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.

Designers often have the biggest impact when they reimagine the relationship we have with everyday utilities, like those in the kitchen. Decisions as straightforward as the height of a stool can change the fabric of everyday life.

One great example is Austrian designer Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the woman who arguably had more impact on modern kitchen design than anyone in history. In celebration of International Women's Day and as an homage to my own grandmother, I wanted to tell her story.

The “fitted” kitchen

I discovered Schütte-Lihotzky on a recent visit to The Design Museum London, when I went to see the “Designer Maker User” exhibit. I'd never heard of her before, but she is credited with creating the first modern, efficient, "fitted" kitchen in 1926. A "fitted" space means that units are attached to a wall rather than free-floating. It was the first time someone thought to design for cooks instead of home builders.

Schütte-Lihotzky worked in the Municipal Building Department in Vienna, which controlled all aspects of housing, but as a newly-graduated architect, she had little experience with cooking. Instead of letting that naiveté hold her back, she embraced her beginner’s mindset and embarked on an early form of design research, interviewing and observing women in their homes and using film to conduct time-motion studies.

She found that women were spending their entire day preparing, cooking, and cleaning. This endurance activity started with trips to the local store, as fridges and storage units were not the norm and food would spoil within a day or so.

To add to the challenge, the stove, sink, and pantry were installed without any consideration for food prep workflow or the relationship between tasks, and work surfaces were installed at varying heights, putting strain on women’s bodies.

From her interactions with everyday cooks and the application of factory-line principles popularized by Henry Ford, Schütte-Lihotzky introduced her replicable, affordable, space-saving, and egalitarian “Frankfurt Kitchen,” named after the New Frankfurt initiative to address the city's shortage of public housing in the 1920s.

Each kitchen came with a swivel stool, a gas stove, built-in storage, a garbage drawer, and an ironing board. Schütte-Lihotzky used resilient materials like oak to repel critters from getting into perishables and installed aluminum storage bins for staples like sugar and flour. The main objective was to free up hours each day for women to devote to other pursuits.

Within a few years, 10,000 of Schütte-Lihotzky’s units were installed in apartment buildings across Frankfurt, and her design became the model for all subsequent Western kitchens. Her work reframed women’s relationship with cooking and set in motion a radical wave of change.

My grandmother, Ruth Kandel, who was born in Frankfurt just as Schütte-Lihotzky's work started getting acclaim, would often tell me about her upbringing—that her purpose in life was defined by “Kirche, Küche, Kinder” (church, kitchen, children.)

While she loved her husband and children dearly, she also dreamed of becoming a lawyer or a social worker and contributing to the world beyond her kitchen. I feel extremely blessed to have had women like Schütte-Lihotzky blaze the trail through design, freeing up my time so that I’m able to embody my grandmother’s desire to go forth and create.

Can the design of today’s food liberate us further?

Now that I’m at IDEO, I have the opportunity to carry Schütte-Lihotzky’s work forward. We partnered with IKEA to think about the future kitchen—how we might design it to be more efficient and use less energy while making it easier for home cooks to feel confident about preparing healthy food.

We also worked with a startup called INFARM to design modular, stackable units that use far less soil, water, and space to grow food at an optimal light and temperature. Because of the compact size of the units, you could install one in your own home kitchen, or stack them up to feed thousands of employees a day during winter months when produce typically has to be shipped in from far away. Good for cooks and good for the planet.

People used to say that a woman’s place was in the kitchen. Today, thanks to pioneers like Schütte-Lihotzky, a woman’s place is anywhere she wants to work.

As a designer who loves to cook, I’m intrigued by the way kitchen design has enabled me—and generations of women who came before me—to spend less time preparing and more time enjoying the food we make, so we can move on to other things.

Small cities provide the character that comes from not having the world’s largest corporations on their hips. Communities are close-knit and form at a slower, more intimate pace. And cultural spaces in those locales are stronger for being able to bring people from diverse backgrounds together to have a dialogue that goes beyond a town hall meeting.

