For more than 40 years, Sage has helped businesses of all sizes navigate complex business environments. While many of its larger customers have the means and the structure to support climate initiatives, many of its smaller customers do not.

Sage wanted to help its SMB customers get ahead of future climate regulations and meet consumer expectations. And building carbon-footprint evaluation and mitigation tools would also dovetail nicely with Sage’s own climate aspirations: cutting its own emissions in half by 2030. Together, Sage and IDEO investigated how the company could leverage the data in its platform to calculate its customers’ emissions, both direct and indirect, and how that information could spur action as they aim to hit net zero.

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To get started, the design team went deep with customers running all kinds of businesses—from a taxi company to a champagne bar to a falconry center. Business owners shared that their focus often has to be on the day-to-day, a series of small decisions that, when added together, lead to business success. For many, tackling a problem as complex as climate change felt overwhelming. IDEO and Sage synthesized those insights and began working across verticals and products, bringing together experts from marketing, technology, sustainability, and operations to build out new concepts. With the help of two carbon accountants, the team worked to figure out how existing data could inform customers about both their direct and indirect emissions, which can be harder to track. Given how tight SMBs’ margins are, they focused on how that knowledge could fuel emissions-cutting changes that also save money, giving businesses extra incentive to take action. Together, the team created a roadmap of customer outcomes and experience guidelines to help shape future products.

Sage has taken that work forward, launching Sage Earth, a platform that aims to help businesses measure, manage, and mitigate emissions—even across supply chains. With carbon accounting now built directly into all Sage Accounting and Sage for Accountants products in the UK, Sage has made climate action practical and accessible for millions of SMBs. By automating emissions measurement and reporting, Sage Earth removes barriers of cost and complexity, empowering business owners and their accountants to stay competitive in supply chains where up to 95 percent of emissions occur. 

From co-developing the UK Voluntary SME Carbon Reporting Standard to launching a Carbon Accounting API, which gives banks, fintechs, and other platforms access to Sage’s Carbon Engine, Sage is embedding sustainability into the systems people already trust—helping hundreds of thousands (and rapidly increasing) small businesses turn climate ambition into everyday action.

Small- and medium-sized businesses—companies with fewer than 500 employees—make up about 90% of the world’s businesses, according to U.N.-backed SME Climate Hub.

Two thirds of small businesses don’t know how they’re going to reach net zero, and lack the resources to do so, according to a recent survey by SME Climate Hub. Still, the majority reported they want to act on climate, recognizing it can help them become a more resilient business.

Large companies may be the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, but an estimated 80% of those emissions come from supply chains—often made up of smaller enterprises.

Scaling rapidly

in the three years since the launch of Sage Earth, which is now being used by hundreds of thousands of businesses

World's 1st

open-source hybrid emissions factors dataset, Carbon Commons, led by Sage, helps SMBs calculate carbon footprints using existing data

Menopause is much more than a biological transition—it is a profound shift that often arrives just when people experiencing it start to feel invisible. Because it has long been shrouded in darkness as an unmentionable female affliction, those going through menopause often feel unprepared and alone.

Recognizing that its customer demographic makes QVC uniquely positioned to surface conversations and provide support to those dealing with menopause, the video commerce retailer partnered with IDEO to figure out how it could not only meet customer needs, but also flip the conversation on midlife. To learn more, a team of female design researchers held in-depth interviews with folks experiencing it firsthand. The people they spoke to had limited information about what was going on with their bodies, and in some cases, it took years before they understood that symptoms they were experiencing were related to menopause. Respondents also reported that midlife brought a change in social status and the feeling of being boxed in by stereotypes.

