Master Kong (known internationally as Tingyi Holding Corporation) is number one in market share in both instant noodles and ready-to-drink teas, with over $10 billion USD in annual revenue. While China has a rich tea culture, most sugar-free bottled tea on store shelves markets itself as “healthy” and “tasty.” Wanting to set itself apart from the competition by uncovering new consumer needs, Master Kong reached out to IDEO. Together, Master Kong and IDEO immersed themselves in modern Chinese tea culture and built a new, premium, sugar-free bottled tea brand that resonates deeply with contemporary tea drinkers. ‍

During research, the combined IDEO/Master Kong team took a two-pronged approach to uncovering new opportunities: industry exploration and consumer research. The team visited various tea-related businesses, from traditional tea houses to modern beverage shops, as well as “third place” tea spaces outside of home or work. They also conducted in-depth, in-home interviews with consumers with various levels of interest in tea, delving deeply into their daily routines to better understand their lifestyles and any emotional or functional needs related to tea.

The team discovered that the essence of Chinese tea culture resonated with contemporary consumers’ longing for authenticity, simplicity, and physical rejuvenation in their fast-paced lives. This insight presented a unique opportunity for Master Kong. Instead of positioning its new sugar-free tea brand as merely a “healthy alternative” to other beverages,  it could spark a meaningful connection to tea culture, seamlessly integrating into various moments of modern life.  

Armed with this insight, IDEO designers and dozens of Master Kong beverage team members participated in a series of immersive, hands-on tea innovation workshops. Teams of experts from R&D, marketing, supply chain, and other company departments temporarily set aside their job titles to explore, iterate, and refine dozens of new tea concepts that were commercially viable, feasible for mass production, and aligned with consumer needs. The cross-departmental collaboration allowed for a broad mix of perspectives, experiences, and expertise, enriching the innovation process.

The co-creation sessions led to a new sugar-free tea product and flagship brand called Cha De Chuan Ren (“Descendants of the Tea”), which celebrates fine, origin-sourced tea and the passion and dedication of tea farmers. The novel concept resonated strongly with consumers and was validated during subsequent rounds of quantitative market testing, ensuring its relevance and market potential.

Cha De Chuan Ren launched with two signature flavors: Tieguanyin (green tea) from Fujian and Pu’er (black tea) from Yunnan. The unique mottled bottle design pays tribute to traditional handcrafted glass containers and the handiwork of tea farmers. The tactile paper label, which features Jia Ma-inspired woodblock illustrations of local tea fields and tea farmers’ hands, nods to the artisanal craft of tea making and the source of the tea inside.

“Descendants of the Tea” debuted on Tmall in April 2024. It claimed the top spot on the commerce site’s Tea Beverage V-List in August and September. Offline, it launched in FamilyMart convenience stores in May and has since expanded nationwide. The new brand received a 2024 Red Dot Award for “Brands & Communication Design.”

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“We are honored to collaborate with IDEO, a global leader in innovation, as our strategic partner. ‘Descendants of the Tea’ is not just an exceptional product but also a tribute to the rich heritage of tea culture. Only by continuously integrating culinary traditions with innovation can we sustainably meet consumers’ true needs.”

Richard Chen
‍CEO, Master Kong (Tingyi Holding Corporation)

“Innovation is incredibly fragile. If even one leader is unsupportive or hesitant, the culture of innovation can collapse. I always encourage my team to take risks, as long as they’re not high stakes. After all, what’s the worst that can happen? At the very least, we’ll have a fair chance at creating something new.”

Wei Hong-Chen
‍Chairman of Master Kong Beverage Holdings Co., Ltd.

Sugary bottled teas were once very popular in China. Today, rising consumer demand for healthier beverage options has expanded the market for sugar-free tea.

#1

on Tmall’s Tea Beverage V-List, August- September 2024

2024 Red Dot Award Winner

‍for Brands & Communication Design

Twenty years ago, carrying a single-use plastic water bottle was a status symbol—no more. Growing awareness of the negative environmental impact of plastic pollution, combined with the adoption of healthier lifestyles and social media influencer trends, has made reusable water bottles “it” accessories for on-the-go consumers. While brands such as Stanley, Yeti, S’well, and Hydro Flask own the under-$100 market, fashion brands such as Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Dior, and Prada have etched out a new and growing market for high-end bottles that appeal to discerning, trend-conscious young people looking to perfect their hydration habits.

