Only 20 percent of American homes are protected by security systems, and most of these systems are installed after a break-in. ‍

Home security veteran SimpliSafe hoped to convince the other 80 percent of home-dwellers to invest in preventative technology so the break-in never happens. The company approached IDEO to refresh and simplify the look and feel of its connected products to reach this wider audience and help them feel safe.

Interviews with potential customers revealed insights that informed the new design. Families told the researchers that existing security systems are expensive, bulky, and hard to install and use. Instead, systems should be unobtrusive, but responsive to your needs. They should react appropriately in emergencies, while also protecting your privacy.

Responding to those requests, IDEO overhauled the design and interaction of more than a dozen SimpliSafe products, including a wireless, touch-to-wake keypad; easy to install sensors; and a smart home base that acts as the brains of the system. Additionally, IDEO designed SimpliSafe's first step outside of the home—a video doorbell that can be used in tandem with the namesake home security system or on its own. Making the system enjoyable and intuitive to use means families are more likely to use it consistently—and correctly.

The team developed a consistent design language across SimpliSafe’s physical products, user interface, and digital presence. That clear visual language lets you know what each component does right out of the box; for example, the glass break sensor looks like a human eardrum that might actually hear a window shattering. The design also reduced the size of entry sensors by four times, while improving their range and battery life. Tapered backs and swept-front surfaces for all of these sensors help them blend into your home. The new system’s clean, understated appearance instills confidence without stoking fear of what could happen.

SimpliSafe’s keypad and base station guide you through setting up the system with voice feedback, while gentle LED lights and sound cues let you know at a glance that the system is armed correctly and you’re in safe hands. The system is also equipped with multiple layers of backup, so you don’t have to worry if the power or Internet goes down.

And the system responds intelligently, tailoring the way it reacts to match different scenarios. For instance, it sends a gentle reminder if a window is left open but a police response if a window is broken in. The design team also incorporated a first-of-its-kind privacy shutter on the system’s security camera so families can opt out of being recorded at home.

SimpliSafe launched its redesigned security system in early 2018, replacing the company’s two previous generations of products at the same price point. Already, the revamped system has cut the number of support calls from new customers.

In June 2018, venture fund and private equity firm Hellman & Friedman acquired SimpliSafe in a deal that valued the company at about $1 billion.

With a record number of applicants, stiff competition for top students, and a desire to make classes more diverse, college admissions teams are feeling the strain. Bowdoin College in Maine, one of the top liberal arts schools in the U.S., received more applications for the class of 2022 than for any other in its 224-year history.

Whitney Soule, Bowdoin’s Dean of Admissions and Student Aid, saw her staff at risk of burning out. On the advice of Bowdoin’s president, Clayton Rose, she invited IDEO to embed at the college and help design a new way of working. The IDEO team studied Bowdoin’s workflow and zeroed in on the application process as an area ripe for redesign.

By observing how Bowdoin counselors read applications, IDEO learned what drove their decisions. Mindful of how their choices could impact young people’s lives, counselors prioritized a meticulous reading of each application. But this thorough approach meant they often engaged in redundant work or delayed making final decisions.

IDEO designers translated their insights into a book for staff, featuring watercolor portraits of the admissions team and a clear articulation of their values—from integrity to inclusion. The book was IDEO’s promise that introducing a new reading process wouldn’t mean sacrificing Bowdoin’s personal touch.

Then, the designers and counselors ran A/B tests using real applications from past years, unwinding long-held beliefs about how they “should” be read. Soule and her team experimented by adjusting timelines and other factors that determine when and how applications move from a first read to a second read to a committee discussion.

Soule gave her team explicit permission to toss their typical playbook. Seeing their own process with fresh eyes, counselors realized they could be more confident in their expertise and tweak their workflow to meet changing demands.

A/B testing proved that some variables had little effect on the team’s final admissions decisions. With that in mind, IDEO redesigned the reading process and included a system called “magic sort,” which helps parse groups of applications based on a new set of counselor assessments in order to route each to its next round of reviews more efficiently.

