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.

Taking this 2025 appliance from concept video to functional prototype meant creating a realistic experience of technologies that won’t exist for many years. Designers had to come up with a way for the system to see and recognize foods on table’s surface and respond accordingly—and they had to make it work reliably for more than six months while some 250,000 visitors tried it out at pop-up exhibitions at the Salone del Mobile and EXPO Milan.

To find out how they did it, I talked to IDEO London interaction designer Siri Johansson and developers David Brody and Kalyn Nakano of IDEO Palo Alto, who built custom software that borrows techniques from computer vision.

How did the need to build a prototype for real use affect the interaction design?

Siri: As soon you put something in a public setting, people are always going to try to break it, especially if they’re really excited about it. They don’t mean to break it, of course, but they want to play with it and see what it can do. We had to focus on a few key functions and figure out how to make them work well enough that it would be feasible for people to play freely with the installation. A key design principle was to keep the technology low-key and in the background, to preserve the warmth and tactility of the kitchen, so we focused on functions that demonstrate that intention and show how the table uses digital to free up your mind so you can engage with physical things. The table knows what I’m cooking and gently guides me through the process, so I don’t have to keep going back to my iPad to browse a recipe. I can focus more on my ingredients—how they feel, how they smell.

How did it affect the software design?

Kalyn: Knowing this was going to be a live prototype forced us to consider every scenario. With on-screen prototypes, predicting how a user might interact with the screen is a lot more straightforward. But here, adding another dimension and more objects to the mix challenged us to consider all the different ways people could position and interact with the items on the table. Once we started building, it became clear that the concept video for the design was really just a starting point. Testing all the different arrangements and permutations challenged some of our initial designs and software implementation methods, especially when we started thinking about transitions. Tracking objects while they were moved around on the table forced us to implement things more formulaically to achieve a display with smoother transitions between states.

How did people’s interactions with early versions of the table change the software?

Kalyn: With a live prototype like this, you give up control over the experience. You can’t send everyone down the path you want them to take. We started building and testing our software based on the interactions shown in concept video, but those interactions are choreographed, and when people in the office started playing with the prototype, we realized the behavior in the video—putting the veggies down on the table and sliding them from place to place—wasn’t natural for everyone. Some people would hold the vegetables in their hands or lift them off the table while deciding where to put them. These interactions weren’t wrong, but we hadn’t accounted for them in our initial designs. The need to accommodate for this forced us to reconsider our image processing techniques to make sure we could still recognize the objects no matter how they were being handled.

How did you adapt the CV software to the specific needs of the project?

David: Our approach wasn’t to make CV that could be used for anything, in any situation. The better route was to take advantage of our constraints for the exhibition and build a simplified version of CV (written with openFrameworks and OpenCV) that we knew could be tractable and provable in the time we had. The table has to consistently recognize three ingredients—broccoli, tomatoes, and rice—so that people can experience how it works. While more complex CV might create models of what generic broccoli looks like, our solution uses examples of broccoli that it has already seen, along with shape and color distribution. It compares those factors with what it’s seeing in order to distinguish between objects. The distribution of color helps it distinguish between broccoli and a blue bowl of rice, while comparing with previously seen examples help it distinguish between broccoli and a green shirt sleeve.

Why was this an efficient strategy?

David: A lot of conventional CV uses a “sliding window” approach: The computer identifies an aspect of an object, like its shape, and looks for that object within a larger image by sliding the window of vision until it recognizes something that matches what it’s looking for. The hard part is making it work in real time, because the computer compares every possible “window” that contains the criteria it’s looking to match, and each comparison takes time. Since our software is only looking at colors, it’s easier to identify which windows on the table might contain the objects it’s seeking. So the first thing it does is look for the points on the table where the intensities of color are the highest, and it says, “these might be objects.” It sends that information down the pipeline to the next step, and that’s where the color-recognition algorithm comes into play: It compares the histogram of a potential object with the histograms for broccoli, tomatoes, and rice, and determines which object it’s looking at.

What was it that excited you about this project?

