For the socially-conscious, investing can be a tricky proposition. The same people who wish to vote with their wallets may find that their options for investment funds and 401K plans are rife with companies that violate causes they believe in. So far, there have been few options in the marketplace that give consumers the opportunity to put their money in financial products that not only cut out environmental and social offenders, but actually contribute to the well-being of the environment and society.

Dave Fanger, a financial professional, was determined to design a solution. He approached IDEO to help create a startup venture for socially-conscious investors. Pacific Life, a Fortune 500 financial services company and Fanger’s employer at the time, offered the resources to develop and launch the idea. The online impact investment platform gave consumers the opportunity to invest in high-growth industries that are addressing global, environmental, and social challenges. Swell rigorously screened companies for both impact and performance, so consumers could be confident that their investments were in line with their values.

A holistic approach

Embedded as core team members, IDEO designers worked alongside Swell’s founder to shape the company. In just one year, they went from an initial concept and prototype to an SEC-registered investment adviser with a fully developed business model, a digital platform with initial investors, and well-defined branding that set the look and feel of the values-driven company. The IDEO team helped to hire the initial team of employees, working to ensure that the fintech startup would have the creative talent it needed to operate post-launch, as well as a defined culture that would help it grow.

A new investment platform

From the outset, it was important for the team to build an innovative, digitally-fluent, and customer-centered platform to make it easy for investors to back causes they care about. Working in close collaboration with software development partner Carbon Five, Swell and IDEO committed to act nimbly, take risks, move fast, and ditch decks for prototypes. Understanding the motivations of the investor—their values and what drives their investment decisions—was key, so the team leveraged IDEO’s network to form a consumer council, which helped to quickly iterate and refine prototypes throughout the duration of the product development process. Having that core group involved every step of the way made it easy for the team to keep consumers at the center of the design and validate key decisions quickly.

Swell offered consumers portfolios of companies that work to solve some of today's biggest challenges. The six impact portfolios offered were: green tech, renewable energy, zero waste, clean water, healthy living, and disease eradication.

As of June 2019, Swell had attracted over 15,000 investors⁠—more than half under the age of 34⁠—and $35 million AUM. Nearly 40 percent of investors were making investments on a recurring basis.

Learning to code isn’t just about knowing symbols and syntax—it can help unlock kids’ imagination by inspiring them to build new things and interact with everyday objects through discovery and play.

With that in mind, Google Creative Lab came to IDEO to help with user experience and product design on their new coding tool for children. The result of the collaboration, Project Bloks, is a simple and interactive experience that teaches kids how to code using physical blocks. This establishes a new paradigm for learning computer science: it takes a language typically only understood through screens and keyboards, and makes it tangible.

Project Bloks was also designed as an open hardware platform, enabling developers and educators to build tangible programming applications that are innovative, educational and fun.

Kid-centered design

From the very beginning, how kids physically play and learn were at the center of the project. Designers quickly iterated using sketches, foam core, paper, Play-Doh, and 3D-printed models to see how slight changes informed children’s experiences. Understanding what deepened kids’ engagement, increased their curiosity and changed their behaviors drove the language, taxonomy, architecture, and physical form of Bloks.

Because play and physical building is an important way in which many kids develop skills, designers began with a set of blocks and sought to help them discover coding through tangible objects. Each block was given a specific function and shape, guiding kids to arrange, combine, and rearrange the blocks to create commands and control things like robots or speakers in the real world. Children could also create block patterns together by physically building on each other’s ideas.

An inside look at the design process. Video by Google.

Designing for early learners also forced the team to rethink how a new language could be taught. An early version of the blocks was based on how programmers typically code, from top to bottom. However, the team quickly realized that the orientation had to be driven by the child’s natural instincts. Given young children are just learning to read from left to right, designers observed that the switch in directions was too confusing and changed the arrangement of Bloks commands to go left-right in addition to top-bottom.

The final outcome of Project Bloks was an interactive coding kit comprised of three key parts - pucks, baseboards and a brainboard. The puck is a critical component that controls a command, whether it’s an on/off switch or the ability to move in a particular direction. It’s the piece that enables children to move from words to the world of graphics and play. The puck is easy to produce and can take an unlimited range of forms and functions, enabling the Bloks system to scale.