Spotting an opportunity to disrupt the predominantly utilitarian water bottle market, Steinmann partnered closely with IDEO, tasking the team with developing an industrial design that perfected the tactile and sensory user experience, from drinking and carrying to disassembling and cleaning thoroughly. The collaboration deepened over time, with Steinmann and IDEO working together to develop the high-level engineering concept, the OKAPA logo mark, and packaging ideas.

Key user-centered features of the OKAPA bottle include a medical-grade German borosilicate glass interior for superior taste of hot or cold beverages with no lingering odors; a Swiss-engineered thermoplastic lockable and leak-proof tilt cap that can be easily operated with one hand when driving or doing other activities; and an ergonomically shaped mouthpiece for a pleasurable drinking experience. Precision-engineered for maximum longevity, the inner glass bottle is suspended via a shock-absorbing system inside a bead-blasted, extruded, and anodized aluminum outer shell. Eight modular parts come apart easily for either a quick or thorough cleaning.

At its core, the OKAPA bottle elevates an everyday ritual through meticulous design and uncompromising engineering. Launched in January 2025, the new bottles are available in eight contemporary colorways curated by renowned color and materials specialist Beatrice Santiccioli (BSD), including Misti Pinku, Goldie Samba, and Fetishe Noir, among others.

In the US, the reusable water bottle market is estimated to increase from $10.2B in 2024 to $14.1B by 2031, with 69 percent of Gen Zers owning at least one. Customization trends, such as personalized design and branding, are anticipated to boost the market, ripe territory for disruptive startups such as OKAPA. (Persistence Market Research)

Once a practical accessory for hikers and outdoor enthusiasts, reusable water bottles have gone mainstream. Yet none check all the boxes in terms of purity of taste, hygiene, durability, functionality, and beauty.

8

modular pieces ensure hygienic cleaning is quick and easy

100%

recyclable materials in each bottle

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s mission is to interpret and conserve the earth’s biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science. Over its 110-plus-year history, its offerings grew to include everything from a quarterly magazine, popular websites and apps with millions of users (Merlin, eBird), partnerships with outside organizations, and the world’s largest database of photographs and audio recordings of birds. This abundance is a testament to the passionate enthusiasm of its employees. Still, it confused potential members and led to siloed internal efforts, preventing the Lab from advancing its urgent collective vision. “Birds and biodiversity are in peril,” said Executive Director Dr. Ian Owens. “We must take radical action with a coherent vision, united voice, and purpose.”

IDEO began by helping the Lab better define its audience. While primarily composed of people passionate about birds, IDEO discovered its larger audience was nature lovers interested in biodiversity, bioacoustics, conservation, and science. From there, IDEO created a brand strategy and architecture focused on helping the Lab streamline its efforts under the “One Lab” brand. The brand architecture visually articulated the relationship between Cornell University, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and the Lab’s many products and offerings. IDEO designed a comprehensive brand identity system to work across mediums, including a simplified logo system, new colors, type, graphic language, voice and tone, and key messaging.

When the Lab’s design team began implementing the new branding elements across its website and many digital products, it became clear that the organization also needed IDEO’s help in creating tools to facilitate cross-department collaboration. To better understand the day-to-day nuances of the organization, IDEO designers worked out of the Lab, co-creating a brand activation playbook. The playbook, launched in 2023, contains recommendations for new cross-functional working groups (partnerships, visual identity, and brand voice), as well as exercises and interactive tools designed to build trusting relationships, gain alignment, foster collaboration, and manage change at scale.

Post-collaboration, the Lab has applied the new brand across its website, apps including Merlin and eBird, Living Bird magazine, email and newsletter templates, and its line of merchandise. A new internal brand guidelines site has become central to employee onboarding, while new working groups are helping to bring down barriers between teams and spur collective action. Like a flock of birds, the Lab now sings one collective song.

