For 6-year-old Dave Jr., a long line at Disneyland triggered a massive meltdown. His parents were concerned and a little embarrassed, but not surprised; Dave Jr. struggled to keep his emotions in check.

Hoping to help, Dave Jr.'s uncle, entrepreneur Craig Lund, joined forces with researchers at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, along with a video game designer who had worked on Quick Hit and NBA 2K. Together, they set out to design something that could teach coping skills to kids like Dave Jr. who need to manage “big emotions,” as well as children suffering from anxiety, ADHD, and other behavior issues, which are on the rise.

Their collaboration resulted in a video game called Mightier and a startup called Neuromotion Labs—a 10-person team of psychologists, game designers, and engineers who embedded at IDEO Cambridge for a one-month sprint to improve the game and get ready for launch.

To play Neuromotion's game, kids are first taught simple, calming breathing exercises. During gameplay, kids wear heart-rate monitors on a wrist or arm that detect spikes caused by stress or anger; as their heart rates go up, the game's difficulty increases. Kids have opportunities to pause and try deep breathing to counter the ramped up challenge. As it turns out, "gamifying" restraint builds strong incentives for kids to take charge of their emotions—they have to if they want to win.

Already activated around boosting mental and emotional health, IDEO's design team worked side-by-side with Neuromotion to study how parents and children experience Mightier. From home visits to group interviews to a summer camp-style design session with kid players, live feedback fueled the next iteration of the gaming platform and better product-market fit.

IDEO helped Neuromotion hone the visual design and mechanics of Mightier and expand it's suite of games. The team observed that the Mightier program was more successful the more involved parents of players became, which revealed a need for additional resources for adults. So they created new supports, including a more detailed orientation and a personalized coaching service for parents staffed by trained therapists.

But can a video game actually help kids cope? Early peer-reviewed studies showed that playing Mightier reduced outbursts by 62 percent, oppositional behaviors by 40 percent, and parental stress by 19 percent. After 12 weeks of using Mightier, a survey of kids and parents showed that 96 percent of parents saw positive behavior changes in their children, while 92 percent of kids learned new coping skills.

Shortly after the design sprint, Neuromotion secured its next round of funding and officially launched Mightier’s array of “bioresponsive games.” The games have already been played more than a million times, and Neuromotion has measured more than a 100 million heartbeats. Mightier games are helping kids and families across the country.

What about Dave Jr.? Recently, his sister told Lund she "accidentally" bumped Dave Jr.’s bike off a pier and into the ocean. She was expecting an outburst of anger, but after eight months of playing Mightier, Dave Jr. stayed cool. His uncle couldn’t be prouder.

Many of us have let vegetables wither in the crisper drawer, or thrown out a child’s half-eaten restaurant meal, but the sheer scale of food waste around the globe is hard to grasp. According to the United Nations, about a third of the food the world produces every year—1.3 billion tons—is lost during production or tossed by consumers, with North Americans throwing out the most food per capita. The average American wastes enough food each month to feed another person for 19 days.

IDEO received a series of grants from The Rockefeller Foundation to find solutions, given the power of IDEO’s human-centered design approach to address systemic challenges. Through a number of projects with The Rockefeller Foundation and other organizations, IDEO designers from across the U.S. devised novel ways to tackle food waste.

For IDEO’s first initiative, designers tapped into the enthusiasm of the broader creative community, in partnership with The Rockefeller Foundation, the City of San Francisco’s Department of Environment, the Closed Loop Foundation, ReFED, and other groups. In the summer of 2016, OpenIDEO—IDEO’s open innovation practice—launched the Food Waste Challenge, asking how people might curtail waste by rethinking our relationship with food. Between June and October, more than 20,000 people from 113 countries took part in the challenge, tracking their personal waste and brainstorming solutions.

Challenge participants submitted more than 450 ideas. A team of food industry experts helped select the 12 top proposals, which included software to help people buy food collectively from wholesalers and a service that delivers extra meals from corporate events to those in need. Ultimately, the Closed Loop Foundation chose to award Full Cycle Bioplastics a $50,000 grant to scale up its idea to convert inedible food and paper waste into a fully compostable alternative to oil-based plastic.