The IDEO-Bowdoin team put the revised technique to work right away, processing 300 new applications from the annual QuestBridge program for low-income students. Counselors found they were able to make equally valid decisions while cutting the amount of overlapping work they faced by 40 percent, compared to years past.

Working with IDEO challenged us to change the way we work together—and we learned a new method of problem solving that we continue to use. We are better equipped to elicit creativity, then channel it into the practical implementation of new solutions. It’s been transformative!

WHITNEY SOULE, DEAN OF ADMISSIONS AND STUDENT AID, BOWDOIN COLLEGE

The new reading method let staff cope with a growing volume of applications, while balancing the need to evaluate individual students with the need to think holistically about the makeup of Bowdoin’s student body. Counselors adapted the technique to the rest of the year’s admissions cycle, including early-decision, regular decision, and transfer applications.

To extend what her team learned to other departments, Soule has led several design thinking workshops across campus. Her success as a leader has mirrored the growth of her team and the college; by empowering staff with new tools and the freedom to experiment, Soule and Bowdoin are leading by example in the evolving world of higher education.

For half a century, Swarovski has crafted iconic chandeliers dripping with the brand’s signature crystals. With the rise of new interface technology, the company came to IDEO for help to design the chandelier of the future.

IDEO designers set out to create beautiful, emotional experiences by layering technology onto Swarovski’s lighting offerings. Whether it’s setting the tone for a sophisticated retail experience, creating subtle ambiance at a romantic dinner for two, or providing true quality light to read a book, the team considered how a chandelier can enrich personal moments throughout the day.

Swarovski and IDEO assembled a multidisciplinary group, including industrial and UX designers, brand experts, and engineers to quickly vet, build, test, and refine their ideas.

Designers from IDEO and Swarovski worked together to completely reimagine the crystal chandelier.

Together, the team designed a new tech-infused chandelier and family of other light fixtures. At first glance, the chandelier resembles a simple, sleek metal disc. But when you turn it on and peer inside, an endless number of crystals swirl far into the distance—an Infinite Aura.

The Infinite Aura collection also includes pendant and wall lights. The team developed a mobile app that proactively modifies light settings based on the time of day, and also lets users customize their experience—including adjusting brightness and color to set a personal mood, or “Aura.”

Unlike most fixtures, Infinite Aura doesn’t just give off ambient light; families can also benefit from high-quality functional light, directed downward to help them focus on a task or diffused upward and downward to create a subtle ambiance. In a similar way, the chandelier can expertly illuminate a library, hotel lobby, or concert hall.

The new lighting line adds greater functionality and emotional resonance to today’s smart buildings, while retaining Swarovski’s timeless elegance. Infinite Aura debuted in Frankfurt, Germany in March and will be available internationally in fall 2018.

More than half of Americans don’t have the cash to cover a $400 emergency expense like a car repair or trip to the hospital. Taking that reality to heart, American Family Insurance, a Fortune 500 company that offers auto, home, business, and life insurance, was seeking a way to make an impact by helping people earn and protect—not just insure—the things they value.

American Family approached IDEO with an ambitious goal: to innovate in a way that would help working families—many of them existing American Family customers—who need a financial cushion in case of the unexpected. This new mission fell in line with American Family’s overall orientation toward increased social responsibility, including committing to a liveable wage for all employees, helping with student loans, and providing college scholarships and tuition reimbursement for employees’ children.

In early discussions, American Family thought people might need budgeting tools, but from the very first research interview, a different urgent need emerged: people needed a way to shore up their savings enough to protect against unforeseen needs. This same story came from numerous places. In Tennessee, the IDEO design team sat in the kitchen of a working single mom of four, who explained how her lifestyle was built around her extremely constrained budget. She couldn’t afford childcare, so she’d organized her home to allow her 11-year-old to watch the younger kids: partitioned snacks, timers on the TV, chore charts on the fridge. She managed her budget meticulously, it was clear, and she didn’t need new financial tools. What she really needed, she said, was extra income cushions so a surprise expense like a doctor’s visit or stretch investment like a kid’s basketball uniform wouldn't derail her plans. Like many of the people the team visited across the country, she didn't want to take on debt; she wanted extra work and the dignity and peace of mind that comes with it.

