Named after Ernest O. Lawrence, UC Berkeley’s first Nobel Laureate, The Lawrence Hall of Science’s wide-ranging products, services, and tools developed organically over half a century. To begin to make sense of the breadth and depth of its offerings, IDEO asked leadership and staff to surface the myriad activities, audiences, and relationships with external partners, enabling the group to visualize—and make sense of—the totality of The Lawrence brand.

During in-depth research with parents and kids, educators, and experts, IDEO discovered that each of these audiences had distinct mindsets. Parents and kids engaged with The Lawrence to explore, have fun, and dive deeper into a specific topic. Educators utilized it for professional learning opportunities and to discover new, exciting classroom tools. While experts, including UC Berkeley faculty, STEM educators across the US, and funders, viewed the center as a resource for best-in-class STEM education research. The mindsets highlighted The Lawrence’s unique capabilities, but the complexity also created some opportunity areas, including ways to use storytelling to create emotional resonance around The Lawrence’s core values and how to design a unified narrative to connect the dots across audiences and offers.

Building on its strengths as an institution and the identified opportunity areas, IDEO created a modern, vibrant, and flexible brand that strategically and visually unites all of The Lawrence’s offerings, working across digital and physical media. Grounded by a grid system, the updated brand identity is simultaneously rigorous and fun, featuring a bright color palette and signature retro-cool super-nova mark. Different offerings are bundled together based on different audience needs, preventing confusion and easing navigation. Even the name of the science museum, The Lawrence Hall of Science, was updated to a more contemporary and approachable, The Lawrence, inspired by The Met.

The Lawrence unveiled its new brand with much fanfare in late 2018 as part of its year-long 50th anniversary celebrations. Visitors can see the updated identity across all public-facing elements, including The Lawrence’s website, curriculum and educator materials, letterhead, collateral, and exhibition and wayfinding signage. The redesigned brand has been credited with bolstering the popularity of the science center among families and schools and causing ticket sales to return to—and exceed—pre-pandemic levels. Internally, the rebranding effort has helped generate excitement and energy across departments, helping solidify a collective future strategy and vision for its next 50 years.

The Lawrence Hall of Science’s diverse offerings had grown extensively over the decades, creating a confusing and disjointed experience for its various audiences. On the eve of its 50th anniversary, Lawrence leadership sought a brand refresh to better connect with its target audiences and differentiate itself in the STEM education ecosystem.

Over $6M in new funding

raised to transform and modernize The Lawrence, thanks to IDEO's rebranding effort

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When Greene King approached IDEO in early 2022, it was (and still is) one of the UK’s leading hospitality brands, with over 2,600 pubs, restaurants, and hotels. At that time, consumers in the UK and other parts of the world were beginning to rediscover the joys of travel after years of pandemic lockdowns. Greene King’s newly formed Venture Hotels Team wanted to understand how guest expectations had shifted during Covid-19 and how a new customer-centric hotel brand and signature service experience might meet—or exceed—their expectations.

To get inspired, the IDEO team interviewed a range of travelers of different ages and backgrounds, met with hospitality and luxury experts, and conducted immersion visits, including visiting high-end hotels. The research revealed modern travelers want unique hotel experiences that cater to their curiosity, support local communities, and are environmentally sustainable. Luxury, which once meant “exclusive,” was now about enabling one-of-a-kind cultural experiences. Today’s travelers value inclusivity, accessibility, and well-being; they want to feel welcome, do things at their own pace and have thoughtfully curated options to choose from. They also expect hospitality practices to be ethical and sustainable, contributing to the welfare of local communities and the planet.  

Building off this research, IDEO crafted a new entry proposition for Greene King’s new Everly Hotels Collection called “The Discover Collection,” which leverages the best parts of a classic British pub and inn—bespoke historic locations full of character, culture, and stories—while offering guests a modern experience from pre-arrival to departure, all grounded in supporting the communities they are in.

