Midea, one of China’s largest appliance manufacturers, wanted to identify growth opportunities in the domestic consumer market, while focusing on people’s cultural beliefs around health and well-being. During the course of the project, IDEO found that Midea could play a key role in building a healthier nation.

The team set out to design potential future products for Tong (“through, whole, and to understand”) that are built around the basic themes of eating, breathing, and being: an easy-to-use, hassle-free herbal tea dispenser, an air balancer that improves and balances the quality of air in the home, and a body-balancing mobile phone app that encourages users to rebalance their body condition where needed, through movements created with the Chinese philosophies of well-being in mind.

The Tong project was featured extensively in the press, and opened further conversations with Midea about creating new value and extending into new markets.

Put food on the table or keep the furnace running on a frigid day? It’s an unfortunate choice many low-income families in Flint, Michigan, face.

To help customers in Flint and other Michigan towns stay on top of their utility bills and better understand the relationship between their energy consumption and the resulting costs, Consumers Energy partnered with IDEO and utility assistance provider The Heat and Warmth Fund (THAW) to create an innovative pilot billing program called Clear Control in late 2013.

The pilot was designed with three major human-centered changes to the traditional utility experience:

• Instead of monthly bills, participants received two bills per month. Shorter billing periods allowed for smaller, more frequent payments, helping customers match available funds with their ability to pay.
• Daily text updates on energy usage and bill amounts kept consumption top of mind.
• Consumers Energy offered personalized, in-home audits to help customers make low-cost, high-impact changes to their energy bills.

A year later, the results of the pilot are energizing. Clear Control participants accumulated no new debt, while the control group owed $300; pilot customers used 20 percent less electricity, reducing their bills by $200 per year; and 95 percent of participants paid their bills in full and on time, compared with 35 percent in the control group. The utility company simultaneously benefited by avoiding arrearages, late-payment fees, and shutoffs. Consumers plans to incorporate Clear Control lessons into its overall energy assistance program design and development moving forward.

"It’s no longer ‘me’ against ‘them’—now it’s ‘us,’" said one Clear Control participant.

In 1980, Apple asked IDEO to develop a mouse for their radical new computer, the Lisa. Previous attempts at mouse design, by Douglas Englebart and Xerox PARC, yielded results that were too expensive and hard to make. The Apple mouse needed to be more reliable and less than 10 percent of the cost of the earlier versions.

To start, the design team created a cheaper, much-improved mechanism that would operate the mouse, and found that a complex, plastic "ribcage" would hold the pieces together. The team similarly tested and refined the mouse’s other key components, from the audible and tactile click of the button to the rubberized coating on the ball. A record turntable spun for days, logging “mouse miles” to check the reliability of the electromechanical assembly.

The resulting mouse proved mechanically and economically sound and was changed only slightly when adapted for use with the first Macintosh computer. The basic mechanism design is used in virtually all mechanical mouses produced to date.

Food is the heart of most cultures. In China, one of the oldest cultures in the world, food is central to family gatherings and celebrations. It’s what binds people, a tangible way of showing love and respect. But in recent years, the Chinese food industry has suffered from concerns around safety.

Two siblings, Harn and Anmao Sun, set out on an ambitious venture: to create a trusted source of food in China and, by setting an example, to instigate a movement around conscious farming practices. The American-born entrepreneurs launched Hunter Gatherer, a restaurant and retail food space built around a transparent supply chain, from farm to table to grocery shelves. The venture is based on growing and serving what they call real food: The ingredients are chemical-free and come from known and trusted sources—food they’d eat themselves. The purpose of the venture is simple: to serve people real food that is their right.

Having studied and worked in the US, Harn and Anmao grew accustomed to browsing farmers markets on Saturday mornings or picking up a burrito at Chipotle. But when they returned to China, they were unsure about the safety of the food they were eating.

“In China, you wouldn’t go to a food stand, because you’d be concerned about the ingredients,” Anmao said. “You can’t take the safety for granted.”

Hunter Gatherer’s very existence challenges bedrock assumptions about how food is produced in China. A long and depressing list of scandals—milk contaminated with melamine, pork produced from diseased pigs, used cooking oil repackaged and sold as new—has rocked the public trust.

