatable, car seat? Can you imagine how great it would be if you had a small, portable car seat you could just throw in your bag?
—Kim Powers, IDEO San Francisco

BOOKING A NATURE GETAWAY

I want to redesign the way we book campsites. The current system is really challenging to navigate, particularly for outdoors neophytes. It's opaque and cumbersome, and there's no way to release sites for last-minute booking. I'd love to design ways to make the process simple, intuitive, and experiential.

Shouldn't a booking site feel welcoming and fun? Couldn't it show you what kind of hike to expect on the way to your campsite and what the views are like? If it’s a car camping site, how noisy is it? How about real-time weather so you know what to pack, or a map showing how close your site is to amenities like bathrooms or a store? What if it included ratings from other campers? Let's make our parks and forests more accessible, especially to those who aren't experienced outdoors people.
—Kate Lydon, IDEO San Francisco

DODGING TOURISTS IN THE BIG APPLE

New York City sees more than 60 million visitors a year, and locals know that with tourists come clogged sidewalks, long lines, and dozens of confused subway riders. As a New Yorker, I’m also struck by how seldom visitors tend to go outside the typical destinations—a.k.a. Midtown and the usual suspects. I love how distinctive each neighborhood of New York City is, and the unique culture, food, and experience each offers.

I know we can do a better job of moving people around the city so that visitors have a better experience. I’m inspired by this initiative the city of Amsterdam is using to distribute, rather than limit, the flows of tourists. Amsterdam encourages tourists to visit outlying areas and see popular attractions at off-peak times. Why can’t we? IDEO worked with the TODAY show to design a seamless experience for the street audience at Rockefeller Center; we can put some of those same techniques to work at a larger scale.
—David Boardman, IDEO New York

NAVIGATING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

I would love to see a well-designed urban infrastructure that allows for driverless mobility, makes cycling and walking safe alternatives, and accounts for a broad span of ages and physical limitations.

Right now, multimodal transportation is not synced. Urban dwellers need various types of transit to get around, from trains to buses, but none of them talk to one another. There's so much focus on driverless cars, which is great, but we also need to seize the opportunity to encourage more active mobility by creating more car-free zones for safer walking and biking, for example. Both protected bike lanes and central bikeways would encourage more safe cycling in cities.

In general, street signage is not all that helpful or appealing. Might there be a way to not just wayfind, but also add delight? Signs could provide more than just basic information, such as interesting historical tidbits about the city, the number of steps between signs, or digital messages on sidewalks or in other unexpected places. People could also track their city journeys via an app on their phones to show where they've been, and get recommendations for where to go next; their urban journeys would become living maps.
—Margaret Kessler, IDEO San Francisco

PAYING FOR PARKING DOWNTOWN

Parking lot pay machines are poorly designed. They’re often covered with lists of instructions and homemade signs taped on by the operators and owners trying to show customers what to do and in what sequence. The machines need to accept credit cards—with a stripe in one exact orientation—bills, coins, and of course parking tickets with a magnetic stripe in one orientation, too.

I like how the parking garage at San Francisco International Airport allows you to use FasTrak to avoid a paper ticket. Maybe ticket machines could use Apple Pay or another pay-by-phone service to avoid credit cards and cash, or better yet, use pay-by-phone services in your car on the way in and out of the lot so you can avoid the ticket machines entirely.
—Dennis Boyle, IDEO Palo Alto

Want to reimagine transit with us? Contact Madison Mount (madison@ideo.com) at IDEO’s San Francisco studio.

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Just in time for the busiest days of American travel, our designers put their heads together to imagine a future of seamless transit, complete with inflatable car seats and airplane sleeping pods. IDEO already does forward-thinking transportation design with partners like Ford, Lincoln, Lufthansa, and major airports. But transportation is a sprawling industry, and there’s always plenty more to do.

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.