At the conclusion of the Food Waste Challenge, OpenIDEO launched the Food Waste Alliance, a platform for participants and experts to stay engaged with the most promising ideas and innovators. The alliance helped entrepreneurs share resources, prototype new concepts, secure funding, hire staff, and form partnerships. OpenIDEO invited hundreds to join the alliance, and 92 percent of members told IDEO they made progress in their work as a result. One member company, RISE, received funding from another participant who discovered RISE through the alliance. This investment let RISE prototype its concept for milling spent grain from beer brewing into flour for baked goods and ultimately join the prestigious Food-X accelerator.

The Rockefeller Foundation also supported IDEO’s work with City Harvest, a New York organization that collects 160,000 pounds of unused food each day and delivers it to soup kitchens and food pantries. City Harvest wanted to understand the habits of local families who visit food banks in an effort to ensure all the food the group distributes gets eaten. To get a peek into these families’ kitchens, in January 2017, IDEO researchers conducted observations and interviews across New York City’s five boroughs. Pantry customers cooked for the researchers, giving them an inside look at how the families engaged with the food they had available and what food meant to each of them: tradition, stability, even adventure. Based on insights from pantry visitors, IDEO made recommendations for City Harvest, including community-run cooking classes and a way for families to request specific foods or reserve pick-up times by text message. IDEO also created three video vignettes to help build even greater empathy between City Harvest and the people it serves.

In spring 2017, capping IDEO’s work with The Rockefeller Foundation, the organizations teamed up with World Wildlife Fund and Hyatt hotels in Florida, New York, and New Jersey to rethink all-you-can-eat buffets. IDEO studied diners and staff at Hyatt buffets and found that employees—from event planners to kitchen staff—each add a cushion of extra food to cover their bases, while guests overfill their plates to avoid missing out. In the end, diners eat just half the food organizers serve, while the rest goes to waste. This and other data-driven insights gleaned about diners’ habits led to subtle substitutions, including smaller plates of meats and cheeses that can be ordered from servers and individual pastries rather than whole cakes. These alternatives have not only built on Hyatt’s existing food waste management strategies, but have also helped reduce buffet costs at Hyatt Regency Orlando and continued to receive support from guests.

The problem of food waste is too enormous to ignore. Wasted food means squandered resources, lost money, and ultimately, hungry people—more than 15 million in the United States alone. Designers and innovators from coast to coast have helped find solutions to the crisis that fulfill a variety of needs, from preserving produce sent to food pantries to keeping plastic packaging out of the oceans. The Rockefeller Foundation and other IDEO partners are leveraging powerful design techniques to pave the way for a waste-free future.

In 2017, IDEO acquired longtime partner Datascope and integrated the company’s data scientists and engineers. Datascope team members aren’t just passionate data scientists; they’re human-centered designers who happen to work with data, as illustrated by successful collaborations like this one:

In today’s job market, there’s no such thing as being "done" with your education. This is particularly true in the fields of data science, machine learning, and AI, where significant advances are made on a monthly basis. To meet this need for more in-depth training, Metis—part of Kaplan—wanted to create a comprehensive data science program for students from all backgrounds. Metis asked Datascope to design the curriculum from scratch, drawing on the company’s deep expertise in the field.

Datascope spoke with practitioners across industries to identify the key skill sets that make them successful: a grasp of design; fluency with data management, coding, and algorithms; and effective communication with coworkers and the wider world. The team crafted a 12-week bootcamp that develops these specific abilities.

In order to prepare students for the work world, the bootcamp is structured less like a class and more like a company, where students are “hired” as data scientists—with projects to complete—starting on day one.

Students collaborate on group projects and presentations in a way that mirrors real workflows, and practice pair programming to learn from one another. Using techniques drawn from design, students are invited to refine their project briefs and continually reevaluate their approach.

Instead of a final exam, at the end of the course, students tackle five real-world, open-ended data science projects inspired by Datascope’s client work. One project involves using data from subway turnstiles to detect patterns in the volume of street traffic; another asks students to use data they scrape from the web to predict a movie’s box office profits using regression analysis.

After students complete the bootcamp, they receive an additional three months of career support, from mock interviews to site visits with potential employers. In addition to designing the curriculum, Datascope taught the first three student cohorts and helped Metis build its teaching team as it expanded the program from New York to San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle. Metis now offers online courses, evening classes, and corporate trainings in data science.

If you’re going to take a data science bootcamp, it’s best to take one designed by data scientists.

