All moms want to give their babies the best start in life, and for many, that means nourishing their babies with breastmilk. However, breast pumping is often inconvenient and uncomfortable. Tethered to the wall, undressed, and surrounded by cords and dangling bottles, most mothers who pump are interacting with technology that hasn’t fundamentally changed in more than 25 years.

Passionate about solving this challenge, the startup Willow set out to completely re-imagine the breast pumping experience. The team at Willow envisioned a “dream pump” that would deliver what moms want most: mobility and discretion.

The Willow team approached IDEO to be a close partner in bringing their product to life. As a cross-disciplinary team of researchers, industrial designers, and mechanical engineers, IDEO, Willow, and Function Engineering worked together seamlessly to identify mothers’ unmet needs and resolve engineering complexities with a simple and elegant design.

The resulting product, Willow, is the first all-in-one, wearable breast pump that cuts the cords, ditches the mess of bottles, and fits easily inside a bra. Mobile, discreet, and hands-free, Willow allows women to achieve their breastfeeding goals without pressing pause on their own lives.

The final design of Willow was informed by research and in-person interviews with dozens of mothers, ranging from first-time to experienced pumpers. Insights about their personal routines, challenges, and workarounds guided the design team as they built more than 60 physical prototypes to understand how Willow could best fit into mothers’ lives. Learnings from those prototypes helped the team to define the size, shape, color, and materials of Willow, as well as each step in the pumping process.

One key design element that emerged from this iterative process was the simplicity of Willow’s architecture, which makes the pump easy to use, assemble, and clean. The pump contains just a few basic parts that snap together, and only two parts that need to be cleaned (both are dishwasher-safe).

Considering how personal the breast pumping experience is, the team aimed to help the pump feel less like a stark, mechanical device and more like a considered, modern, and personal accessory—a goal ultimately achieved through the pump’s colors, texture, and finish.

Because of Willow, mothers no longer need to plan their lives around pumping—it can happen anywhere, at anytime. Willow gives moms back their time and freedom and gives them choice; now moms can play with an older child, work, or enjoy precious relaxation time at home. With Willow, pumping breastmilk finally fits seamlessly into women’s active everyday lives.

More than 50 million people worldwide suffer from schizophrenia, yet only half receive psychiatric treatment. When they do, it usually involves medication and one-on-one therapy to treat the most visible symptoms, including hallucinations and paranoia. But the disease can also cause debilitating symptoms that medication can’t easily treat, such as social anxiety and isolation, lack of motivation, and memory deficits.

For people living with these symptoms, what might seem like simple activities—socializing, spending time outdoors, exercising—can sometimes feel overwhelming. And if patients aren’t given effective care, they can become even more isolated, and their physical health and quality of life suffer. They’re far more likely to let the rest of their treatment regimen slip, skipping medication or therapy sessions.

To help address these challenges, a digital health research group at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) approached IDEO with an idea to supplement the longstanding medication-and-therapy model with a tool to alleviate hard-to-treat symptoms, and more importantly, improve patients’ quality of life. It would require identifying unmet needs among patients and determining which kinds of interactions could have the greatest impact on young people with mental illness.

The outcome of that collaboration is PRIME, or Personalized Real-time Intervention for Motivational Enhancement, a digital platform that empowers young people with schizophrenia with the tools, motivation, and community of support they need to achieve their goals.

The simplicity of PRIME belies its deep functionality. The easy-to-use mobile app helps patients stay motivated to stick with behaviors that boost their health, social skills, and productivity, and it provides motivational coaching from trusted professionals and social connections with other patients.

How It Works

The PRIME app lets users set daily goals based on their particular needs. There are more than 500 small challenges to try—from inviting a friend to play basketball to spending time with a family member—and users can see their progress tracked through incremental successes over time.

Whenever users need help, trained motivational coaches are on hand to provide cognitive behavioral therapy coaching, encourage patients to achieve their goals (and to push beyond their comfort zones), and support their interactions with other users.