Could we, the team wondered, offer people who already have jobs the extra hours and income they need in a way that reduces, rather than exacerbates, the stress they already face? Would employers get on board?

The short answer was yes. Today’s businesses depend on on-demand work, including seasonal warehouse and retail shifts. Typically, companies look to temp agencies whose model is built on staffing with the goal of permanent placement. Moonrise enables companies to tap into a workforce that's already employed, allowing them the benefits of passive recruiting (reliability, consistency), but for short term work.

Knowing innovation was the path to growth, American Family took a chance by embracing a radically new brief: Create a service to help families living on the edge bridge the gap between the size of their paychecks and the size of their dreams. The result was a new business venture called Moonrise.

When customers told us that having an easy way to earn extra money could improve their lives, we were compelled to pursue a solution. Moonrise is a business with a human-centered mission. We’re proud it’s part of our American Family.

Jack Salzwedel, Chairman & CEO, American Family Insurance

The Moonrise platform lets workers sign up for shifts with partner organizations through a simple text message interface, and get paid as soon as their shifts are done. Employers who sign up to partner with Moonrise can list open shifts on the platform.

“Moonrisers” are W-2 employees of Moonrise, not contractors, so they don’t have to pay self-employment taxes. They also get personalized business and comment cards to take to job sites, making their interactions with employers feel more professional. In this way, Moonrise helps workers not only build a buffer against unexpected bills, but also explore new positions and fields—and perhaps even land new full-time work with Moonrise partners.

To test the program in real time, IDEO and American Family assembled 11 Moonrisers, six employers, and a team of designers and programmers to work out kinks in the platform. During a one-week live pilot in Wisconsin, Moonrisers finished a combined 28 work shifts, earning an average of $121 each, while IDEO designers worked behind the scenes to keep the process running smoothly.

Based on the success of the pilot, American Family created a new startup company called Moonrise, which became a wholly owned subsidiary of American Family. Moonrise launched to the public in the Chicago area in 2018, with plans for an eventual nationwide rollout. Moonrise signed Enterprise Rent-A-Car as its first employer and actively matches workers in Chicago with shifts, while continuing to build more corporate partnerships.

Since launching in 2018, over 7,000 people have applied to become Moonrisers, more than 7,000 shifts have been fulfilled, and over $500,000 has been put into the pockets of hardworking Moonrisers. Additionally, Moonrise will be expanding into 3 additional states in 2019.

IDEO and American Family Insurance interviewed customers of The General—a division of American Family—about how they budget to make ends meet. In this conversation, customer Chandra told designers how $62 could be the difference between breaking down and breaking even for her family.

It’s not always easy for established companies to innovate, especially outside their core business. But innovation is a high priority for American Family. Creating an employee -centered startup like Moonrise solves an urgent problem and distinguishes them from their competition. Together, American Family and IDEO identified a pressing human need and built a program from the ground up to meet it.

Having already used acrylics, oil paints, graphite, and finally moving on to digital art, there was not much left to experiment with to broaden my artistic arsenal.

Or so I thought.

It was 25th of September, 2016, when my artistic alter ego was born. During that period of my life, I was searching for a way forward, having just returned from university without a job. I spent most of my time ideating and planning my next move.

That afternoon, I sat down to take a break and illustrate my state of mind. I started what was meant to be a 20-minute drawing session with a 0.5mm fine liner. That pen, plus an old notebook that I had used back in university, became my weapon of creativity.

When I was done, I had a character that I named “the relentless dreamer”—a tiny figure with a peculiar helmet that shielded his wandering heart from reality as he knew it, granting him the ability to see far beyond the clutches of a life he deemed to be limited. This tiny figure reminds me that it is crucial to be idealistic, ambitious, and forever creative.

Drawing this character gave me an emotional release unlike anything I had experienced before through art. Though I was often plagued with a sense of anxiety around what my drawings would mean or stand for, this time, I felt weightless.