The baseboard reads the puck’s instruction and is activated when a puck is placed on top. The brainboard provides the power and connectivity. When hooked up to a baseboard or a chain of baseboards, the brainboard sends the instructions—turn left, jump, get louder—to a connected object, like a rocket or a speaker.

The boards can be rearranged, sequenced, and packaged however kids like, opening up a vast realm of possibilities. Children can code anything from a toy robot drawing a shape on a piece of paper, to a sensor turning on a fan when the temperature gets too high.

Enabling innovation for education

Beyond a tangible coding kit, what makes Bloks unique is that it’s an open platform. Educators, developers, and designers can build on it to accelerate new ways of teaching and exploring tangible programming. The platform can fit into various curriculums around the world. The pucks can take on different shapes and graphics. The material used can be fabricated by 3D printing.

The Bloks platform is a new vernacular that allows kids to interact with the language of code in a way that’s less prescriptive and more open-form, like a sandbox. And the more kids play with Bloks, the more opportunities they discover for what they can create with a little bit of code.

For students who are the first in their families to pursue higher education, navigating college can often feel like navigating a foreign country. Challenges like not having enough money or poor access to support services can make graduating an insurmountable hurdle. In fact, only 55% of these students in the United States end up completing their degrees.

To help change this statistic, IDEO partnered with Beyond 12, an organization that provides personalized, virtual coaching to first-generation college students to help them learn how to register for classes, apply for financial aid, and much more. The challenge was to scale Beyond 12’s successful coaching model using technology in order to benefit as many students as possible.

In 2014, IDEO designed the MyCoach app, with the goal of helping students take ownership of their education and feel in control of their future. After the early version of the app was named as a finalist in the prestigious Robin Hood Foundation College Success Prize, Beyond 12 piloted the product with 3,500 college students across the US. Following the pilot, Beyond 12 and IDEO went back to work, using the resulting insights and data to design the next evolution of MyCoach.

First and foremost, IDEO sought to develop a more flexible model for Beyond 12 to enable scalability of the offering. As some students need more support than others, a blended business model was envisioned to recognize the spectrum of students’ needs. Engaging in-app content forms a supportive layer that helps students get organized, stay on track, and learn the skills they need to stay in college, while students who need more hands-on assistance can connect directly with coaches. An invisible data layer works behind the scenes to assess student risk and dynamically tailor student support throughout the school year.

Once the app’s model was solidified, creating a user experience that compels students to use it became essential to its efficacy. Growing up with technology has reshaped how many students engage with the world, and tools like Snapchat have set a new dynamic for participation. Youth today are the masters of their own digital worlds, fluidly jumping between conversations, engaging with stimulating content and contributing their own perspectives. As a result, MyCoach needed to speak students’ language and to create content that was authentically youthful and effective in order to be effective. By drawing inspiration from popular social sites, digital experiences and games, the team designed a user experience that keeps pace with a digitally native state of mind.

IDEO Designer, Isabela Sá explains the approach that led to MyCoach’s design and content strategy, “We created an app that makes no distinction between content and utility. We borrowed the content-first approach of social apps like Snapchat and Instagram and used it to teach students the skills and strategies they need to graduate. With that, the digital experience became more human. The intricate system that we had designed to power the whole thing was hidden below the surface. For students, the app was just the means to learn how to help themselves and get in touch with a coach when they needed one.”

Development is underway for the next version of MyCoach, which will allow Beyond 12 to scale its offering to reach exponentially more students in need.

Coca-Cola is one of the world's most iconic brands. More than 5,000 people work at its global headquarters in Atlanta.

Back in 2010, Coca-Cola found itself at a major crossroads. As the company grew, it became clear that in order to stay competitive, any kind of campus renovation would have to take into account a vision of the future of how people work at Coca-Cola. Before the company hired architects, they came to IDEO to help design this important part of their 2020 vision strategy; ultimately the redesign would change the way the company works, plays, and profits.

Imagery courtesy of Coca-Cola, Gensler, and IDEO

For listeners, the panoply of podcasts seems to grow daily; and for creators, there’s an exponentially growing audience, which means even the most obscure subject matter is bound to find eager ears.