Tapping into its vibrant social network to help patients feel less isolated, PRIME prompts users to snap photos of happy moments, highlight important events in their lives, and share challenges they’re proud to have accomplished. Unlike Facebook, which can be overwhelming for some patients with schizophrenia, PRIME is a closed community where users can talk freely about their challenges with others who are just like them.

Click above to hear our audio story, or listen on SoundCloud.

To measure the efficacy of PRIME, UCSF and IDEO combined traditional metrics, such as Patient Health Questionnaire scores and time spent in the app, with new metrics evaluating patients’ quality of life. For example, they studied the pictures of things that made users happy before and while using the app, and measured the frequency, depth, and quality of patients’ social interactions in the app based on word choice and punctuation.

Learnings from these human-centered metrics helped the team iterate further on PRIME’s design, so that the platform would generate even higher levels of engagement and stronger improvements in patients’ motivation and social functioning. In this 2016 peer-reviewed, clinical study, 80 percent of patients with schizophrenia achieved their daily goals, and users logged into the app an average of 4.5 times a week, far more than the expected rate of once a week.

PRIME has also made an impact on patients and their families on a personal level. The mother of one research participant was thrilled with the results. She told IDEO, “I wish you could have witnessed my daughter’s first response to seeing the faces and profiles on her phone. She looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘Everyone looks normal. Everyone looks like people you see every day.’ It was as if she looked into a mirror that reflected possibility and hope.”

Human-Centered Design

The PRIME platform is an example of how the human-centered design process can lead to first-of-its-kind innovations in the field of mental health care. PRIME designers conducted comprehensive interviews that led to a deep understanding of patients as whole people, not just conditions or sets of symptoms.

For Dr. Danielle Schlosser, lead researcher on the PRIME project at UCSF, collaborating with IDEO and applying design thinking to her research on mental health was illuminating. "[It] showed us that in order to engage our users, we needed to provide a safe and supportive community that directly catered to their needs. The insights we gained enabled us to create an experience that inspires patients to improve their quality of life by emphasizing their strengths. Working with IDEO helped us make powerful, creative leaps in our process, and build a digital health platform that’s already deeply impacting patients’ lives.”

The success of PRIME in treating schizophrenia has led to additional federal research funding, and the platform is now being expanded to treat a wider range of mental health conditions.

For example, in this recent, peer-reviewed study, PRIME helped patients with moderately severe depression experience a 50 percent reduction in symptoms, with a noticeable difference in just two weeks—far faster than the average of four to six weeks it takes for traditional medication and therapy to yield improvements. By the end of the depression study, 90 percent of participants said they had achieved their treatment goals, such as to “become happier” or to “feel less lonely.”

Numerous patients with schizophrenia and depression have already benefitted from PRIME’s unique offering, and the team is exploring ways to commercialize and scale PRIME to reach more people with mental health conditions.

New Yorkers are a tough lot, but damaging coastal storms will continue to test their resilience. More than 400,000 people live within the city’s floodplain and are at physical and economic risk. In the face of both natural and manmade challenges—from superstorms to confusing insurance regulations—many New Yorkers are not aware of their flood risk, or even that they should be thinking about it at all.

The Center for NYC Neighborhoods‚ a nonprofit that champions affordable homeownership for middle- and working-class families and communities, engaged IDEO to create a resource that could help New Yorkers keep their homes and finances safe. Launched in September 2016 with funding from New York State's Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, FloodHelpNY is an expansive platform that dismantles the complexity surrounding flood insurance and gives homeowners clear and simple guidance for assessing their flood risk and taking action toward resiliency.

Facing the complexities of insurance policy, shifting flood regulations, climate change, and citizen engagement, the design team began by engaging two vastly different groups of New Yorkers—those who had been battered by past storms and those not yet affected. Homeowners in the first camp were angry and frustrated by a system that had let them down after Superstorm Sandy. Homeowners in the second camp were simply unaware of their risk and had little idea of what might happen. The right design solution needed to encourage both groups to take action and learn about flood risk and insurance regulations, while also addressing divergent levels of need and preparedness.

