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.

Here are four titles on Tim’s list of highly recommended reading:

1. Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson, the biographer behind Kissinger and Steve Jobs, turns his attention to the original Renaissance man, whom Brown describes as “perhaps the most curious person who ever lived.” Isaacson draws from 7,200 pages of the artist’s notebooks to trace his journey as inventor, painter, doctor, sculptor, and scientist. Da Vinci was both a procrastinator and a perfectionist, both exuberant and introspective—and his life holds valuable lessons for creatives today. Read the book.

2. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies and Companies by Geoffrey West

Presenting something of a “theory of everything,” West says we can apply the same mathematical principles that govern growth in nature to complex political, corporate, and civic systems. What they all have in common is their response to a rapid increase in size. As cities, companies or human beings grow, they require more resources, which leads to innovations like higher wages and new products, but also negative consequences like waste and overcrowding. As he unpacks the physics of modern systems design, West cautions that growth must be matched by greater sustainability.

3. Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the World by Chris Lowney

Before he became an investment banker at JP Morgan, Chris Lowney spent seven years as a Jesuit priest. That background in the cloth helped him realize that the issues he faced in nurturing new leaders at JP Morgan were the same ones the Jesuit order had faced over its 450-year history. The Jesuits focus not on what leaders should do, but on who they are. They contend that leadership springs from within and involves a never-ending process of self-examination and learning. The four pillars of leadership that inform the Jesuits’ “corporate culture” are: self-awareness (understanding your strengths, weaknesses, and values), ingenuity (innovating and adapting to a changing world), love (engaging others with a loving attitude), and heroism (energizing yourself and others with heroic ambitions). Can you imagine if every corporate leader embraced these principles? Read the book.

4. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

Doughnut analogies do a lot to sweeten economics. What, Raworth suggests, if we positioned society within a “doughnut” made of two rings: an inner ring that represents the minimum amount of food, shelter, and other necessities a person needs, and an outer ring that represents the point at which greater consumption begins to damage the Earth beyond repair? That question, along with the author’s case for a more compassionate, sustainable economic model, dovetails with our interest in advancing the circular economy. Tim calls it “a book about economics that makes sense to designers.” Read the book.

Want more? Here are 10 graphic novels we give a thumbs up. And here’s a list of more than 75 books we love, from East of Eden to Exit West.

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When he’s not on the road, teaching, or tinkering in his garage, our CEO Tim Brown can often be found immersed in a good book. Histories, biographies, creative nonfiction—for someone who leads a company that approaches problems from multiple angles, it’s often books that have nothing to do with design that offer the most useful insights.

The exercise wrapped up a three-day workshop with The Nature Conservancy, focused on finding new ways to track entangled whales. Whales often get caught in fishing lines, and responders can’t always free them on the first try. The Conservancy was looking for an easier way to find the whales after they swam away, so that they could complete their rescues.

When designers take on a new challenge, we start by talking to people to gain empathy for their needs. But how do you do that when the user is a whale? Along the way, we found a few workarounds.

Here are our top four lessons on designing for non-humans:

1. Understand the entire ecosystem

We were designing for an unusual ecosystem—an underwater one—and we needed to understand it from all angles. So, we took a day-long field trip to Monterey Bay and Moss Landing, where we really focused on getting a sense of the marine environment. We went kayaking among wildlife, visited a whale disentanglement boat and checked out all of its knives, buoys, and equipment, and talked to several locals. We wanted to understand everything we could about a whale’s journey and behaviors—even if we couldn’t talk to the whales themselves.

Tip: When you can’t physically ask users about their environment, you have to get creative to put yourself in their shoes (or fins). Getting a first-hand look at the users’ surroundings helps you gain empathy for them and gets you into the right mindset.

2. Get visual

Knowing that we’d never be able to experience entanglement from a whale’s perspective, we had to find our own scrappy ways to understand how it happens. We watched whale rescue videos, got a collection of whale posters (illustrated by the man who did the special effects for Free Willy), and asked a rescuer to tie string around miniature whale models to help us visualize the entanglement process. We also bought crab fishing gear, rope, buoys, flippers, and lifejackets to decorate our project space. When our clients arrived for the workshop, we set up kiddie pools and inflatable orcas on our patio. This may sound excessive, but it was a really important part of the project; not only did the equipment set the right scene and mood for the workshop, but it also allowed us to quickly and easily test our ideas.

Tip: Keep your designers and clients immersed in the project with visual cues that represent the subject matter. It keeps morale high, and can even help you quickly iterate and test concepts—the kiddie pools at the workshop came in handy when it was time to try out prototypes.