Signature moments include a warm welcome during check-in, as well as staff recommendations and local maps highlighting neighborhood gems. During their stay, guests enjoy expansive seasonal food menus, as well as a beverage menu that includes a wide variety of locally brewed, distilled, and crafted drinks by local suppliers. Rooms feature a smuggler's treasure chest with a surprise treat. Art and books from local talent are on display throughout the hotel, and local experts lead activities and events. Guests tangibly experience Greene King’s commitment to sustainability through its use of local materials, produce, talent, and partnerships, all designed to support the surrounding community. Upon departure, guests receive a personalized postcard.

In addition to the hotel experience moments, IDEO delivered branding recommendations for The Everly Hotels Collection, including visual identity and tone of voice that provide a cohesive look and feel for the collection of hotels while simultaneously showcasing each property's unique character. This was all packaged as an experience playbook, with design principles and briefs to help guide implementation decision-making across Greene King’s marketing, digital, interior design, and food and beverage teams.

A few months after the project ended, Greene King launched The Everly Hotels Collection. Its pilot hotel, The White Horses in Rottingdean, East Sussex, opened within the year. The new brand and guest experience strengthened bonds with Greene King’s loyal customers and first-time guests, ensuring the brand's relevance and appeal in a competitive market. More hotels are planned in the future in other scenic UK locations.  

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Greene King wanted guests to have a consistent brand experience while maintaining the storied charm that makes each property unique.

2 years

from concept to the launch of Greene King’s boutique Everly Hotels Collection

1 pilot hotel

The White Horses opened in Rottingdean in 2024

The hard drive space is full of companies competing over technology and performance. But iodyne wanted to add another layer, focusing on user needs and product aesthetics to better position the company to meet the values of a broader audience and create compelling new entrants into this crowded market.

Together, IDEO and iodyne jumped into in-depth discovery research to learn more about the needs of their end users. The team sat down with photographers, videographers, and digital imaging technicians, asking questions about their file management systems, how they used hard drives in the field, and how they stored them for transport and at home. They also headed to the source, visiting studios and home office set-ups to understand the full range of potential use cases.

A few big discoveries leaped out. No one had a single storage solution to rely on. Users constantly transferred data from different hard drives designed for different purposes (in the field versus at home), accumulating hundreds of old hard drives over time. Traditional hard drives also don’t allow multiple users to work off them simultaneously or come with software systems that help keep projects and tasks organized, protected, and sharable. Meanwhile, the ever-shrinking size and weight of laptops—and people’s willingness to take them everywhere—set a new benchmark for portability, one that iodyne could lean into.

With these and other insights in hand, the team brought unrivaled performance and aesthetics together to create a far superior user experience. IDEO and iodyne developed Pro Data’s engineering architecture, collaborating on thermal performance analysis, material choice, inspection of sample parts, and even packaging design. By combining integrated venting, multiple laptop-quality fans, smart power management, and 20 thermal sensors, the team was able to minimize cooling fan loads and reduce noise and power consumption. A single, centralized, and consolidated storage space makes sharing data among teammates easy, too—up to four computers can connect to the Pro Data at the same time and access the same files. The redesigned Pro Data creates new value for consumers in a highly mobile, secure package that can go from desktop to backpack and back again.

The iodyne Pro Data hard drive launched in 2021 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. Storage Review wrote “Nothing else comes close to this level of performance in a package this size,” while Jemery Boros of StarGate Studios said “I don’t think I could have done the shoot without Pro Data. It was easy to use, fast, and kept all of our data safe on the other side of the world.” The drives have since been used in the making of major motion pictures from F1 to A Complete Unknown.

Spurred by Pro Data’s success, iodyne decided to create a second product with IDEO, a Pro Mini that could provide the same cutting-edge performance and sleek design but scaled down to fit the needs of customers who required less storage capacity in an even more portable package. Pairing Pro phone-quality industrial design with a unique internal solid-state cooling architecture that imposed key constraints on airflow was critical.