I began focusing on these black and white ink drawings, and the experience was cathartic. Each one entwined with the stories that brought them to life. Even though most of the figures I drew were imaginary, I was taking my life and experiences and expressing them through my illustration. I would envision part of the figure in my mind and let the rest appear.

My intention was for viewers to move their eyes constantly as they looked for meaning in the drawing or simply made out the shapes.

Some of my work is dark, some full of mystery—a mystery I hoped that others would try solve as they navigate the intricacies of the line work.

Amidst all the visual chaos, there was one constant: A human element. The figures would serve as my connection to the pieces, and I hoped they would resonate with the audience, too.

These days, you will probably find me seated in the corner of a cafe with a fine liner pen. To many, I am just an artist, ardently sketching away. But what I’m actually doing is getting a little dose of sanity, as I move the images in my mind onto the pages of my book.

And in that very moment, I am dreaming… relentlessly.

Want to see what other IDEOers are drawing and doodling? Take a peek inside more designers' notebooks.

Two years ago, after spending most of my life mimicking artwork that appealed to me, I assumed that I had reached my artistic peak. I had been drawing since 1999. I still enjoyed working on portraits and surrealist compositions, but creatively, I felt stuck. After starting university, my product design work proved to be quite fulfilling, but my personal work was feeling uninspired.

Creativity Challenge # 6: Warm up a group

Creativity thrives amidst free-flowing social discourse. To get a roomful of strangers to innovate, you may want to begin by breaking down some social barriers. When this exercise is done right, the room will be abuzz with chatter and laughter, and participants will be more open to what comes next.

Tool: Speed Dating
Participants: Pairs in groups of any size
Time: 15-20 minutes total, 3 minutes per round
Supplies: Paper printed with a set of questions for each participant. Several different sets of questions will be needed to accommodate the entire group.

Instructions

Step 1: Give each person a list of open-ended questions. Several different sets of questions should be spread throughout tables in the room so that people aren’t continually being asked the same questions.

Examples of possible questions:

• How would your closest family members describe you?
• If you had a million Euros to spend in a way that benefits humanity, what would you do?
• What do you wish your parents had told you?
• What was a live performance or show you really loved, and why?

Step 2: Ask each person in the room to pair up with someone they don’t know very well or have never met. This may involve getting up and moving seats.

Step 3: Have one person in each pair ask a question from the list. Allow three minutes for the other person to answer.

Step 4: Have each pair switch roles and repeat, asking a different question on the list

Step 5: Tell everyone to find a new partner and repeat the process for a couple more rounds.

Tips from the field

You want to keep people moving to create a well-orchestrated round-robin. Be proactive about timekeeping. Assign someone to be a facilitator or timekeeper. To add a little fun, use a buzzer or gong to announce that time is up.

Depending on the nature of the working session that will follow the Speed Dating exercise, you can tailor some of the open-ended questions to be inspirational and loosely related to your topic. For example, if the objective of the meeting is to discuss the future of workspace for the organization, one of the prompts may be, “Describe an inspiring space you have worked in.”

Give a little thought to the type of questions you use. Meaning-of-life questions and superlative questions (the most, the best, the worst) can cause people to stall out or draw a blank. The whole purpose is interaction. So if your question stumps your partner for even a handful of seconds, it’s not quite right. Try the questions out on someone before you use them in a group setting.

If your group might be uncomfortable with an activity that includes the word “dating” in the title, call it Speed Meeting—which we have found works with Nobel laureates.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems, or view more from this series of creative exercises on the IDEO blog.

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Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

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1. Design for human capabilities

We are in an uncomfortable place at the moment. Technology has connected us all more than ever, but we are feeling less substantive connection with one another. Human interaction has been reduced to lowest common denominators. Unhappy people click more. Now technology is starting to displace us. In the next few years, deep learning-based AI will take over human activities, from driving to medical diagnosis. The discomfort is increasing as society faces mass redundancy, increased inequality and a crisis of meaning. We can all feel it coming. Design can help.