Kalyn: This was a great example of building to learn. Creating a live prototype introduced a lot of interesting interaction design questions into the software development process, and it got us to solve technical challenges that wouldn’t normally come up during a screen-based prototype. It generated a new excitement for designing dynamic and thoughtful off-screen experiences, and watching people’s reaction to it was inspiring. When we set the table up in Milan, we came in the next morning and found construction workers playing with it, saying, “bellissima!”

The IKEA Concept Kitchen 2025 was on display at IKEA Temporary, a pop-up exhibition at Salone del Mobile in Milan, Italy, April 14-19, 2015 and can be seen at EXPO Milan, May 1-October 31, 2015.

Read more about Veggie Vision and the entire Concept Kitchen on Tech Insider and at IDEO.com.

What will kitchens be like a decade from now? IDEO recently helped IKEA envision some wild ideas that will likely be entirely plausible—someday. Usually, predictions like this exist only on screens, as concept videos and digital renderings. But this time, IKEA asked IDEO to build a working prototype of one future concept: the Table for Living, a cooking and work surface that recognizes the foods you place on it and projects customized recipes and cooking tips right onto the tabletop.

On a recent visit to the lab, I got an early look at Monster Moves, a new app that lets kids choreograph moves for a team of dance-happy monsters. If that conjures images of elaborate 3D creatures, think again: At first glance, Monster Moves appears to be completely flat. Any single frame of the game looks just like a simple 2D illustration.

But when one of those 2D monsters does a twirl or flip, suddenly (and pretty magically), you see that each one has a complete three-dimensional physiology, from the top of his head to the booty he’s shaking.

It might seem hardly noticeable, but think about it: if the image was truly two dimensional, there would be no top or bottom, no back or sides. To make the monsters look flat, but still have the ability to rotate 360°, the team used 3D modeling to create the characters, and then stripped down the art to make the monsters look two dimensional. Even though they appear flat, all the monsters have skeletons and skins, and they can turn to any angle.

So why bother making them look flat?

Toy Lab’s Michelle Lee explains that the 2D look of the game is crucial to its function. The mission of Monster Moves is to help kids understand that they are the choreographer, and that there is a direct connection between their choices and the monsters’ dance steps, which develops an awareness of creative control. The designers wanted kids to focus on the dance moves, so it was important that the art not distract them with too much 3D detail. That’s why they stripped away all the fancy shadows and shiny curves and kept the monsters as simple as possible.

The early version (left) has a 3D look, which the designers thought was still "too much." They chose to eliminate all shadows except for the drop shadow beneath the character (right).

Curious to check out the monsters for yourself? Learn more about Monster Moves and the entire portfolio of IDEO Toy Lab apps at IDEOToyLab.com.

Just like the rest of IDEO, the Toy Lab is dedicated to building creative confidence. Admittedly, they have a bit of an edge when making kids’ products—children have natural creative confidence, so the Toy Lab’s job is to encourage them to preserve it and show them new ways to apply their innate creativity.

We built a light pipe, which, in principle, can be viewed as a fiber optic cable. All the sides are polished to a clear finish so that the light can be reflected internally inside the pipe. If the light hits a section of pipe where the surface is not perfectly reflective, like if it’s gouged or scratched, it will use that section as an "emitter" and attempt to escape the pipe. We take advantage of this by covering the bottom surface of the pipe with dimples. To make the path consistently bright, we arranged the dimples in a gradient with fewer dimples closer to the source, where the light from LEDs is brightest, and more dimples to catch the light farther along the light path (where the light is dimmest).

This step-by-step guide describes our process of quick experimentation and prototyping to achieve good illumination without having to run extensive light bouncing simulations. The design is created in Illustrator using blend modes, and the light pipe is manufactured with a laser cutter on 1/4" thick clear acrylic.

Please note that results will vary depending on many factors. The optical design, LED brightness, and beam angle are important factors to consider.

1. Open a new Illustrator document and draw a rectangle. We chose 8" x .5".

2. Make a guide and space it roughly 1/4" away from the edge of the rectangle. This is where the dimple pattern will begin. (Leaving a 1/4” margin allows us to later mask off the area to prevent seeing excessive LED brightness near the source in the light pipe.) Now draw a circle with a .005" diameter.