IDEO worked with iodyne to create the Pro Mini’s internal layout and collaborated with an emerging engineering company to incorporate novel solid-state cooling technology, positioning the vents to maximize airflow and optimizing how users physically interact with the device. The team also addressed users’ durability concerns, advising iodyne on part selection as samples came in from vendors. The new Pro Mini is set to ship in the second half of 2025.

Hard drives are essential tools of the trade for people with large troves of media to store and transfer, like photographers and videographers. But beyond rolls of masking tape and label makers, there isn’t an easy way to see what’s on each drive without literally going through them one by one.  

Traditional hard drives generate a lot of heat and need fans to cool them, making them bulky, loud, and slowing transfer speeds.  

Many external hard drives are treated like commodities. They’re designed for mass production rather than for durability and aesthetics.

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2 cutting-edge hard drives

to market in 3 years

LACDMH is the nation’s largest public mental health department, serving over 10 million people. The agency provides critical support for the most vulnerable, including staffing a toll-free, 24/7 Help Line. Since late 2024, more than 70 Field Intervention Teams—comprised of mental health clinicians (social workers, psychologists, licensed psychiatric technicians, and registered nurses) and community health workers (trained peers or community members with lived experience)—have been dispatched around the county to help de-escalate mental health crises quickly, compassionately, and without force.

Because those experiencing a crisis are often too disoriented, confused, or otherwise unable to seek help for themselves, IDEO’s communication strategy targeted reaching “trusted messengers”—parents, spouses, siblings, and friends of people who have a mood or personality disorder like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. The campaign aimed to define mental health crises, help people understand what to expect when they call, build trust in FITs, and divert mental health crisis calls away from 911.

To understand what drives these specially trained mental health professionals to do this type of work—and what sparks trusted messengers to call for help—IDEO met and interviewed former clients and loved ones who had reached out to the county for support during a mental health crisis. The team also interviewed multiple FIT staff to learn more about how they approach clients and families.

The research inspired the communication strategy’s central idea: position FIT members as real-life superheroes and first responders. By associating FITs with that term, the campaign changes the narrative and communicates their compassion and expertise to those in crisis. Custom illustrated portraits feature actual FIT staff in strong, action-figure-style poses, while a bright, eye-catching color palette and clear, direct language convey confidence and inspire trust.

The team explored their initial design directions in a series of focus groups with LA residents, trusted messengers, and county and mental health workers to better understand the impact of the potential messaging and visuals. The research uncovered the importance of clarity, even in an inherently emotional situation. The  IDEO team discovered that transparency—and real personal stories—would be the key to building public trust in ACR.

Between March and June of 2025, the robust awareness campaign will run across LA County in a number of languages on city buses, in Metro stations, on social media, streaming TV,  radio, and more. An updated landing page on LACDMH’s website includes in-depth information and educational videos about mental health crises, as well as heartfelt testimonials from staff and former clients who have been helped by the service.

LA County Department of Mental Health created an innovative new program to provide urgent, compassionate care to Angelenos experiencing a mental health crisis but needed help driving awareness of its service across the region.

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Calling 911 is an entrenched behavior in an emergency. However, dispatching police officers who are not trained in mental health can make a bad situation worse. In 2022, 39 percent of people shot by LA police officers were in the midst of a mental health crisis.

172 million impressions

delivered via digital and physical ads across LA

50% increase

in calls to the ACR helpline, year-over-year, attributed to IDEO’s awareness messaging

24%

of Angelenos now name LACDMH as the first to call in a mental health crisis, leapfrogging 911 or the police, which slipped 14.3 points

It all started when we partnered with the American Refugee Committee (ARC), an organization that provides services to 3.5 million refugees across Africa and the Middle East. We teamed up to imagine a future where refugees have a voice in shaping the services provided to them, and are able to hold humanitarian organizations accountable for the services they receive.

