To bring students healthy food at school, San Francisco Unified School District had already hired Revolution Foods, a caterer that serves some of the highest-nutrition meals in the nation. But when the lunch bell rang, 72 percent of those who could afford lunch weren’t showing up; students didn’t want to wait in the long lines or rush to finish, so they headed off-campus to eat.

Working alongside more than 1,300 students, parents, union leaders, nutrition staff, board commissioners, principals, teachers, and community groups, IDEO and SFUSD redesigned school lunch. Together, they developed recommendations for three age-appropriate dining experiences, from communal eating to student-designed spaces to new technology platforms, and worked to develop a robust business model.

In September 2013, the San Francisco Unified School Board expressed unanimous enthusiasm for IDEO’s work, clearing the path for this new vision of student-centered lunch to take root.

You can learn more about the cafeteria, and hear firsthand from the students, in this immersive, interactive story.

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Steelcase and IDEO have been collaborating for more than 25 years. The relationship has influenced furniture design across a range of environments, from work spaces to hospitals to schools, and has resulted in numerous design awards for iconic pieces like the Node Chair for classrooms and the innovative modern office chair Leap WorkLounge.

At the heart of the relationship lie trust and a spirit of collaboration, said IDEO founder David Kelley, allowing the space for innovation. “It has to be the collaboration between our inherent innovation capabilities and their extraordinary internal knowledge about the market and what they do best,” Kelley said. The way IDEO began working with Steelcase decades ago has influenced the way they continue to work today, involved in all areas of the business, from design and engineering to strategy and marketing.

The first collaboration in 1989 was for a new Steelcase division called Details, and featured desktop products to go along with its already successful line of office furniture. From the beginning, IDEO founder David Kelley and a group of designers were involved in helping Steelcase with decision-making on every level of the new division, from product strategy to hiring and everything in between. The particular blend of strategy, design, and engineering used to help Details become successful actually became the prototype project for the future IDEO, and is the blueprint for how IDEO works today.

What followed were a series of projects in which Steelcase and IDEO explored moving away from the traditional office cubicle toward furniture that was more architectural and open. More than 10 years ago, Steelcase noticed that the way people worked was changing from static work in offices to more fluid environments that were technology-enabled with laptops and mobile phones. This insight led to two collaborations, Room Wizard and media:scape, design efforts that captured this changing landscape by extending intelligent work to be supported by digital products, not just physical ones.

Jim Hackett, former CEO of Steelcase, said that an early brainstorming exercise in IDEO’s Palo Alto studio made him realize the power of a human-centered design approach. “They asked me to come to Palo Alto for a brainstorming exercise, so I went through the literal exercise that IDEO was having clients do at the time,” Hackett said. “As I was cutting foam core on the floor of one of the studios, I was thinking: I would never work the same way again after doing this. Not just designers should work like this, but anybody who is a knowledge worker should work like this.”

The collaboration’s many successes had a profound impact on Steelcase, and on Hackett personally: “I’m so humbled, I can’t even express it. I can’t tell you how many waves of joy come over me when I’m at IDEO. It’s just an extraordinary part of my life.”

Over the years, the two companies have been in nearly daily communication, a practice that has informed the work of both. While Hackett brought Steelcase’s perspective of corporate boardrooms and running a global company, Kelley and IDEO were working in the most innovative place in the world, saturated in design. Both companies agree that neither would be the same today without the experience gleaned from the other.

Some of the projects include:

RoomWizard
Aiming to connect the convenience of digital technology to physical spaces, the teams designed RoomWizard, a web-accessible touch-screen display that provides the real-time status of shared meeting rooms, simplifying the process of reserving and managing those spaces.

Leap WorkLounge and Ottoman
Building on their earlier work on the Leap Chair, the teams created a work chair with the comfort and style of a classic club chair, a luxury Leap Chair that takes work away from the desk.

i2i Chair
In researching the needs of a growing number of collaborative settings, Steelcase identified an opportunity to combine task and lounge seating. Named for the collaboration it enables, the i2i chair supports a variety of postures, including sideways, reclining, perching, and leaning. Winner of the Spark Gold Award, 2010, and the IDEA Silver Award, 2009.

Amia Chair
Steelcase and IDEO designed a task chair with modern ergonomic capabilities that accommodated a wide range of body types at a lower price point. Winner of the IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, 2009.

media:scape
Steelcase asked IDEO to help evaluate and design a “walk up and connect” experience that merged furniture and technology to help teams access and share information. Designed to look light, open, and inviting, media:scape used a pedestal table with cleverly embedded hardware and interactive technology to foster group work. Winner of the IDEA Bronze award for Office & Productivity, 2011.

