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.

Since we moved in, Andy Deakin and I have teamed up to build out our displays. As industrial designers, we’re not trained in the art of window displays, but we’ve developed our own principles, drawing on our work creating physical exhibits or immersive experiences—and the rules set by the Port Authority.

Unlike traditional window fronts, ours comes with an elaborate set of constraints. The building is owned by the Port Authority of San Francisco, which has strict guidelines for what can be put on display. No direct advertising, no big logos, and nothing that looks too much like retail. The location also presents its own challenges: We have to create something strong enough to compete with the towering Bay Bridge above, and the bright sunlight along the Embarcadero. And every design has to do double duty—it needs to have meaning for people walking by on the street, as well as our coworkers and clients inside the building.

Our latest window design centers on a new line of cycling bags IDEO created with Brooks England. This time, the biggest challenge was showing off the gear without making the window feel too much like a store. We pulled inspiration from displays and exhibitions we admired, then brainstormed and sketched different iterations as a team before landing on the final concept: a bright yellow bike strapped with a mountain of boxes, which act as shelves for the bags to perch on.

Here are our seven rules for window design.

1. Set the Focus

What is the central focal point of the visual story you’re telling? Distinguish between primary elements and stage-setters. Try using only one material throughout, or in the case of the Brooks window, dip everything in one color to simplify the backdrop and create a neutral stage for the centerpiece—the bags.

2. Exaggerate Scale

Playing with scale helps create a big impact—especially if you want to amplify small objects to fill an entire window. We loved the Selfridges window display of giant flowers for the Apple watch, and employed this trick when we built a display for the launch the launch of Tom and David Kelley’s Creative Confidence. For that project, we created a six-foot-tall stack of books to fill the window.

3. Repeat a Theme

Whether it’s boxes, sticks, chairs, or lightbulbs, selecting one item and repeating it to completely fill the space is a simple trick to create an impressive sense of complexity. Aesop is a master of this and we’ve borrowed the technique for numerous exhibits.

4. Create Depth

Many windows create the illusion of depth when they’re actually quite two-dimensional. Using layers and forced perspective—similar to the tricks of theatrical set design—helps to draw the viewer in. Thomas Brisebras’ MAKE installation was a great example. Seemingly random floating sticks transformed into the word MAKE as you walked past the window. His was certainly the most Instagrammed window we’ve created so far.

5. Add Momentum

When they're composed in a particular way, static compositions can feel almost like they are in motion. Objects can be suspended in midair or positioned to make it seem like they're flying through the scene. When we created our 2020 event window, we installed multiple Steelcase Node chairs to give the impression they were jumping in the air.

6. Design for Duration

Our window budget often limits the types of materials and construction methods we can use. But keeping the duration of the display in mind can help guide the choice of materials. If it is only intended to last for a few weeks, exploring what you can do with cardstock might make the most sense. Unionmade, a San Francisco store, does a nice job of repurposing everyday objects and designing with lo-fi materials to suit their quick refresh rate.

7. Above All, Entertain

And don’t forget inject some play and humor into the mix. Watching people on the street look up and get the joke is half the fun.

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When the IDEO San Francisco studio moved its office to Pier 28, we landed a whole new design challenge: a massive, floor-to-ceiling front window along the Embarcadero. For the first time, we had a public display case to highlight our events and projects, and we had to figure out how to best activate it, while sticking to some pretty strict rules.

Last year, about a month before the con, I came across a Bender Badge project by AND!XOR—a group of hackers from California—on Hackaday. The Bender Badge is a nod to the robot character from Futurama and it comes packaged with games and flashy lights in the shape of his head. It’s also designed to be hacked (the barrier to entry is low—it can be programmed using the Arduino IDE). It seemed like a good place to focus my excitement.

For years, I have been looking for an opportunity to design something for DEF CON that interacts with sound. Networking and parties are a big part of the con, and often these events feature live DJs and music. I also wanted to create a design that relates to Bender's personality—he's often drinking and smoking, so a cigar seemed appropriate. Optimal choice: a cigar-shaped microphone.

The Bender Badge comes equipped with a standard set of hardware components (buttons, LEDs, and a display). Since the project was still in development, and I didn’t know which parts would be in the final version, I decided to build an add-on. The badge kit features an STM32F103 microcontroller, which includes an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). This allows the microcontroller to receive analog audio data by sampling it at high speeds and converting it into digital values. My goal was to use a microphone to capture the surrounding audio data and then convert that data into frequency components via Fourier analysis—specifically, using the discrete Fourier transform (DFT). The results of the Fourier analysis can be displayed as a bar graph. This is commonly referred to as a spectral analysis, and in this case, it would focus on frequencies between 20 and 20,000 Hz (the range for human hearing).