To co-design solutions with homeowners, IDEO set up pop-up stations at neighborhood meetings in Canarsie, Red Hook, and Gerritsen Beach, and had flood-affected residents create paper prototypes of the resources they wanted in place the next time a storm hit. The team learned how residents contextualized their individual risk, which information they prioritized, and how their frustration could inform a better outcome. In Lower Manhattan, where residents are less aware of flood risk, the team set up a pop-up station with virtual reality viewers that simulated water rushing into the surrounding streets, a visceral wake up call that got them talking about flood recovery.

‍

Less than a month after launch, FEMA began promoting FloodHelpNY as a key resource for building flood resilience. The platform helps all New Yorkers learn what flood zone they’re in, or will be in, how that affects their insurance rates, and what steps they can take to mitigate their risk. It features a first-of-its-kind flood insurance rate calculator that can help homeowners get a rough idea of the costs they could face as insurance prices go up. It is also the main conduit to apply for the Home Resiliency Audit, a New York State-funded program that equips at-risk homeowners with vital documentation valued at over $800 that confirms their actual elevation and insurance costs—all with the personalized assistance of an engineer and housing counselor team. In the coming months, FloodHelpNY will expand further to offer homeowners free backflow valves that reduce the chance of sewers backing up during flooding, as well as access to more existing benefits for resiliency.

The New York City floodplain, which is expected to grow as tides continue to rise, threatens neighborhoods that are among New York’s oldest and most historic. The people who live there make the city work: teachers, police officers, subway operators. Many of these homeowners will watch their flood insurance premiums surge, year over year. It’s a troubling future, but one that FloodHelpNY is designed to help New Yorkers face, by guiding them toward greater resilience and assuring them that they aren’t alone.

Athletes looking to score big on game day could hit the gym, but they’d probably be better off hitting the sheets instead, according to Rise Science, a sleep analytics startup. Harnessing the latest sleep science, Rise helps players significantly improve reaction time and decrease false starts, lapses, and injuries, among other benefits.

While attending Northwestern University, the co-founders of Rise Science created a simple sleep app and light-touch coaching service, which they prototyped on the school’s Big Ten football team with positive results. They came to IDEO to optimize their customer experience and scale the business, and joined IDEO’s Startup in Residence program.

While observing coaches and players using Rise, IDEO saw the opportunity to better integrate the digital and hardware experiences and design a more robust, intuitive, and service-heavy on-boarding experience during the first few weeks using the system, when breaking old habits and incorporating new ones are most challenging.

At the end of the residence program, Rise left IDEO with a rebranded and optimized sleep training system. Here’s how it works: Players and coaches receive a short, in-person introduction to sleep coaching by a Rise employee. Players who opt in to the service receive a sleep-training kit that includes the Rise Coaching App; adaptive sleep plans tailored to their chronotype, age, game schedule, and training load; a part-human, part-machine sleep coach that continuously supports each player, monitors progress, and gives timely feedback; in-context education that provides daily and weekly sleep insights; and products like UV glasses, sleep mask, and bed sensor. In just a week of using Rise’s full sleep program, 97 percent of players report getting 54 more restorative minutes of sleep per night.

Recently, Rise Science added the Chicago Bulls, Miami Dolphins, and the University of West Virginia to their sleep-training roster, enhancing their performance, one good night’s sleep at a time.

“Coming into IDEO, we knew our service was letting customers down. When we left, we had the blueprint for the next version of Rise. We were able to solve and optimize sleep at a much larger scale,” said Jeff Kahn, co-founder and CEO of Rise Science.

Here's an example: When I was working as a chef in fine dining, I set out to reinvent a classic—my all-time fave—the bagel, lox, and cream cheese sandwich.

My former boss, Chef Joan Roca, once told me that his most prized dining experience was when he ate the best version of a beloved dish:

"For me, there is nothing like eating the best bowl of spaghetti Bolognese I've ever tried—I don't care if you've come up with the most revolutionary dish made from watermelon and chicken feet, it just doesn't resonate in my memory banks like the familiar flavors of Bolognese do."

The process of reinvention or "deconstruction" is fairly common practice in the modern kitchen. Once you've deconstructed something, it unlocks myriad ideas. Here's what design thinking looks like in the kitchen, as expressed through a new version of the classic breakfast sandwich.