The result was Kuja Kuja, a platform that has the potential to fundamentally shift the way humanitarian organizations serve refugees.

Kuja Kuja, a visual platform for tracking refugee feedback.

In a deep and humbling way, the friendships we made during those two weeks reminded us of how refugees, who are typically lumped together as a faceless, nameless group of displaced people, are smart, educated, optimistic human beings who've been brutally ripped from their homes by war and the vagaries of governance.

There are more than 65 million refugees and displaced people around the world today. That’s nearly 1 out of every 100 people on the planet. These people are no different from you or me in their need for safety, shelter, work—the most basic human rights.

On our last day in the settlement, at the end of the workday, we went to play ping-pong at a community center.

It was raining on and off, and there were a lot of people packed inside. There was a group of Congolese refugees breakdancing and practicing for a hip-hop dance competition. One of the dudes was beatboxing while his friends pop-n-locked and windmilled.

I started to beatbox with him and soon we had all kinds of people busting into our jam-circle to throw down raps in multiple languages—French, Swahili. It was the best example of getting close to the people you're designing for I could ever imagine.

I will certainly never forget that day. I glimpsed a world in which, if we were were all trapped in a room together, and broke out in song and dance, there would be no more war, no more displacement, no more refugees.

Back in August 2017, I was embedded at the Nakivale refugee settlement in Southwest Uganda for two weeks. I was there with Nathalie Collins from IDEO.org, to build a web application that collects refugee feedback and then visualizes that data in meaningful ways. Those two weeks could have been two months—Nathalie and I developed deep friendships with many of the refugees on the team. I'd been vocal-jamming earlier in the week with a pentalingual Burundian refugee and Kuja Kuja team member, and someone started videotaping...

More than 60 food, clothing, jewelry, and art vendors—including 25 IDEO designers—are stocked up to serve, while also raising money for the non-profit La Cocina. There's a little something for everybody, even...

1. The DIY Gardener

Plant your own succulent garden in a glass terrarium, or stock your home bar with cocktail mixers, artisan bitters, and local honey, courtesy of Radish.

2. The Girl Who Has Everything (She doesn’t have this.)

Jessica Hannah makes small-batch perfumes inspired by Hollywood classics and even the smell of worked leather. She also hosts regular workshops to help people craft custom scents from plant essences.

3. The Craft Brew Obsessive

You’ve tried microbrew, but not like this. IDEO designer Sean Hewens combines homebrewing with making fantastical maps—charting a fictional submarine race across the San Francisco Bay, for example—to create Bean Brew. Lucky drinkers (just 16 per micro-batch) answer a survey about the map on their Bean Brew bottles, and Sean turns the results into a one-of-a-kind poster.

4. The Jewelry Minimalist

Angular and understated, the gold-filled trinkets from Batsu Maru might be right for the best-dressed woman in your life.

5. The Upcycler

Waste not, want not. So says The Consistency Project, which sells vintage and customized clothing that’s been given a second chance.

6. The Recent Transplant

Bare walls? Why not fill them with whimsical, colorful, and soulful art from IDEO designer Felicia Chiao and illustrator Yoshi Yoshitani. Prints, postcards, art books, and coloring books are more than enough to liven up your space.

7. The Makeup Maven

Blood orange vanilla. Rose cardamom. Peppermint Eucalyptus. These aren’t flavors of bon-bon; they’re lip balms from METTA GOOD. The balms are made from beeswax and jojoba, coconut, and avocado oils, and METTA donates one percent of its proceeds to nonprofits.

8. The Pet Pamperer

Make your pooch look as posh as you do with colorful bandanas, bowties, and leash bags from The Foggy Dog.

9. The Happy Homebody

In her free time, IDEO.org senior designer Nicole Kraieski loves to throw down on her pottery wheel. She describes her tasteful tableware as, “ceramics made of clay by the Bay” in San Francisco.