The Cornell Lab’s 300+ scientists, professors, staff, and students were passionately dedicated to their individual team’s unique conservation projects, but segmented internal systems could stymie their collective impact.

1 brand

unifying 300+ employees and 8 departments

Founded in 2008, Ascend Public Charter Network prides itself on providing “rich, joyful learning experiences that unlock lives of boundless choice” for its students, 93 percent of whom identify as Black or Latinx. The organization is also proud of being Black-led: 78 percent of staff and 80 percent of the executive team are people of color. Using co-design and joy, IDEO held a mirror up to Ascend’s core optimistic spirit during a moment of anxiety and change, helping its new CEO, staff, students, and parents reflect a dynamic, collectively imagined vision.

While the project’s goal was serious, the combined team centered the collaboration on bringing back fun, beauty, and imagination to those who could use it most: educators. Through engaging interactive activities, the IDEO team invited principals, PTA members, student council representatives, and board members to join “organizationally sanctioned play” moments like creating collaged vision boards and writing poems about Ascend’s impact. These interventions helped burned-out educators escape the day-to-day tasks of running schools and dream expansively about Ascend’s future. The team also solicited written, visual, and audio stories, asking community members to describe Ascend at its very best.

Stitching together submissions from 551 students, 75 parents, and 16 staff members, the co-design sessions resulted in a powerful new purpose, mission, and values, as well as a vibrant visual language and activation tools to bring Ascend’s vision of a “dope,” “unapologetically Brooklyn” charter network to life. The joyful, eye-catching visuals are embedded throughout its 17 Brooklyn schools, staff recruiting and training materials, and digital presence.

Shortly after the collaboration with IDEO, Ascend received an unsolicited  $11 million donation from MacKenzie Scott's foundation, Yield Giving, the most significant gift the then-14-year-old institution had ever received. The pivotal funding will allow the organization, with its bold new “grown-up” vision, to focus on becoming the school of choice in Brooklyn by 2027.

In the summer of 2021, one in four K-12 teachers was ready to quit. Pandemic stressors and increased curriculum scrutiny were to blame, according to a 2021 Rand Survey.

In 2022, 44% of K-12 workers reported burnout, the most of any US professions the time, according to a Gallup Poll.

Pandemic exhaustion and leadership turnover left Ascend’s new CEO eager to align staff around an exciting new vision.

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$11M grant

Ascend received an $11M grant from the MacKenzie Scott Foundation a few months after the collaboration

1 collective vision

to guide a network of 17 schools

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Eltono coincidently was on our inspiration mood board so we knew we must connect. At the same time our studio was revisiting work by an artist-nun named Corita Kent. We found her work and process deeply inspiring to our culture.

There's a backstory worthy of telling here: In 1971, Boston Gas Company commissioned Kent to paint a mural on a gas tank in her new hometown of Boston.

The work, known as Rainbow Swash, is a simple commentary on the nature of painting and minimalist joy, a six-color combover on the bald head of a stout roadside tank.

Kent was an unlikely candidate. For nearly two decades, as a nun in the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles, she had pushed the edges of acceptability as an artist, teacher, and activist.

Her work, now recognized in the Pop canon alongside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, challenged cultural norms by reappropriating common packaging and advertising slogans and setting them alongside passages from the Bible, pop music, and classic literature.

As counterculture gained momentum, and Kent used her art to advocate for justice and peace, her profile grew and her messages sharpened. Eventually her protest was too much for the Church to handle, and they mutually separated, leading Kent to make a move to Boston and continue her art.

But something changed in 1970. While her activism persisted, a new body of work arrived, with simple brushstrokes and appeals to love each other.

It was this moment that, 15 years later, culminated in her iconic USPS Love stamp, and also led to the commission from the Boston Gas Company.

Today’s headlines are a 1960s deja vu: culture wars, social injustice, sexual harassment, mass shootings, covert ops, media corruption, political failure. It’s easy to draw parallels to Kent’s day, and to find artistic expressions in response (Shepard Fairey comes to mind). But I’ve personally wondered how Kent made the shift to rainbows and love, and I mean that with no irony.

Maybe it comes down to this simple truth: Love wins. While Kent was popular in her time at Immaculate Heart, even landng on the cover of Newsweek, she didn’t achieve true household status until her 1980s USPS Love stamp. It’s the message we all needed, and it’s still the message we want today.