The amazing thing about good design is that it looks at ambiguity and disruption and sees fertile ground. There is huge opportunity when we focus on things that humans are uniquely equipped to do—empathy, creativity, care, love.

If we do it right, we can conceive and shape new roles for humans in a layer on top of the efficiencies that machines can achieve. We can use those uniquely human traits to re-find and enhance community and depth in our relationships with each other. We can go from Artificial Intelligence to Augmented Intelligence.

—David Webster, Partner, IDEO Palo Alto

2. Design for emotional wellness

The uncertain state of the world is having clear consequences for individual health. You see it in the headlines everyday: Kids paralyzed by anxiety. Suicides by gun. Addiction to opioids. We live in the most technologically connected times, yet our rates of loneliness are increasing. If you dig deep, the common root is an absence of emotional and mental well-being.

I’m not talking about the well-being that’s branded through luxury experiences, like wellness retreats. I’m talking about what Maslow missed at the very bottom of his hierarchy: that sense of inner well-being that is absolutely necessary for our survival as humans.

What’s exciting about our moment now is that science has surfaced the myriad ways we can cultivate emotional and mental well-being—all of which are new channels for design.

Designing ways to get better sleep is also a way of designing for resilience to stress and better ability to manage our emotions. Tackling loneliness and designing for meaningful social connection is also a way of designing for a stronger immune system and brain protection. (Conversely, enabling chronic loneliness is as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.) Designing ways to help people find their sense of purpose and meaning in life is an incredibly powerful way to design for healthier mind and bodies.

More and more, designers will realize their superpowers. Doctors and nurses are key players in facilitating wellness, but let's not forget that designers can be healers, too.

—Ann Kim, Portfolio Director, IDEO Cambridge

[This portion was also featured in Fast Company.]

3. Design for circularity

While it's easy these days to lament the state of the environment and the need for change, there's some hope to be found in the increased momentum towards a more circular economy. Collaborations between industry and design have yielded smart, feasible ideas for redirecting waste streams and reconnecting key stakeholders.

Businesses are investigating new product and packaging design that enables materials to be used again and again; they're asking how to leverage logistics in more efficient ways; and they're conceiving of new ownership models that could extend the lifecycle of the products they make.

The next questions on the horizon revolve around the economic systems that need to be in place to support these circular innovations. For example, we can design buildings so that they can be deconstructed—a circular engineering idea—but the cost of labor makes that reality prohibitive. In 2019, it's time for more applied circularity, leveraging emerging technology, organizational design, human insights, and social networks to create the conditions for the circular economy to take hold.

—Lauren Yarmuth, Portfolio Director, IDEO New York

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With 2018 fading into the distance, we're looking with hopeful eyes toward what the next year may bring. Our ongoing projects and client work help us hold up a mirror to reflect on what’s been happening and make informed predictions about what’s to come. Here are a few forecasts from IDEO leaders on prospective trends in design and tech.

If you know what we’re talking about, you could well be one of the world’s frustrated changemakers. You can see that change is essential, but you’re struggling to light the spark because your business’s indicators are all annoyingly positive. If this is you, what can you do? Should you hope for—or, even, engineer—a crisis?

This was one of the questions a group of business transformation leaders took on recently, at our Make Change Happen event in Munich, Germany.

“It would be a lie to say that a good crisis or a good disruption doesn’t help,” said Roman Lentz, Chief Digital Transformation Officer at global building materials firm Heidelberg Cement. “Because if you honestly look at organizations that change the fastest, they’re the ones with their backs most strongly against the wall… And frankly, that’s my challenge, because we’re not in crisis. We’re producing healthy margins. We’re not seeing cement being disrupted any time soon.”

Sandra Schiller, Head of Product Management for Valves and Automation at Georg Fischer Piping Systems, agreed. A crisis, Schiller noted, “can force through faster changes.”

But this doesn’t mean you should wait for a crisis, as London’s black taxis discovered, a few years too late.