Proof of Concept

I built the microphone circuit to make sure it was configured properly before creating the printed circuit board (PCB). The circuit starts with the microphone to capture surrounding audio. Next, the signal from the microphone is amplified so that the microcontroller can receive a wider range of data from the ADC, which results in better definition from the Fourier transform. Lastly, the amplified signal goes through a low-pass filter to suppress any frequencies above 20,000 Hz that could interfere with the analysis.

The greatest challenge during this stage was implementing the DFT on the STM32 microcontroller. Thankfully, there is an algorithm called the fast Fourier transform (FFT) that speeds up the computation for the DFT, but it's still a complex and time consuming calculation. Performing the FFT and then updating the display is a time-sensitive task. If the display is updated too slowly, it will look choppy and less responsive. Luckily, I came across a library developed by STMicroelectronics that was already optimized to work with my specific microcontroller.

Circuit Board Design

One of my biggest hurdles in designing the PCB was board size. I didn’t know the exact size of the Bender Badge, but I attempted to scale everything based on the buttons and the screen. From there, I figured out what size I wanted the circuit board to be so that it looked proportional to the badge. I was able to make the badge look like a cigar by adding silkscreen to the top layer (the label, paper edges, and ash at the end), and by cutting the PCB into a cigar shape.

I placed most of the surface mount parts on the bottom of the circuit board to keep them hidden. The microphone stayed on the top layer to efficiently capture surrounding audio. (It also fit nicely as part of the cigar label.) I also added orange LED "ash" to the end of the top layer to make it look like the cigar was lit. These LEDs were meant to be triggered by acoustic activity, so that they would flicker and look more like embers than a solid light.

Firmware Finalizing

Two weeks before DEF CON was set to start, I submitted the PCB design for fabrication, and I created a prototype of the board. The majority of the leftover work involved converting the FFT output into something that could be shown on the display. The FFT outputs an array of frequency groupings, known as bins, where the size of a bin (or frequency grouping) is based on the audio sampling rate and size of the FFT. The bin size can be thought of as the output resolution of the FFT, and for the cigar mic the bins are about 39 Hz (40,000 Hz/1024) wide. Bins are important because they contain information on the amplitude of frequencies within each group. If the cigar mic does not pick up any surrounding audio between 1-39 Hz (the first bin), the value for that bin will be close to zero; but if there is activity within that frequency range, there will be a value greater than zero relative to how loud that frequency source is.

The FFT bins are grouped to create a bar graph that displays frequency data logarithmically (fewer bins grouped together at lower frequencies, and more bins grouped together at higher frequencies) in an effort to resemble human hearing. The display consists of 32 individual bars that are 4 pixels wide.

Assembly and Debugging

Once the circuit boards came back from fabrication, the first step was to assemble and test one. I connected the output of the PCB (the connection that sends the captured audio data to the microcontroller’s ADC) to an oscilloscope to see if the microphone was capturing audio and if the preamplifier was increasing the amplitude. I encountered two errors in my design. First, the microphone was incorrectly oriented, and second, I had flipped two pins on the preamplifier, which resulted in significant distortion. Both were easy fixes, but added extra time to the assembly process. As a result, I was working up until I got to DEF CON, and then some.

Shortly after I arrived in Vegas, I met up with the AND!XOR guys and showed them my addition. They loved it, and within a few hours, I had my cigar wired up, and my code running on their Bender Badge. It was awesome (and relieving) to see it all come together. Now I just have to figure out what to do for DEF CON 25.

If you want to learn more, check out my GitHub page for the project, which includes PCB files and badge firmware.

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Every year, it's hard for me to contain my excitement as DEF CON approaches, so I try to focus that enthusiasm into various projects. (For the uninitiated, DEF CON is one of the world’s largest hacking conventions. The days are long, the sleeping is limited, and it’s Vegas in the middle of summer.) In the past five-plus years, designing and programming custom badges to share at DEF CON has become increasingly popular.

Strolling down the Porto’s Rio Douro in the bright, spring sun, a Thoughtless Act caught my eye. A man selling knock-off sunglasses had thoughtfully—or instinctively—used the bench he'd been sitting on to display his wares.

It was the perfect display stand: the slats provided a neat grid format to lodge the glasses into so they could be fully admired from all angles, while the greyed wood gave a neutral backdrop to assess the color and design.

From a design research perspective, observing the way people exploit the objects and environments around them can provide fruitful and culturally-relevant inspiration. Taking ownership of public space and repurposing it for a transient commercial opportunity was natural to this street seller. We see other examples of nomadic, 'pop-up commerce' with things like food trucks and busking musicians.