Node Chair
IDEO collaborated with Steelcase to design a platform for improving the classroom experience. The final product, dubbed the Node chair, has received praise for promoting student collaboration, allowing educators to reconfigure classrooms to fit different teaching styles, and enabling institutions to save money by making spaces more flexible and accommodating for varied uses. Winner of five design awards.

Watch: A love letter to Node.

A great healthcare experience shouldn’t be a luxury. It should be available to everyone, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they need.

Planned Parenthood health centers have opened their doors to every woman and man for 100 years with this core conviction, offering services ranging from pap tests, cancer screenings, and breast exams to contraception, treatment for sexually transmitted infections, counseling, and education.

As the healthcare landscape continues to shift, Planned Parenthood is evolving to lead the progress. For the past year, the organization worked side by side with IDEO to rethink and prototype a patient and employee experience that elevates individuals and their health and well-being.

Together, the teams designed a number of patient and employee interactions and corresponding prototypes that address different patient needs: education, personalization, connection, and support for any decision.

Concepts in Development

These concepts are being rolled out across health centers around the country:

Welcoming Waiting Areas
To help set the right tone for patients from the time they enter the door, the teams designed waiting rooms that offer different types of environments for different needs. The Hub is an area that transforms the passive waiting room experience to a greeting area that’s staffed by knowledgeable guides who help orient patients, and quiet nesting spaces for reflection and privacy. Patients can spend time with friends and family in a social, kid-friendly common area, and those who want to get involved to support Planned Parenthood’s mission can learn about health and advocacy information. This modular design toolkit can adapt to the individual buildings, budgets, and community needs of any existing Planned Parenthood health center.

Restorative Recovery Rooms
For women who are recovering from surgical procedures, small thoughtful details have a magnified positive impact. Redesigned recovery rooms have been separated into semi-private spaces, accommodating loved ones who want to join patients after a procedure. Soothing colors and soft, warm fabrics create a comforting environment, and service gestures including cards with words of support and encouragement from staff reinforce Planned Parenthood’s promise. A take-home kit provides clear information about what to expect during recovery and recommendations for follow-up care.

Unifying Employees
Because the heart of Planned Parenthood is its dedicated employees, we developed and launched an engagement and training program that provides staff with the tools and support they need to do their best work. In This Together, an employee engagement training, prepares staff to work with a vastly diverse community, reduce stigma around health choices, and empower patients to take control of their care. It’s based on a clearly defined set of workplace values and service standards, common goals that help employees across the global organization work together to provide top-notch experiences at every location.

Vision for the Future

These concepts are in varying stages of development, with plans to launch coming soon.

Patient-Physician Tool and Educational App
Visit Companion is a prototype for a suite of digital tools that help patients learn about their reproductive health choices and create personalized plans with their clinicians. While they wait, or anytime before a visit, patients can learn the answers to common questions related to their appointment and see side-by-side comparisons of their care options. The app uses familiar language and symbols to describe symptoms and side effects, and it provides a record of what was discussed during the visit as well as reminders for follow-up appointments.

Simplified Medical Forms
For the 2 million-plus patients who visit Planned Parenthood health centers, there’s an opportunity to make appointments more convenient and straightforward. Currently in prototyping stages, Friendly Forms is an easy-to-understand, interactive digital questionnaire written in simple, conversational language that was designed by replicating how Planned Parenthood clinicians speak to their patients. The forms adapt as patients answer questions, giving only the prompts that are relevant. Patients will be able to complete Friendly Forms any time before their appointment, so it’s easier to complete the forms accurately.

Holistic Women’s Health Care
Women who rely on Planned Parenthood for their sexual and reproductive healthcare can benefit from having trusted clinicians guide their care throughout their lifetime. Through the Well Woman Plus program, Planned Parenthood will connect women to trusted providers for care beyond physical exams and birth control consultation. Clinicians will use interactive digital and physical tools to map out lifelong health care milestones and help patients think proactively about their future, from family planning to preventive screenings.

To learn more, go to PlannedParenthoodExperience.org.

Find out more about Planned Parenthood's approach to creativity in this Q&A with executive vice president and chief brand officer Dawn Laguens.