“In China, agriculture is going through a huge change,” Anmao said. “In the US, agriculture operations are regulated. Farmers’ practices are regulated. If they use pesticides, there are limits because these farmers understand that once a certain threshold is hit, additional pesticides will not yield more crops. But in China, pesticide use came about 30 years after the US and Europe, and because of a lack of full understanding, farmers in China incorrectly operate under the assumption that more pesticides means more crop yields. Also, with over 250 million farmers in China, it becomes immensely difficult to properly regulate everyone.”

New Ventures

Harn and Anmao wanted to restore trust in the simple act of eating in China, and they came to IDEO to build a scalable business based on that vision. This was essentially a startup, a shared commitment between IDEO and Hunter Gatherer.

“I’ve lived in Shanghai for the past seven years, and as a relatively active and health-conscious person, I’ve had to invest quite a bit of time in finding food that I trust,” said Charles Hayes, managing director of IDEO Shanghai. “That investment has been both in the time it takes to research the sources of ingredients but also a literal investment in paying a high price for imported food just for that extra peace of mind.”

Anmao and Harn took up residence in the IDEO Shanghai offices to incubate their business. Together with IDEO designers, they tested packaging, cooked countless meals, and found ways to introduce unfamiliar ingredients to Chinese consumers. They discussed different concepts of lunch and dinner, and how notions of freshness in Chinese culture might affect cold-storage systems. In IDEO’s prototyping kitchen, the teams tested all manner of different foods, flavors, colors, mixes, and price points, and they brought consumers in to try them out. IDEO designers, along with the founding team, also worked on the brand and positioning of what would eventually become the Hunter Gatherer enterprise—its location, human resources, and marketing strategies.

As the restaurant concept came together, finding the right food sources had to be addressed. Traditional agriculture couldn’t be trusted; organic certifications were available on the black market, and safety protocols around chemical use were nonexistent. Anmao and Harn decided to invest in their own farms. They met with farmers, asked questions about their methods, and walked in the fields to see for themselves. Eventually they settled on two plots of land outside Shanghai and began developing more than 80 different crops to be used in the restaurant.

From Seed to Table

When it came time to find the right space for the first location, Anmao and Harn discovered an open, airy storefront on Anfu Road in Shanghai’s tree-lined former French Concession area. They designed and built a retail space and kitchen, and along with IDEO designers, they trained the staff and organized workflows. The staff set the tables with Mason jars filled with flowers, hung photographs of the farmers who grew the food, and put up a sign that showcases the percentage of vegetables coming directly from the Hunter Gatherer farms, already more than 70 percent in less than a year after opening.

Customers can shop for fresh vegetables, locally sourced and imported canned and jarred goods, bins of cereal, freshly made smoothies, artisan sauces, and exotic chocolates. Upstairs, they can feast on delicious dishes in the homey restaurant.

Reviews have been glowing. One customer raved about the machine that grinds fresh nuts. Another loved the open space, the “good vibes,” and the refreshing cucumber water. Young people go there on dates, and families return for the delicious menu variety.

The convivial space has blossomed into more than just a restaurant and grocery store. It’s become a gathering place of sorts, both for the community and for partners who share the same vision. Farmers and food purveyors are invited to showcase their products at seasonal events and to mingle with customers and share recipes and stories.

“Hunter Gatherer has come to symbolize a kind of lifestyle the Chinese people have been looking for,” said Eugene Lin, an IDEO business designer. “A place they can enjoy hanging out with friends, as well as a movement and mission they can stand behind.”

A Digital Future

This is just the beginning of the venture. The plan is to open 40 more locations throughout China. But the vision for Hunter Gatherer’s growth is bigger than brick-and-mortar restaurants—where the business will truly scale is in the digital space. Eventually, the plan is to launch a Hunter Gatherer online grocery store from which anyone can buy food grown from trusted sources.

“We have to create trust with the consumer. It’s the most difficult and most valuable thing to do in China, especially with food,” Anmao said. “Our brick-and-mortar locations will establish that increased trust. Then we can go online and grow the idea to the rest of the country.”

Will Hunter Gatherer have a hand in changing the way that the world’s most populous nation thinks about food? Its principles are already spreading, from neighboring farmers adopting more sustainable planting methods, to a growing market for products like wine.

