Since its founding over a century ago, Tokyo College of Music (TCM) has trained countless world-class musicians. Despite its well-established reputation, however, the school was feeling a pressing need to reconsider its role in order to remain relevant in a changing world.

The college had plans to build a second campus in Daikanyama, a prominent area of Tokyo known for being a hotbed for new global trends. Taking advantage of this opportunity, TCM leaders asked IDEO to help them develop a new concept for the school, and to redesign the learning experience while preserving a focus on classical music.

To kick off the research phases of the project, IDEO designers interviewed TCM students, and traveled to London, New York, and Boston visiting educational institutions, music schools, and arts facilities.

The team observed that students at music colleges outside of Japan were giving serious consideration to their career plans at an early stage in their studies, acquiring a variety of skills and mindsets through a well-rounded education. By contrast, TCM students were focused on learning and performing classical music, but tended not to have a clear image of future career opportunities.

IDEO proposed four specific directions for TCM’s new campus, based on an overarching theme of “culture, fields, and people collaborating across boundaries.” The first aim was to foster a business mindset and entrepreneurial spirit among the students that surpassed their classical music training. Next was to increase opportunities for actual performances, collaborations with professionals outside the school, and joint projects. The third aim was to position the college as a platform that would encourage the spontaneous creation of communities within and outside the school. The final aim was to develop students who were digitally savvy and fluent in new technologies, enabling them to continue evolving in response to developments in the real world. These goals are reflected in the various spaces of the school, as well as in the design of the experiences that occur in those spaces.

The most symbolic of these spaces is the Creative Lab. Originally intended as a library, the space now functions as a platform where people from within and outside the school community can collaborate and generate innovative ideas. The open layout, which encloses a cafeteria for students and faculty, can be altered depending on programming needs. The Creative Lab provides a venue not only for live performances in which the students can polish their improvisational skills, but for holding workshops and other events on topics such as cultural exchange, business, and new technologies.

New furniture and objects were carefully selected to inspire spontaneous encounters and conversation between students from different departments and staff, creating a flow of activity.

Even the landings on the staircases, which tend to be dead space, were designed with this concept in mind. One student commented that the space facilitates meeting new people and creates “opportunities for deeper interaction with students from other departments.” This intentional, open design has transformed the space into a hub within the school and the local community.

Through the new environment and educational opportunities at TCM's Daikanyama campus, students now have stronger opportunities to apply their creative talents in numerous fields worldwide, creating impact informed by the various perspectives, skills, and relationships they have developed at TCM.

Georgia is among the most populous states in the American South. It’s a place with a storied past and promising future—on the rise economically, and continuing its powerful cultural impact on music, TV, cuisine, and tourism. Over 10.4 million people call Georgia home, and nearly all of these people will at some point navigate the state’s websites for securing everyday services. Ideally, this online platform would provide unifying and accessible government resources for everyone, whether they’re renewing their vehicle registration, seeking a fishing license, or looking up tax law updates.

Georgia’s Office of Digital Services (DSGA), part of the Georgia Technology Authority, was challenged with designing a platform to modernize the collective and individual online presence of 80+ state agencies, many of which used visually disconnected formats and color palettes that could leave the public feeling confused. DSGA recognized that they could provide more efficient and higher quality service to the public if they simplified the language, designed the site from the user's point of view, and created a more cohesive look and feel across agencies.

IDEO worked with the DSGA to identify the priorities of Georgia residents who use the various agency websites. On a road trip from Savannah to Atlanta, with stops in Macon and Dublin, the IDEO team immersed themselves in the rich culture of Georgia, connecting with social workers, low-income residents, state agency leadership and civic organizations to learn how Georgia’s digital properties could better address their disparate needs.

The design research underscored that there isn’t just one Georgia—it’s a tapestry of people, geographies and political orientations. Yet several common themes emerged, including:

Georgians want their government to “give it to them straight.” On the redesigned Georgia.gov platform, the people of Georgia can easily search popular topics to get the information they need. This includes learning how to apply for food stamps, renewing a business license, or simply finding out the location of a local office in their area. If a user has remaining questions, they can connect directly with a real human for further assistance, balancing direct information with warmth and a personal touch. User feedback on the site provides the opportunity for continuous design improvement.