La Victoria Lab (LVL) is a group of designers, anthropologists, architects, and entrepreneurs working on improving the lives of the Peruvian middle class. Founded in 2014, LVL is the Innovation Lab of Intercorp, an economic group of 35 companies spanning banks, malls, cinemas, schools, health care clinics, and more. Intercorp was founded by Carlos Rodríguez-Pastor, one of Peru’s most successful entrepreneurs, employs more than 90,000 people, and accounts for almost 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Peru is one of South America’s fastest growing economies, with a healthy 6 percent year-on-year growth from 2007 to 2017, on average. That rising economic tide, along with government policy, has created extraordinary social mobility: Between 2005 and 2017, the share of poverty fell from 55% to 22%, of a population of 32 million.

Know The Customer

As Peruvians’ lives have improved, the new middle class's needs and aspirations have changed: They’re entrepreneurial, expect great services, and want the best for their children. That challenge and opportunity led Rodríguez-Pastor to enlist IDEO to bring our empathic approach to the construction of Innova Schools, a new school system, and to redesign Interbank's customer experience"

Success in these two projects bred ambition. Intercorp, Rodríguez-Pastor realized, needed to build two capabilities: a deep, bedrock understanding of the new middle class, and an innovation capability with which his companies could create new products, services, and experiences. “I want a little IDEO,” Rodriguez-Pastor said, and the germ of LVL took root.

A Lab Takes Shape

In early 2014, as contractors broke ground on the Lab, its founders set about hiring an eclectic team from across the globe and undertook their first project: to deeply understand the needs, desires, hopes, and dreams of the emerging middle class.

Three months of ethnographic research was followed by three months of bringing their insights to life. LVL’s team surrounded themselves with mementos of people’s lives: toys, products, ads, as well as video interviews with families, to help Intercorp’s executives literally step into the lives of their prospective customers.

Solutions and Skills

Powered by those insights, La Victoria Lab has brought human-centered problem-solving to a variety of Intercorp’s companies, including new retail ventures, and improving the cinema-going and banking experience.

In 2015, the Lab began scaling its efforts to build innovation capabilities across all of the portfolio companies by using IDEO’s innovation readiness assessment, Creative Difference. Each company received a report of their strengths and improvement areas, and as a result, LVL facilitated workshops and community groups focused on building essential capabilities.

"Creative Difference is the first tool that has allowed my team and the organization to have a precise picture of where we are in the spectrum of doing truly innovative work. Now, we can identify our strengths and areas of improvement, we can develop work plans and actions based on data, and can start to really dig deep into innovation,” says Aurelia Alvarado, Director of Innovation, Innova Schools.

La Victoria Lab’s experiments are catalyzed by Intercorp’s scale, reach, and national ambition. Innova Schools, for example, is now Peru’s biggest private school network (read more about Innova here). And Interbank’s new retail experience rolled out to more than 180 branches nationally.

As LVL matures, its focus is changing, says Hernan Carranza, Chief Innovation Officer, Intercorp. “There's a transition taking place at La Victoria Lab, from a studio undertaking typical design projects, to a platform for impact-led journeys that start at pipeline discovery, defining key performance indicators, all the way to implementation and stewardship."

Just as important as the projects it delivers is the wider intent of LVL. The aim is for IDEO’s role within La Victoria Lab to wane, as Intercorp’s waxes, and the company’s internal Innovation capability and culture strengthen. LVL’s ventures range from mindset-changing initiatives, such as curating Peru's largest innovation festival, to deeply transformative endeavors targeted at reinventing the core value propositions of Intercorp's insurance, drugstores, and medical services. It envisions massive cross-organizational transformation.

“Innovation,” said Rodríguez-Pastor, “is too important to be outsourced.”

Keep up to date with the latest projects from La Victoria Lab: lavictoria.pe

"For the latest developments on our work with Intercorp, head to "The Possibilities Business: An Oral History of Organization Transformation"

1. Choose your creativity apps wisely

Try as many as possible, then edit them down to the few you use regularly and that can fit on your home screen.

If you're a writer, there are many notes apps that offer distraction-free writing (IA Writer, Daedalus). Day One is a great choice for people who use journaling as a creative practice. For photographers, there are a wealth of tools (pro-quality editing apps like VSCO, exotic image-modifiers like Prisma). My personal favorite is Over, which allows you to add text your photos via a simple, fluid interface.

For those running brainstorms in the non-digital world, 3M's Post-It app is a surprisingly effective way to capture a wall full of notes, then reorganize and export them to others apps. For doodlers, Procreate is the gold standard. (You might prefer to use this app on an iPad, unless you have eerily-thin fingers).

2. Curate inspiration feeds

Aside from tools, you’ll want apps that supply a steady stream of inspiration. Some obvious ones: the Kindle app for reading, Audible for audiobooks, and a well-designed podcast player (we recommend Overcast). Other good sources of waiting room material are the various read-it-later apps, such as Instapaper or Pocket, and if you’re still reading this post, the Longform app. One note of caution here: don’t overwhelm yourself with a pile of material that feels like work to get through. Delete regularly.