3. Bring all the players to the table from day one

Since we couldn’t talk to any whales during the project, we conducted our design research with the people who knew them best—marine biologists, researchers, fishermen, and rescuers. We also brought in people with backgrounds in design, technology, government, and academia, and collectively discussed the problem and potential solutions. With the help of so many experts, we were able to fill in all of our gaps in knowledge, whether it was about whale anatomy or government funding.

Tip: When you’re designing for animals, you’re also designing for the people that work with those animals (similarly, if you’re designing for kids, you’re also designing for their parents). To make sure your solutions work for them, too, bring a wide range of voices into the room—even if they have to dial in.

4. Test prototypes in context

After brainstorming and sketching out early concepts, we headed to the IDEO Shop to create prototypes for the whale trackers. We couldn’t test the devices in the shallows of the kiddie pool, so we set up a rig in a neighbor’s swimming pool to see how they’d perform above and below water. This context helped us immensely in understanding what improvements could be made and how much each tracking device would burden the whale. We were able to measure how smoothly the devices moved through water (to minimize drag), and how well they stayed afloat. After each trial run, we were able to refine the prototypes on the spot, and continue testing.

Tip: Before you finalize any concepts, create a test environment that’s as close as possible to the user’s environment. This helps you understand how the concepts will work in context, and gives you the ability to record and measure what you've learned.

Next time we have to design for whales, though, we'll probably just channel our inner Dory.

Special thanks to Dali Yu for being a thought partner for this article, Rachel Tobias, Joerg Student, and Brooke Thyng for taking these photos, and the rest of the team for hosting an amazing workshop!

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On a Thursday afternoon, I found myself with a team of whale biologists, product designers, mechanical engineers, and public policy directors, all standing by a gigantic pool, throwing handmade contraptions into the water. Above us, aerial drones were flying around capturing the scene. Below us, GoPros on selfie sticks moved back and forth under the water. Typical day in the office.

In one sentence, who are you?

A hard-headed idealist, who revels in the start and finish of every project, but curses throughout the process.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I am a curator of architecture and design. I always wanted to work in a museum, and so I studied art, architecture and curatorial history, and then worked in several galleries and museums.

3 favorite possessions?

1. A pour over coffee maker
2. A pair of small ink drawings of imaginary landscapes
3. Handwritten notes tucked into my suitcase from my sons and husband

What does a typical work session look like?

A typical work session includes too many people and little is accomplished, but a productive work session includes 1-2 colleagues, an inspiring setting, and a knotty idea.

How do you get over creative block?

Deadlines. My father always said to think of a deadline as an opportunity to submit a draft. If you are truly interested in going further you will or you may never return to a subject, but one shouldn’t think that you need to know everything at the time of a deadline. It is a moment that reflects what you do understand at that time.

How do you see the world in 2078?

More tax money is spent on public education and the arts than on the military. Society needs to value education and the arts. SFMOMA understands the value of arts in culture, in making sense of issues, as well as complicated issues. I am hopeful humanity will come to its senses on what to prioritize.

What is the biggest challenge in curating "design"?

I’m not sure there is a singular big challenge to curating design. There are smaller challenges, such as how to exhibit interactive software or ubiquitous commercial products or representations of buildings meant to be experienced in person, etc, but no one specific challenge. Challenges make work interesting, no?!

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I don’t have a bucket list, but I understand the concept and my interests are always shifting, but this week, I’d like to be sure to experience:

• Space travel
• De Maria’s Lightning Fields with my family, New Mexico
• Piamio Sanatorium, Finland
• I am too late since it is destroyed, but would have loved to have visited the Operations Room for Project Cybersyn, Chile

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

The ladies of today—Neri Oxman, Tatiana Bilbao, Nathalie du Pasquier, but especially ladies who paved the way, Esther McCoy, Lina Bo Bardi, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Susan Kare, Ruth Asawa, Anna Halprin, Clara Porset, and the list continues

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Capturing the world of design is a tall order. It means constantly considering the now, questioning the promise of future technology, and looking across the historical register for patterns and mishaps. Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher does just that, and as the curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA, she goes one step further and puts it all on view. Her work asks tough questions for us and, in turn, to us. I took a moment to catch up, get a bit of background, and figure out what motivates her day to day.

Smartly curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, the show features objects dating back to the late 1950s, from the Eames Office to the first iPod to a home CRISPR kit.