You’re whizzing along on your bike, en route to a new restaurant for a client meeting. You reach an unfamiliar intersection; which way to go now?

Instead of dismounting and digging for a phone, you brush your hand along your jacket sleeve for directions, then double-tap the denim to re-start your music. Without taking your eyes off the road, you’ve taken care of the problem.

This intuitive interface for connected apparel began with Levi's, makers of durable workwear for 140 years, and Google, creators of forward-looking technology, which joined forces to fashion the first item of clothing with touch-sensitive, copper-core threads woven directly into the fabric. Once it was established that the first connected garment from the partnership would be a jacket within Levi’s Commuter line, with interaction on the sleeve, Google worked with IDEO, leaders in designing for human needs, to develop the gesture language of the jacket and industrial design of the technology within.

This is the first connected garment that helps us break free from devices. It seamlessly incorporates Jacquard by Google technology to perform digital tasks, such as navigation, communication, and music playing with a few swipes or taps on the sleeve.

Jacquard by Google—a platform that makes it possible to integrate touch and gesture interactivity into fabrics using conductive yarn and standard, industrial looms—was inspired by a curious twist of history. The Jacquard loom, invented in France in 1804, used punch cards to automate the process of weaving complex patterns into fabric. In the 1940s and ’50s, engineers employed a similar punch-card technique to program the first computers.

IDEO spent time on the project early on, collaborating with Google engineers and Levi’s clothiers on the jacket’s development, helping craft an experience that would make the intelligent threads intuitive to wearers.

Working alongside Google and Levi’s, IDEO’s work included:

• The industrial design of the electronics integrated into the snap tag and connector (the tag snaps onto the jacket’s cuff and connects to your phone via Bluetooth)
• A vocabulary of gestures on the cuff of the jacket that lets you interact with the jacket’s technology
• Early exploration of the basic design philosophy and conceptual design for the interaction model of a corresponding smartphone app that ties it all together (works with both iOS and Android phones)

The IDEO team’s first task was to validate what commuters of all stripes wanted from the garment, in addition to the work Levi’s did in researching with its consumers. In interviews, group exercises, and wear tests with urban cyclists and other workers on the go, the team learned that cyclists needed a way to stay connected, while still living in the moment. That meant being able to answer calls, hear text messages, get the next direction, and control their music without using a screen.

Levi’s, Google, and IDEO developed a language of movement for Jacquard-enabled fabric that feels familiar and human and builds on the ways people would naturally interact with a garment (a whole-hand brush along the sleeve, as opposed to a one-finger tap on a touch screen, for instance).

Then came the design and engineering of the snap tag on the jacket’s cuff, which gently notifies you of calls, texts, and other jacket interactions with light and vibration feedback. The flexible, lightweight strap incorporates the look and feel of a Levi’s jean button, while housing advanced electronics that capture touch data. The tag is removable, charges via USB connection, and works in conjunction with a mobile app that lets you configure settings for the garment, set notifications, and customize gestures and interactions.

The Levi’s Commuter Jacket with Jacquard by Google changes the game because it’s simply that—a jacket—with technology that adds new utility and value, allowing us to wear our everyday interactions on our sleeves.

The Levi’s Commuter Trucker Jacket with Jacquard by Google hit stores in October 2017.

IDEO and Google have a long history of collaboration. Learn more about our work on Google Bloks here.

The daughter of British and Japanese mathematicians, Sputniko! has become both a fashion icon and feminist spokesperson in Japan for speculative designs like the Menstruation Machine (which imagines a future without menstruation, in which people simulate having periods as a nostalgia exercise) and The Red Silk Of Fate (in which genetically-engineered silkworms produce a thread impregnated with the love hormone oxytocin—the perfect material to weave into a seductive outfit). We wanted to know more about why she chose speculative design as a medium, so we caught up with her to ask a few questions.

COMMUNICATING IDEAS THROUGH POP VIDEOS IS A BOLD MOVE. WHAT LED YOU THERE?

I started as a pop musician. I was writing songs when I was at Imperial College in London, before going on to the Royal College of Art. So I was already making music videos. They seemed like a good way to challenge the "high art" culture. I liked pop art, like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Andy Warhol. Plus, at the time I was graduating in 2010, YouTube was becoming more significant. So I wanted to tap into that. Nowadays, the internet is so important for this kind of work. I thought that there needed to be more new speculative design work that was intentionally aligning with internet culture and viral culture.