It wasn't quite enough to persuade me to part with my euros, but it was a lovely example of Thoughtless Acts in action, nonetheless!

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 the invention of new products, services, and experiences.

My husband always writes me a little bit of Valentine's Day Code. The image above is one of my favorites—Charlie was learning 3JS, a 3D web development framework, and made me my dream: an exploding pink disco ball floating in space. He's made a 3D simulation of Big Sur (where we took our first road trip together), a "Charlie Bot" (forking off of hubot, creating a fake Charlie for me to talk to when I was traveling a lot) and an Adventure-style text based game, where I got to achieve my dream of meeting Prince with my dog Hudson.
—Ashley Holtgraver, IDEO Cambridge

As a Biodesigner + Cardiologist at IDEO Palo Alto, I led three classes of 5th graders at Covington Elementary School (Los Altos, CA) in their annual sheep heart dissection this Valentine's Day. I introduced them to the fundamentals of cardiovascular anatomy and physiology, including the structure and function of each chamber and valve, their relationships to surrounding conduits, and the hemodynamics and electrophysiology that drive the system. You know, just the basics. All of the kids experienced a hands-on exploration of the heart’s surface and texture, then under the supervision of volunteering parents, dissected their ways into the depths of the organ. Accompanying me was my rockstar hostess and sidekick Celia Wedner, future doc and daughter of Palo Alto’s Grant Wedner.
—Farzad Azimpour, IDEO Palo Alto

I’ve been doing cross-stitch for more than 10 years. Cross-stitch is an ancient form of embroidery that’s very intricate—it takes a long time to finish a product! The time I spend making a pattern is one of my favorite ways of expressing love on Valentine's Day.
—Christina Shen, IDEO Shanghai

For our third annual Galentine’s Day gathering, we started by designing postcards to send to our district representatives. This was followed by whiskey tastings and a fancy dinner hosted in a room decorated with posters of inspiring power-women. Everyone left with a "treat yo-self" care package, complete with home decor, "Make Your Mark" to-do lists, homemade biscotti, and soothing teas.
—Rohini Venkatraman, IDEO San Francisco

At IDEO London, we held an office-wide Valentine’s Day celebration with activities and treats under the theme of Random Acts of Love. We set up areas to collect clothes and food for those more in need, and a station to create a heart chain of messages to people across IDEO locations, hoping they’d continue the chain. Prior to the event, we asked everyone to send us one song they’d take to a desert island and why. Over a selection of strawberry daiquiris and fresh cupcakes, we filmed people talking about their chosen song. We had tears and goosebumps. Interestingly, most people chose songs to remind them of someone they love dearly. Three others chose songs that have helped them get through life.
—Bobbie Brightman and Ryan Lovett, IDEO London

This is a fortune my boyfriend and I got on one of our first trips together, before we were "officially" dating. Something told me to hold onto it. Later, he had this greeting card printed for me for Valentine's Day. He actually had to print a minimum of 100 so somewhere we have a hefty stack of personalized greeting cards of ourselves. Over 3 years later, I still have the fortune.
—Becky Lee, IDEO San Francisco

I used to work for a company that was pretty hardcore about celebrating Valentine's Day. We would exchange gifts, play games, have a big party, etc. One year I made this clock for my good friend and former colleague Irene Pau. The design is inspired by an inside joke that's probably not worth going into here. But the main goal was really just to make something weird that would creep her out, and also help her get to meetings on time. Mission accomplished?
—Griffin Thomson, IDEO Palo Alto

I love giving people Spanish Sweethearts for Valentine’s Day. They’re unique (read: hard-to-find) and everyone learns some Spanish from my gift!
—Katie Clark, IDEO San Francisco

Kiley was our New York front desk concierge for a couple of years, and she decided to leave last year to head to Arkansas and pursue writing and graduate school. She always put a lot of work into making the office feel special, so we decided to throw her a big going away party to show our appreciation. The base of the K was cut from scrap foam core on the laser cutter. The colored fringe was created from discarded Post-it pad slivers that were collecting in the hallway, which were stuck onto the K then cut vertically. Try your own letter piñata for Valentine's Day!
—Njoki Gitahi, IDEO New York

Header image by Volkan Olmez on Unsplash.

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When choosing a gift for your Valentine, why settle for a store-bought card? Drop that box of chocolates and steal these IDEO designers' crafty, hacky, wacky ideas for celebrating the holiday of love. Or better yet, try dating a designer! There’s bound to be a good gift in it for you.

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.