Globally, the European Commission reports, a truckload of textiles heads to landfills or is incinerated every single second.

The fashion industry accounts for some 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Less than 1 percent of the materials used to make clothing is recycled, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

The best way to keep clothes out of a landfill? Don’t make them.

Picture this: Not long ago, it wasn’t unusual for a customer to walk into an H&M store and not be able to find a basic white t-shirt in their size. Why? Like most long-established retail operations, H&M was operating with a push model—placing seasonal bets on what the demand for a given item of clothing might be, locking orders far in advance, and hoping that they were able to sell out. Make a mistake in that kind of model, though, and you can end up with customers unable to find the basics they rely on, or excess inventory you can’t sell. That’s a problem for the business, but for the environment as well—and one that doesn’t fit H&M’s aggressive sustainability goals.

Though H&M had tried to tackle the problem before, the launch of the H&M Group Design Studio, co-created with IDEO, gave the retailer the confidence to go after it again. The team started out by mapping out the complex network of people that make up its supply chain across the globe, meeting with everyone from designers to garment suppliers, logistics managers, and even folks selling the final product in H&M stores. 

They then created an algorithm for more precise ordering, as well as a tool that provides a shared view of information. Instead of placing orders, the new automated flow—dubbed “Cruise Control"—allows staff to work with a demand forecast that gives them more time to focus on customer-centric operations, like providing guidance and inspiration. It also makes it easier for H&M to follow the demands of the market, and place much more accurate bets on what consumers will want, when. Already, H&M has significantly increased sales while cutting excess inventory—a result that improves its bottom line, as well as its environmental impact.

Estimates project that by 2030, global apparel consumption will hit 102 million tons.

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22%

reduction in stock during a pilot program

34%

increase in sales during a pilot program

To foster creative projects that spoke to the needs of local communities and environments, the BSA began to engage its members in collaborative, user-led design. The organization launched its first-ever innovation challenge, putting out a call for all members to pitch their ideas for projects in the built environment.

The BSA expected those pitches to have dollar signs attached. To the organizer’s surprise, only one asked for funding. The rest requested less tangible, but equally meaningful support: advice, connections, specific expertise. Those are resources that the BSA has aplenty, but hadn’t learned how to leverage well.

From that first go at an innovation challenge, the BSA learned how to better support its members. It also learned that to lead with purpose and make strategic choices, one must develop the confidence to say no. Instead of spreading itself thin across many projects, the organization decided to take small steps, focusing on one initiative at a time, so that it can deliver focused impact and stay true to its evolving mission.

With 36% of global energy going to buildings and 8% of global emissions caused by cement alone, the architectural community is inextricably intertwined with both the causes and solutions related to climate change.

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According to a survey conducted by the AIA, the architecture profession in the US is less diverse than the population as a whole. This lack of diversity can contribute to a disconnect between architects and the communities they serve.

31

submissions received from innovators in the Boston region working on equity and sustainability challenges

5

innovation teams invited to pitch ideas

The resources that NYU students needed were organized by administrative department, and buried on disparate websites and calendars. But students don’t think in terms of departments—they just need to know where their classes are.

All of this became patently clear as IDEO shadowed students. Team members visited classrooms, walked with them through their days, and hosted pop-ups in highly trafficked areas to get ideas from passersby. That helped the team develop a common understanding of the overall student journey and grounded employees in the key moments that can either make or break a student’s experience. Visualizing their journey helped departments gain a shared understanding of the fractured communications challenge and develop possible solutions.

To synthesize those insights, we formed cross-functional action learning groups, challenging existing practices at the university and coming up with new ways of working. Participants came from a diverse set of departments, including enrollment management, student affairs, marketing and communications, IT, global inclusion, student services, the provost’s office, digital communications, and more. The cohorts sketched early hypotheses and got feedback from faculty, administrators, and students from all of NYU's undergraduate schools to refine initial concepts.

Collaborating with students gave staff a first-hand look at what students were struggling with and a way to engage students directly in addressing those challenges. Just as importantly, there was an overall culture shift at NYU: Administrators started with questions instead of agendas, came together around a table, and reached beyond their job descriptions to meet the needs of students.

