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.

During the project shareback, one of the designers held up a piece of paper with this quote:

“Interacting with legal was one of the worst experiences of my life.”

Full stop.

Maybe the commenter was talking about me. Maybe she was talking about another lawyer. Maybe she was commenting on the legal process generally. It didn’t matter. For the first time in my career, I thought about the impact I have on the people I interact with in my role as a lawyer, and how that impact might be quite negative.

We never discussed anything like this in law school. Instead, we focused on “making cases,” “winning arguments,” and “clerking for the right judge.” Later, as Biglaw associates, we talked about “billing hours,” “closing deals,” and “working with the right partner.” But I don’t recall ever being asked, “How did your client feel about how you handled that matter?” or, “How did the lawyer on the other side of that call feel about the interaction?” Or, for that matter, “Are you providing a colleague or client with one of the worst experiences of his life?” We talk about these issues all the time at IDEO when it comes to our clients and their customers, but they aren’t things I ever talked about with fellow attorneys.

In that moment, I made a decision: There was no reason I couldn’t do my job — and do it well — and care about the experience of the people I was affecting.

Fast forward to 2014. I took my mother to see a neurologist at Stanford University. He confirmed our family’s worst fears: My mother had Alzheimer’s, and it was advancing. Rapidly. This was devastating, hard to hear news. And yet, in the car on the way home, I felt strangely positive. Why? Because the doctor took the time to translate the complexity of her disease into language we could understand as non-medical professionals. He walked us through very difficult territory with honesty and compassion. He was respectful of her even as she repeatedly asked him the same questions. And he highlighted the factors we could control. We couldn’t change her disease, but we could approach it proactively and honestly, while giving her as much dignity and comfort as possible.

What if the experience of working with a lawyer felt more like this?

Even though law and legal processes are designed by humans for humans, the reality is that most interactions with legal professionals don’t feel very good.Interactions are often harsh, transactional, and bereft of transparency, emotion, or humanity. Touch points are filled with frustration, confusion, and disempowerment. Lawyers may resort to aggressive tactics as a way to navigate conflict or out of fear they will be taken advantage of in a given situation. Worse, many lawyers I talk to seem to accept this status quo. That’s just the way law is practiced. That’s just the way it is.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Instead, we can practice what my colleague, IDEO partner Chris Domina, in 2011 termed “human-centered” lawyering (when he asked me if I knew “any human-centered lawyers outside of IDEO?”). Human-centered lawyers are those who can treat legal problems as human problems, translate legal complexity into relatable frameworks, and navigate tension and conflict with skill, patience, and respect for all stakeholders involved.

In working toward becoming more human-centered, I’ve come to understand the value of making emotional connections with individuals I’m interacting with and not treating legal matters and the people connected to them as purely transactional. Empathy, the key to human-centered design, is the same key that opens the door to human-centered lawyering.

For example, instead of being frustrated that opposing attorneys are “rejecting” my proposals or “not seeing it my way,” I’ve learned to try to put myself in their shoes. If I were representing their client or working for their in-house legal team, what would I be most concerned about? What problems are they trying to head off, and what problems have they had in the past in these types of situations? Are they frustrated because this is just one of too many things they have to deal with today? From this very human place, I can be a collaborative problem solver, rather than someone engaging in an argument to win a point or “push back” because that’s what lawyers are “supposed to do.”

In being human-centered, am I any less firm when it comes to working through difficult legal challenges? No; my colleagues generally refer to me as “strong” and “confident.” Do I “just give” on issues during a challenging negotiation? Not at all. IDEO doesn’t compromise its people or its business, no matter how big the deal or how aggressive the opposition. But neither do we compromise our compassion.

Most legal professionals I know have had interactions with other lawyers who use anger, hostility, power tactics, aggression, and rude or belittling behavior to try to navigate legal situations (and most of us have also been guilty of the same at times). In addition to harming the relationships their clients are trying to build, those behaviors leave their mark on people. They leave people fearful or resentful of lawyers, and of course they tarnish the profession’s reputation. That’s not the kind of impact I want myself or my team to have on the world.

Is the legal team at IDEO perfect? Do we succeed in making every legal interaction with people inside and outside of IDEO positive? Of course not. But as a team, we have a clear purpose: to provide human-centered legal support and solutions to the IDEO community and to the broader legal industry.

Stay tuned—and stay human—lawyers.

This story was originally published on Medium. For more on the subject of human-centered lawyering, read this story by legal designer Sean Hewens and this interview with IDEO's general counsel Rochael Adranly.