In 2016, we posted 15 inspiring podcast recommendations from IDEO designers, and exactly two years later, we’ve built a whole new list. This time, we put the call out to all of IDEO, inviting recommendations for all types of programming—whatever our teammates are currently listening to and loving. Hopefully many on this list will be new to you, and will help freshen and diversify your own audio queues.

1. Ear Hustle

Ear Hustle takes an honest look into the lives of people within the confines of the American prison system, and it invokes both laughs and tears. Nigel Poor, a Bay Area-based artist, teams up with Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, both current prisoners at San Quentin, which is California’s oldest prison and houses the greatest number of death row inmates in the nation. The three hosts produce stories at the facility’s media lab, where they explore topics as light as how “cellies”—or roommates—are assigned, and as dark as the gut-wrenching effects of the three strikes law. Regardless of the topic, each episode is eye-opening and humanizing, allowing listeners to understand the realities of living behind bars. —Sue-Jean Sung

2. How I Built This

How I Built This takes listeners on a “behind the scenes” tour of how driven entrepreneurs turned innovative ideas into world-changing companies. The stories are full of passion, challenges, successes, and failure...how couldn't you get hooked on this podcast!? Most compelling is the overwhelming humanity that comes through in each founder’s story. Without question a feel-good podcast that will get your creative juices flowing! —Andrew Evans

3. Switched on Pop

I love Switched on Pop because I love music, and pop music tends to get a bad rap or get brushed off as sugary, over-simplified sound, which is just not the case. This podcast is run by a musicologist and a pop songwriter. They deconstruct songs sonically and lyrically to help give some insight into what the song is doing, and how it achieves its goals. The musicology perspective is fascinating to me and helps me deconstruct other songs that I hear. —Meg Rice

4. How to Be Amazing

How to Be Amazing is an in-depth interview show hosted by comedian, author and actor Michael Ian Black. I love this podcast because Michael Ian Black as a host is simultaneously witty, vulnerable and empathetic. Thus, the conversations move fluidly between banter and deep revelations. The guests are creative types: artists, authors, chefs, musicians. Black's focus is on how each guest manages to find creativity and persevere in his or her field. Every episode ends with an “Amazing 5” recommendation segment, in which the guests recommend a book, music, food, TV, and miscellaneous item. My favorite episodes: David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Maira Kalman, and Judd Apatow. —Mollie West Duffy

5. Love + Radio

I love Love + Radio! It has amazing non-fiction, long-form stories. Each one is unique and totally unexpected. Every time I listen to this podcast, I find myself transported to another world. It's truly magical. One episode in particular that stands out is a series of interviews with a man who is dating a life-sized doll, but [spoiler alert!] you don't realize his girlfriend is a doll until the very end. It’s incredible! You really learn how to feel empathy for people whose lives are worlds away from your own. There's also a three-part series about a woman in Colombia who realizes that the family she's just married into are drug lords. The series follows her story as she moves to the US and later is forced into hiding in the Witness Security Program, after providing information to the US government. Another story I loved was from a woman who had an out-of-body experience while undergoing surgery. —Ali Cottong

6. Containers

I got really into the Containers podcast. I never thought I would geek out so hard on this seemingly mundane part of the global supply chain. As a designer at IDEO, I work with a lot companies on their journeys to become “future fit.” One way companies are becoming future fit is by making the bold shift from a increasingly strained linear economy (take, make, waste) to a more prosperous, circular one (one that is regenerative and keeps materials and resources in flow at their highest use for as long as possible, creating new value along the way).

One huge part of redesigning a future economy is understanding how our economy today is designed. This podcast tells the story of containers, something so seemingly banal and ubiquitous. It colorfully illuminates how they came to be and the role they’ve had in transforming not only our economy but so many facets of our modern society in such a short amount of time.