Eltono has done installations in more than 90 cities around the globe; each unique, but connected by a calculated joy. His work is made from randomly placed forms inspired by the architectural elements of the site. Though we had yet to meet, his work felt right—a cosmic alignment of our values. And once we did share ideas, we were stoked, except about one thing—color.

Eltono’s choices were exuberant and bright. Colors inspired by Mediterranean sun, French countrysides, and European sensibilities. They are radical for hidebound New England, an area known for its pilgrim stoicism, and not native to a region that is white and gray for five months of the year. We quietly fretted about what to do, how to discuss the issue with him. Then I was reminded of Kent. Of her joy in the face of adversity—love and rainbows. We didn’t change a thing.

In fact, we wore the colors—in the form of paint splatters on our faces—with pride! Eltono invited help not only from other muralists, but also from IDEO families and neighborhood kids. His colors greet each passerby’s smile with their own. Each defies the gray sky of the coming winter and the equally gray social climate.

When Boston Gas sold to Keyspan in 1992, the original tank was torn down. But, due to its popularity, Kent’s mural was immediately repainted on a accompanying tank.

Eltono’s art continues making the case for defiant joy, standing in solidarity just a few miles from Kent’s Rainbow Swash. In this season of anxiety and division, there is no greater protest than to stand proud and bright with joy and love.

*Deepest gratitude to the many that helped us make this possible: Geoff Hargadon and Gary Strack at Central Walls; Michael Monestine from the Central Square Business Association; Amanda Hill, Pedro Soto and Al Wilson from Beyond Walls; Jason Weeks from the City of Cambridge; our artist assistants Lena McCarthy, Brian Denahy, Laura Menucci, Meghana Srinivasan, and Julia Roth; the many at IDEO that helped coordinate, paint and photograph, especially Christina Abele, Tiffany Knight, and Dirk Ahlgrim; and the architecture and interiors teams at Hacin + Associates.

Earlier this year, we moved our Cambridge-based studio into a building in Central Square. We wanted to personalize our new home with some public art, but were uncertain about what final expression it should take, so we got started by slapping on a new coat of paint—transforming it from an oppressive gray brutalism to a welcoming white canvas. Then, a local connection, who shared our desire for more street art in Cambridge, suggested we look up Eltono.

So, in addition to designing the thing, I spend 50 percent of my time crafting the story of the thing—showing people how the interaction will influence new behaviors, new futures, new ways to live. The story has to be good enough for the user to picture the experience for themselves. Here’s a sneak peek at a typical day:

6:00 AM: Warming up at SoulCycle

It's not always easy rolling out of bed this early, but sweating my heart out on a stationary bike is my favorite way to start the day. To me, design is like a sport—you have to be intentional about the routines that you do everyday to help you be at your best mentally and physically. Spinning gets my brain revved up for the eight hours of creativity that lie ahead.

9:00 AM: 👋 Project Space!

“Fudgyolk” is my project team's code name (we always keep the client confidential), but it is also a fun identity. The name was inspired by a blended sous vide soft poached egg sauce we had at our first team dinner (here)—yum! Shoutout to my talented teammate Brooke Thyng who designed our team identity!

10:00 AM: Post-Synthesis Cleanup

Our project just completed the "synthesis" phase. What does that mean? About a week ago, we were in a room full of Post-Its with 10 more of these boards, moving ideas around, interpreting what they meant, and sharing our initial hypotheses as a team.

Synthesis helps us discover important themes and patterns that point to opportunities for design, and a story to share with our clients about the needs we uncovered. This process typically takes about a week and it's mind-bending work as you try to make sense of lots of data!

To celebrate a successful completion of this phase (and finally clean up our project space) we challenge each other to a race for who can strip their board the fastest. We try to design some fun into everything, even our chores! We're especially excited because post-synthesis we move into pixels—the interaction designers dream world.

11:00 AM: Analogous Inspiration

My team rocks out to our "Hair" after we've all had an indulgent blowout. Though seemingly unrelated to our health and wellness project, Dry Bar's ability to make people feel confident and at their best inspired us to integrate some of that experience into our own project's design solution.