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Not long after I began working with IDEO, I had the privilege of taking part in a project to design how its new internal legal group would operate. For those unfamiliar with IDEO’s process, each project begins with a “looking in” phase in which the design team interviews project stakeholders and shares their feedback.

Because usage is tied to a period of time, a digital calendar with interactive feedback seemed like the perfect way to represent a year in the life of the Chicago studio. There would be three elements to it: a milled piece of wood whose undulating shape would represent changes in energy usage over time; an interactive display that would show usage in more detail; and a set of buttons that would let users call up specific data on the display.

The Code

This is a tricky project for someone who doesn’t know anything about coding let alone a programming language. I had to figure out how to manipulate the usage data using tools from my life as an industrial designer. I started with Grasshopper, a visual programming language and a plugin for the 3-D modeling software Rhinoceros that I learned how to use as an undergrad. Instead of writing code, you connect boxes of different abilities to each other. By connecting the boxes with each other, I was able to pull in the data from my Excel spreadsheet and convert it into 3-D shape; then it was ready to work within Rhinoceros. Because Grasshopper is a plugin for Rhinoceros, you can see what you’re doing as you go. After some long nights, I figured out how to display the data in a 3-D shape.

Prototyping

With the code all set, I moved on to creating the touchable surface. I made some quick 3-D prints of the data I created in Rhinoceros, then made a low-fidelity video prototype to display how the installation would look and work. The idea was to let the user feel the changing data via a touchable surface, and give him/her a visual representation of the data on the screen.

Build Phase

Step 1: Milling the wood

The touchable interface was the main piece of my installation, so it was crucial to get it right.

I bought one long piece of walnut and used the table saw to cut it to the length I needed, then glued the resulting pieces together. I created the undulating surface with a CNC table mill, which took roughly 10 hours. It was loud and dusty, but worth it. To get the perfect finish, I had to sand it — a lot. I probably could have stopped earlier, but I wanted to have a perfect piece. Then, I rubbed it with Danish oil to protect the surface and bring out the wood grain.

Step 2: The visual feedback

To create the visual feedback, I used a Raspberry Pi, a capacitive touch board (MPR121), a 7” HDMI screen, wires, and some copper rivets. With no experience with Raspberry Pi or electrical engineering, I had to catch up quickly. To display the data on the screen, I used a handy piece of code I found on the internet called PiPresents. For input, I used capacitive touch buttons, which I linked to specific images that display the data.

Step 3: Panel assembly

This step was one of the harder parts. I had to bring all the different pieces together and create the framed panel. I started with a cheap frame from an art supply store, then created an acrylic, laser-etched back panel, spray painted it black, and sanded it to make it matte. Next, I attached the wooden panel to the screen, and connected the 12 capacitive touch buttons, one for each month, arranged along the long axis of the wooden surface. Once everything was in place, users could feel the wood to get a sense of our changing energy usage, then touch the buttons to see a drilled down explanation of the data by month. About a month and a half after I first came up with the idea, it was finally ready to present to the studio.

A big thank you to the whole studio, especially to Chris Gold for helping me during the milling process, Rob Rehrig for giving me a Raspberry Pi 101, and Sophie Feng for taking awesome final pictures and video. Want to recreate the project? Check out the code on Github.

As an industrial designer, I’m always eager to bring together the digital and the physical. So when I discovered that the Chicago studio was collecting data about their energy usage, I decided to create a project that would make that information feel real, teach me more about other disciplines, and serve as a gift to the studio that had hosted me as an intern for half a year.

"Arrivo!," I shout to the taxi driver as I close the gate of the building with my foot. I speed walk towards his car, parked 50 meters down the road, drag the suitcase on the back seat and ask the driver to take me to the airport. My holiday in Napoli—my hometown—is over. I'm already shivering at the idea of setting foot back in London.

Halfway through the trip, my eyes catch on an unusual detail. A tennis ball cut in half to fit the top of the taxi's gearstick. I can't help but investigate.

"Ascolta (Listen)," he says in the gruff voice of a longtime smoker, "with this heat, my job gets very challenging." Despite air conditioning, he explains, the sun makes the gearstick slippery and hot, which makes for a rather unpleasant driving experience.

To tackle this problem, he decided to carefully slice a tennis ball in half and place over the gearstick's handle. "It's a precise job," he explains. "You need to make sure it won't move once it's placed." The texture of the tennis ball allows for a better grip, and doesn't get hot in the sun—ta-da!

He brakes lightly to come to a stop at the departures terminal. As he rummages for my change, he surprises me with a Steve Jobs-style "And one more thing ..."