1. DEFINE THE DESIGN CHALLENGE: REINVENTING THE BAGEL SANDWICH

Bagel, lox, and cream cheese immediately transports me to the kitchen table at my Nana's house on a Saturday morning. The flavors are classic, yet sophisticated; a perfect dish to deconstruct for a modern appetizer.

To help you play along, here's a brief definition of deconstruction in the chef's world. The concept, which was made famous by catalan chef Ferran Adria, is to reimagine the elements of an established dish in order to create something new. I love deconstruction because it allows me play with one of my favorite elements of cooking and eating—memory.

2. DESIGN RESEARCH

The next step in recreating the bagel, lox, and cream cheese sandwich was to look into the origins and variations of the dish. I wasn't surprised to learn that the word "Lox" stems from the Yiddish word for salmon, “laks”. (There are Scandinavian roots, too, where fishermen preserved salmon in saltwater brine).

What I didn't know was that in 1869, the transcontinental railroad began transporting barrels of salted salmon—giving rise to its popularity in New York City, especially among the Eastern European Jewish immigrants who came over to the U.S. with a taste for cured and smoked fish.

As for the remaining ingredients: Bagels were first seen on the silk route in China, and then refined in Italy in the 14th century. My polish grandfather told me he used to buy "hard bagels with a huge hole" as a child in Radom, Poland. Capers came from Italy, cream cheese has roots in Britain, and tomatoes came from the new world.

So, none of the key ingredients to the sandwich come from New York City, but it was New Yorkers who put them together. The fact that the combo wasn't "old country" made me more relaxed about reinventing it—at least I knew that my version wasn't bastardizing some 1000-year-old dish, the dish itself had always been a food bastard.

I realized that in order to successfully transport myself back to my grandmother's kitchen table, I had to leave the core elements in their original, unadulterated form somewhere in the dish.

I looked at more than 50 restaurant versions and cookbook recipes for bagels, lox, and cream cheese. Then, I extracted all of the possible elements and techniques that went into the sandwich.

The ingredients included: lemon, lime, chili pepper, black ground pepper, white pepper, cayenne pepper, red onions, white onions, radish, avocado, cucumber, butter, cream cheese, capers, caperberries, olives, pickled scallions, hard boiled egg, chives, dill, tomato. I looked at the whole spectrum of preparations that were applied to each ingredient on my list: fried, scrambled, or hard-boiled eggs; raw, baked, or smoked salmon; pickled or marinated vegetables. There was an almost endless variety of combinations!

3. SYNTHESIS

I created a spreadsheet with the list of ingredients and techniques I'd compiled in my research. The lefthand column listed each possible ingredient; the middle column listed the traditional preparations for each ingredient; and the righthand column listed the options for modern techniques that could be applied in place of the traditional ones.

4. ITERATION (AND FAILURE)

I began to deconstruct the dish ingredient by ingredient, deciding if and how I was going to affect each preparation and presentation. Sometimes I chose dramatic changes like converting drops of lemon juice into an icy lemon granita or transforming smoked salmon into an aerated mousse shot from and ISI foamer. But I also used more common techniques: an alternative cut on a cucumber, dehydration of fresh onions to make chips and powder; crumbled and sautéed bagel in olive oil. Some ingredients were left untouched like the black pepper or some were simply substituted like using marinated cherry tomatoes instead of sliced tomatoes.

I prototyped 10 to 12 iterations of each ingredient before settling on a final version. Conceiving a modern version of the dish that triggered my childhood memory was a bigger challenge than I had imagined. The first 4 to 5 prototypes sacrificed flavor for fancy techniques. One of the versions I came up with was just a bunch of powders—terrible!

Finally, I realized that in order to successfully transport myself back to my grandmother's formica kitchen table, I had to leave the core elements—bagel, lox, and cream cheese—in their original, unadulterated form somewhere in the dish.

5. IMPLEMENTATION

My final version of the dish was a fluid mix of old and new: the presentation and techniques of the dish placed it strongly in the modern kitchen while the flavors remained old-world.