Georgians want to take pride in the legacy and the future of their state. IDEO developed an entirely new design system with new navigational elements, fonts, and a color palette inspired by Georgia’s landscapes, all of which can be modified for individual agencies while remaining consistent with the state brand.

A distillation of the original Georgia seal adds authority, and new icons anchor the site’s menus and bring more clarity to the search function. The platform was designed to be Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 AA compliant, providing clear and accessible page content that adheres to federal laws and international web standards. To instill trust in Georgia’s online presence, each page also has a header that indicates it’s an official Georgia State website and outlines the uniform features constituents can use to identify this.

With improved navigation and easy-to-access prioritized content, Georgia.gov is a much more efficient platform for addressing requests from citizens. The site projects a happy-to-help, citizen-centered approach that aims to empower all Georgians so that they feel confident, informed, and prepared.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 30 million Americans have diabetes, almost 10% of the population. The vast majority of these diagnoses are type 2, which is commonly treated through a combination of medicine, diet, and exercise. Today, one of the major barriers to better outcomes is access to trusted information. As little as 15 percent of people with diabetes receive adequate education from their healthcare providers on managing their disease and making recommended lifestyle changes.

Ascensia Diabetes Care, a global healthcare company, has been a leader in diabetes treatment for over 70 years, known primarily for producing blood glucose meters. IDEO has worked with Ascensia for more than a decade, helping develop and design their CONTOUR NEXT ONE meter in 2016. In 2017, Ascensia engaged IDEO with a new goal of moving the company beyond physical devices. Ascensia envisioned a first-of-its-kind approach to educating and monitoring diabetes patients. In partnership with IDEO, they wanted to build a comprehensive solution—one that would not simply take glucose readings and document food intake, but would consider all factors that impact a person's health.

Through deep collaboration, Ascensia and IDEO built a powerful app-based service. The project began with a strategic vision for the experience and ended with the delivery of an all-encompassing health offering, including training of providers, packaging, app design, content creation, and visual design.

The patient experience married data and tracking, real-life mentorship, and personalized content. When a patient signed up, they were paired with a Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) who created a tailored program based on their needs and linked them to relevant articles on topics like cooking, mental wellbeing, and sexual health. The IDEO team led the charge in hiring and training guides, crafting the educational content, and even designing the content management hub.

The data engine behind the app is another one of the program's stand-out qualities. The app pulled data from multiple data sources—exercise bands and glucose meters—to provide constant feedback, track progress, and continually refine the experience. To generate empathy, as well as build the app's initial data set, IDEO's data scientists tested the product on themselves. One designer wore a wrist full of exercise monitors around the office and tracked her blood sugar after every meal.

The app-based service was tested with 60 people and demonstrated remarkable early results. Only two participants failed to complete the study—a stunning success rate when adherence to therapy for chronic illnesses in developed countries averages around 50%. Additionally, participants reported drastic improvements in both physical and mental health. One recently widowed 70-year-old woman emerged from depression, returned to swimming, and started having regular blood sugar readings.

The project required Ascensia to embrace new ways of working internally, adopt a broader view of their offering, and ultimately expand the way they serve people with diabetes.

When Mr. Gordon told his fifth grade students they were taking a field trip on a bus, many of them envisioned the city bus that they ride each day to school. But when they saw the Verizon Explorer Lab pull into the school parking lot, they realized a unique experience awaited them. Painted in bright colors, this bus promised something very different from their daily commute.

“Climb aboard, explorers!” says the Lead Explorer. The students walk through the bus’ sliding doors and inside, where instead of rows of seats, they find a sleek research lab. Suddenly, the lights dim. The bus makes a rumbling noise as though it’s about to lift off. And on a large screen, a vision of Earth from space appears. The students listen and point as the video narrator briefs them on NASA’s ongoing search for life in space.

Science education isn’t always this fun. Some kids have a chance to learn through interactive games, immersive experiences, or engaging field trips; but many lack access to rich educational experiences in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). As a result, they can be less likely to pursue careers in STEM, though many future jobs will demand mastery of these subjects. This not only impacts a student’s potential and future, but reduces the diversity and number of qualified STEM job applicants.