"You know, it's not just about the function of the tennis ball, it's also the excitement of getting a new one every year. That bright yellow marks the start of a new season—it's something I look forward to!"

I gently close the cab door, roll my suitcase to the entrance and, out of the corner of my eye, catch him smiling in the dense, departing traffic.

Human-centered design requires us to observe human behavior with beginner's eyes, so that we can spot the innate ways people interact with the world around them. We call these intuitive and unconscious reactions Thoughtless Acts, and IDEO designers collect photos of them to inspire their work.

In one sentence, who are you?

A queer, shapeshifting, creative cat mama with a big heart.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I am currently an illustrator and a textile designer. When I was a kid, I used to draw little doodles on dinner napkins and give one to everyone at the table. I loved sharing my art with everyone.

When I was around six, my mom enrolled me in a summer program at The Baum School of Art in Pennsylvania. There, I learned all the technical aspects of drawing and painting. I went to Baum every summer for 10 years. Then I got an academic scholarship to Pratt Institute.

The next thing I knew, I was living in Brooklyn and working my ass off. During my senior year, I focused my thesis on textile design. I always liked the idea of bringing my designs off the page and applying them to T-shirts, pillows, hats, chairs, bedding, etc.

I graduated in 2015, and a few of my friends from college and I started Fem Foundry. One of the best things about art school is getting your work critiqued by your peers, and the Foundry lets us continue that. Plus, we do a lot of other fun things, like organizing drink and draws, having gallery shows, and tabling at art fairs.

Like many other twenty-somethings, I had to start paying rent after school. I worked a few odd jobs—did branding for local restaurants, taught painting classes, designed event posters, and helped out at an animation studio. There were many times when I had no idea what I was doing, but I’m a big believer in fake it 'til you make it.

About a year after graduation, I landed a job as a textile designer at Deborah Connolly Designs, a small company in Midtown Manhattan. I went into the interview clueless about the industry, and now, two years later, I can tell you everything you could possibly want to know about designing bath towels, beach towels, kitchen towels—really any kind of towel.

3 favorite possessions?

1. The first and only quilt I ever made
2. A white gold locket my mother gave me with our pictures in it
3. My black denim Fem Foundry jacket that I decked out with pins and patches and my eyeglass collection

What does a typical work session look like?

Right now, I’m designing beach towels for next summer. There’s usually some sort of inspiration or color story for the designs, and then it begins! I work primarily on a Wacom drawing tablet with either Photoshop, Illustrator, or Nedgraphics. Most designs go through a few revisions before I send them out for production.

When I’m illustrating at home, I like using traditional mediums like gouache paint and charcoal pencil. I also enjoy playing around on my iPad in Procreate. It’s exciting what technology is bringing to the table for creative people.

I’m a total podcast junkie while working. Some of my favorites are Reply All, Freakonomics Radio, On Being, Revisionist History, Lovett It or Leave It, Nancy, Death, Sex & Money. If I sit in silence, I tend to overthink things; listening to something keeps my momentum going, and it’s a great way to track how long I’ve been working on a project.

How do you get over creative block?

At work, I’ll just start a new design in order to keep the juices flowing, and then when I’m in my groove, the trickier designs come more easily. With painting and illustrating, I try to step away and come back to it later, or sometimes I flip a drawing backwards or upside-down so I can see it from a new perspective.

What was the last item on your to do list?

Buy cat food at the bodega.

How do you see the world in 2078?

Technology is going to change everything. Hopefully, by 2078, old, white, male Republicans won't be calling all the shots in politics, and there will be peace and happiness among all races and religions.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

Scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

Oooh… Lauren Callaghan is amazing. She’s such a talented illustrator, I’m very into her use of patterns and bright colors. The designer Ramey Masri is mind blowing, he runs the Instagram @space.ram. Everything is rainbows— everything. I bought some silkscreen prints from Natalie Andrewson at MoCCA Fest a few weeks ago and hung them by my desk. It makes me happy to look at them. I also love Oliver Hibert. His graphic, funkadelic paintings are amazing. But honestly, I’m constantly creative crushin’ on all the talented members of Fem Foundry. I’m so thankful to have them as my friends; they are such an inspiration.

Check out their work on Instagram; or on Facebook.

Cassandra and I first met when we were young, poor, and living in Bed Stuy. As I floundered, she settled into what would become her long-term home. Her art connected her to the people around her, first as a student, then as a freelancer painting murals and business logos for neighbors, and, most recently, as a founder of a local women's art collective called Fem Foundry. Cassandra's work is unflinchingly bright, peculiar, and accessible, even when life and Brooklyn are not. I'll let her take it from here:

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.