QVC and IDEO worked together to design an integrated suite of offerings that could give customers a safe space to discover and share more about menopause. That included an on-air programming series called “Menopause Your Way,” where QVC could support those going through menopause in the privacy of their own homes, a digital landing page with useful solutions, and social media campaigns to help women share and learn more about each others’ experiences. Because people experience menopause and choose to manage it in many different ways, the team wanted to create an integrated ecosystem of content that women could access according to their unique journeys. The new offering helped QVC  reach its core audience with solutions and relevant products, and created a space where menopause is out in the open and part of an ongoing conversation. And in the process, QVC evolved to become a more customer-centric company, putting its audience and their needs at the heart of its offerings.

9/10 of British menopausal women say society and brands overlook them.

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1 in 2 women in the UK admitted they didn’t know what was happening to them during perimenopause.

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Nearly 40% of menopausal women are being prescribed antidepressants to help manage their symptoms, despite 4 out of 5 describing the treatment as “inappropriate.”

Season 2

a series focused on menopause is now in its second season

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Healthcare is a complex web of institutions, interaction, relationships, and services. In England, the National Health Service consists of thousands of separate organizations spread across the country. This fragmented structure means that rolling out digital tools and using them to their full potential can be difficult.

NHSX approached IDEO and Public Digital, IDEO’s sister company, for help designing user-centered resources that would empower Children and Young People’s Mental Health (CYPMH) practitioners to use digital tools more effectively, shifting service design from a reactive to a proactive process, and allowing each regional organization to create the best digital services for their children and young people.

The team took a human-centered approach, tapping into the perspectives, challenges and needs of NHS practitioners and leaders across the system over months of research. They then designed a set of accessible, straightforward online resources, courses, and templates that would enable a practitioner to start their own local service transformations. These included everything from practical advice on improving users’ experiences of CYPMH, to teaching methods for service design, to content focused on achieving digital transformation at scale.

The resources were easy to implement and replicate, allowing mental health practitioners across the country to seamlessly integrate physical and digital, create firebreaks in the system, and better bridge the gap between seeking care and receiving it. They were designed to evolve over time, and the work is replicable across the NHS, with the potential to touch millions of lives.

By empowering practitioners to utilize these digital tools to ease the burden of care, NHSX plans to create a positive ripple effect across the entire NHS, its partner organizations, and the country at large.

In a study undertaken in July 2020, the first summer of the COVID pandemic, the NHS found that clinically significant mental health conditions amongst children had risen by 50% compared to three years earlier.

More options, more access

digital resources are helping children and young people access more options for their mental health care

It’s not easy to shift the paradigm for an entire industry. But when a company comes along that promises to reinvent air travel, it opens up a blue sky of opportunities. That’s the flight path for Boom Supersonic, which is thinking big about how passengers arrive at their destination not only faster, but also with a greater sense of wellbeing.

To really comprehend the experience of flying in the unique contoured profile of this ultrafast jet, and to help Boom make key decisions about the design of the plane, the IDEO team believed that you had to go beyond algorithms and schematics—you needed to actually board it.

Using a “build-first” approach, the team quickly constructed a full-scale mockup of the fuselage from plywood and foam core. That became a prototyping platform to test multiple seating configurations, galley and lavatory size and placement, luggage storage solutions, and other concepts that would differentiate and add value to the passenger experience. For the first time, the Boom team was able to set foot in its own aircraft and truly understand the experience from the perspective of its clientele. The exercise allowed the Boom team to confidently make decisions by comparing multiple cabin configurations and options in full-scale.

Throughout the project, Boom and IDEO invited future travelers aboard to interact with the prototype and offer feedback. That input culminated in a more refined model, with augmented windows, moonroof, in-flight entertainment screens, and sound design—all further augmented by a Virtual Reality component to allow our future travelers to fully immerse in this new experience.

Together, Boom and IDEO brought a sneak peak to the Farnborough International Airshow, a biannual exhibition for the aerospace, aviation, and defense industries. The event was an opportunity to give the industry and potential customers a preview of Boom’s innovative new jet. In collaboration with the client, an exhibition architect, and a digital production agency, the team created an immersive environment designed to make the Overture experience feel tangible, eliciting the wonder of this revolutionary plane.