Designing a design community

After graduating from Florida State University and working professionally in Tallahassee, I started to realize that there were a lot of talented folks who were brought up in the community only to eventually light out for a larger zip code—taking their skills and passion with them. At the same time, I saw the community starting to rally around Domi Station, its growing co-working space and tech incubator,.

Wanting to pull those threads together, I quit my job at the large ad agency where I worked to form a creative collective called Foremost, which does international design work and supports local startups and events to help grow Tallahassee’s design community.

Today, when I’m not busy with my day job designing emerging technology at IDEO’s CoLab, I volunteer with Foremost. Our latest project, led locally by my business partners Jake Kiker, Lucas Lindsey, and Micah Widen, is a physical space created for the local community. We call it Happy Motoring.

Finding our station

It all started with an abandoned Esso gas station on the Southside of Tallahassee. I was ecstatic when Foremost bought it in 2015 to create a community space. The mid-century design of the building was (and is) beautiful, something to be preserved, and we knew that creating something locals would get excited about meant bringing them in as co-creators.

So we organized an event where Southside inhabitants could tell us what they wanted, inviting our friends at Street Art Tallahassee to put together a pop-up gallery and Juniors Roasted Coffee to host a campfire that would bring people together.

A shared vision

Part of what I wanted to do in creating Foremost was to show the city how many talented creatives live here. So, for the community event, I rallied five of the best young artists I knew in the illustration scene to battle it out in a Battle of the Boards (based on Ink Wars, an awesome event series put on every year in Georgia at Creative South.) The illustrators were each given an inspirational word and an hour and a half to fill an eight-foot board. The theme was "knockout."

We reserved two of the boards for the Southside community to write down their ideas—big, small, impossible, and plausible—about what the space might become.

Video by Conner Hill.

Building community comes from listening to diverse voices. Too often, we divide ourselves into bite-size neighborhoods or groups that lack a space for hearing each other out. We hope Happy Motoring will become that space—by giving everyone a chance to contribute, we’ll have all of the pieces we need to start building something local and real.

Want to do the same in your hood? It might be easier than you think. Organizations like the Knight Foundation fund grassroots urban innovation in cities. You can start small—create a meetup group, find someone with an empty lot and start a weekend market, or invite some food trucks and organize pop up events. Plant a community garden. Hold group bike rides. Whatever feels right to gain trust and start a dialogue in your hometown.

And if you’re interested in joining the next event in Tallahassee, be sure to follow our updates and join us for Happy Motoring Station’s official launch on March 8, 2018!

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When you hear about “design hubs,” your mind may not instantly jump to Tallahassee. But small communities have just as much passion for design as larger metropolises—they just lack the resources to attract the same attention. Though I live in a big city now (Boston), I learned a lot about the importance of community from working and growing up in small towns in Florida.

Sure the game is fun (although neither of us is very good), but what interested us more were the distributed locations of the courts around the city. Spread out across the city like sprinkles on a hipster cupcake, these tennis courts would be a great new way to explore San Francisco. And it would keep us busy for at least the next couple of years of Saturdays.

There was only one problem. I couldn’t find a decent tennis map of San Francisco. I wanted a map that was useful, of course, but also one that was well designed. So I decided to make one myself and give it to my wife as a birthday gift, with the goal of making it attractive enough that she would agree to hang it on our wall, but also useful enough that we would actually make it a centerpiece of our new Saturday hobby. And lastly, I wanted to visualize the MUNI bus routes to each court (since—oddly—riding the bus is another avocation that my wife enjoys).

My starting point was the only map I could find—a fantastically unattractive google map that shows the tennis courts of San Francisco in 2003 graphic design glory.

A tennis map of San Francisco in all its 2003 graphic design glory.