The final version included smoked salmon, toasted bagel, cherry tomato, fresh dill and Philadelphia cream cheese. It also featured smoked salmon rillettes; sieved egg whites and yolks; a Meyer lemon granita; dehydrated purple onions; powdered chives, powdered tomato, and powdered lemon zest (some of the powders made the final cut!); sweet, fried capers; cucumber ribbons, pickled shallots and nitro-dill cream cheese (cream cheese of the future).

When I sat down to enjoy the dish, I could almost hear my Polish Nana telling me, "Ess, mein shayna yingele, ess." (Eat, my beautiful child, eat.) And so I did.

Hi, I'm Danny, the culinary resident in IDEO San Francisco's Food Studio. I've been cooking professionally for many years, and now that I'm here, I've discovered that designers and chefs have a lot in common. We both sketch out initial ideas and then iterate quickly until the product is tasty and ready to consume.

What does the Imagination Institute do?

We are looking at how we measure imagination, so we can explore ways to increase it. The other part of our activity is studying how imagination plays a role in different fields. For this, we’ve been running events (like the one you attended) in which we gather leaders in domains such as education, futurology, psychology, physics, even comedy.

Why pull from different disciplines?

We want to understand what kind of mind is best suited for creating progress within these specific fields. The hope is that we could get some idea of how to develop that kind of imagination in schools. In the school system at the moment, it’s one-size-fits-all. But individual differences matter!

What would you teach, if you were trying to get more creativity into schools?

The value of personal expression. There are so many forces in our lives that put other people’s words in our head. But creativity research findings show how important it is to be able to insulate yourself, and not be contaminated by other selves. Often the best way we can help others is by developing our highest potentialities to their fullest, and schools are doing a pretty crummy job of that at the moment.

Business leaders want the outputs of creativity, but they often have an unconscious bias against creative behaviors and personalities

How do you continue to be inspired by others without losing yourself?

If you are secure in your sense of self, you can be open to new experiences. It’s the people who have the most fragile egos who are insecure and not creative because they are so scared that they could be wrong.

Tell me more about openness to experience. You mention that a lot.

Openness to experience is a personality trait that can be measured. It has been shown to be the number one predictor of creativity. To be creative, you need to constantly be growing. Openness allows that.

Who’s your psychology hero?

I am hugely interested in Maslow and the humanistic psychologists of the 50s and 60s. When they talked about creativity, they viewed it as the height of being. All these ideas are so relevant today, in our age of constant anxiety, with all the pressure to pay attention to other people’s goals.

What’s your take on creativity?

It’s a very vulnerable way to be—to be curious, and a little crazy.

Embracing the messiness of your mind.

Business leaders ask for creativity, but I think people are actually conflicted about what they really want. They want the outputs of creativity but they often have an unconscious bias against creative behaviors and personalities.

Want to know more about how to flex your creative muscle? Go buy Scott’s book, Wired To Create.

I came across psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman at an event hosted by the Imagination Institute, where Kaufman is scientific director. Before being locked in a room for two days to discuss the philosophy and psychology of education, all participants had their brains scanned in an MRI machine. Only later did I realize this was typical Kaufman: He’s made a career of fearlessly mixing hard science with culture to create fresh angles on a question IDEO asks on a regular basis: How can we all be more creative?

Two weeks ago, I was witness to such a moment myself. A colleague and friend, the imaginative Mr. Brown, was doodling a mob of amiable monsters and charming creatures with ink, a brush, and some paper.

Pretty, yes. Cute, maybe. But it was when he was cleaning up that he came across a real gem: With ink-stained hands, he scrunched some paper towel to mop up the inky mess. He dabbed the offensive blob, gave a little twist and twirl with the paper towel, and lifted his hand away.

Underneath shone a ravishing vortex which drew one’s imagination into its depths. Not one to shy away from allowing his imagination to wander, he kept twirling, twisting, and whirling.

Being the cheap bugger that I am, and living in a home filled with empty walls, when I spied these beauties I immediately requested if I could have one once he was done.

His inky booboos are now hanging at home—a prized possession.