Boom’s presence at Farnborough not only underscored the Overture’s progress but provided an inspiring glimpse into the future of air travel. During the air show the company announced the production Overture design, a market-expanding alliance with Northrop Grumman, and agreements with tier one suppliers Collins Aerospace, Safran, and Eaton. Not long after, Boom received its largest order to date, this one from American Airlines. 

The prospect of getting to London in time for dinner just got a little closer.

Boom plans for Overture to get from New York to Frankfurt in just over four hours instead of the eight hours spent on a commercial jet today.

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The Overture supersonic jet has a cruising speed of Mach 1.7, about twice as fast as today’s commercial planes. Overture is built to fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuels (SAF).

20 Overture deposits

made by American Airlines, joining current customers United Airlines and Japan Airlines

While Lotbot has started to calm down and find its rhythm, another story has emerged. It’s the story of how our studio has adapted to living with a robot. It’s a story about how the design of AI, no matter how small a role it might play in our lives, has implications beyond its intended use—and can even influence the culture of an entire organization.

As a researcher with a background studying and designing human-computer interaction, I was enamored by the social bot. I started observing Lotbot’s day to day operations, and over time, I noticed that while most people were interacting with the bot using commands that it was trained to understand (e.g. “spot today”), a small group of people were holding on to the social norms they’d typically use in interpersonal interactions. This made me think: What motivated people to use words like please and thank you, when they knew that the AI wouldn’t know the difference anyway? And what does this mean for future interactions with robot coworkers?

I launched a full-on design research project. With support from my colleague Justin Wan, I collected quantitative data from Lotbot’s Slack channel to understand how the studio’s language patterns had changed since the bot was introduced. I also conducted a series of surveys and qualitative interviews to understand what motivated people’s approach to interacting with Lotbot.

Here’s what I found—and what it means for how we consider the connection between AI and the culture of organizations.

Language has changed, but we're still holding on to something

Before reviewing the Slack data, I hypothesized that shorter messages of 15 characters or less (“Need spot today”) indicated that the user believed they were interacting with a “robot,” while longer messages (“I need a spot today, please”) aligned with a more human-to-human conversation style. I also looked at the change in frequency of polite language such as please and thank you to see how often people were holding on to human-to-human conversation styles.

It turns out that once Lotbot was introduced to the parking channel, the number of messages that had 15 characters or less increased significantly, while the percentage of total messages using polite language decreased significantly (from 30 percent to 10 percent).

As Danny DeRuntz, the creator of Lotbot, explains, the AI was trained to recognize the basic components of a request—the need (a parking spot) and the timeframe (tomorrow)— so it’s no surprise that our interactions in the channel had started to become more, well, robotic.

The survey data, on the other hand, revealed that some people thought about Lotbot as another member of the studio—they treated it with the same respect they would a human colleague. Others said that they based their interactions on the fact that they knew the rest of the studio was watching. People were conscious of how their commands came across to other human colleagues who do care about people’s attitude, even if the bot doesn’t.

The in-person interviews further supported what the survey highlighted. Those who continue to use polite language are motivated to do so because they feel that it’s important to show gratitude when you’re asking for a limited resource. As one of my colleagues put it, gratitude is an important part of the collaborative culture at IDEO, and that should not be lost just because there’s a robot among us—especially since that robot exists solely to help us do our jobs.

Learning goes both ways with AI

So what does it all mean? The prominent narrative about AI and robots is that they are learning to interact with humans, but this quick study highlights that the learning goes both ways. In the context of the parking Slack channel, the limits of Lotbot’s functionality trained the humans to interact in a different way. A way that, for some who resisted the changes, felt antithetical to our company culture.

A group of data scientists at IDEO recently published a set of AI design principles. One of these principles asks designers to consider how their designs can be sensitive to people’s context and culture. AI systems are designed to provide efficiency, but in some settings, that efficiency might compromise and conflict with other institutional and cultural priorities, like politeness and gratitude. A recent article in Fast Company echoes this concern, suggesting designers of social bots should consider emotional thinking, helping bots be better companions in their interactions with humans.