3. ALT + Click and drag the circle to duplicate it, and move it to the other side of the rectangle. The two circles mark the two ends of the dimple pattern.

4. Select both circles and create a blend.

5. Open up the blend options to fine-tune the blend.

6. Change the spacing to "Specified Steps" and set the number to 700.

7. You should see 700 evenly spaced dots! In order to get them to start off sparsely spaced and then get closer together, we'll modify the path of the blend. Select the Anchor Point Tool (Shift + C).

8. Use the white arrow to select the first point and drag it until you see the spacing start to change.

9. Create another guide halfway along the path, and then drag the anchor point (with the white arrow selection tool) just past the guide. Repeat the same process with the last circle, but move its anchor point about half an inch to the right.

10. You should now have a gradient spacing of 700 circles becoming more closely spaced as you move from left…

11. …to right.

12. Once you are satisfied with the blend, expand it.

13. ALT+Click and drag the blend to copy it, and place it at the bottom of the rectangle.

14. Select both blends and then use the instructions from Step 4 to create another blend.

15. Use the instructions from Step 5 to fine-tune the new blend.

16. We chose to give our pattern a little bit of randomness, so we ALT+Click-ed and dragged the blend down and to the right ever so slightly.

17. With that, we’re ready for the laser cutter! This process is pretty quick to prototype (roughly 15 minutes from start to finish), so explore different gradient patterns and techniques, and try light pipes that are curved or bent (just keep in mind the critical angle).

18. Next, we raster the dot pattern on 1/4″ thick acrylic. Be sure the acrylic surface is clean and scratch-free.

19. Different laser cutters have different settings for varying materials and thicknesses, so keep that in mind when choosing your settings. We used a speed of 80, power of 50 and maximum PPI for the raster. For the vector cuts, we took 4 cuts at speed of 4, power of 95, and maximum PPI.

20. Now take your light guide and examine the edges. Make sure the material is transparent; otherwise you’ll need to do some hand-polishing.

21. The slightly bumpy yet clear finish the laser leaves after a cut works great for our purposes. You’ll want to surround all clear surfaces with white reflective paper or tape, and mask off the quarter inch where the light first enters the pipe.

22. Here are the results with a super-bright LED! You can see that the light starts to drop off a little toward the end of the pipe.

23. We could come back to tweak the blend pattern (reducing the number of dots at the beginning of the light pipe and increasing it toward the end).

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Light guides are physical tools that transmit light along a path from an illumination source while maintaining constant brightness. They’re often used in products to create a line of light that is consistently bright and dynamic-looking, even when it comes from a single source. Unfortunately, there is no simple how-to guide available for making them. The process is kept tightly guarded by optical engineering companies. We came up with a quick process to make our own light guides, and now you can too.

IDEO has decades of experience with automotive work, which has brought keen insight into the trends and technologies that will define the vehicles of the future. This presents an important design opportunity: If we visualize today the way we’ll live in decades to come, we’ll be better prepared to make smart decisions when the age of autonomous vehicles arrives.

The Future of Automobility is an online visualization of how life with driverless cars might really look and feel. It considers four scenarios: “Moving People,” which looks at how commutes will change when we can look away from the road; “Moving Things,” where we examine automated package-delivery fleets; “Moving Spaces,” where we envision mobile offices meeting people where they live and parking in underused areas of our cities; and “Moving Together,” which explores how the interior of future vehicles will be customized to meet our personal needs during ride-sharing.

The experience is as emotionally compelling as it is feasible, combining radical innovation in transportation concepts with immersive storytelling. It expresses not just our vision of the future, but also how we work, how we think, and what we value.

Want More?

IDEO alum Jonah Houston continues the conversation in a Medium article on how the horse can provide inspiration on designing modern driving interfaces.

Press‍

A Fascinating Glimpse at How We'll Carpool in 2027, WIRED
Imagining A Future Where Autonomous Cars Let Everyone Carpool, Fast Company
IDEO envisions ride-sharing car concept for 'the future of moving together', designboom
IDEO Visualizes the Role of Autonomous Vehicles and Ride Sharing, Core77

Awards

‍2015 Webby Awards

Once our hands are off the steering wheel and more vehicles are shared rather than owned, what will change in our lives?

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.