3. Audit your distraction

Ok, time to get real. How are you really using your phone? Are there certain apps or websites that you check repeatedly every day? Do you have habits that are vaporizing your time (We're looking at you, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit).

If so, engineer some limits on usage. One simple approach is to put all the apps that distract you on a separate screen, or even to hide them away inside a folder—putting a bit of friction between you and your addiction. Use that brief moment of additional swiping as a reminder to ask yourself whether you *really* want to go down the rabbit hole. Might there be something better to do with your time?

4. Support your focus

When you do decide to commit to a creative task, there are a number of apps that can help support you. Many swear by the Pomodoro technique, which involves a commitment to focus for 25min chunks, with 5min breaks in between. There are many Pomodoro timers in the app store, though Apple's stock clock app works just fine, too.

If you’re easily distracted, try a white noise app. Rain Rain provides a vast array of variations on the sound of raindrops falling from the sky, alongside airliner and washing machine soundscapes.

For a slightly less boring selection of background sounds, fire up Spotify and search “ambient playlists”. Brian Eno's Music For Airports is an excellent writing companion.

5. Change your morning ritual

With all your apps organized on your phone, you should be all set for a more creative relationship with your device. You only need one more thing: discipline. One trick is to think about your "first apps.” When you grab your phone in the morning or after getting on the bus, what are the first apps that you open? Do you have a set pattern? Are those really the apps that you want to be opening or are you a slave to habit? Try opening a creativity enhancer first and see how that changes your perspective for the day.

And sure, we know you're not going to write a novel while waiting in line for an ATM. But instead of losing yourself in a Facebook fugue state, maybe you could take a minute to construct a groove in Figure, or play around with a photo in Prisma. There. Didn't that feel good?

Illustrations by Felicia Chiao.

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Is the iPhone the greatest tool for creativity ever invented, or its worst enemy? The answer is... both. On the one hand, the smartphone is the Swiss Army Knife of writing, research, photography, and planning tools. On the other, it is an attention-sucking black hole, consuming all of your free time in a gaming and social media vortex. Here are a few ways to make that computer in your pocket best serve your creative goals.

That's starting to change. With 76 million Baby Boomers gazing down that long, winding road, aid-in-dying laws gaining ground (California's passed in June of this year), and an epic list of recent bestselling books on the topic, many written by doctors, death is having a moment.

Which led us to ask: How can design play a role?

To find out, we teamed up with local hospital network Sutter Health, the Helix Centre in London, and the Ungerleider Palliative Care Education Fund to launch OpenIDEO’s End of Life Challenge. Thousands of people around the world participated, submitting ideas for tools, services, and platforms that might improve the way we prepare for and navigate the end of life.

Some incredible ideas came across the transom. Imagine the relief of a soundscape that cancels out the maddening noise of bleeping machines in hospitals, or a digital platform that provides respite vouchers for family caregivers who desperately need a break.

Struck by the volume of ideas the challenge generated, we wanted to make sure the momentum didn't end there. A team formed to send out a call to a loose network of healthcare professionals, designers, artists, storytellers, organizations, and individuals to see if it made sense to join forces and build a public event.

Re:Imagine End of Life kicks off Monday evening, October 24th, 2016, and runs through the week in San Francisco. With multiple events every night in San Francisco and the East Bay, there are plenty of opportunities to join the conversation.

Tonight (10/24), at Grace Cathedral, Dr. BJ Miller, Dana Cho, and I will lead a workshop on how design can play a role in the way we die. OpenIDEO Challenge participants Brad Wolfe, Ken Rosenfeld, and Yoko K will share the ideas they are developing.

Other highlights include:

• Death over Dinner at the Battery
• An immersive VR art experience
• How Doctors Die, with Dr. Ira Byock and Dr. Joon Yun
• An evening of stories and music with You're Going to Die
• Open conversations at Zen Hospice Project

Want to know more? The event's organizers can be reached at hello@letsreimagine.org.

No one knows when it will happen. Could be 30 years. Could be next week. What we do know is that we are all dying. And that how we die—perhaps the most important event human beings share—is something we never talk about.

Featuring commentary from leading thinkers in art, philosophy, business, and design, the publication draws out the modern day relevance of the period’s most iconic paintings. Paul's essay reflects on Pieter de Hooch’s work, "A Mother Delousing Her Child’s Hair", also known as “A Mother’s Duty.” I asked him to tell us more about the book, and why it should be on every designer's wish list.

