More than 7 million people each year came to the Boston.gov site to tap into all sorts of city services: reporting a pothole, learning the assessed value of their property, paying a parking ticket, checking recycling schedules.

Boston wanted to create a beautiful platform that would make the process of finding and navigating information easy and intuitive, one that prioritized the needs of its people.

The Boston.gov site had outgrown its existing structure and needed an overhaul. The user experience was mired by the fact that Boston City Hall has nearly 50 different departments, each with its own microsite, navigation and content standards that feed into a centralized site.

So the City of Boston hired IDEO to design its new digital home, Boston.gov. IDEO designers worked with the major stakeholders—department heads, employees, and Boston residents, with a focus on those in underserved communities and those with varying levels of technical proficiency—to gather insights into what users needed.

The objective was to design something that would simplify how people navigate the site, to make it easier for residents to find answers to common questions, and, in the process, serve as a community facilitator—an up-to-date, reliable resource that makes life in the city more manageable.

Rather than organize the site by the city’s departments, the design solution was rooted in illuminating relevant content by topics—people’s life moments—many of which overlapped through different branches of government. Owning a car in the city, for example, is closely related to preparing for winter, so bridging those common threads allowed for a more intuitive organizing principle.

In the process of the site redesign, IDEO also helped to create a visual identity system that underscores Boston’s strengths: the city’s confidence, humility, personality, and optimism.

In addition to the web architecture and redesign, IDEO also produced a comprehensive style guide to help maintain design consistency, so departments can add content without compromising the overall integrity of the site, as well as a brand look that the city has decided to adopt across nearly all of its consumer-facing media. Now you’ll see the famous underlined B on T-shirts, banners, and even snow shovels.

Holding true to its mission to include Boston residents and all site users in its design process, the new Boston.gov site was piloted for six months, and the process document on the city’s blog (including the IDEO designed brand guide), before a full launch was rolled out in July 2016.

“The website should act like a helpful human. This is one of the big differences between the old site and the new site,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city’s chief of information technology in a Boston Globe article. “Oftentimes, when you looked at something on the old site, it would feel like you were interacting with some sort of lawyer-robot that was speaking to you in government-speak, using very formal language. We are trying to move away from that so your experience is akin to a person.”

The City of Boston was in need of a new digital home—one that emphasized a shift to a more welcoming tone and commitment to its citizens.

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In the Western Hemisphere, The North Face brand has long represented an active, sporty lifestyle that’s filled with challenges and adventures. But appreciating “the great outdoors” in China is less about extreme sports and more about connecting with nature in a communal, spiritual way. This research-based insight led the team to identify new opportunities for The North Face to better target its messaging.

Designers found a key opportunity: Encourage Chinese consumers to escape the pressures of hectic city life by enjoying the freedom and renewal that comes with spending time outdoors.

Today, as people find less time to enjoy the benefits that lie just beyond China’s large cities, there’s a tangible desire to return to the outdoors to refresh, reassess, and renew oneself. The North Face aims to help consumers do exactly that.

To create a compelling new brand vision for The North Face in China, the team’s design research tapped into Chinese ways of spending time outdoors. IDEO’s insights and creative brief provided the essential brand story for The North Face in China and informed the tagline of the company’s current marketing campaign, “Go Wild” (去野). The North Face brand’s new messaging links “old nature” and “new outdoors” through a combination of digital, retail, and interactive community channels.

IDEO also collaborated with the company on designs and prototypes for a new digital platform and an updated store-within-a-store merchandising display. The digital community aims to attract newcomers and connect them with more experienced outdoors enthusiasts and clubs. As the platform evolves, it will help aspiring adventurers plan trips, learn skills, and share their experiences through photos.

The retail community space aims to integrate this digital community with in-store shoppers and an effort to turn the “buy-a-product moment” into a “join-the-outdoors moment.” Both will be integrated to provide a holistic brand experience in China centered on nature and community.

In the West, The North Face, with its decades-long history, has long symbolized an adventurous, active lifestyle. In China, however, the outdoor market only began accelerating in the early 21st century.

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Success in this growing market depends on building strong and deep connections with Chinese consumers.

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20% sales growth in China

from 2012 to 2013—the year the project was completed—propelling the brand from sixth place to a market-leading position

Over the last 36 years, IDEO and Lilly, along with the pharmaceutical giant’s other design, development, and manufacturing partners, have collaborated on more than 250 projects. During this time, Lilly has not only honed its engineering-focused internal device-development team but also transformed into a human-centered organization with extensive, robust in-house innovation capabilities.

Early in the relationship, a team of IDEO designers and Eli Lilly leaders traveled the world to understand how people with diabetes live with the disease. Their findings led to the design of a series of award-winning insulin injection pens like SAVVIO. Portable, aesthetically pleasing, and discreet, the pens are suitable for use in both medical and personal settings. Combined with Lilly’s technical design prowess, this human-centered focus allows the devices to seamlessly integrate into patients’ lives and routines, making a challenging disease like diabetes feel more manageable.

Fast forward to today, Lilly’s innovative, easy-to-use auto-injectors are not only continuing to provide life-saving treatments to people with diabetes but also enabling the adoption of the popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, which together accounted for the majority of the company’s annual revenue in 2025. Perhaps most importantly, patients consistently rate the experience of using Lilly’s auto-injectors as relatively pain-free, easy to use, and preferable to competitors’ brands, improving adherence, satisfaction, and health outcomes.