But what does this mean for the design of Lotbot? Should it be designed in a way that encourages expressions of gratitude? It wouldn’t hurt— but the stakes are low, and the occasional robotic conversation is overshadowed by a number of other rituals and activities that keep our culture feeling friendly and free.

But the question does bring up an interesting opportunity area for social robots and AI in the context of larger offices, especially those that haven’t scaled ritual and culture. As companies grow, corporate culture can be hard to maintain, and as automation becomes more common it could get harder. If social robots like Lotbot can draw attention to the social norms that matter to a company’s culture, we might be able to create and use them to support corporate culture at scale. Social robots may be able to serve as reminders of cultural practice and values.

The possibilities are endless, but one thing’s for sure—human-computer interactions are influenced first and foremost by humans, and the humans of IDEO have spoken. After sharing my research about changes in conversation style with the studio at a recent lunch meeting, my colleagues took to Lotbot’s Slack channel to declare their love and admiration for the tiny bot. In the weeks that followed, I observed an uptick in polite language as well. While I’m in no position to analyze the psychological motivations behind this outpouring of love, it did make me wonder if we all felt the need to make something more human after we found ourselves becoming more robotic.

In November, we shared the story of Lotbot, an AI Slack bot we built to manage parking spots at our Cambridge studio. Long story short: In building Lotbot, we utterly misjudged its personality and found ourselves on the wrong end of a tiny tyrant.

Growing up, I fell in love with the rituals I had to go through to listen to music. I’d flip through my growing collection of cassette tapes, assessing my options based purely on album artwork. Selecting a tape meant that I’d found the perfect companion of mood, time, and place for the present moment. As the music started playing, I’d follow along with the lyrics and analyze the liner notes so that I could try to understand just a little more about what it was I was hearing.

As preferences for personal music collections shifted from analog to digital, convenience overtook curation. Cassettes and CDs were dethroned by the $0.99 iTunes single and, eventually, the killer Spotify playlist. Today, I myself am a diehard Spotify user who eagerly awaits a fresh “Discover Weekly” playlist. But over time, something special was lost. For many, the act of listening to music was no longer reserved for a particular time and place. Now it was everywhere, on-demand, all the time.

This is how the idea for Art of Listening was born. I’d been reflecting on the fact that much of my time was spent with music playing in my ears. Whether during my commute, throughout the day, or simply as I was winding down at home, I had been using music as background filler. Artists hadn’t stopped making albums with deliberate progressions, so why had I chosen to stop listening to them that way?

I wanted to find a way for others to join me in honoring the full-length album as an art form. For each listening, I transform a casual gathering space into a fully curated experience. I put the album artwork on display so that guests see it upon arrival, preparing them for the coming event. Once inside, they’re greeted by a playlist of previous albums, former bands, collaborations, and b-sides from the artist. A screen alternates between quotes pulled from past interviews and snapshots from their social media lives, giving life and character to the people behind the sounds.

We sit and listen to the album all the way through, without any interruptions; after it's finished, people share their reactions as well as anything it may have prompted them to write or draw.

For the attendees, each event is just a short exercise in active listening. For me though, preparation includes several days of collecting and organizing all of the small things that will make up the event. The process isn’t unlike a design project—it can sometimes be all too easy to get wrapped up in the minutiae of day-to-day tasks as you’re working through them. Just as I’d been focused on individual songs rather than the album they were a part of, it’s important to take a step back from your work and try to look at the whole. Now, I try to keep an eye on the larger goal, and ask myself whether the things I’m diving into are in support of getting me there.

As I’ve continued developing Art of Listening, I’ve learned a few lessons that apply to other projects I’m working on:

1. Use subtle cues to guide behavior

By the time guests enter the space, seating has already been carefully arranged. I want to make sure there’s enough room for everyone, but I also want to encourage people to meet their neighbors.