First-year students reported receiving hundreds of paper forms, and email from more than 70 unique senders.

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NYU needed to offer students the right resources at the right time—and collaborate to serve them as a unified administration.

New services

in-production include centralized calendars, dynamic campus mapping, and customized notifications

Design-thinking cohorts

now support the student experience

Diversity alone isn’t enough—in marketing or any other facet of business. Today’s brands must authentically engage with and create the conditions for co-design with existing communities.

That sort of deep, meaningful engagement with customers doesn’t happen over Instagram. It requires a playbook, a prototype, and a healthy amount of trust. So, IDEO worked with Athleta and Gap to tap into the wisdom of a council of women who represent intersectional identities and lived experiences. The council surfaced powerful insights for the brand, like the fact that active women don’t need a brand to empower them—they already feel powerful.

After only a few weeks, Athleta experienced the difference between research and a truly reciprocal relationship. The way their brand engages with communities is adding depth, understanding, and authenticity to Athleta’s content, products, and experiences. And women can feel the difference.

76% of US adults say that the media promotes an unattainable body image for women.

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Fewer than 1 in 10 businesses review for inclusion as part of product design and marketing campaigns.

>2X

user growth in 2022

13,000+

Athleta WellPro well-being providers active on the platform

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The toymaker came to us to figure out how to make the device safe and fun. We started thinking not just in terms of physical usability (though designing for tiny hands and making sure products can survive a drop on the ground is our bread and butter), but also about how we encourage healthy engagement patterns.

A lot of VR headsets are designed to be super sticky—so engaging that users don’t want to take them off. But when we design for kids, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can create healthy interactions. We wanted the design of the View-Master to help children intuit when it was time to put the toy down. So, we decided not to include a head strap—or any other means of attaching the headset to little bodies. When kids felt their arms get tired or their eyes start to cross, they would know it was time to take a break.

Over the past four decades, the IDEO Play Lab has designed and licensed more than 250 toys and games, from classics like the Barbie Camper to the first set of Sesame Workshop smartphone apps for kids.

With every product, we think about how to design fun and engaging experiences that delight parents, entertain kids, and lead to success for our partners. But we also put a lot of thought into making design decisions that support healthy habits, and help kids—and their families—thrive. 

Here are a few examples of how we’ve navigated those design choices.

Designing for movement: Dusty Wing Control

Most of us have learned to use a joystick or a set of arrows to drive a remote-controlled toy or move a character around a screen. But when we set out to help bring the character “Dusty” from the popular Disney movie Planes to life in an action-oriented vehicle toy, we took a step back to rethink how littler kids would engage with it.

As we tested designs, we saw that small children not only struggled with small buttons and the spatial skills necessary to operate the typical remote control joystick, but also that there was no fun in sitting still and tapping buttons. Instead, during our design research sessions, kids pretended to be the characters: They went full airplane mode, hands stretched out, zooming around the living room, dodging furniture. 

Taking a cue from their play patterns, we put Dusty’s remote control mechanism in toy wing tips that fit on little hands, enabling them to interact in a way that is not only more fun, but also instinctive, better mirroring how they naturally play. Players drive Dusty forward by pressing and holding a controller button, enabling his propellers to spin. When they bank left and right, Dusty matches their every move. Dusty even calls out flying commands that they can perform together.  The toy is not just easy for them to operate; it also gets them off the couch and moving, playing the main character in their own stories.

Designing for confidence: Pictionary Air

When we set out to re-invent the classic drawing game for the digital age, we had to figure out how to bring the core interaction to life in a new way. During ethnographic research, we noticed that when players were under pressure, they would often stare at their drawings looking embarrassed, and hesitate to keep drawing. To get people out of their heads and back in the game, we designed a new interaction that keeps participants looking up and laughing with each other. We combined a light pen and a smart device’s camera to allow picturists to create life-size illustrations in the air in front of them, an early foray into AR for classic games. For another layer of fun—and another option for those with less confidence in their drawing skills—players could interact with their sketches to provide more clues, much like in charades. We also decided to make drawings disappear quickly after each round was finished, to lower the stakes for self-conscious players.