I've now seen the show twice. Here's what’s stuck with me:

So much of what comes out of Silicon Valley today has its roots in the DIY utopianism of the Whole Earth Catalog. Founded in the late 60s by Stewart Brand and a bunch of Stanford longhairs, the Catalog promised “access to tools" that would equip us to break free from our hidebound culture.

The title was inspired by Brand’s 1966 campaign to have NASA release a satellite photo of the Earth as seen from space—the first image we’d see of the "whole Earth." That picture, he believed, would unite humans in our belief in a shared destiny and encourage more peaceful, ecological, and holistic thinking.

When I was in my 20s, the Whole Earth Catalog spurred me to start my own DIY design magazine, ReadyMade, in the back of a used furniture warehouse in Berkeley. Whole Earth made designing a life on one's own terms seem within reach.

That spirit shines through in another standout of the exhibit: the recreated office of Charles and Ray Eames, down to the posters on the wall, the kilim rug, and a looping projection of their film for the World’s Fair (a serenade to industry and systems design). Everything they laid their mid-century paws on exudes a kind of singing-nun joy. Two things I love most about them: their philosophy that “Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects,” and that they employed the people they were designing for—Los Angeles locals, war veterans, and housewives.

There’s also the agitprop hijinks of Ant Farm; the stained leather scrappiness and propaganda of Marin’s craft guilds; and Heath Ceramics—the tableware preferred by my avocado toast.

And for us outdoorsy types, the centerpiece of the exhibit is a Bucky Fuller-inspired North Face tent, pitched alongside radically new 1970s climbing equipment made by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia.

I had a feeling the iconic "one laptop per child" by fuseproject would be on hand (check!), and was excited to see my friend Eric's (of Stamen Design) dazzling data visualizations.

Having done a tour of duty at WIRED in its third year of publication (1995), it was great to see their eye-popping cyberpunk spreads on display, and I'm always happy to learn of companies like D-Rev that care enough about social impact to design an $80 high-performance knee (80 percent of the world's amputees have no access to modern prosthetics).

California design got swept up in the digital tsunami that WIRED was chronicling and all those "new tools" for connected living now look quaint. The first Apple desktop computer and Handspring Visor sitting under vitrines look like beige relics from a technocrypt.

IDEO’s Dennis Boyle, who led the Handspring Visor design team, told me that its eye module accessory is credited as being the first digital camera on a handheld electronic PDA. "It’s the precursor to today's cell phone cameras," he said.

I'm drunk on Kool-Aid, no doubt, but I walked away from this show marveling at how IDEO appears to be the aortic valve of California design. There are no less than five examples of our work on display: The prototype for the first Apple mouse, Thoughtless Acts? and Method Cards, the Handspring Visor, and the prototype for the Q Concept workstation, designed by David Kelley and Jim Yurchenco, Jane Fulton Suri, Dennis Boyle, and Martin Bone, respectively.

Yurchenco, who repurposed a butter dish and a roll-on deodorant ball procured at a local Palo Alto drugstore to make the earliest mouse, is struck by the crude tools designers had at their disposal back in the day:

“It was done using old techniques: a pencil and paper on a drawing board instead of 3D solid CAD to design the parts; manually machined injection molding tools and pieced together check models instead of 3D printed models. Of course, everything designed at that time was done the same way.”

Though it seemed impossible to design a mouse for less than $10 when Steve Jobs first proposed it, IDEO founder David Kelley and Yurchenco alighted upon a crucial insight:

“The most surprising thing that happened during the process was we were able to make [the mouse] low-cost by realizing it didn't have to be as precise as we first thought," Kelley says. "Because the user's human brain would intuitively move the mouse to exactly the right spot."

Jane Fulton Suri still expresses surprise that a simple deck of cards (Method Cards), which were published in 2003, became the foundation for IDEO's design approach:

“At the time it wasn’t obvious that sharing information about our approach and sensibilities would be a powerful way for IDEO to lead the way. It's now core to IDEO's strategy to create design tools and empower others in the world at large.”

Three of the four designers quoted above still work at IDEO. And that reminds me of another thing I love about California designers:

They never stop trying to make things better by making better things.

Next up: Nick Pajerski interviews "Designed in California" curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher.

If my heart were a painting, it would be on permanent loan to California. I love its shaggy optimists who turn drained swimming pools into skate parks. Its fog and fearless politics. Its pioneers and garage inventors and beat poets who came in search of a Golden State. I'm a big believer in the design that was born here, too, which is on display at the SFMOMA’s "Designed in California" exhibit through May 27, 2018.

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.