As we design and prototype new tools, platforms, products, services and ventures in the circular economy, Containers inspired me to see the transformative power that a single, simple, and elegant innovation can have when it allows people to do something they couldn’t do before, at a tremendous scale. —Rhys Thom

7. Death of 1000 Cuts

I’m listening to Season 1 of Death of 1000 Cuts. It’s actually an 8-week writing course given by a poet, Tim Clare. The 15-minute podcast gives advice and a structured 10-minute writing exercise every day for 8 weeks. It helps with stagnant writer’s block, writing confidence, writing fatigue and helps exercise the writing muscles for people to feel empowered to write and to dedicate the time to creativity. I love it because while I’m an (IDEO) lawyer by day, it means I get to do the creative flex thing by night. —Rebecca Wint

8. My Favorite Murder

My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast—not a combination you'd expect, but the hosts, Karen and Georgia, make it go down like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s not at all about glorifying the crimes, but rather, looking into the darkest parts of the human experience and finding a way to laugh. MFM (as fans call it) has also inspired a feminist movement with a massive fan base. There's even an IDEO Slack channel devoted to the podcast. —Jennifer Maer

9. NPR's Hidden Brain

Hidden Brain features amazing storytelling on why we do and think the ways that we do (backed with experts in the field!). Why are people in multi-cultural relationships more creative? Why did a competitive luxury brand gift Snookie a rival Gucci handbag? Why does wearing bright red sneakers make other people feel you're more influential? Why should marriages be more like Pinot than Cabernet? All these questions answered (and more) through the Hidden Brain. —Mike Peng

10. Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention is about climate change, how it's a feminist problem, and has a feminist solution. It's hosted by Maeve Higgins, an awesome comedian and storyteller; and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland (!). It's the first thing I've listened to on climate change that has made me feel something like hope. —Ashley Holtgraver

11. Cocaine and Rhinestones

Cocaine & Rhinestones is an in-depth look at some of the wildest stories of 20th century country music. I suppose I love it because I love old country music and was raised in an environment where Hank Williams was God. But these stories go much deeper than fading memories of hearing steel guitar over a busted truck radio. It's so well researched I might compare it to a Ken Burns documentary. Yes, it's dark, and that's why you'll love it. Murder...check. Alcoholism and adultery...check. People behaving in intolerable ways...check. But all of the negativity and carnage are balanced by unflinching tributes to a truly unique American musical creation. It's incredibly respectful of those who wrote and performed the music. Irony is uncool now anyway. This feels real. —Zach Hobbs

12. The Longest Shortest Time

The Longest Shortest Time is a parenting show. I like to think about someday becoming a parent, but even as someone without children, the way they talk developmental theory makes the whole concept of parenting feel more diverse and accessible. I don't have kids yet, so I listen in to see what my future could look like, and to learn more about youth today. —Stuart Getty

13. Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness

I love Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness because, well, Queer Eye is my new obsession, and he just absolutely delights me. He's so smart and yet somewhat hides it to remain more "curious," and he really explores every topic under the sun, from Saudi Arabia to abstinence in addiction therapy. —Madeline Armstrong

14. Change Agent from The New York Times

I've been surprised by how much the stories told on Change Agent stick with me, and how powerful analogous inspiration can be in helping us change our behavior. —Em Havens

15. Racist Sandwich

Racist Sandwich is a podcast about food, race, gender, and class. It's a refreshing, honest, and deeply human look at what happens at that intersection. I really like the podcast because they tell different stories from points of view that are rarely highlighted by traditional media channels. I am a latecomer to the show, but I found their episodes "Tasting Something other than Shame" and "Detroiters are Fighters" to be particularly inspiring. —Sandeep Pahuja

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Now that we consume most of our information through screens, audio programming is a breath of fresh air. Podcasts enable us to get up and out, liberating us from the tether of phones and computers.

That’s a shame, because research shows that feeling joy at work not only increases our wellbeing, but also our performance across the spectrum. Joy increases our working memory and cognitive flexibility, which in turn leads to better problem-solving. Take doctors, for example: Those who have been primed to feel joyful make a correct diagnosis earlier than those in a neutral mindset. Joyful businesspeople consider a wider range of scenarios and make more accurate decisions. Joyful negotiators are more likely to achieve win-win agreements. And it turns out it’s infectious: Joyful leaders spread positivity to their teams, increasing rates of effort and cooperation; and when salespeople exhibit joy, customers respond by spending more time in a store, giving higher satisfaction ratings, and expressing a greater likelihood to return.

Have I convinced you yet? Ok, then. Here are six ways you can transform your work environment to increase joy, and bring out your most productive, collaborative, and creative self.