In under-resourced schools, students are often limited to the scarce tools available for STEM learning in their classrooms. Many kids rarely have a chance to leave their neighborhoods. For these kids, mobile learning experiences that come to their school offer unparalleled exposure to cutting-edge, technologically advanced, and—most importantly—inspiring gateways into these critical academic subjects.

As part of its focus on digital inclusion, Verizon partnered with IDEO to share the excitement of STEM learning with middle schoolers. To facilitate access and discovery of STEM, the team designed a learning experience that takes place on a coach bus and can be scaled to reach kids across the nation.

The team set out to transform the bus into the Verizon Explorer Lab: a futuristic research lab that transports kids to new environments, from outer space to under the sea. As part of the larger Verizon Innovative Learning program, the Verizon Explorer Lab offers delightful and rigorous content that meets national science standards.

A multidisciplinary team comprised of designers across interaction, communication, environments, games, and software partnered with Verizon to bring the Verizon Explorer Lab to life.

To keep the student at the center of the experience, the team designed alongside kids. Their gravitation toward play, interaction, and technology inspired the digital game that students play onboard the bus. When developing the game’s narrative, the designers turned to popular kids’ books and movies. What began as a card game prototype eventually became a 360-degree video and virtual reality expedition to Mars—complete with a custom musical score—that introduces middle schoolers to engineering basics.

After stepping through the bus doors and taking a tour of the solar system, Mr. Gordon’s students receive an emergency call from NASA: They must rescue the missing Curiosity rover, which is dedicated to collecting evidence of life on Mars. Eager to save Curiosity, the students become immersed in the adventure at hand. And through the adventure, they become immersed in science.

Students use tablets to design their own Mars rover. Each rover appears on a large screen and traverses the planet’s extreme terrain. The goal is to collect data that suggests life on Mars, including ice deposits, photos, and more. Students iterate on their rover’s design—wheels, power sources, and sensors—to test if it can stand up against dust storms and craters. The team consulted a NASA planetary scientist to ensure accuracy, as well as educators to establish cohesion with classroom curricula.

During the game, students are encouraged to compare designs and learn from each other: One rover may be able to travel long distances and take various photos, while another can carry large quantities of ice and sediment samples but can’t go far because of its size. At the end of the mission, the group finds Curiosity and sends all of the evidence they’ve collectively gathered back to NASA to aid the search for life beyond Earth. Before departing the bus, students watch an animated video that explains various jobs in STEM and encourages kids to pursue one of these careers.

The Verizon Explorer Lab teaches students the engineering design loop, the value of collaboration and teamwork, and what a career in STEM might look like. The mission to Mars game is just one of many potential STEM learning opportunities for students and integrated, customizable learning modules for teachers.

Since launch, the Verizon Explorer Lab has traveled to various parts of the United States and reached thousands of kids. It continues to be managed by Learning Undefeated, Verizon’s nonprofit partner. By designing for and with students, it’s possible to create educational experiences that facilitate meaningful learning and genuine fun. The Verizon Explorer Lab represents progress towards a more inclusive future for employers and the STEM field.

In exploring the topic, I soon realized the issue was not the lack of stuff he would leave behind when he passed away, but rather quite the opposite. Today, a digital information overload is present for almost all of us.

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As the techie of the family, I’ve taken on the role of digital archivist for two close loved ones we’ve lost over the years. My brother died in 2003, and 15 years is a very long time ago in technological terms. Nonetheless, I was able to build an archive of his photos, MP3s, school papers, personal documents, and other digital fragments. I felt closer to him because of this.

Today of course, we have social media, and it’s a cultural trope to say that we live out our lives publicly on it. But social data only represents a limited and curated self that we share with the world. Our digital footprint is vast. Beyond our social data, we have our emails and chat histories, the photos and videos we take, the photos and videos others take of us, and our web searches—all of which are rich with metadata, including time, date, and location.

IBM estimates that humanity is generating 250 billion gigabytes of data every single day, and that 90 percent of all the data ever created by mankind has been generated in the past two years alone. In just two years, we’ve surpassed the volume of the entire record of human knowledge from cave paintings up until the end of 2015.