But the true sign of success will be almost invisible—the moment when an increase in demand will result in safe food for everyone and when real food becomes commonplace.

Being a design researcher, I’m constantly conducting real-world research on a subject area or problem. Researchers travel widely, and spend weeks interviewing, observing, shadowing, and prototyping. But even when a trip seems full of scheduled activities, there should always be room for opportunistic inspiration. Because that is the thing I value the most.

I am an inspiration hunter. When I see 45-minutes of travel time between interviews, what I actually see a window of opportunity for a real-world experience. As well as naked scrubbing, on recent research trips, I’ve subjected my teammates and myself to:

• Screaming like rabid fans to appear on a game show in Los Angeles.
• Having our fortunes told by psychics in Hong Kong.
• A workout class only described to us as “cathartic” and a “nonstop endorphin surge” in New York.
• Getting too close to the ring at a lucha libre match in Mexico City.

So how exactly can one justify this as inspiration? Well, it depends on your definition of inspiration. I like to see design inspiration as something that lives in the intersection of three things: Satisfying a curiosity, Defying the expected, and Touching an emotion.

1. Satisfying a Curiosity:

How many times have you thought to yourself, I should take that Cantonese / personal finance / fermentation course in my free time? When you’re working a design project, you’re often looking to help others adopt a new behavior or learn a new skill. You can empathize with that experience by doing something yourself that gets you outside your comfort zone.

The Class, aka scream-cardio.

2. Defying the Expected:

Of course we should be inspired by new approaches, that’s what we’re here to design. But finding people or things that truly disrupt your equilibrium can positively influence a project in all sorts of unexpected ways.

3. Touching an Emotion:

Seek places, people, and experiences that bring out a real human emotion that you want to design for. Then surround yourself with what you find, as not to lose it. You might end up with entire mood boards or inspiration shelves from your trip, labeled “joy” and “empathy”. Keeping these artifacts in your workspace will let you feel what you first did.

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On a recent research trip in Asia, I found myself naked in a spa, being vigorously scrubbed by an elderly Korean lady. She removed whole layers of my epidermis, all the while grunting in disapproval. The experience was agonizing but also completely amazing.

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Now, two years later, we’re pushing the limits of our skills by building the project’s next iteration: Shrumen Lumen. This time around, we’re skipping flowers in favor of 12 to 18 foot-tall kinetic mushrooms. Thanks to a totally different geometry, this project is a lot harder to build. But with hard work from an enthusiastic team of volunteers and help from a Burning Man Arts grant and our Kickstarter campaign, the Shrumen Lumen will soon be ready for the Playa. Here is how we’re making it happen.

The vision

To kick off the design process, we looked back at what made Blumen Lumen work so well. Several principles stood out.

1. The flowers had a minimal footprint on the ground but created a huge interactive space.
2. The grouping of flowers was beautiful from afar, but people could also interact with a single flower.
3. The structure was scalable. We were able to build one prototype quickly to figure everything out, then mass-produce as many as we could afford, both in terms of time and money.
4. The flowers were quick to install, and packed up neatly in a shipping container.
5. Mechanical interaction made the flowers interesting during the day, while lights added a new element at night.

We folded a lot of those takeaways into the design, sketching out a garden of five mushrooms that are big enough to provide shade during the day, and can also change shape and light up at night. Just like the flowers, we wanted people to be able to interact with individual mushrooms, but also wanted to add an interaction point that controls all the mushrooms together.

Origami at scale

The geometry of the mushrooms is based on the folding pattern of an origami magic ball. The beauty of that structure is its ability to expand and contract; the challenge is that it’s much harder to control, and, as we found out later, much harder to fold at scale.

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We jumped straight into prototyping, and planned to use the same method we had used to build the flowers: Route the patterns in corrugated plastic, fold them so that they would “memorize” the fold lines, unfold them, then weld them together. But while each flower was made of only two 10 by five foot pieces, the mushroom heads were made of 12. We’d also never worked with this origami pattern at this scale.