But this was a start! I downloaded it as a KML file. What’s a KML file? It stands for “Keyhole Markup Language” (I have no idea what this means), but what it does is important. With a KML file of the tennis courts, I could manipulate the data file in ArcGIS or QGIS, two enormously powerful pieces of cartography software. For anyone looking to get into amateur cartography, I strongly recommend GQIS. It works on a Mac (which ArcGIS doesn’t) and its cost (zero dollars!) outweighs its bugginess.

My next stop was DataSF.org, which has lots of great open source data, including maps of the city. What I was looking for here was something called a Shapefile, a geospatial data format that nerdy geographers use. I found one corresponding to San Francisco neighborhoods and another for San Francisco parks. Lastly, I found one for the MUNI bus routes of San Francisco.

Next it was off to QGIS to combine my various datasets into a single map.

First there were neighborhoods, then tennis courts, then parks, then bus lines.

With a couple of tweaks, I was able to label the tennis courts and isolate the MUNI bus lines according to route number, so that it looked less like a giant red spider web.

There are many a professional cartographer out there who would have kept playing in QGIS to make their map a bit prettier. But I’m a designer, and the sooner I’m able to get out out of QGIS and into the Adobe Creative Suite, the happier I feel (and the higher likelihood that the final design of the map will be something that someone is willing to hang on a wall). Luckily, QGIS has an option to export a file as an SVG file (a vector format that can be opened by Illustrator).

Post-export, the file looked like this.

You wouldn't hang this baby on the wall?

Wait, what? Why does it look worse? Totally natural and easily fixable. I isolated each layer (parks, tennis courts, MUNI Lines, neighborhoods) and then got to work playing around with colors and stroke weight and other good stuff, all of it so much easier because I was working with a piece of software most designers are familiar with.

At some point during this process, my day job at IDEO led me to Amsterdam. While there, I was inspired by the fantastically-designed Dutch train maps and a pro tip from my graphic designer colleague (Anthony Stimola) that the Dutch font of choice is DIN. Back in front of my computer, I created a look and feel for the map inspired by my travels.

A trip to Amsterdam inspired the look and feel for the finished map.

Next up was the laborious process of determining which bus lines one could actually take to each tennis court. My approach was 100% analog, starting from the top of the alphabetical list of tennis courts (Alamo Square) and marching straight through to the end (Youngblood Coleman), noting all of the bus lines that had a stop within reasonable walking distance to a court. I discovered that Helen Wills court in North Beach takes the prize as most MUNI-accessible tennis court (it's served by nine bus lines!), while five tennis courts around the city are served only by a single bus line.

The painstaking work of manually matching tennis courts to nearby bus lines.

Lastly, I considered how this map would be used. Of course I was hoping that my wife (and others) would find it attractive enough to hang on a wall in full analog glory. But this is 2018, and in order to be useful, the map also needed some connection back to the digital world. I added GPS coordinates and a clickable URL link to a Google Maps location for each tennis court.

A detailed view of the court's location and the corresponding bus routes

That’s it! My wife was happy with her birthday gift, and agreed to hang it on our wall. This past weekend, we used our new map to find the McCoppin Square court in the Sunset neighborhood. A few minutes after we started playing, two women arrived. Unfortunately, they would need to wait until our 30 minute time limit had elapsed. Eager to play, they asked us if we knew of any other tennis courts in the area. In fact, we did. I texted her a PDF of my new map and off they went to a nearby court. Hooray for the power of a good map!

My wife and I are city people, and our only family car is a Vespa that is much too slow to cross any bridges. So most weekends, if it’s nice out, we’ll chart an urban hike through San Francisco, targeting a different neighborhood and a different park. This has kept us occupied for the last few years. But they don’t call it the 7x7 for nothing—San Francisco is actually a small city. So my wife and I have started to play tennis.

7:10 AM: A Reluctant Jog

I run to Fort Greene Park, where I’m rewarded with a Seurat-like tableau of what seems like all the dogs in Brooklyn. I’m not a jogger, but I’m doing a six-week food-and-fitness challenge with coworkers. I'm grateful for the peer pressure, because it may be the only thing keeping me going.