HOW DO THE SCIENTISTS AT MIT FEEL ABOUT HAVING THEIR WORK PORTRAYED IN THIS WAY?

I work hard to be close to the scientists, and discuss with them how to best show their work. So far their reaction has been very positive. Some of the genetic engineers I've worked with have been getting more interest from investors because of the media interest. I think that a lot of scientists secretly want to be passionate and tell stories about their work. But they can't, because they need to be very precise. With us, and these stories, they can detach from that precision in a good way.

Crowbot Jenny by Sputniko!

WHERE DO YOUR IDEAS COME FROM?

I read a lot of science news blogs—I'm an information addict. I'll go through the news about AI, genetic engineering, and so on. What designers can do is imagine a consequence of these new technologies. If any of these imagined narratives ring a bell for me, then I'll do further research, in order to make the idea more concrete.

WHAT TECHNOLOGY IS CAPTURING YOUR ATTENTION RIGHT NOW?

AI and self-driving cars. And of course genetic engineering. But right now, my hottest interest is blockchain. This new system for handling money and identity is increasingly being adopted. Many people are thinking about it in terms of security. But creatives can think of other consequent narratives that could come from Blockchain. For example, how could it change lifestyles?

YOU'VE BEEN AT THE MEDIA LAB SINCE 2013. HOW DID YOU END UP THERE?

I first came to the Media Lab as a TV reporter when I was 27. I had my own TV show in Japan about design, and I came to interview Nicholas Negroponte. I told him how interesting I found the Media Lab, and he responding by telling me that they were looking for a new assistant professor in the arts category, and that I should apply. I was like, what? Me? I don't have a PhD! But I applied, they liked my work, and they invited me to start a new group.

Red String of Fate by Sputniko!

WHAT'S THE ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE LIKE FOR YOU?

I love being in this environment. The only thing that is a challenge is that academia is very paper-based. I don't publish papers, nor do my students. We are more about exhibitions and storytelling. It's not so much in the academic format.

WHY ARE YOU CALLED SPUTNIKO!?

It was my high school nickname. I attended an American school in Japan. I was tall and pale and I liked science and space. So the other students thought I must be half-Russian rather than half-British, and they started calling me Sputnik. Japanese girls' names often end in "ko", so Sputnik became Sputniko. Then, when I started doing music gigs as a student in London, I added the exclamation mark, because I liked the German band Neu!. It was completely not serious—just a band name. I never expected to be making and showing work, let alone teaching at MIT with this name. In Japan, when I go to symposiums and conferences, government ministers call me Sputniko-san. It's so surreal. My name reminds me of my weird career path.

YOUR WORK IS VERY CROSS-CULTURAL. WAS THAT A PRODUCT OF YOUR UPBRINGING?

Partly it was having a British mother and a Japanese father. And also growing up in Tokyo, where western culture and eastern culture are present at the same time. I grew up in Shinjuku. It's where all the skyscrapers are, but also yakuza bars and the red light district. My parents are both mathematicians, so I was surrounded by math. But I also liked art and music. For example, take the way I read books. I usually read about ten books at once, on a kindle. I usually just read five pages at a time. And then I move to the next book. The way I consume information is very parallel. For me, associations and connections are the seeds of my creativity.

DO YOU OVER WORRY ABOUT BEING OVERLOADED WITH INFORMATION?

Overload is not so much a problem for me. For example, I get my eyelash extensions done every three weeks. While that happens, I have to close my eyes for an hour. Which means that I can't look at my smartphone. I used to hate doing eyelash extensions so much. But then I found an eyelash specialist who was a beauty technology expert. She's like a Google for me. When I close my eyes I always ask her, what's a new technology that you've found? That's an example of how information-addicted I am.

The designer and artist Sputniko! may sound like she's from outer space, and that's not far from the truth. An associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab, her work feels like a Large Hadron collision of design, fashion, technology, and pop music—all filtered through the multiple personas she presents on YouTube.

A few years ago, I traveled to Amsterdam in the wintertime. Amsterdam is famous for having rivers flow through its streets, but this winter, the rivers were frozen and they became new roads. Simultaneously, people took advantage of the sudden change and switched to an alternative form of transportation (ice skating!). One person’s thoughtless act can attract other people and become a sort of movement when other people start to join.