This unwavering focus on driving innovation through a patient-first mindset is evident in some of the most impactful projects Lilly and IDEO collaborated on over the years:

GLP Auto-injectors
Convenient and cutting-edge, the first Trulicity injection device was originally designed to deliver the GLP-1 drug to treat type 2 diabetes. Today, it has been adapted for use with other GLP-1s, Mounjaro and Zepbound, which are increasingly popular weight-loss drugs and are also administered once weekly via fixed-dose injections. A wide base enables the pen to be held securely against the injection site, and the device automatically regulates the dose and needle depth.

Taltz Injectors
For most patients, living with severe plaque psoriasis means being your own medical technician—metering your drug dosage each time, and attaching and removing needles by hand. Taltz provides patients with clear visual and auditory feedback throughout the injection process through simple icons, bright colors, a translucent material, and clicking sounds. The devices are available in both autoinjector and prefilled-syringe formats and are adapted for Emgality, a preventive monthly migraine treatment, and Ebglyss, which helps treat eczema or atopic dermatitis.

HumaPen SAVVIO Injection Pen
Key insights informed the design of SAVVIO, including patients’ preference for insulin pens that look less like medical devices and more like everyday objects you’d find in a backpack or purse. The sleek, colorful device was created to help patients feel comfortable and confident about fitting mealtime injections into their everyday lives.

Refillable Human Growth Hormone (HGH) Injector and Reconstitution Device
Designed to be kid-friendly, the Refillable HGH Injector leverages insights into pediatric treatment adherence to create a more integrated, systematic approach to treatment, while the Reconstitution Device makes mixing Lilly’s powder-and-liquid drug easier and less intimidating for parents and healthcare professionals alike.

KwikPen Insulin Pen
KwikPen is a next-generation, prefilled insulin injection pen that builds on the success of two previous designs, reducing its size to 5.7 inches and enhancing ease of use for patients.

HumaPen(R) Luxura™ Insulin Pen
HumaPen Luxura combines several innovations into a robust yet elegant pen that can be carried and used anywhere—an insulin pen solution that improves dosing accuracy, dose setting, and injection force.

In addition to designing products to meet the needs of people with diabetes, IDEO and Lilly have developed innovations in areas of oncology, autoimmunity, and men’s health. The results of this collaboration and expansion have won numerous design awards and produced one of the longest and most fruitful innovation relationships in IDEO’s history.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Eli Lilly had a number of new, life-changing medications and two big challenges: Most of its drugs were self-injectables, not pills, so patients were hesitant to take them. And its drug-delivery device platform lagged behind its drug pipeline.

99%

of Trulicity users reported the auto-injector was “easy” to “very easy” to use in a JDST study

$36.5B

of Lilly’s $65.2B 2025 revenue came from sales of its auto-injectable GLP-1s, Mounjaro and Zepbound, a 45% increase from 2024

‍“…the Advisory Council will recommend transformational programmatic, cultural, and physical change to San Quentin that can serve as a practical model that can be replicated and scaled to other institutions.”

Source: Office of Governor Gavin Newsom: Governor Newsom Names Leading Criminal Justice and Public Safety Experts to San Quentin Transformation Advisory Council, May 05, 2023  https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/05/05/san-quentin-transformation-advisory-council/

The Advisory Council included the expertise of established criminal justice, public safety, healthcare, academic, reentry, and rehabilitation professionals, along with system-impacted/formerly incarcerated community leaders, and representatives of crime victims/survivors. The premise of IDEO’s involvement is to augment the Advisory Council Co-Chairs’ and members’ expertise in evidence-based best practices and lived experience living and working in prisons, with expertise in collaborative design, synthesis, visualization, storytelling and bringing visions to life.

Specifically, IDEO was brought in to facilitate input-gathering, and assist with incorporating the many viewpoints into a single, cohesive report of recommendations to the Governor. This included meeting the challenge of bringing together the viewpoints of 21 people on the Council (17 members, three Co-Chairs and an advisor to the Governor); incorporating the views of people who are most impacted (those incarcerated at San Quentin, San Quentin staff, community-based organizations, victim/survivor groups, among others); and formatting and designing the final report.

IDEO’s facilitation included workshops with the full Advisory Council, individual interviews and check-ins with Council members to gather their input to inform the recommendations. Each Advisory Council member was asked to speak with, and record feedback from, no fewer than five people at San Quentin or in affected communities and to share this feedback with IDEO. IDEO integrated this information and feedback into this report.

Research activities included visits to San Quentin to speak with and facilitate conversations with:

• San Quentin residents (100+) including the Citizens/Inmate Advisory Council, focus groups with Spanish-speaking residents, former gang members, ACT (LGBTQIA+), Voices Heal, People in Blue, San Quentin Citizens Advisory Council.
• San Quentin staff (100+) including interviews with numerous officers.
• San Quentin staff and residents together.
• Current participants and staff at Amistad (MCRP) and Beacon (former lifer) campuses (many who were previously incarcerated at San Quentin).
  
  

IDEO also organized listening, information sharing and feedback sessions, both at San Quentin and in the community, between Co-Chair representatives and various stakeholder groups, including victim/survivor groups, labor unions, and advocacy organizations. These perspectives were also brought into the report.  

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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.