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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In one sentence, who are you?

I am an illustrator who enjoys bringing any amount of joy to people through my creations.

What do you do? How did you learn how to do it?

I create different drawings using pencil and ink. The illustrations range from patterns to caricatures, unique creatures, and other one-off ideas. I grew up sketching and doodling and it has continued. When I moved to LA, I was suddenly surrounded by an amazing cadre of artists and creators who constantly inspire me, as well as push me to keep improving myself. That is how I learned my craft and continue to learn, because I believe you never truly finish learning.

What are your 3 favorite possessions?

Miniature Back to the Future 2 hover board; Magnum P.I. Tiki Mug; a drawing of my fiancé and me, which she drew. Not in that order.

What does a typical work session look like?

I have a running list of ideas and sketches that I pull from if I don't have an art show with a specific topic that I am working towards. Usually, I'll do some Google searches on the topic at hand and pull a bunch of reference photos for perusal during the pencil drawing stage. I sketch out the drawing inside a pre-drawn area, such as 4x6 or 5x7. Art that is easy to frame is always a goal of mine, because I love framed art and it drives me mad when I see things tacked onto a wall or cork board. After finalizing the pencil drawing, I'll usually step away for a moment or two to play a video game or watch a show. I like to do something that differentiates the time between stages. Once I come back to the drawing, I pull out all the different micron pens that I think I will use for the piece. I check the nibs, and then I begin inking. I put on dramas in the background to listen to, or things I've seen a ridiculous number of times. West Wing and Parks and Recreation are two such shows.

I don't like to start inking unless I am going to finish a drawing that night. Sometimes, a piece is too large, and I have to break it up over two nights. If that happens, I make sure the pens I've used on the previous night are away from all my other pens. I do this to achieve a consistency within the lines. Once finished, I scan the piece, put it within a predetermined frame, and pack it up for a craft fair or deliver it if it's for an art show. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

How do you get over creative block?

I used to stop drawing and just stew for a bit until it finally passed, which could take a bit of time. As I've gotten older, and ever so slightly more confident in my abilities, I push through it. I just keep drawing. Yes, sometimes the drawings are awful, but as Lauren (my future wife) always says, "sometimes you just have to pass a rat."

How do you see the world in 2078?

A lazy utopia, filled with autonomous everything. Humanity will have moved past Earth and outward into the stars while robots cater to our every whim and we become fat and happy. I could be confusing my vision of the world in 2078 with the timeline in Wall-E—who doesn't yearn for the saccharine dreams of Pixar in 2017. It is tough to image the future right now because at this moment it feels as though we are hanging by a loose wire, and any minute now someone with a spray tan is going to cut the wire and tell us all how huge his ratings are, as we all fall to our collective doom. I hope we make it to 2078, if only so that I can enjoy my hover chair and 128-ounce Slurpee.

What’s number one on your bucket list?

I should say something epic like bungee jumping off of Thomas Jefferson's nose on Mount Rushmore, but honestly, I'd like to have my own artist's studio. Some place I could retreat to and tune out the world and draw silly pictures. That to me is something I want to do before I fade out of this existence.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

I've had a one-sided love affair with Dustin Harbin for a long time. I own two of his original pieces and his diary comics book. The man can use an ink nib like Aaron Sorkin can turn a phrase.

I’ve been creative crushing on Austin Salmi since I saw his doodles, patterns, and adorable characters on Instagram almost two years ago. Austin’s work, learned through practice and osmosis in his job surrounded by artists, has a giggly character about it that fits his intention to hide the ugliness of the world for a moment, and make lovely order out of chaos. I got to learn a bit more about him and his process in this installment of Creative Crushes.

We had just begun work on a project exploring how we might help a medical-liability insurance company increase patient safety by learning from past incidents. As we talked, our conversation shifted away from excitedly imagining ideas for data-driven tools toward ways our work might potentially do harm.

What if our designs ended up raising premiums for doctors and, in turn, healthcare costs for patients? What if they kicked doctors off their insurance? What if doctors stopped reporting adverse events to keep their premiums from rising? There was real potential that our work could result in reduced patient safety or increased cost of care. We could inadvertently build a tool that could be used against the very people we were trying to help.

Today, data systems and algorithms can be deployed at unprecedented scale and speed—and unintended consequences will affect people with that same scale and speed. How can we always make sure we’re putting people first when designing large scale systems? Especially when those systems will change over time and evolve without direct human supervision?

The seed planted during that bar conversation has grown into a set of principles, activities, and now a set of cards that our teams—both data scientists and designers across every other discipline—use to ensure we’re intentionally designing intelligent systems in service of people.