“Black taxis were untouchable,” said Ben Terrett, CEO of Public Digital, a firm that partners with IDEO and specializes in digital transformation. “So untouchable that some of their services and ways of operating were protected by regulation. They have special parking spaces in London, special streets only they can go down… certain roads only they can pick up from.”

But then wave after wave of digital disruption flooded in as they sat behind the wheel, watching their dominion ebb away. First, GPS meant that the traditional cab drivers’ knowledge of London’s labyrinthine streets was no longer the golden ticket it had once been.

Then Uber arrived, and its bookable, predictable, low-cost rides started to eat into the black taxi business. So how did London’s cabbies respond?

“Their defense has ended up being reputation,” said Terrett. “That’s basically their only defense: ‘But we’re the black cabs!’”

Turns out customers weren’t as attached to the reputation of London’s cabs as cabbies were—and they couldn’t compete with the convenience and cost-cutting of on-demand services. Now the London Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) wants to sue Uber for the earnings its 25,000 members lost in the first five years they were operating in the city. The LTDA estimates that cabbies lost £10,000 each per year, and has been taking legal advice to sue for £1.25 billion.

It didn’t have to come to this.

“What’s interesting is that people have been trying to help them—by building services on top of their service,” said James Higgs, Executive Director for Digital Transformation at IDEO London.

In 2011, the year before Uber launched in London—Hailo, now MyTaxi, tried to bring the predictability of a booking app to the black cabs.

“Taxi drivers didn’t even want that,” Higgs said. “They would charge you an outrageous minimum fare… they even resisted companies trying to help them deliver a better service!”

We don’t want to pick on London’s iconic cabs and their drivers. They’re not even employees of a centralized company that one could point a finger at—they’re self-employed. But we think there are lessons here for us all.

“The black cabs are a good analogy for a lot of businesses,” said Terrett. “I can see lots of industrial-era companies who, when digital organizations go after their market, their defense is ‘well, we’re us, we’re the number one brand in this market.’ That’s no longer a good enough defense.”

Here are three key takeaways for businesses looking to inoculate themselves for potential disruption:

1. Don’t wait for a crisis

Just as you shouldn’t wish for a crisis to happen, so you shouldn’t wait for a crisis to happen before you change.

“It’s really nice if you start in a safe environment in order to secure your future business,” says Georg Fischer’s Schiller. “It’s not about securing your business tomorrow, it’s about the business for the next few years. And as we are a 200-year-old company, we really would like to be around for another 200 years: And so we have to start working now.”

2. There’s an Uber for your industry, too

The leaders of large industrial companies like Heidelberg Cement and Georg Fischer are investing in digital transformation programs now—because, while there may be no Uber for cement or pipes or any of their other product lines yet, there’s probably an entrepreneur somewhere pitching an idea that sounds something like that to an investor right now.

And because, however unlikely it might seem to some today, it’s certain that digital transformation—defined by Tom Loosemore, a partner at Public Digital, as “applying the culture, practices, processes, and technologies of the internet era to respond to people’s raised expectations”—is going to disrupt every industry, including the one you work in.

3. Digital is your friend

Instead of thinking of digital disruption as a threat—you’re better off picturing it as a friend.

OK, so it’s a friend who needs a lot of hand holding at first. But as long as you’re prepared to invest the time and approach it from a human-centered point of view, digital transformation will make many things a whole lot better. It will increase your productivity, your pace of innovation, your rate of learning, and your customers’ expectations—and it’ll help you deliver on them.

When Georg Fischer’s design teams, for instance, began creating digital prototypes, so they learned new, more flexible, agile ways of working. And they started producing a new, digitally-enabled ‘smart part’ that alerts machine operators to problems in the system, so their customers now have more control over operations.

So, don’t sit by the curbside, your legacy engine idling, as you wait—hope even—for a crisis to come. Instead of clinging to what is, use digital to prepare for what might be. Welcome change in now, from a position of safety, and maybe you can secure your business’s long-term future—and save a cool £1.25 billion.

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Strange as it sounds, the main challenge for some people today is that their business isn’t in crisis. No blockchain or platform or AI startup is threatening to disrupt their market—yet.

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.