Consider that we’ve only had photographs for a few generations. I can look back at this photo of my young grandfather and his rugby team in County Sligo, Ireland, but we have no photos of his grandfather. Until quite recently, most of humanity never had any record of how their ancestors looked—something we take for granted today. Even the written word was not always ubiquitous; just 200 years ago it’s estimated that only 12 percent of the world’s population was literate.

The digital records for people over a certain age are inherently incomplete, but the younger you are, the more complete your picture is, whether you created it yourself or it was captured by your parents as they documented your childhood to share with Grandma. In the historical blink of an eye, our digital footprints have gone from spotty to distinct—a complete picture of our online lives.

This begs the questions: What if we left our digital footprints behind intentionally? How might we curate, filter, or amend our digital records as we plan for our own end of life?

There are a number of emerging technologies and techniques that can help us design our digital afterlives. If you’re interested in training a chatbot to mimic you, you can begin today with Replika.ai, a bot that learns to be more like you the more you use it. The team behind it has even open-sourced their underlying chat tech on GitHub.

VocalID is a company that allows people to preserve their vocal legacy by recording a set of voice samples. Its primary customers are people who lose their voices—for example those with ALS or Parkinson’s. Could people give these voice samples to family members after their deaths, or request that their voices die with them?

Beyond text, researchers at the University of Washington have shown that with a broad enough set of video samples, we can train an AI to create entirely new video clips of the same subjects. And emerging technology called “deep fakes” can use machine learning to swap faces in online videos.

Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Syncing from Audio. University of Washington.

The collision of our immense datasets with rapidly advancing abilities in machine learning is not only inevitable, it’s happening now. Roman Mazurenko is a digital avatar of the real Roman built by one of his grieving friends after his death. Anyone can download it/him from the app store.

This is not about the singularity or transhumanism; I’m not talking about uploading my consciousness to the cloud to create Virtual Sean. But rather, how might our loved ones experience us differently after we pass?

In the future, we’ll have new ways to preserve more bits and pieces of ourselves— our voices, photos, texts, etc.—and new ways for our loved ones to experience this ephemera. There will be new challenges as well. Much of the data we create is invisible to us and is not under our direct control or ownership. When we pass, this data will live on, whether we like it or not.

I expect that you might be simultaneously intrigued and concerned by this topic; that’s to be expected. But just as we must one day face the end of our lives, we must also grapple with our digital identities and digital legacies.

Let’s get the dialogue started.

A few months ago, my cousin asked me about his digital legacy. He asked how his kids could explore his personal artifacts—his ephemera—in the digital age, when there are no vinyl records, physical photographs, or even MP3s to hand down.

In the design world, the practice of critique relies on a universal language learned in art school. Students routinely pin their work up on a wall, and offer feedback in the same way that was modeled for them. From industrial to graphic design, students learn a shared form of expression that allows them to engage with each others’ work and make suggestions for how it could be better.

Perhaps leaning back, stroking one’s chin, and groupthinking creative work is like dancing about architecture, but at least in art school, everyone knows the steps to the dance.

In the modern world of design work, that’s no longer the case. I joined IDEO more than 10 years ago. Since then, the number of disciplines we practice have mushroomed from around 10 to 33. Our backgrounds vary wildly, as do our outputs—from artifacts to interventions, micro to macro, processes to systems. And we’re not the only ones working this way. Multidisciplinary teams are more and more common across industries, and each discipline or practice brings its own jargon—and methods of critique.

In other words, the language barriers teams have to deal with are increasing.

So, how does a data designer critique a teammate’s copywriting? How does a graphic designer articulate her intuition about business design? How does a multidisciplinary team find a universal language to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a proposed solution?

These questions sent me and a few coworkers off on a assignment. We set out to create a shared vocabulary for critique that would be broad enough to serve the challenges of today. We started by asking: What qualities do we most associate with creative excellence in our work? And, how might critique help ensure our solutions have the desired impact? We came up with an initial prototype, and tested it with teams in the wild.