Unfortunately, this fold pattern was much trickier. It took a team of eight people a full hour to fold the first three-piece sheet. The plastic also cracked in several places. To make the process easier, we changed the orientation of the corrugation by 90 degrees, and asked the router shop to make shallower cuts into the plastic. The new the fold lines made the pieces much stronger, and we actually managed to fold an entire sheet of 12 pieces (though it did take 10 people).

Setting the Shrumens in motion

To make the mushroom heads contract and expand, we needed to build a solid mechanical structure, kind of like an umbrella, that would connect the folded plastic to an actuator. We experimented with a 1:12 paper scale model to figure out where to attach the actuator, and prototyped the speed of the movement. Since there will be significant stress on this structure, all the parts had to be machined. We were extremely lucky to have Jim Feuhrer (and his five decades of experience in building) to help us create them.

Building a safe structure

Last time around, when the wind came up on the Playa, we could just close the blooms to prevent the flowers from tipping over. It’s much harder to make the Shrumens more aerodynamic, so they had to be carefully engineered to withstand 60-plus mile per hour winds. To hold the origami structure in place, we mounted 1 1/4 inch aluminum tubes around two aluminum hubs. One of the hubs is mounted to the top of the actuator and can move up and down, while the other one is mounted to the stem.

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The entire head assembly slides into a 6-inch, thin-walled steel tube that is mounted onto a 3.5-inch-thick wall pipe. Luckily, with some minor modifications and reinforcements, we were able to recycle the base we used for the flowers to anchor the system.

Designing the digital interaction

Not only are we installing 1560 LED lights in each mushroom, we are also designing ways for visitors to interact with the mushrooms. By standing on certain pads, burners can change the color and movement of the Shrumens. Each pad can also measure weight, so, for example, if two people hop on a certain pad, more of the structure will turn red.

To make this work, we are using a network of Raspberry Pis in each stem. Powered by 12 volt batteries, the minicomputers control both light and movement. Each of the 1560 LEDs in the stem and cap are independently addressable, and the chip in each LED only uses one pin for data input and output, so they must be controlled with precise timing. The team chose to use a Pixel Pusher microcontroller because of its power (it can control 4000 LEDs) and built-in libraries. Processing, running on the Raspberry Pi, pushes color combinations and scenes. The Raspberry Pi also monitors the load cells, which are placed in those lighted platforms at the base of the mushroom. When visitors step on, these load cells can trigger the mushrooms to change shape or color.

The team

Of all the projects I’ve worked on, this one required the most manpower (by far). Thanks to 40-some weekend warriors—a mix of highly specialized experts and enthusiasts who picked up new skills like soldering, metal cutting, or drilling—Shrumen Lumen is about to happen. It has turned into a highly sophisticated installation, and I can’t wait to see it in the desert.

Special thanks to everyone who helped bring Shrumen Lumen to life: Ali Hasanbeigi, Anthony Wainman, Angie Kim, Annette Diefenthaler, Blake Durtsche, Bomani McClendon, Britta Durtsche, Dali Yu, Dave Sumberg, David Brody, David Good, Diem Ho, Gabrielle Fulco, George Joseph, Gilles Roux, Gina Romero, Hannah Williams, Henry Hsiung, Janko Potezica, Jazz Tigan, Jesse Silver (production lead), Jessica Pastor, Jim Feuhrer, Jimmy Chion, Joerg Student, Justin Chang, Kalan Kircher (digital lead), Lauren Fundora, Leo Marzolf, Nathalie Collins (digital co-lead), Nicholas Leverone, Nivi Ramesh, Olivier Notteghem, Peter Bronk, Rachel Frey, Remy Pieron, Sam Starr, Steve Moore, Victoria Cao

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Two years ago, I worked with a team of IDEOers and IDEO alumni to create an interactive art installation for Burning Man that we dubbed Blumen Lumen. Drawing inspiration from a foldable yurt I’d made for the art festival a few years before, we built massive, kinetic origami flowers that responded to their environment by changing color and opening and closing.

1. To create a happy group atmosphere… Hello & High Five

Everyone walks around the room in random directions. At intervals, the facilitator instructs them to interact with a person they are passing. At first, the instructions are to say, "Hello." Then, it’s a high five. And finally, it's a compliment about some aspect of their appearance. Even though you know it’s an exercise, it’s impossible to receive greetings and compliments and not feel a little better about life.