Designing for all ages: Twister Air

In classic Twister, the fun hits when players are frozen in contortionist poses, hovering and balancing over each other. Our challenge from Hasbro: What does Twister look like in the TikTok era? And how do we make it fun for everyone? As we tested out potential interactions, we observed that for younger kids and older adults (basically everyone but the teenagers), the choreography on most popular dances was a bit much to learn or to even attempt. While kids found it hilarious when parents messed up (you’ll see lots of dance flops posted online!), we also wanted to find a way to create a sense of achievement for all ages. We started looking for the sweet spot between silly fun and accessibility, stretching players just enough to make them feel challenged, but not too overwhelmed to keep trying. In our prototypes, we preserved the classic Twister interaction while building in opportunities for rockstar moments where players can flop or shine. The footage made for viral family group chat nuggets, helping everyone feel part of the fun.

Designing for development: Little People Klip Klops

Preschoolers love the action of cars zipping down racetracks. But typical matchbox cars move too quickly for their little hands and slow reaction times.  When we set out to create a similar action-oriented—but also character-driven—toy for Little People, we needed to figure out how to slow down the experience, without sacrificing the action. Through several rounds of prototyping, we built out Klip Klops, leveraging a very simple mechanism that allowed princesses on ponies to teeter back and forth down a ridged downward track. By centering  the “clip clop” sounds of the hooves and building out a multi-story castle setting where the princesses and their steeds would live, we created opportunities for kids to enjoy the intentionality of the movement and built in the space for layered storytelling, allowing little kids to practice multiple development skills at once.

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Navigating your own toy design journey, or trying to get your team at work to stretch its imagination? Get in touch at helloplaylab@ideo.com. We’d love to collaborate.

Almost a decade ago, when we were all exploring VR of the early aughts, Mattel set out to redesign its classic View-Master as an affordable VR headset for a new generation of kids.

Wagashi is a traditional Japanese dessert considered to embody a microcosm of time, space, and nature, typically made of agar, water, and sugar. In this coffee shop, each dessert features a main ingredient—berries, citrus, chocolate—that determines its primary flavor, with an added twist: the addition of a layer of coffee, which corresponds to the carbon footprint associated with producing this main ingredient. The higher the carbon footprint, the higher the level of coffee in the dessert, and the more bitter it tastes. You can see and taste it.

Making Data Feel Real

This is the concept behind DataWagashi, the design-tech project I collaborated on with Boston-based design technologist Iyang Huang. DataWagashi invites people to experience the future of data communication by bringing climate data to life through all the senses. We go beyond traditional visuals by incorporating taste, smell, texture, and physical interaction, expanding the vocabulary for how we understand and interact with data. With DataWagashi, data transforms from numbers on a screen to a vivd and engaging multisensory journey.

Fighting Data Fatigue

In today's world, the constant doom and gloom surrounding climate change can make it feel overwhelming and disconnected from our daily lives. The complexity of climate data, which is often presented through numbers, charts, and preaching, only adds to this detachment, making the information hard to relate to our senses and emotions. We wanted to find a new, better way to raise awareness about these important issues, and make data communication more intuitive, enjoyable, and fun. So we turned to food, a universally-loved and relatable medium, to make complex environmental data more accessible, foster empathy, and empower people to make better choices. But food is just one of many creative media we can use to overcome data fatigue and craft engaging data stories through design.

One way we can think about changing how we present information is by transforming text-based information into something capable of carrying multimodal information—like edible objects, but also, sounds, lights, responsive wearables, and much more. Instead of just making a deck that tells people there has been a 20-degree sea water temperature increase, why not design a way for people to directly feel the difference? Imagine experiencing wildfires not through statistics, but by tasting the severity of raging flames through a range of spicy dishes, hearing the before and after of dwindling forest chorus, and touching the roughness of the scorched grass. By physicalizing data, we translate numbers back into experiences that can be seen, touched, and felt, connecting more deeply with the real world.

