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.

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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.

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.