2. To get people into an agreement mindset… Yes, Let’s!

Stand in a circle. Someone suggests an activity by saying, “Let’s,” followed by a verb. For example, “Let’s ski!”

Everyone else loudly agrees together: “Yes! Let’s ski!”

Then, everyone mimes that activity, until someone else suggests a new activity. After a few minutes of this, it's much easier to hear ideas from other people and greet them with encouragement and agreement.

3. To stretch capacity for attention and focus… Red Ball

Stand in a circle. (Have you noticed that improv involves a lot of standing in circles?) Pick someone in the group, look them in the eye, say, “Red ball,” and mime tossing them the ball. They say, “Thank you, red ball,” to acknowledge receipt and then throw it to someone else. Once the group has the hang of this, you can add a green ball and blue ball. To make things interesting, these balls can be different sizes and weights. (They could even be a feral cat or a baby.) Pretty soon, the group will be highly alert to one another and focused on cooperating on the task at hand.

4. To free people of their inner censor… Ba Da Da

Everyone in the circle claps to create a beat. The first player says a word to the person next to them. They respond with whatever comes into their head. The entire circle then says both words and then adds, "Ba Da Da” (pronounced in the same rhythm as “potato”). For example, first person: “Crazy.” Second person: “In love.” Everyone: “Crazy in love, ba da da.” Then the second person starts everything again by saying a word to the next person in the circle. By doing everything to a rhythm, people are forced to respond in the moment and not overthink their choices.

5. To get everyone making eye contact and collaborating… Pass the Clap

Look into the eyes of the person next to you and without using words, coordinate so that you both clap together. That person then turns to the next person and does the same. Pretty soon, you’ll have a rhythm going and a clap will move quickly around the circle. See how fast you can go without losing rhythm. If you want to add some challenge, create multiple claps moving simultaneously in different directions around the circle.

Illustrations by Yoshi Yoshitani.

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More and more designers are using improv games in order to get groups in the mood to collaborate. There are many of these games, taught at places like Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade. We picked five simple favorites.

But dig a little deeper, and McMaster’s restaurant is a modest poster child for a grand ambition: to create a pre-industrial food system. We’re filming Doug as inspiration for a project for IKEA about future solutions for home food waste. His ultimate vision is a tight-knit network of conscientious producers, shops, restaurants and consumers working together to create a healthier, more sustainable, transparent, and financially viable alternative to the industrial food system.

At the heart of that is a principle of zero waste, explains McMaster, who trained at top restaurants like Copenhagen’s Michelin-starred Noma and nose-to-tail stalwart St John, in East London. Zero waste proponents argue that people, and businesses, should aim—as the name suggests—to generate no waste, through refusing, reducing, reusing and recovering the products they use every day. Over a sandwich, McMaster proudly tells us the story of his pop-up precursor to Silo in Australia, Joost, where, over two careful years, his team reduced the entire restaurant’s waste to just one, one litre jam jar.

He’s similarly conscientious at Silo. All the food and drink served, he explains, comes from local producers with whom he has a strict no packaging policy. Ingenious recipes make creative use of ingredients to minimise waste—a whey ice cream, and pickled rose petals (the byproduct of cheese production and a florist, respectively) are clever examples. Organic waste, from coffee grounds to leftover cake, is fed to ‘Bertha’, the affectionately-named anaerobic composter which takes pride of place on site. The compost it produces goes back to his producers to fertilise their fields. Silo's fittings are all upcycled—from old floor tiles that have become tables, to former school chairs, to the carrier bags that have found new life as colourful, swirl-covered plates.

Silo’s part of a wider movement, though, looking at smart ways to make the food system more sustainable, from farm to table. It’s a pressing problem: by some measures we’ll be 9 billion people by 2050, requiring a 70 percent increase in global food production. We currently waste a third of food produced, consuming land, water, and using pesticides in our insatiable appetite for juicy prawns and plentiful pork chops.

Squint hard enough and you can spot a view of the future: one where we use fewer raw resources, waste less, and build new businesses mopping up what’s left from the supply chain. One underpinned by digital, where we care more where things come from, grow things more economically, closer to where they’re eaten. Where we connect with a network of fellow foodies, making a little extra money on the side, and talk to our neighbours more. Where we’ll be more conscientious about where our food comes from, and how we dispose of it, too.