Introducing the Phygital Experience

The integration of Generative AI into storytelling introduces a new blend across digital and physical platforms, enabling us to transform large-scale datasets into tangible Wagashi forms. Setting up a few lines of mapping rules allows the data—whether static, real-time, or customized by user input—to dynamically manifest across multiple formats such as graphics, text, sound, and food, bridging the gap between digital information and physical entities. These entities could be data-driven recipes, playlists that shift with real-time data trends, algorithmically-woven textiles, ambience gadgets that adapt to environmental changes, and vending machines that dispense data-inspired poems on bamboo paper, making abstract data interactively tangible. 

This approach opens up various real-world use cases and applications in everyday lives, from creating customized dessert recipes and generating climate sonatas to sending personalized gift packages.

The importance of data empathy

DataWagashi is also about democratizing data. By turning data into physical, sensory experiences, we can break down information barriers, ensuring that people with varying data literacy levels can grasp the complex concepts and join in on conversations about climate change and environmental impact. This redesign of data presentation fosters understanding among diverse groups across ages, cultures, and professional training, creating a fair environment for dialogue and learning, and making the intricate world of data an experience open to all.

Soon, you might walk into your favorite cafe and order desserts not by ingredients, but by picking up a menu called "Biodiversity Forecast in 60 years," and choosing from "Rainforest," "Desert," or "Ocean." Maybe you’ll have a weekly smoothie subscription that alters its formula based on a synthesis of the average air quality (climate data) and how active you are (personal health tracking data). The next day, a box of unique foods arrives, driven by your data choices, offering delightful surprises. This not only gives you a tasty treat but also connects you to a bigger data story, inspiring awareness and action.

Heading to SXSW 2024? Meet up with us at DataWagashi: Feeling Climate Data through New Design Medium, and learn more about how we can make the data tangible in the most flavorful way for a better climate future.

Picture this: You walk into your favorite coffee shop, check out the desserts, and choose which one to order based on its carbon footprint—just by looking at the confection itself.

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We interviewed dozens of leaders of innovation, design, and new product teams at multibillion-dollar companies in search of clues as to where the trouble starts: When funding was cut?  When teams were reassigned? When groups were dissolved? 

Our research uncovered five reasons that innovation portfolios fail—and tips for making sure it doesn’t happen at your company.

#1 The black hole of undefined strategy

In work we did with a Fortune 500 shipping company several years ago, executives decided that the company needed a global innovation team. They committed millions of dollars, hired a startup leader, and assigned 25 people to the team. The startup founder built them a venture based on a new technology that tracks packages. In its first year, that innovation alone made the shipping company tens of millions of dollars.

But when review time came around, executives told the leader they were dissatisfied. Why hadn’t this team done anything to evolve the company’s core offerings? Why had they broken rules inside the company? They fired the leader, even though the higher-ups hadn’t articulated to the team—or to each other—what successful innovation looked like. 

Often, this misdirect starts with undefined strategy at the top. Innovation strategy requires a different type of conversation: less focused on big-picture goals; more focused on strategic planning, like how to invest and pursue goals over the next year. It starts with this question: What are the outcomes we want from this work?

#2 The peril of orphaned innovations

All too often, a company creates an innovation team, but doesn’t connect it with the company’s core business. That can create an innovation orphanage: ideas developed in isolation that lack the necessary resources and support to be successful. 

We witnessed this on a project with a large automotive company. It had recently acquired a startup that offered private work shuttles.  They brought IDEO in to lead an innovation lab around new product possibilities. Together, we built a new venture: a commute benefit that the company could sell to employers to better leverage the startup’s fleet of private work shuttles. But after six months of generating revenue and trying to sell it to the broader startup, it still wasn’t in their pipeline.

The problem was misaligned incentives: The CEO of the automotive company had tasked the innovation to a standalone team, without bringing in the decision makers at the startup. When there’s no ownership or investment from the departments that the innovation is meant to serve, great ideas go nowhere. Instead, leaders need to create a process for identifying and nurturing promising innovations, and define who owns the outcomes and makes implementation decisions before the innovation even begins. 