Analogous inspiration is one of my favorite moments in a project. It allows you to design in a less cognitive, more intuitive and experiential way.

12:00 PM: Interaction Design Kraftwerks

Every Friday, the interaction design community gathers over lunch to build on our craft, and inspire one another. We call it Kraftwerks. Today, led by our Design Director, Tobias Toft, we're geeking out on making autonomous toothbrush-headed robots.

Interaction design is a very diverse community made up of visual designers, systems designers, motion designers, and software designers and these craft sessions give us a chance to teach each other new skills and evolve our digital fluency as a community.

1:00 PM: Gathering Inspiration for the Final Experience

Collaboration is so important across every phase of the design process. I like using Pinterest to engage everyone on the team to collectively gather inspiration and create alignment on a visual direction before we start making.

Here, we're collecting images for an exhibit we plan to build to display the key moments of our final app.

2:00 PM: Designing the Final App and Story

When it's time to design, I use two screens: One running Sketch to design the screens of our app, and one showing a Google Doc that provides a work-in-progress narrative. (Use your imagination—this work is confidential!)

We write user narratives that act as a framework for us to share the signature moments of the app. This produces a to-do list of screens we need to design. When we present the final app to the client, the story makes it feel less like a screen walkthrough and more like a compelling story that portrays how the app benefits the user's life.

3:00 PM: Photoshoot

When we're designing new experiences, stock image/video sites don't cut it, so we create them from scratch. Here's our B-roll where we're planning who will be playing the role of the user in our narrative, and sketches of what the scene will look like. We included confetti in one of our photos ;)

6:00 PM: Caltrain

I catch up on my jamz on my ride home from Palo Alto to San Francisco. Currently streaming SZA's Love Galore.

Finally home and ready for an interaction with my couch. Thanks for spending the day with me!

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When people ask me what I do for a living, I say, “I design things that make the invisible, visible.” Sounds super vague. Let me explain: While the role of an interaction designer is usually associated with building apps, websites, and VR environments, my role at IDEO also includes thinking about how to bring digital-physical interactions that have never before existed to life.

My mom and I have a lot in common. We think problem solving is fun. We love people watching. We both only wear black. But our most striking similarity is that we both ask questions for living. I am a design researcher, focused on helping organizations build innovation capabilities and evolve their culture, and my mom is a political journalist in Turkey. The influence of her profession on my personality has been enormous, and so much of the way that I work comes from watching her. Here are five design lessons she’s taught me.

1. Plan the research through role playing.

My mom's favorite way of understanding the truth and planning her story is to put herself in others' shoes and go through the experience herself. For instance, when covering a policy change affecting a local community, she wouldn't just interview people from her desk, she would spend days embedded in the neighborhood, waiting in the same lines, sitting in the same overcrowded offices, eating at the same spots. That immersion helped her connect the dots of how the policy was actually playing out on the ground, and allowed her to focus on the details that mattered most to the people living through it.

Walking in someone else's shoes before you even meet them can also inform how you plan your research. On a recent project, we needed to understand what physicians experience when they do rounds in clinical contexts, so we went speed dating. We captured the pain points of quickly talking to a lot of people at once and trying to remember the essence of the conversation. This experience helped us to focus on asking the right questions during our interviews with physicians.

2. Lean-in the right moment.

She was great at tracking the questions politicians refused to answer, keeping a running list of what they sidestepped, deflected, or went silent on. She always said you learn more from what politicians decide not to say than from what they actually do.

As designers, we prioritize empathy in our interviews, but my mom’s approach always inspired me to keep going to discover better insights. Finding eloquent (and ethical) ways of asking more about an uncomfortable topic might require a bit of pre-work—creating the right environment to make a person feel at ease, or sharing a bit about yourself. I once worked on a project about bathroom hygiene— one of the most intimate topics a stranger can talk to you about—and instead of asking people about their own behaviors, I talked to them about their roommates or friends. Turns out, people are way more comfortable talking about someone else's bathroom ritual.