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.

Snow in NYC!

I decided to frame my questions into City Play Project—100 days to observe, create, and capture playful moments in the city. Sometimes I found playfulness in the street cats of Istanbul, or a serendipitous moment of two strangers dancing in the West Village, or even a painted mural in East London.

Once I started my 100-day project, lots of friends—even friends of friends—started making and sending me images of playful interventions from all over the world—Florence, Istanbul, Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, and San Francisco. The most wonderful part about it was seeing how each person defined playfulness. Comparing all the differences helped me find some universal truths. Here are six things I learned from the project.

1. Playing in the city makes you notice things in a completely different way

Once you start looking for playfulness, you see things differently. It’s almost like adopting a traveler’s mindset. A type of pavement or a trash can suddenly look more interesting. You realize that you can be more playful with everything—even your own shadow.

2. It’s contagious

When you play in streets, others play with you. One moment can inspire a movement—just like the sticky notes in the New York subway. Sometimes, you just need to find a way to give others permission to join you in changing the city around you.

Taking over the subway with post-it notes!

3. Playing alone is harder than playing with others

People are terrified by empty spaces, public humiliation, and interacting with strangers in the street. Being silly alone is hard, and being silly with strangers is even harder. Often, we need encouragement from friends to start playing. The person who goes first makes it easier for the rest to be more playful.

4. It brings intimacy, trust, and love

Playfulness brings people closer. If you are brave enough to play with strangers, you can build trust in an instant, unspoken way. People who have never met before can play together. It helps you see the child in others and initiate creative collisions. It creates intimacy, and all that magic leads—or might lead—to love.

Play with city signs and spread the love.

5. Playfulness builds confidence

Allowing yourself to be more playful when you are walking down the street brings more confidence. You become more comfortable with your surroundings, and in how you interact with people, even—strangers. You stop asking for permission to do things, you just do them. A playful mindset allows you to try things, step up, express your thoughts in a physical way without being shy about it.

6. A framework can help encourage it

Constraints may seem like the last thing we should think about when we play, but they can actually spark playfulness. Constraints aren’t always restrictive—especially at an urban scale. The limitations of a cul-de-sac or the weather can push people to unique ways of playing. Sometimes it’s the boundaries that makes us embrace playfulness.

Want to join me in observing playfulness in cities? I challenge you to do the same! Tag your photos with @cityplayproject.

‍

I’ve always been intrigued by what makes city life so charming. Having spent most of my life as an urbanite, I’ve come to realize that what captivates me most is the playfulness I see around me. Just as we can find inspiration by writing or reading about what interests us, I decided to find inspiration through observation. I wondered “How does play affect how we behave in cities? What are the social and physical effects of play in urban design? If we played more in cities, would we be happier? Fall in love more often?”

Spirit is a simulated AI, a provocation created by IDEO’s London Studio in response to a commission from the Design Museum. It asked designers and their teams—including Yves Behar of fuseproject and furniture designer Konstantin Grcic—to contribute to a project on the future of aging as a sequel to an exhibit of the same topic that they hosted 30 years earlier. The museum asked IDEO to explore what community might look like in the year 2047.

For our project, we aimed to start a dialogue about the role emerging technologies might play in the way people connect as a community. In the future, we may no longer need to drive our children to school, speak with anybody to go grocery shopping, or visit a human doctor. Technology often makes us more independent, and less reliant on human contact and support. To counter the social isolation that may arise, we developed the concept of a free and open-source social AI, a system built to foster strong and healthy communities by strengthening social bonds and keeping people active and mentally stimulated.

Creating the Exhibit

We designed the interactive part of the exhibition for three reasons: We wanted to give visitors a glimpse of what it would be like to interact with an artificial entity; we wanted to see how people would feel about the interaction; and, obviously, we like playful experimentation and prototyping.

Current AI technology is in its infancy when it comes to having a real dialogue with a human being. But just as autonomous cars learn with every mile they drive, these technologies will learn the more they interact with people. Current popular AI products (Siri, Alexa, etc.) listen to user commands and respond. We found it interesting to reverse that by having our Spirit actively ask visitors questions, and rather intimate ones, including: What makes you happiest? What would you be scared of forgetting? Would you trust an artificial intelligence to choose your friends? If you lived to 120, how many partners would you want to have?