#3 The risk of the wrong talent

By definition, innovation requires new approaches. It often requires new talent, too. Think of the classic example of IBM, often taught by professors Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman in their work on ambidextrous organizations. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the technology giant would invest in new innovation efforts, like the personal computer, but the company was never able to commercialize or scale the product. IBM’s business leaders didn’t have an entrepreneurial mindset—the company needed talent who had experience taking big swings.

We recently saw this play out at a food manufacturing company. They wanted to try an agile approach to developing new products and tasked a team of operators from the core business to make it happen. The team developed a new breakfast product, which tested well with consumers. But they didn’t feel confident enough to advance to piloting it without further data. Why? The internal team had never launched a new product from scratch, and they were terrified of screwing up. 

To avoid the talent trap, it helps to think about three different roles in a workplace: explorers, scalers, and optimizers (with credit to Bud Caddell and Simon Wardley). Optimizers make up about 90 percent of employees; they drive growth and improve operations across the core of an established business. Explorers work in departments like R&D and product development, and are good at spotting new opportunities and developing ideas. Scalers iterate on ideas until they find the right product-market fit. All three roles are essential, but shine at different parts of the innovation process. Explorers work best within innovation teams, until they can pass off an idea to scalers for development; scalers can then institute new processes and tools for optimizers to use within the workplace. 

#4 The troubles of a bad handoff 

When company leaders get excited about an innovation, it can be tempting to go for an ad hoc implementation, rather than moving through clear internal steps. But the wrong handoff can lead to inconsistencies and inefficiencies. The baton gets dropped. That’s why it’s necessary to design a clear innovation process for how to generate, evaluate, and implement ideas. Here’s a guide to the handoff models we see most often—and when to use them:

‍The Owner’s Manual: After months (sometimes years!) of work, an innovation team hands extensive documentation over to a new team, which is meant to execute their vision. But be honest: When is the last time you actually read an owner’s manual cover-to-cover? Exactly. This model can work if the innovation doesn’t need to be directly developed by others (insights from a research group, for example), but it doesn’t work well for a new product, where it can turn into a knowledge dropoff.

The Architect: The future owner of the work embeds with the innovation team. That way, they can share the insights from the development process with the new team. This model works well for industries like consumer packaged goods, where a brand manager is responsible for product development from beginning to end.

The Ambassadors: Members from each stage of the innovation embed throughout the project, ensuring that no learning is lost and each phase of work feeds smoothly into the next. This model also builds an awareness of what downstream teams most need.

The Hive: Each project functions as a microcosm of the business, where multidisciplinary teams tackle a challenge from beginning to end. This is common in accelerators and incubators, since they often set up new organizations as microcosms of a parent company, made up of people from every major function.

#5 The danger of short-term metrics

In our experience, innovation teams often have a three-year lifespan. During the first year, everyone is excited, encouraging the innovation team to swing big. By the second year, company leaders are asking, what are your results so far? By the third year, a lot of the top executives have changed seats, and the new leadership doesn’t see a meaningful effect on their core business, so they decide to shut it down.

It’s a short-sighted move: This kind of work often takes years to show impact on metrics like revenue, loyalty, or customer satisfaction. The labs can still show value in the short-term, though, by demonstrating how the work drives efficiency or changes behavior.

This brings us back to the head of innovation at the shipping company, the one who created a startup that netted millions, but got fired because the team hadn’t evolved the company’s core offerings. To avoid this trap, companies need to establish clear metrics to assess progress over time—the number of prototypes a team develops, experiments they run, employee retention or external reputation. Otherwise, you’re cutting down the tree you planted three years ago, before it even had a chance to bear fruit.

Falling into an innovation trap of your own? We’d love to chat with you about it.

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(Images created with Midjourney)

A few years ago, we led a project to investigate a question: Where does innovation go wrong?

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At a time when everyone was concerned about kids using AI to cheat, they wanted to discover how it could enhance learning and teaching for the better.