1. Add a pop of color and light

Research with nearly a thousand office workers across four continents shows that people in more colorful workspaces are more joyful and alert than those in drab spaces. They’re also more confident and friendly. Bright colors reflect more light, which acts like a stimulant, a shot of caffeine for the eyes. If you can’t paint your whole office, try adding an item with a strong pop of color to your desk, like a vibrant piece of art or a yellow mug, to brighten up your space—and your spirits!

For even more joyful energy at work, go toward the light. There’s a reason most people prefer a desk near a sunny window. Light helps regulate our Circadian rhythms, leading to higher energy levels and mood. Research shows that workers who get more light exposure in their offices are more physically active during the day and sleep better at night. Among nurses working on acute care wards, more sunlight exposure correlates to an increase in spontaneous laughter. If you are slow to get going in the morning, see if you can find a spot near a window. Or fight the afternoon slump by taking your meetings outside.

2. Buy a plant

When you’re working in a high pressure situation, make sure to introduce some greenery to your workspace. Exposure to nature helps restore our attention and can mitigate the effects of stress on our bodies and minds—making it less likely that we’ll snap at our teammates. Psychologists believe that looking at nature refreshes our ability to concentrate because it is passive, but also stimulating. In many offices, nature views are a perk reserved for management. But the good news is that studies show even a few plants can improve attention, reduce blood pressure, and even prompt more generous behavior toward others.

3. Keep it cute

One of my most memorable days at IDEO was when one of my coworkers surprised us by arranging for fifteen puppies to visit our office. As people moved from one meeting to another, they couldn’t resist spending a few minutes sitting on the floor cooing and cuddling. It might sound like a distraction, but researchers in Japan have found that looking at pictures of cute things, such as baby animals, may actually help increase concentration. One theory is that cuteness elicits a nurturing impulse that requires focus and care, priming the mind to zoom in and tune out distractions. So, go ahead, share the latest otter video on Slack, peep the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed on your lunch break, and keep those photos of your adorable nieces and nephews on your wall. These joyful bursts of cuteness might just help you when you’re doing work that requires careful thought and attention to detail.

4. Get some air

When you need to zoom out and get perspective on a work challenge, seek out the joy of elevation. Our emotions often seem to lie along a vertical axis: we’re in high spirits or light-hearted when happy, we feel low or heavy-hearted when sad. By moving ourselves physically upward in space—ascending to a roof deck or even just climbing a set of stairs, we not only find a joyful lightness, but also a shift to more big-picture thinking. Psychologists have tested this by intercepting people who have just walked up or down a flight of stairs and asking them to think about people’s behavior. When participants are told that someone is painting a room, those who have just walked down a flight of stairs are more likely to think about the specific actions involved (“applying brush strokes,”) while those who have just walked up the stairs are more likely to think about the broader purpose behind the actions (“making the room look fresh”). Ever have a flash of insight on an airplane? When we need to make big decisions or solve intractable problems, elevation can help us literally “see the forest for the trees” and avoid getting caught in the weeds.

5. Keep the ball rolling

To cultivate a creative mindset, keep a ball or frisbee at your desk. Research shows the kinds of fluid, curving motions we make when we play can help unlock a more flexible thought pattern, which in turn heightens creativity. In one study, participants who made curving motions with their arms came up with more ideas for uses of a newspaper than those who made angular motions. And the ideas they came up with were more original. This might explain why you often find ping pong tables at startups, and suggests that taking time to play might be the perfect warmup for creative work.

6. Turn up the tunes

When you want to help your team find its groove, give them an actual groove. That can produce a phenomenon that scientists call synchrony—when we sing or move in the same rhythm with others. When people experience synchrony, either by tapping out a beat or a rocking in chairs at the same tempo, they display greater generosity and perform better on a cooperative task. Some researchers have speculated that this may have originated when humans first began to coordinate their efforts to achieve complex goals. By noticing the rhythms created through repetitive manual tasks, people could better synchronize their efforts, and perhaps this led to an unconscious sense of unity. If it’s not too distracting, one way to harness this effect may be to play music with a strong beat in your workspace. People will naturally begin to tap or nod along with the music, creating a synchronicity that helps you find your flow.