It goes without saying that some of the best ideas were borne from a fortuitous mistake: Alexander Fleming had his mold, Archimedes submerged himself in a bath, and Spencer Silver accidently created the perfect adhesive for Post-it notes (IDEO thanks you, Mr Silver).

To better understand the madness of the focus group, I decided to do a bit of research on how it came to be.

The story begins in 1938, when a psychoanalyst named Ernest Dichter left Vienna to escape the Nazis and headed for the US. When he arrived in New York, he made an interesting career decision. Instead of helping individuals understand their problems, he decided to offer his psychoanalytic services to corporations.

One of Dichter's first clients was General Mills, which had a problem with its Betty Crocker cake mix. Its food scientists had formulated a dry mix that required only the addition of water. Once placed in the oven, it miraculously blossomed into instant cake. But after a good start, sales flattened. The executives were baffled: The product was more convenient. Why weren’t the housewives buying it?

Dichter gathered groups of women and put them through exercises derived from Freud’s methods of probing the unconscious, including free association and Rorschach tests. He explored their feelings about relationships and their role in the family. And then he started asking them about cake.

What he took away from these sessions was that cake was more than just a sweet baked product. It was loaded with sexual symbolism. He was particularly fascinated by the ritual of the wedding cake, which featured the husband taking a long knife and plunging it into the white cake.

His conclusions, like a good cake, were multilayered. First, the cake was symbolic of the wife’s relationship to the husband, and so she felt guilty making it by just adding some water to powder. Second, the sexually charged nature of the cake meant that it had associations with fertility, even childbirth.

Ernest Dichter and a Betty Crocker ad from the 1950s that anoints cake as the great unifier—almost as good as make-up sex.

His solution to these complex issues was simple: General Mills should remove the powdered egg from the formulation, and instead require housewives to add their own fresh eggs.

It’s hard to know whether the executives were swayed by Dichter’s Sexual Theory of Cake, or whether they liked the fact that removing the eggs would save money. Either way, they took his advice. And, sure enough, sales soared.

In the following decades, Dichter imitators turned his methodology into a hackneyed formula, and the focus group lost its way. We wondered if we could bring emotion and surprise back with a 21st-century reboot of the technique. Here are the five principles we followed:

1. Break the mirror

Hiding in a dark room behind a two-way mirror distances you from the consumer. If you want to find out what makes people tick, get eye to eye with them in the room. If you find this uncomfortable, suck it up: Discomfort is a sign that you’re learning something.

2. Lose the clipboard

The dynamic of “moderator and participant” creates an authority relationship in the room, which can lead to participants saying what they think they are “supposed” to say. Try having the questions served up differently—such as pulling them at random out of a jar. People will share more when they feel they’re having a natural conversation.

3. Think dinner party, not jury service

The original idea of focus groups was to create an environment in which people encouraged each other to share their feelings. Today’s sessions are often stiff and with the same amount of social interaction you’d expect from people doing jury service. So, do whatever you can to create a warm social environment. In our recent experiment, we started the session with 30 minutes of improv exercises, run by a trainer from Second City.

4. Record video confessionals

When Dichter ran focus groups, he would make all the interpretations and deliver a report to the client. These days, the client needs to feel some empathy themselves. The best way to achieve this is video, but an intrusive camera lens can cause people to clam up. We solved this by running interviews using a hidden-camera technique pioneered by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (see below).

5. Talk about the why

All the clever methods in the world won’t help if you don’t have the core goal in mind: understanding the motivations behind human behavior. We live in an age of data: We have more information than ever before that will tell us what people are up to. But the greatest inspiration comes when you can form theories about the why. Despite being more than a half century old, the focus group is still one of the best techniques for achieving this.

The Errol Morris–pioneered "Interrotron" puts interviewees at ease by giving them the impression they're speaking to another human, not a camera lens.

‍

Focus groups suck, right? Bored people sitting in front of a mirror, delivering canned opinions on demand. Everyone from Silicon Valley to Amy Schumer pokes fun at them. But it wasn’t always this way: When focus groups started in the 1950s, they represented an exciting new way to probe the emotions and motivations underpinning human behavior. How did they get so staid and safe?

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

‍

My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

‍

In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

‍

The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

‍

This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.