How did you get involved in the book?

Marcel was an artist-in-residence at our San Francisco office. He’s a world-class designer and we learned a lot from him. Later, his team approached me about this project. They sent me a list of paintings and asked if any of them sparked anything for me. The de Hooch was the first piece I saw and I picked it straight away. At IDEO, we often take shocking or not-beautiful things and make them poetic. So a girl having her head deloused immediately struck me as a great human truth. I love that de Hooch has made it beautiful and celebrated it and used all this classic technique around it.

You say design acts as a witness to our smallest moments of triumph and tragedy. How do we witness increasingly broad challenges, like poverty and citizenship?

Tackling a big problem doesn’t mean you have to look for the big solution. It’s always the tiniest thing that begins the catalytic chain that unlocks things. I firmly believe that looking for the tiniest moment at the center of the human experience is the place to start. So you toggle back and forth and try to look for things that are both human and universal, and personal and individual.

I was in Kansas City the other day talking about the plight of the citizen, and at the same time we were telling very specific stories of people that we knew or had met that day. We were able to talk about citizenship at one scale, and still refer back to individuals. Nobody reacts to a segmentation study or a bar chart or a number, everybody reacts to a story. You have to find the meta in the micro.

Art does this, too. De Hooch does a fantastic job of telling a story in which I can recognize myself. I remember sitting there and the feel of my mother’s hand in my hair. I think design is about asking people to feel it in their own skin, remember their own experience. Good art makes you see yourself in the frame, and that is our work these days, too—to help join together small and big and to help people see themselves inside the big system.

What was your first impression of the book?

It’s beautiful. I think beauty is very important. Having beautiful things around you makes you feel alive. In the age of digital—which these days has become almost synonymous with disposable—it’s really nice to stop the train for a minute and put something in your hands that has heft, and is an extremely lavish, unapologetically gilded object. To me it’s like holding a piece of jewelry or going to the symphony. The sensorialist in me is awakened by this book and I’m very proud to have been included in it.

Paul Bennett has always had an appreciation of the Dutch Masters: “I love the craft of them, actually, the feeling of the pictures.” So, IDEO'S Chief Creative Officer jumped at the chance to contribute to designer Marcel Wanders' latest project, Rijks, Masters of the Golden Age, a lavishly gilded coffee table book that pays homage to the 17th-century masterpieces hanging in the Rijksmuseum’s Gallery of Honour.

That was 10 years ago. I was in high school in China, where a comic dork looked like this:

That ego-crushing was followed by a lot of self-loathing and Cheetos. But over time, the taste of Cheetos grew flat, and my hands started itching to doodle in physics class again. I decided to follow the method the editor suggested:

Before long, I was running my first monthly series in a halfway reputable magazine. That helped me edge up in the high school popularity rankings, and I got a few messages of encouragement from reader forums. Above all, though, the method helped me get into a state of comic flow; nothing else mattered when I was drawing. Even when I was failing in life and full of self-doubt, I could always fall back on my sketchbook.

Which brings me to Lesson #1:

But even when you’re following a proven method and trusting the process, there are a few dangers to watch out for when embarking on graphic novel projects. The Pain/Gain index, for example:

If the difficulty index K is too high, terminate! There are four levels of challenge in a graphic novel project:

Creating anything that requires more cognitive load than watching Game of Thrones after a full workday is challenging to begin with, which leads to Lesson #2:

For me, it’s about rewarding myself with things I’m fond of drawing: intricate landscape, fashion, and action scenes. Since I suck at writing dialogue, I’ve kept it to a minimum, and substituted in symbols and visual cues.

Here are four other things I learned while making graphic novels, so you don’t have to go through the same pain:

I’m at work on #6 at the moment, which is the most fun.

Coloring under progress

It’s the last step in a graphic novel I’ve been working on about living in a dystopian San Francisco of the future, where the scarcity of organic food leads its residents to fight to the death at grocery stores. The story is a dramatized observation of the on-going identity battles most San Franciscans face today. It’s a place where one feels simultaneously insider and outsider. You can be both a picky eater and burrito consumer, the root cause and the victim of jacked-up rental prices, and equal parts poseur and satirist of hipsterdom.

“San Franciscocoa” depicts a mundane but impossible feat of grocery shopping—buying a bag of cocoa powder that’s going into extinction.

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“Sorry, but it’s simply not up to the publishable standard.”

The editor handed me back my work, which took hundreds of hours to create. There was a long pause.

“You should try more live sketching,” she said, lowering her voice to soften the blow. “Build a strong foundation before finding your personal style.”

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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.