7:45 AM: A Bristling Problem

As I brush my teeth and stare into my rusty medicine cabinet, I decide it’s time do something about the crowding in there. Since the space is so small, I probably can’t find an off-the-shelf fix, but maybe I can come up with a bespoke solution.

8:35 AM: Swift Passage

This sweeping view across the East River and the Manhattan skyline is my favorite part of the morning commute. It reminds me of the hope and excitement I felt when I first moved here 12 years ago. On the way, I steal some winter fashion ideas from my fellow commuters, noodle through a crossword on my phone, and listen to a podcast about the perils of multitasking.

9:10 AM: I Loaf This Place

IDEO New York sits on an invigorating corner of the city where tourists, tchotchkes, and street food collide with colorful chaos. Upstairs in the studio, the best part of the week awaits: A selection of delicious, crusty bread and a variety of spreads. It’s Loaf Day! Bonus: Someone has scrawled on the kitchen chalkboard: “Might as well face it, you’re addicted to loaf.”

10:00 AM: Team Standup

Our project is about investigating how cities and workplaces can support human potential and resilience. Today we’ve got a lot to do, including hosting some research participants in the afternoon. Deliberately coming together at the start of each day helps our team align and stay on track. In our project space, we take turns sharing our energy level on a scale of 1 to 10 and write a long punch list for the day.

10:30 AM: Download & Synthesis

We’ve spent the last few days traveling for research and speaking to lots of people in the field. We transcribe the important things we’ve learned, filling Post-it notes and boards with quotes and observations. We start move things around into clusters, looking for patterns that will lead us to insights. One theme we're seeing is how hiring systems often overlook valuable skills that are hard to quantify, kicking qualified applicants out of the process early. “So much of the hiring process is gaming to get past the system,” reads one quote.

11:30 AM: Scrappy Prototyping

We take a break and head to the office makespace. We think we might want to make something printed, so we grab some construction paper and markers and each create some prototypes. Should we make a gallery walk of posters? A tabloid-size newspaper printed on pulp? Maybe a giant book with an accordion fold!

12:30 PM: Fun With Lasers

It's lunchtime and I can’t stop thinking about the toothbrush situation. I make some quick sketches of a slot-in shelf that would allow the toothbrushes and toothpaste to sit above the floor of the cabinet, still be easily accessible in the short vertical space, and cover up the unsightly rust. I transfer the specs to Adobe Illustrator, grab some spare acrylic, and fire up the laser cutter. A few minutes and a little glue later, I’ve got a prototype of a tiny shelf that I can take home and try out.

3:00 PM: Learning from Users

As part of our research, we’ve invited a few people into the studio to share how they think about themselves in relation to their jobs. We take them through a hands-on exercise, asking them to pick objects that represent the key attributes and skills they value in themselves. As they describe their collections, we begin to see a rich picture of their work-life experiences and connections.

4:30 PM: Moodmaking

I gather visual inspiration for our deliverable. I troll design sites, look through books, and research brands and designers that have been on my radar recently. As I pin up images, I think about how the various elements of typography, color, photography, illustration, and scale could come together to create a unique look and feel for everything we’ll design for our client and the people they serve.

6:30 PM: A Melodic Exit

Time to head home. As he often does at the end of the day, Jared, our experience lead and sometime maestro, is slaying with some live guitar and singing. Today he’s accompanied by Kati on ukulele, and together they send us off down the elevator to the strains of "Wild Horses."

7:20 PM: Installation

It’s in! The tiny shelf is a big improvement, but in practice it’s still a bit tough to reach the toothbrush in the back. Next iteration needs more simplicity and maybe some better color matching. It’s back to the sketchpad for tomorrow’s prototype.

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When people ask me what I do for a living, what I really want to do is just show them. For me, graphic design is about finding the best way to bring ideas to life: posters, film, installation, animation, or even objects. So, a day at IDEO is following ideas wherever they may lead and getting distracted (I mean, inspired) along the way.

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.