2. People are human, leave room for the human stuff

At the first event, I was so excited for the listening that I didn’t leave room for a break before starting the music. Once the album finished, people ran out of the room, disrupting a key moment for discussion and reflection.

3. Build in opportunities for reflection and feedback

After the music had finished playing at the first event I was nervous to leave people sitting in silence. I resumed the ambient playlist from earlier in the night, only to find that it prevented people from freely sharing their reactions to what we had just heard.

4. Measure by more than just content alone

For me, Art of Listening is much more than just listening to an album in silence. It’s about the moments of surprise and delight as people learn more about the artist, and the connections that form when people physically come together in one space. I don’t measure a successful event by how good the album was, but by the experiences that people have.

5. See the forest from the trees

My goal with Art of Listening is to provide people an opportunity to pay attention and appreciate music in the format the artist had intended. To get there, I had to realize that the art form itself hadn’t changed, but that I had changed how I’d chosen to experience it.

A small group of people sit nestled together in a room. Some are concentrating, eyes closed; others are diligently writing or drawing in notebooks. A select few carefully bounce in place. Nobody speaks, but everyone is connected by a common thread—the music that fills the room. Together they are practicing the Art of Listening.

Creativity Challenge #8: Empathize with customers, employees, and other end users.

One way to develop more empathy with—and gain new insights about—your customers is to look beyond the narrow definition of your offering and consider the customer’s total experience. The more broadly you define the customer experience, the more opportunities you can identify for improvement through design.

Say, for example, you make interior house paint. You could focus narrowly on the characteristics of the product itself, on making the paint less drippy or making it cover a surface in a single coat. But you’ll find many more opportunities for innovation if you think about the arc of the customer experience. In something as simple as repainting a bedroom, there are probably a dozen steps (each one of which is a chance to innovate): from getting the customer to realize that it’s time to repaint, to helping them choose the color, to shortening the preparation and cleanup time, to keeping track of which colors are on which walls for future reference when it comes time for touch-up.

A journey map helps you think systematically through the steps your customers—internal or external—have when they interact with your product or service. We use maps to synthesize what we learn from interviews and observations. (Or, during field research, you can also try asking your end user to map out his or her own journey.)

Tool: Customer Journey Map
Participants: Solo or groups of two to six people
Time: 1-4 hours
Supplies: Whiteboard or Post-its

Instructions

Step 1: Choose a process or journey that you want to map.
Step 2: Write down the steps. Make sure to include even small steps that may seem trivial. The goal is to get you to consider the nuances of the experience that you may normally overlook.
Step 3: Organize the steps into a map. Usually we display the steps sequentially in a timeline. Your map may include branches to show alternative paths in the customer journey. You could also use a series of pictures or whatever method fits your data.
Step 4: Look for insights. What patterns emerge? Anything surprising or strange? Question why certain steps occur, the order they occur in, and so forth. Ask yourself how you might innovate each step.
Step 5: If possible, show the map to people familiar with the journey and ask them what you’ve overlooked or gotten out of sequence.

Tips from the Field

Here is an example using this method:

Think about a trip to the hospital’s emergency room. Of course the most important moment is at the point of care, when the doc is diagnosing the problem or delivering treatment. But when people complain about (or, less commonly, rave about) their emergency room experience, it’s not usually the skill of the doctor they are talking about. A simple version of the patient journey might include moments like these:

• Experience the pain or discover the symptom
• Consider home treatment versus going to the hospital: the go/no go decision
• Choose transportation to the hospital
• Arrive and park (or pay the taxi, etc.)
• Enter the hospital and find the emergency room
• See the triage nurse
• Fill out the insurance forms
• Wait. And wait some more.
• Get ushered to the treatment room
• Put on an uncomfortable hospital gown, and wait some more
• See multiple preliminary nurses and technicians
• See the doctor for an assessment and sometimes preliminary diagnosis
• Undergo additional blood tests, X-rays, and so forth
• Receive a firmer diagnosis, which can lead to getting: instructions for home care, an outpatient procedure, a prescription, a follow-up appointment with a general practitioner or specialist, or admission to the hospital

As you lay out every step, ask yourself how you might cost-effectively innovate and turn the ordinary experience into something extraordinary.