While we immersed ourselves in the traditional design process—sketching, interacting with students and teachers, and finding inspiration out in the world—it became clear that understanding the AI that underpinned the product was critical to our success. So we dove into using the underlying technology ourselves.

The data scientist on our team started by constructing a simplified Python version of one of Ethiqly's significant features—structured feedback for teachers to share with students—allowing it to interface with a language learning model (LLM). Then, with the help of software designers, we rebuilt and evolved this proof-of-concept prototype to be a real, usable, multi-featured demo of two of the core interaction loops, so that we could test it in research sessions with students and teachers. 

The demo became an invaluable tool to uncover student and teacher feedback, to test the look and feel of a new product, and to glean the real capabilities of the underlying technology. In creating the demo, we realized the importance of being able to prototype generative AI products as quickly and as collaboratively as possible.

At IDEO, we believe in augmented intelligence—that it’s possible to bring more delight, ease, creativity, and impact to human work through technology, including AI. To do this responsibly, it’s important to bring a multiplicity of perspectives to the design of these tools. By building a lightweight system that allows designers without technical backgrounds to prototype with LLMs, we could bring more voices, eyes, and hands into the AI-driven product design process. We also shortened our time to first prototype from weeks to days. 

ChatGPT: A Tool, Not Just a Trend

Using ChatGPT’s interface can be powerful on its own, but what’s not as well known is that the systems behind it can smooth the process for product development. But for casual users of ChatGPT’s browser or app-based interface, there’s little opportunity to learn about how it works on the back end. It also comes with privacy concerns. It’s clear that more and more of our clients need us to understand firsthand what creating LLM-enabled products feels like, and it’s equally clear that we need to explore how LLMs can push the edges of our own creative process.

So, I designed a simple prototyping interface that shows a little more of the guts behind the chatbox. The goal? To help IDEOers better understand how LLMs, and OpenAI’s APIs in particular, work behind the scenes, building their intuition about what the current spate of AI tools are good at, and what they’re not.  

The prototyper interface also adds convenient features like saving a  conversation state—allowing designers to download and share their conversation history and rewind to earlier states to try out new content—to encourage the development and sharing of useful and delightful patterns. I named the tool GPT Prototyper.

Teaching Through Prototyping

While using GPT Prototyper’s interface doesn’t involve any coding, it does show its users more about the parts and pieces that can be configured to refine and expand OpenAI’s conversational abilities, from the system note (background information that shapes the LLM’s responses), to the temperature (the sampling scheme that controls the randomness of the responses), and even accessing an external service through function calls (commands the LLM can send that connect it to abilities beyond text prediction).

We’ve created comprehensive video tutorials, interactive Q&A sessions, and embedded usage hints within the Prototyper to make these capabilities more understandable to everyone at IDEO. Every designer, irrespective of their technical proficiency, can now contribute to the evolution of intelligence platforms, thereby ushering in a new era of digital product behavior.

If it sounds theoretical—it’s not. We’ve used customized versions of the Prototyper to demonstrate how LLMs can work within product and service concepts for work in industries ranging from finance to consumer goods. 

Since its debut last June, the prototyper has also helped us explore more future-facing ideas, like when we gave a pair of vintage Levi’s jeans a personality and history, letting prospective customers learn about how the jeans were made and where they were worn through conversation. We’ve also used it in service of our ongoing research into Gen Z’s relationship to GenAI.

Having the GPT Prototyper means that teams no longer have to wonder if an interaction is possible–they simply build it and give it a try. 

A Glimpse into Tomorrow

Pushing beyond simple productivity gains and into innovation and creativity requires understanding—at least to some degree—of how LLMs work. Tools like the GPT Prototyper are bringing intentionality and speed to our explorations, helping our clients push farther and faster into new possibilities for growth. The tool is also making it possible for us to explore client work without sharing confidential information with unvetted tools—something both we and our clients care deeply about.

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Want to learn more about creating a tool for your organization? Get in touch.

Last spring, my team and I partnered with Ethiqly, an education startup looking to explore how AI might help students learn how to be better writers.

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.