10. The Eco-Chic Toddler

Apila Designs crafts organic cotton clothing—from beanies to onesies to leggings—for fashionistas ages zero to six. The screen-printed pieces are made in and inspired by Northern California.

11. The Avocado Lover

Pretty prints with a hint of snark—such are the whimsical greeting cards from Coffee n Cream Press.

12. The “Nasty Woman”

Give young women the gift of leadership by hosting a workshop with Girls Driving for a Difference. IDEO’s Katie Kirsch co-founded Girls Driving for a Difference in 2015 with the goal of helping middle- and high-school girls use design thinking to boost their self-confidence and improve their communities. The group offers a “workshop in a box” to get you started.

And remember, if you can't find anything off the shelf, there's still plenty of time to make your own gifts. Here's an impassioned plea for doing just that.

Design snobs are hard to shop for. But don't despair: We wrangled our favorite craftspeople for Wunderfaire, our annual winter celebration. The party is sold out, so we're sharing a sneak peek of gifts you can nab online.

The constraints and complexity of working on those challenges can be overwhelming. To help us all push through, we developed a few simple tools to keep in your back pocket. Here are three of them, drawn from the Design Kit Travel Pack, a new deck of bite-sized exercises we’re working on to help social impact organizations and busy professionals unlock their own creative genius.

1. Write a postcard from the future

In the social sector, the language we use is all about fixing things that are broken. We talk about reducing unintended pregnancies or increasing the number of people with access to financial services. It’s important work, but not always framed in the most inspiring way. Before you kick off a new project or initiative, take the time to paint a more audacious vision. Close your eyes, picture a time 20 years in the future, and imagine your work has been a resounding success. What does the world look like? How are people’s lives different? Be as specific as possible. Then, write a newspaper headline for a New York Times story capturing this impact and sketch an image to go with it. Share your vision with your team, and use it as your North Star as the creative process becomes more murky and new challenges emerge.

2. Take an inspiration tour

When we’re designing in conditions with tight constraints—like a tightly-packed informal settlement outside of Nairobi or a rural village in India—it’s vital that we understand and work within the local context. But to unlock fresh solutions, we also need to look elsewhere and gather inspiration from other (sometimes unlikely) places. To design your own inspiration tour, start by naming three adjectives you want your product, service, or experience to embody. For example, maybe we want the new health clinic we’re designing to feel safe, fun, and community-affirming. Then, quickly brainstorm 10 places, businesses, or brands that do this well in your city. (Examples: a sports team’s locker room, a Bible study group, a Weight Watchers meeting, a co-working space, or a comic convention.) Choose a couple of places that are most interesting to you and take a day to visit them in person. Note down your observations as you go, take photos, and look for clues about what might inspire your project. By casting off the constraints of the context you’re working in, you’ll start to see new possibilities.

3. Make time for retail therapy

When you’re feeling stuck and not sure which direction your project should take, try getting tangible (even before you might feel ready). One fun way to do this is a trip to your local hardware or container store. Give everyone on your team 15 minutes to explore the store and create their own scrappy set-up of the product or service you’re designing. Then, one at a time, walk each other through the prototypes you created. Forcing yourselves to use materials available in the store and using a timer helps narrow the scope of what you’re working on from a big, nebulous problem to an immediate and concrete one, often unlocking fresh thinking in the process.

Visit designkit.org to download a free PDF, or get your own hard copy.

When we launched IDEO.org six years ago, we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us. The organizations we partner with are tackling some of the world’s toughest problems, like access to clean water, reproductive health, and the global refugee crisis—big, systemic challenges that have been around for decades.

Here are nine travel experiences we’d love to redesign:

GETTING THROUGH AIRPORT SECURITY

Taking our shoes off to go through security? Gross. But the most stressful moment for me is when my stuff comes out the other end of the scanner and I have to grab it in a rush because someone else's stuff is right behind and my toddler is running in the other direction. Then we waddle over to a corner with all our belongings splayed out and try to make sense of our luggage again. There has to be a better way!