The exhibit had two states: An idle state where visitors were encouraged to talk to Spirit and it displayed selected quotes from previous visitors and visualized the data it gathered through a generative visual design, and an interactive state.

The interactive dialogue state took place inside an audio booth. The system greeted visitors with an audiovisual message and a stylized speech-bubble that mediated the conversation. The system then asked different questions, engaging in deeper conversation over time. For example, Spirit might ask, "What makes you happiest," and the answers could vary from "rich relationships" to "when it stops raining," "playing football," or "creating new things and solving problems." Each answer created a new pebble in the visualization, the color, size, and shape of which were determined by an analysis of the length and the emotion of the response. When the visitor finished answering, the pebble merged into a sea of pebbles representing all of the interactions collected so far.

Visual interface design and data visualization by Studio Waltz Binaire

Building Spirit

The technical challenge of the exhibit was to have the system running for five weeks, seven days a week, eight hours per day. There were a lot of pieces talking to each other, and we needed to be able to track the feedback from thousands of visitors.

Spirit used a bespoke script to follow the conversations, and when the answers veered too far from what it had anticipated, it would send the answer to a chatbot API to find an appropriate answer. Unfortunately, the voice to text turned out to be not very reliable in the museum environment, so we focused on the scripted questions.

The technical setup consisted of two components: the audio booth and the large display facing it. To let Spirit know when somebody was present in the booth, we installed an Arduino with an ultrasonic sensor that communicated with an iPhone 6 via Bluetooth. The iPhone was connected to a directional microphone and a speaker.

Here is where the magic happened. On the phone, we ran a custom app. The app turned the voice into text using the Apple Speech Framework, and then analyzed the emotions in the answer using IBM Watson, an iconic AI developed by IBM, while also checking if the answer is in the pre-written script. If it wasn’t, it used another API to get an answer from the chatbot. The information about the answer and emotions was stored and sent to a custom program written in vvvv that communicated with the iPhone app via OSC.

Ambient noise was our biggest worry. It could have prevented the system from understanding visitors’ answers. Also, the position of the microphone was fixed, so reaching different visitor heights and voice volumes was a challenge. This actually proved to be a problem, as there were several interactions in which the voice was unintelligible.

The Data

One good perk of the interactive system is that we had real-time access to the data, so we could follow how well the installation and exhibition were performing, and what the audience was saying. After the exhibition ended, we found a bit more time to use Python and Pandas in the analysis, and Excel to plot the results.

We had a total of 8996 individual sessions with Spirit during the exhibition, about 10 percent of the visitors to the Design Museum.

The emotion recognition system that we used, IBM Watson, is not yet totally reliable (as an example, “yes” was considered a 100% J=joyful answer). But with the amount of data we gathered, the system was still able to give some hints about visitor moods. And the variations in mood could be correlated to external events. For example, we saw a peak in feelings of joy on the 24th, when London hit its highest temperature after a cold January.

When we looked at the answers, we discovered that they seemed more spontaneous and playful than others given via written questionnaires. They were also more honest, suggesting that for some people, sharing intimately with an AI might be less intimidating than talking to a human interviewer. Others, though, were critical and disconcerted. It became clear that it is important to start a dialogue about how we want to interact with AI in our daily lives.

Though the experiment obviously didn’t culminate in a fully-formed product to help the elderly, the interaction model helped us create the kind of AI we would need to build community and increase social interaction, and allowed us to test people’s reactions to emotional and intimate questions from an AI. The experiment also directly related to the work we do with design research. We frequently send design researchers out into the field to talk to people to learn more about their needs and habits, and how we can design solutions to fit their lives. Our work with Spirit begs the question—could even a design researcher be replaced by an artificial researcher at some point? For now, we don’t have a lot of answers, but this experiment helped us push our understanding forward, and we’re excited about the AI-driven insights that will come in the future.

In the top floor of London’s Design Museum, as dozens of visitors walk by and the rain hits the windows, a woman speaks with an AI bot called Spirit. It asks her how many partners she would like to have if she can live until she is 150. She giggles and answers. “Just one—and that is because my husband is next to me.” According to Spirit’s analytics, her answer is 33% sad and 12% joyful.

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.

‍

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.