Because emergency healthcare is often high-anxiety, we’ve discovered that patients are calmer if you spell out the journey ahead. We sometimes call that “journifying” the journey—taking an amorphous or scary process and breaking it down into tangible, predictable steps. We’ve found “journifying” helps people not only in the emergency room, but in any number of healthcare situations: taking your newborn home from the hospital, going in for surgery, or beginning a new treatment regimen.

This post was taken from Chapter 7 of Creative Confidence. Purchase the book for more on how to use creativity to solve problems, or read more from this series of creative exercises on the IDEO blog.

Everyone is creative. This belief runs through everything we do at IDEO, and in 2013, it led my brother David and me to write a book that would help others—even those who don’t think of themselves as “creative types”—to unleash their creative potential. Creative Confidence has inspired thousands of people to adopt a creative mindset and apply it to the diverse real-world challenges they face. In this series, we’ll share some exercises from the book that can help you approach your challenges from a new perspective.

I spent my afternoons on a small wooden pier, relaxing and staring up at clouds, looking for shapes. That pursuit is an exploration of pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. It was in that leisure time, trying to make sense of the clouds, that I found the comfort that I’d been seeking.

Nine years later, I found myself back in America, interning at IDEO Chicago, where I had far less opportunity for leisurely cloud gazing. Without the spare time to hang out on a pier, I wondered if I could engineer the same kind of comfort. Could I design an experience that brought back those long dreamy pareidolia days with the help of an app?

After all, people in my age bracket, between 25-34 years old, only spend an average of 13 minutes per day relaxing, according to the American Use of Time Survey, and experts say that we need to acknowledge and accept that we’re leisure-limited. Maybe this could be a shortcut to that leisure we’re missing.

So I created “Pareidolia,” an app that searches the sky on my behalf. It’s my way of trying to keep a part of my mind exploring, even when I need to be inside, working. If the app thinks it sees something in the clouds, it pings me to take a look.

To create Pareidolia, I set up a Raspberry Pi and a camera on the terrace of our Chicago studio, and programmed it to look continuously at the sky, searching for interesting shapes. The project uses computer vision, tensorflow, and keras to perceive images in clouds, then snaps an image, generates a drawing of what it imagines it might look like, and shares them via Slack. (The code can be found and downloaded from this Github repo.) It tells us what it sees in the sky in real time and invites us to go out and look for it.

As I started to share Pareidolia with colleagues and friends, my creation was met with mixed reviews. Ross Weijer, a data scientist here at IDEO Chicago, thought that it created efficiency while offering a different perspective. “Technology is something that speeds up your life and, lets you do things quicker,” he said. “So I think it’s subversive and helpful to have the aim of this project be to spare your imagination. It’s saying, ‘Stop, stop, take a moment to consider this.’”

Others, though, felt that the payoff wasn’t seeing images in the clouds, but actually, the act of searching for them. “I look at the sky so little, that when I do it’s because I am looking for an escape,” said Kevin Matuszeski, regional director of business operations “There are very few places left without the presence of screens or where you have to read something. So the pure joy of staring at something just for its beauty should be respected."

In other words, for some people, the joy lays in the process, and Pareidolia seemed to eliminate that.

Pareidolia didn’t turn out to be quite the leisure fix that I hoped it would. And it didn’t quite prove to be an antidote to homesickness, either. But it did encourage me to get outside, take my eyes off a screen for a few minutes, and enjoy nature as much as I could from the concrete of my downtown Chicago office. And even if it wasn’t a total fix, it does brighten up my days.

I was only 16 when I moved across the Atlantic to Vancouver Island, Canada, thousands of miles away from my home in Spain. In this strange new world, I found myself struggling to find something that felt familiar, and could give me comforts of home.

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.