3. If you can’t ask, experiment.

As a journalist in Turkey in the 1980s, my mom covered many presidential elections and other world-changing events. Though occasionally her young age was to her advantage, from time to time, she had to come up with her own hacks to get the information she needed. One of her favorite tricks was to ask herself: how would a completely different journalist cover this story? She'd pick someone with an opposite beat — a sports writer, a foreign correspondent, a food critic — and imagine their approach. Even if she didn't follow their approach, it forced her out of the obvious angle and almost always pointed her toward the story she actually needed to tell.

My colleagues Sean Hewens and Mat Chow did something equally creative. To understand the influential layers in a major international law firm, they created what they call The Blue Hat experiment. They picked a blue hat and brought it to the leaders of the law firm and asked, “What would you do to convince everyone in your organization to wear this blue hat?” Some said a raise. Others said a friendly competition. And some said, get the “cool” lawyers to do it first, then the others will follow. These answers helped the team figure out how influence actually happens at the firm, and shaped how they thought about rolling out a new change initiative.

4. Look outside the mainstream.

My mom would always push me to think in extremes. She always says, “To avoid ready-made answers, don’t talk to expected people. Talk to the extremes. Gather witnesses from all walks of life and listen to stories that others didn’t cover.”

At IDEO one of our biggest source of inspiration in design research is talking to extreme users, or what we sometimes call “super users.” Those who are at the edge of the bell curve of the challenge help us capture workarounds and interesting behaviors. For instance, when we are designing for change inside an organization, we don’t just talk to people in the C-suite; we also focus on people who recently joined or quit the organization, who might have a fresher take or more honest feedback.

5. Don’t just research the people, research the system.

One of the most important parts of being a journalist is understanding the ecosystem you’re reporting in. Otherwise, you can’t make sense of what you find. For my mom, that meant making sure she understood who all the power players were, and how the system worked before she started crafting her stories. This is also true in our design process.

At IDEO, we believe that if you want to create the conditions that change behavior, you have to have a deep understanding of the landscape you are in. When my colleague Divya Viswanathan and her team took on a project to help unify a massive, 20,000-employee generic medicine manufacturer with operations in 27 countries, they didn’t just focus on talking to executives; they talked to everyone. When they chatted with a worker on the shop floor of one of their factories, he read them a poem he had written for the founder of the company. This conversation helped the team realize how much people care about the company’s purpose, and it changed the course and outcome of their project.

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When I was a kid, my mom made up what she called “The Journalism Game” to keep me entertained while we were grocery shopping. She would give me a hypothetical scenario and ask me to think like a journalist, to tell her who I would talk to first to create the story.

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Before that happened, I spent a lot of time doodling my favorite characters—almost exclusively The Looney Tunes. My classmates and teachers liked my sketches. Some kids even paid me for them. I was good at it. But when the tremors started suddenly, after a series of unexplained episodes where I lost consciousness, I couldn’t make my simple lines simple anymore. Coloring was so hard and messy that pencil gray became my favorite color.

I dropped the pencil for more than a decade, did some clay work, played sports, and even started teaching Spanish. But when I got into the design school, I had to face up to challenge again. I ended up learning how to work with other media like 3-D modeling and animation to express my ideas. It was effective, but I still missed using the pen.

For me, nothing can really replace sketching. I learned during these years that drawing is not just a media; it is a way of thinking. So I embraced the shaking in my hands by thinking of every sketch I was doing as an idea, not a product. Just as every idea can be refined, so can every drawing. That was freeing. It meant that no matter how bad it was, over time, it could become something decent that expressed something. I start with my shaky sketch, and if I like it, I start adding shadows and details that are still shaky, but once it’s finished, it’s a single sketch; it is an idea.

One of the things I like to do when I’m traveling is to take the time to sketch the city I’m in. It’s an exercise for getting my tremor down; it helps me breathe slowly and focus on contemplating the moment, the people, the water, the sky, the birds, the glass. My shaky hands help me to draw silly lines in a fast enough way that I can capture the general picture. Then, it’s just a matter of letting my tremors go free until they become part of the landscape.

My hands shake. They literally shake. I’ve had a slight tremor since I was 12 years old, and it hasn’t been easy to adjust. For a while it was just too hard, and I stopped drawing altogether.

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.