What’s shaping this? First, people’s attitudes are shifting. Alongside a longstanding, and growing segment of society choosing sustainable products, a more radical, quiet zero waste movement is emerging. Influential bloggers like 42-year-old Californian Bea Johnson and her book Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide To Reducing Your Waste are championing a very different approach to consumption, and inspiring followers worldwide. Expect their expectations to move sustainability from a nice-to-have to a central part of their buying decisions, and shaping brands accordingly.

The first signs are perceptible at every turn. Take packaging: long a problem, the EU produces 15 million tons of plastic a year, or 156.9kg per person. We’ve been geeking out about Ooho, from Skipping Rock Labs, which is pioneering a seaweed-based spherical container that’s hygienic, biodegradable, and even edible. Going one step further, Berlin supermarket Original Unverpackt, has done away with food packaging entirely.

One big source of food waste, meanwhile is supermarkets’ drive for ‘perfect’ produce. According to the Soil Association, a whopping 20-40 percent of fruit and veg is thrown away for not looking right, despite one survey finding 65 percent of people would buy it, for a discount. Supermarkets like Asda, Intermarche and Tesco have capitalised: you can now buy ‘Ugly’, Inglorious’, or ‘Perfectly Imperfect’ parsnips, potatoes, apples and strawberries that once would have been discarded, for 30 percent cheaper.

But one man’s trash is another’s treasure. There are also smart opportunities for businesses to capitalise at every stage of the farming, distribution, and disposal chain. As part of the IKEA project we also met Londoner Tom, who runs a small company called Rejuce. We joined him as he collected surplus fruit and veg heading for the rubbish from the vast New Spitalfields market, to turn into juices and soups to sell at festivals like Green Man, Bestival and Field Day. Companies like Regrained, and BTTR, meanwhile, take used wheat and coffee grounds, respectively, and turn them into cereal bars or compost.

Closer to home, we’ve seen a raft of companies exploring urban farming and in-house hydroponics at a consumer level, as a way to dramatically cut down food miles and water, and make use of underutilised urban plots. Those include INFARM, which is building digitally-controlled microfarm units, and Growing Underground, a startup in London growing microgreens in the old World War 2 tunnels under Clapham, in South London. Further out, efforts by biofabrication companies like Memphis Meats and Modern Meadow to grow meat in labs might end up as machines on our kitchen countertops, eventually.

Technology isn’t just providing the hardware, though, but a platform to connect. Startups like Farm Drop and Farm Direct are using digital as a way to build more peer-to-peer systems, exploring ways to connect farmers to foodies more directly. The likes of Cassoulet, AmpleHarvest.org, Leftover Swap and Olio are cutting food waste by sharing or selling surplus produce, or leftovers person to person in cities. The Pare Up app, meanwhile, allows New Yorkers to find bargains from local stores on about-to-expire food. For the laziest among us, perhaps we’ll be sending our leftovers off via autonomous delivery robots like Starship Technologies.

Grass roots as these efforts are, zoom up to 30,000ft, and organisations like the Ellen Macarthur Foundation are taking a system’s level view, specifically the radical shift to a more Circular Economy. Partnering with huge multinationals like Unilever, Nike, IKEA, and many others, they’re arguing for eliminating waste from the supply chain, and every byproduct fuelling another part of the ecosystem within in which it exists, mimicking nature. Companies like Patagonia are successfully pioneering how these new businesses might put sustainability at the heart of their company, and be wildly profitable in doing so. Take their new bison jerky, sourced to foster better grasslands, as well as provide delicious food.

Back in Brighton, looking around at the ingenious zero-waste solutions in the restaurant, McMaster muses on what has made Silo a microcosm of a sustainable business, and a glimpse of a more circular future. It’s creativity. “Waste,” he says, “is a failure of the imagination.”

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Tucked in the quiet backstreets off Brighton’s lanes, Doug McMaster’s restaurant Silo is a typical modern eatery in many ways: industrial-chic fittings, chalkboard menu of vegetarian fare, white brick walls, chipboard tables and world music soundtrack.

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.