We’re far from the first people to ponder this. We’ve been inspired by organizations like AI Now and Data + Society, books like Weapons of Math Destruction and Technically Wrong, academic communities like FATML and CXI. In particular, we’ve been eagerly following O’Reilly’s series on data ethics (and encourage you to read their free ebook, Ethics and Data Science).

To develop our own set of guiding principles, we started with people. We talked to folks all across the globe: We interviewed IDEO teams about where they found challenges. We spoke to our clients about where they saw intelligent systems go awry. We spoke to the public about where smart designs seemed to cross lines. We observed and read about AI systems that had gone off the rails and worked to understand how this might have been avoided. We learned a lot.

We came up with an original design, iterated on them, and landed on a set of four design principles and ten activities that can help guide an ethically responsible, culturally considerate, and humanistic approach to designing with data. These activities are meant to provoke thought; they’re a vehicle for introducing new ideas and stimulating conversations around ethics throughout the design process.

To start, here are our principles:

1. Data is not truth

Data is human-driven. Humans create, generate, collect, capture, and extend data. The results are often incomplete, and the process of analyzing them can be messy. Data can be biased through what is included or excluded, how it is interpreted, and how it is presented. Unpacking the human influence on data is essential to understanding how it can best serve our needs.

2. Don’t presume the desirability of AI

Just because AI can do something doesn’t mean that it should. When AI is incorporated into a design, designers should continually pay attention to whether people’s needs are changing, or an AI’s behavior is changing.

3. Respect privacy and the collective good

While there are policies and laws that shape the governance, collection, and use of data, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard than “will we get sued?” Consider design, governance of data use for new purposes, and communication of how people’s data will be used.

4. Unintended consequences of AI are opportunities for design

Just as with any design endeavor, we know that we’re not going to get it right the first time. Use unanticipated consequences and new unknowns as starting points for iteration.

To get started with the activities, you can download the cards here. We hope that these activities provoke dialogue and provide concrete tools to help our community ethically design intelligent systems.

Thank you to the larger team who helped make these cards come to life—Ben Healy, Jane Fulton Suri, Jess Freaner, Mike Stringer, Justin Massa, Connie Oh, and KP Gupta, who designed them.

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A design researcher, a business designer, and a data scientist were sitting at a bar. It sounds like the setup of a joke, but the conversation was actually quite serious.

As a user experience and interaction designer with a hybrid art and tech background, I’ve long been a fan of the concept of using art and design as a Trojan horse to make tricky concepts accessible. Through intrigue, curiosity, and play, these experiences can bypass our biases and open the door to understanding, without requiring deep comprehension. If you’ve ever visited a children’s science museum and watched kids excitedly engaging with subjects that would bore them to tears in book form, then you’ve seen the power of experience and play at work.

Meet ERNEST

That’s why my colleagues and I created ERNEST, an installation that gives the viewer the job of training a rudimentary artificial intelligence. Using facial and emotional recognition tech, ERNEST shows the user imagery and tries to see how happy it makes them. Our goal for this project was to engage users in a game-like experience to help them understand how machine learning models are trained, and subtly hint at the areas where bias could creep in.

Fellow IDEOer Matt Visco and I wanted to make sure ERNEST didn’t look like a modern computer—we designed it to look vintage. With its old hardware and nostalgic graphics, ERNEST doesn’t feel smart on the surface. Its look is meant to evoke a time when computers carried the promise of a utopian future, prior to mass connectivity and the ubiquitous collection of personal data.

The full installation uses five monitors, two computers, and three Raspberry Pis, which power several video loops that reveal the training data behind ERNEST, and give passersby a sense of the experience even if they don’t engage directly with it.

How it Works

ERNEST uses computer vision to perceive the user ambiently through facial recognition, allowing it to detect when a user is looking at it and how far away they are. When a user gets close enough, ERNEST comes alive and asks the user to help it learn. It then shows the viewer images intended to make the user happy, and gauges their emotional reaction based on their facial expression using a pre-trained model. The facial tracking and emotional data is displayed to the viewer in real time, encouraging users to make faces at ERNEST. Viewers can then validate the accuracy of the model to help ERNEST know if it was correct or not.

(Sound complicated? The video below might make it clearer.)

We installed ERNEST in IDEO San Francisco’s lobby for a couple of months, and also brought it to the San Francisco Art Institute Fort Mason Gallery for the CODAME Intersections exhibition in November 2018.

The Results

Many participants loved to challenge ERNEST, often emoting in varying ways through numerous loops of the game. Once, a group of participants spent nearly 20 minutes playing with ERNEST, takings turns to compare how it perceived each person.