Then there’s all the time wasted. Could there be a way to check wait times for security lines—similar to a traffic report—so I know how far in advance I need to arrive at the airport? IDEO designers are already working with the staff of a major Canadian airport to make their screening process smoother, faster, and less unpleasant. Let’s keep the good ideas rolling!
—Sally Sosa, IDEO San Francisco

THE PLANE BOARDING SHUFFLE

I’ve noticed a weird social phenomenon: Everyone gets up when the first people start boarding a plane, even if they have three boarding zones ahead of them. The zones are arbitrarily assigned based on when passengers checked in and how much extra money they wanted to pay—a legacy system based on someone's obscure definition of loyalty and status, plus assertiveness. That means that if someone in Zone 2 gets into an aisle seat, but I'm in Zone 4 and have the window, everyone has to get up, get out, shuffle down the aisle, let me in, and then sit down again. It's entirely inefficient. Also, if I have no overhead carry on and can breeze off the plane, facilitate that. I've never met anyone who actually likes this system. Airlines are leaving money on the runway—literally.
—Denise Burchell, IDEO San Francisco; Shuya Gong, IDEO Cambridge

Airbus' modular plane concept. Source: The Verge

FLYING ECONOMY CLASS

I used to work for Emirates, Singapore Airlines, and Qantas, so I have a vision for the ideal plane cabin. In economy class, you get shoved into an uncomfortable seat next to a guy who hogs the armrest. This is painful for people like me who usually take long-haul flights. (I fly 15 hours from Dubai to Sydney twice a year to see family.)

Why not reconfigure economy class with bunks for passengers on flights longer than four hours, so that people can actually relax or sleep? Do away with the overhead lockers, increase the checked baggage allowance, and allow passengers only one small carry-on unless they’re traveling with kids or a baby. Designate time slots for people to get meals, which they can order beforehand or through the in-flight entertainment system, letting flight attendants better organize their work. You could also automate the system of delivering meals to passengers instead of pushing a trolley down the aisle, which blocks me from getting to the bathroom while an indecisive passenger is trying to figure out if he wants a Sprite or a Coke.

While we’re at it, have a kids' section where they can play without annoying everyone else, and include something like the in-flight nanny service Emirates already offers. Have a nursing area where mums can feed their babies without people bumping past them, or change their babies without having to juggle the kid, a dirty diaper, a fold-down table, and a diaper bag in a bathroom without enough room to swing a hamster, let alone a cat.

Check out this image of a crew rest area on an airplane; the stewards have room to lie down and snooze, while not being dear on space. With just a little imagination, you could make these into seats that fold flat and include easy-to-clean access, since cleaning the airplane between flights takes longer than anything else. The specs of an Airbus A380 would make this setup totally possible!
—Asja Simunovic, IDEO Munich

Qatar Airways Airbus A350 crew rest area.

RIDING THE CROSS-COUNTRY RAILS

Two years ago, I took a long train trip from Chicago to New Orleans with my wife. She’s Danish. I’m Turkish. We have a lot of experience with train travel in Europe. It was shocking to see how sad train conditions are in the U.S. How might we redesign the experience of the Great American Railroad? We can utilize all our design chops—from data to spatial to UX—to do so. I’d love to take the lessons I’ve learned from IDEO’s relationship with Ford and apply them to train travel to make an impact on a more economically and geographically diverse community.
—Dogan Sekercioglu, IDEO Chicago

TRAVELING WITH A KID (AND A CAR SEAT)

It’s so annoying to travel with a car seat. I avoid it at all costs, and then end up trying to rent or borrow one, which is never convenient. It's also a pain when I want to do something like take the train into the city and then take a taxi to a part of town that’s too far to walk to with a toddler.