To learn more about Ingrid’s research on how to design for joy, check out her new book Joyful.

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As a designer who studies joy for a living, one of the questions I am asked most frequently is: How can I find more joy at work? We spend at least a third of our waking hours at the office, and some of us much more than that. Yet most workspaces, with their beige carpets and rows of cubicles, aren’t exactly designed to delight.

Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

Creativity Challenge # 2: Increase your creative output

Anyone who studies dreams will tell you that if you want to remember your dreams, you need a dream journal right beside the bed. The moment you wake up—whether it’s the middle of the night or in the morning—you should capture those dreams before they fade away. The same holds true with your waking “dreams,” your partially or fully formed ideas, your glimpses of possible futures. If you want to maximize your creative output, don’t rely on short-term memory.

Even if you never get to experience Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, you’re likely to have your own moments of brilliance once in a while. When that happens, make an effort to capture those ideas right away, because your short-team memory only holds a thought for fifteen to thirty seconds. One simple way to have more ideas in your arsenal is to start keeping track of them as they occur.

Tool: 15 Seconds of Brilliance
Participants: This is a solo activity
Time: 10 minutes per day
Supplies: Paper and pen, or a digital means of keeping notes

Instructions

When you have an idea or observe something intriguing, take note of it. The actual means of capturing the idea doesn’t matter as much as having it with you at all times. Choose a method or a technology that fits with your lifestyle and your personality:

• Digital tools are great, but paper still works exceptionally well. I always have a pen and a simple folded piece of paper in my back pocket. I also keeps a small pad of paper on my bedside table, with a lighted pen that I can use to jot down an idea while reading or in the middle of the night without fear of waking up my wife.
• My brother David has a whiteboard marker in his shower, so he can write a passing idea before it disappears.
• IDEO partner Brendan Boyle has experimented with various forms of “idea wallets” designed specifically to record his thoughts.
• Mobile voice assistants will let you dictate a quick mental note.
• Your laptop or tablet has all kinds of notepad applications. But we think you’ll get more functionality out of purpose-built programs like Evernote, specifically designed to store such ideas.

So increase your odds in the war against lost ideas. You’ll be amazed at how many good ideas you end up with when you make an effort to jot down those sudden moments of insight. Our brains are constantly making connections and associations with other people, things, and ideas we come in contact with. Don’t let those serendipitous insights go to waste.

This post is the second in a series of exercises taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems. Read part one here.

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Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential.

How do you prevent a handoff from becoming a drop-off? I recently wrote an article for Harvard Business Review that explores this very question. The following is an excerpt of that article.

How should you create a smoother handoff between teams? In short, you can avoid a drop-off by tailoring each handoff to the teams involved. In many companies, innovation teams tend to fall into three buckets: Explorers, Scalers, and Optimizers (with credit to Bud Caddell and Simon Wardley).

There are four basic models for the handoff, and dozens of hybrids. The right one for each part of your innovation portfolio will depend on how integrated your projects need to be with your core business.

1. The Owner’s Manual

After months—sometimes years—of work, an innovation team extensively documents their work in hundreds of pages of slides, spreadsheets, and other files, and then hands all of that over to a new team to execute. When was the last time you read an Owner’s Manual? Exactly. The new team then risks moving on without absorbing the learning of their predecessors.

2. The Architect

The best way to avoid a drop-off is to eliminate the handoff. In this model, the future owner of the work embeds in the Explorer and Scaler teams. That person then acts as a connector, knowing all of the avenues already explored and all of the learning gained.

3. The Ambassadors

Similar to the previous model, in this model, members of the Explorer, Scaler, and Optimizer teams remain embedded in each phase of the project to ensure that no learning is lost and that each phase of work is designed to feed smoothly into the next. In addition, this model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most.

4. The Hive

The difference here is that team members don't roll off the project—it remains a blended team from idea to implementation. This model improves the future work of innovation teams by helping them build an awareness of what downstream teams need most.

Want to dive deeper on innovation handoffs? Read my article in Harvard Business Review.

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If innovation projects are going to succeed, they’ll need to survive a handoff from an innovation team to an execution team. And every time you create a handoff, you risk dropping the baton.

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.