When viewers interact and play with ERNEST, we’re helping them see that machines can have almost human-like perception, reacting differently to different faces, and sometimes being uncannily accurate...or completely wrong. The wrong guesses were in many cases more interesting, and were in fact a very intentional part of the design. We wanted users to see that artificial intelligence is sometimes not as intelligent as we might think.

ERNEST is meant to be a game, but what happens when real-world AI makes the wrong guesses? Or what if those wrong guesses are uneven, indicating an unintentional bias, such as working well for some faces but not others?

We wanted people to realize that designing systems that can ambiently perceive humans without direct input is rife with ethical concerns. And already, systems like these are being deployed at scale. The Guardian predicts emotionally-aware tech is already a $20B industry. Even something seemingly benign like ERNEST causes us to wonder—if an AI is trying to make the viewer happy, who determines what “happy” is? What if bad actors train Ernest to think that disturbing content is “happy?” What if the technology is repurposed to provoke anxiety or anger? What happens if we deploy technology like ERNEST widely?

Of course, ERNEST only scratches the surface of these big ethical questions, but we hope that it helps give people insight into how artificial intelligence thinks, and the ways its thinking can be flawed. The more that we as a society can start to understand these systems, the better we can judge their quality, and work to design them to be in line with our shared human values.

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning are among the hottest topics of the tech world, but some of us at the frontier forget that many people feel intimidated—or even afraid of—these technologies. The pop-culture trope of machine intelligence gone rogue has been a part of our cultural psyche for a good 150 years. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000, The Terminator’s Skynet, and The Matrix’s... Matrix. Combine that fear with arcane tech-speak like “recurrent neural network” and “generative adversarial network,” and in addition to feeling emotionally intimidating, AI and ML can also feel incomprehensible.

Feedback is a tricky thing. There’s always going to be differing opinions of right and wrong, and even if it’s explained to you in a calm, clear voice, it can sting like nothing else. But getting feedback on your work is the only way you'll grow. It forces you to rationalize your thinking and creative decision-making, and teaches you to swallow your pride.

I learned the hard way: A few years ago, I designed my first typeface called Emotiv. It was a concept for a messaging app that would help people express their emotions through language (instead of emojis).

Eager to get my work out there, I decided to send a sample to a very well-respected typographer whose work I greatly admired. Given this individual’s reputation (and my lack of experience) I was reluctant to share at first, but with encouragement from friends, I sent it along with an explanation of how it came to be, not really expecting a response.

A few days passed, and much to my surprise, an incredibly lengthy reply fell into my inbox and hit me like a ton of bricks. It was the toughest feedback I’d ever received. Alignment issues, inconsistencies, readability problems, the email went on and on. It felt like my career was ending before it even had a chance to begin. We designers consider our creations extensions of ourselves—meaning that we take the pain of feedback personally.

While I can't offer up permanent thick skin, I have come up with 4 mindset shifts that will help you get—and give—negative feedback in a constructive way:

1. Introduce constraints

The least helpful feedback goes something like, “Hmmm, I’m not sure I like this.” We all have personal tastes, but there is no build-off point from that—no way to develop and improve. Instead, ask the person giving you feedback to be constructive, give their rationale, and ask as many questions as they’d like, rather than give you a gut reaction.

2. Tag team

Rather than putting yourself on the receiving end, get involved in the process. Imagine that the work being critiqued isn’t yours and offer your own thoughts. That will help you stay focused on the work itself. Plus, by making the feedback process more of a collaborative effort, you can understand the work from new angles to make it better together.

3. Be Spock

Do your best to take your emotions out of the equation. Instead of hanging on every negative word, look for unbiased points that will help you better define and execute the work. Even if the person giving you feedback is using words like “I like...”, or “I don’t like…”, those words aren’t aimed at you—they’re aimed at uncovering the fundamental thinking or execution behind the work.

4. Don’t ask for the answer

When the feedback process unearths a problem with your work, it’s tempting to simply ask for a clear solution to the problem. But that won’t push you to go further and explore other possibilities. Solving the problem yourself gives you another opportunity to learn and grow your skills.

Looking back, I now see now that the typographer who crushed me was actually providing a great service. (Honestly, you could tell someone they are terrible at something in considerably fewer words.)

I’d made the same mistake my fellow design student had made in that first class—I reacted as if it was a personal attack on me as a designer. But that feedback prodded me to become much more critical about my own work, studying details that others might not notice, with an eye toward readability and alignment.

Getting negative feedback can hurt. You pour your time and effort into creating something, and with the swiftest of comments, it gets cut down. But receiving it not only makes your work better, it makes you better... especially at giving feedback.

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Nothing prepares you for the reality of receiving negative feedback. In one of my first design classes, I watched in horror as a fellow student had his work ripped in two for the first time in front of all of us. Shortly afterwards, he quit the course.

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.