How about a packable, maybe inflatable, car seat? Can you imagine how great it would be if you had a small, portable car seat you could just throw in your bag?
—Kim Powers, IDEO San Francisco

BOOKING A NATURE GETAWAY

I want to redesign the way we book campsites. The current system is really challenging to navigate, particularly for outdoors neophytes. It's opaque and cumbersome, and there's no way to release sites for last-minute booking. I'd love to design ways to make the process simple, intuitive, and experiential.

Shouldn't a booking site feel welcoming and fun? Couldn't it show you what kind of hike to expect on the way to your campsite and what the views are like? If it’s a car camping site, how noisy is it? How about real-time weather so you know what to pack, or a map showing how close your site is to amenities like bathrooms or a store? What if it included ratings from other campers? Let's make our parks and forests more accessible, especially to those who aren't experienced outdoors people.
—Kate Lydon, IDEO San Francisco

DODGING TOURISTS IN THE BIG APPLE

New York City sees more than 60 million visitors a year, and locals know that with tourists come clogged sidewalks, long lines, and dozens of confused subway riders. As a New Yorker, I’m also struck by how seldom visitors tend to go outside the typical destinations—a.k.a. Midtown and the usual suspects. I love how distinctive each neighborhood of New York City is, and the unique culture, food, and experience each offers.

I know we can do a better job of moving people around the city so that visitors have a better experience. I’m inspired by this initiative the city of Amsterdam is using to distribute, rather than limit, the flows of tourists. Amsterdam encourages tourists to visit outlying areas and see popular attractions at off-peak times. Why can’t we? IDEO worked with the TODAY show to design a seamless experience for the street audience at Rockefeller Center; we can put some of those same techniques to work at a larger scale.
—David Boardman, IDEO New York

NAVIGATING THE URBAN LANDSCAPE

I would love to see a well-designed urban infrastructure that allows for driverless mobility, makes cycling and walking safe alternatives, and accounts for a broad span of ages and physical limitations.

Right now, multimodal transportation is not synced. Urban dwellers need various types of transit to get around, from trains to buses, but none of them talk to one another. There's so much focus on driverless cars, which is great, but we also need to seize the opportunity to encourage more active mobility by creating more car-free zones for safer walking and biking, for example. Both protected bike lanes and central bikeways would encourage more safe cycling in cities.

In general, street signage is not all that helpful or appealing. Might there be a way to not just wayfind, but also add delight? Signs could provide more than just basic information, such as interesting historical tidbits about the city, the number of steps between signs, or digital messages on sidewalks or in other unexpected places. People could also track their city journeys via an app on their phones to show where they've been, and get recommendations for where to go next; their urban journeys would become living maps.
—Margaret Kessler, IDEO San Francisco

PAYING FOR PARKING DOWNTOWN

Parking lot pay machines are poorly designed. They’re often covered with lists of instructions and homemade signs taped on by the operators and owners trying to show customers what to do and in what sequence. The machines need to accept credit cards—with a stripe in one exact orientation—bills, coins, and of course parking tickets with a magnetic stripe in one orientation, too.

I like how the parking garage at San Francisco International Airport allows you to use FasTrak to avoid a paper ticket. Maybe ticket machines could use Apple Pay or another pay-by-phone service to avoid credit cards and cash, or better yet, use pay-by-phone services in your car on the way in and out of the lot so you can avoid the ticket machines entirely.
—Dennis Boyle, IDEO Palo Alto

Want to reimagine transit with us? Contact Madison Mount (madison@ideo.com) at IDEO’s San Francisco studio.

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Just in time for the busiest days of American travel, our designers put their heads together to imagine a future of seamless transit, complete with inflatable car seats and airplane sleeping pods. IDEO already does forward-thinking transportation design with partners like Ford, Lincoln, Lufthansa, and major airports. But transportation is a sprawling industry, and there’s always plenty more to do.

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.