That experiment illuminated a few things:

• Different disciplines do use different language for talking about their work
• What good looks like is about both process and outcome
• Designers are hungry for this conversation

So, we continued to test the vocabulary. The list diverged and converged until we landed on a set of seven key words, knowing that each is but a doorway into a world of meaning with many interpretations.

1. Beauty
2. Brains
3. Bravery
4. Destiny
5. Heart
6. Magic
7. Mastery

(You can download the cards here.)

The qualities are intentionally open-ended so that all designers (err, all humans) can relate, and so that they can be interpreted in ways that are appropriate in a given context.

The vocabulary was immediately valuable, helping designers move beyond binary sentiments of what is “working” and “not working,” to a more honest and nuanced discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the work.

Imagine a critique that goes something like this:

Lauren (Software designer): How are you feeling about the content?

Jason (Writer): A little bored.

Lauren: Well, it’s a dry subject.

Jason: But people are people. If I’m bored writing it, they’ll be bored reading it.

Lauren: True. But if you’ve nailed the technical aspects maybe we can play a little...what do you think it needs?

Jason: Heart...maybe some Bravery...

Feels a little like dancing, right?

And that is just a snippet. The vocabulary provides an entry point into deep craft critiques that go well beyond aesthetics, or anything we can pin on a wall. As one coworker remarked to me, “We started thinking about beauty in relationship to an org chart—how it could be graceful and smart.”

The shared language is also useful outside of a design team.

Team member: We use this vocabulary to make sure our work is as bold, innovative, and effective as possible. How do you think your organization might respond to these prompts?

CMO: We are all about data...so that sounds like rigor. Teams are paralyzed until they have all the data. I don’t expect that will change over the course of this project, but I would love for you to help us see the value of beauty and bravery.

With a shared language, we are able to not only name our tendencies (as this CMO did), but identify strengths and weaknesses across the seven qualities, both specific to each discipline’s contribution, and as a whole. This builds empathy and understanding for individual efforts on a team, and creates agreements for how to further develop the work.

In our New York studio, we have been using the vocabulary as a way to reflect on our entire portfolio. As a community of intense New Yorkers, we had assumed that rigor and brains would surface. But as we critiqued our work from 2017, we realized that the work that embodied magic and heart in equal parts was what catalyzed clients and made us most proud.

Realizations like this brought up some compelling questions:

How do we embrace magic and heart in our business development process?

What does the resonance of magic and heart say about New York (and the world) today?

How do we want to stretch and grow in 2018?

In just over a year, the critique vocabulary has helped us reach a new level of discourse and awareness. It has pushed us in new ways, as individuals, teams, and a community. It has opened up new conversations with our clients, and given them language to more deeply engage in our work together.

And this is just the beginning.

Vocabulary is never fixed. It is a living organism that will evolve with time. We hope you will take this critique vocabulary and make it your own.

As we face increasingly complex design challenges, and creative, multidisciplinary teams are called upon to solve them, rigorous critique will be essential.

We can only hope it feels like dancing.

Shout out to IDEO Cambridge, Chicago, and New York for collaboration on these cards. Download the cards here.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. The adage has been used in countless ways since the early 1900s, and it’s still the best way I know to describe the challenge of critiquing creative work. What it means to me is, we’re using the wrong language, but it’s all we have.

For Rina, these tiny pointillist masterpieces are about more than just a side project. “Because I have a fast-paced, collaborative job, I love having an environment that allows me to slow down and reflect,” she says.

Years after she and I worked together—back when she was an associate art director at Wired—a friend took me to see her show in a Brooklyn coffee shop. Though the concept was simple, the work was incredibly engaging. I caught up with Rina to learn more about her art, her process, and how “_leafiness_” (her handle on Instagram) helps her meditate and stay creative.

In one sentence, who are you?

An art director, artist, and nature lover.

What do you do? How did you learn it?

I was lucky to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York with amazing mentors and teachers.

In my free time, I paint leaves, though that happened by accident. I live in Park Slope, where the leaves are really beautiful in the fall. I started picking them up on walks, and I happened to have some oil-based pens from a glass project I had done. I got inspired by the shapes of the leaves, and started using the pens—it just happened without me even thinking that much about it. I find it extremely soothing. Many people work together to figure out what goes on a magazine page. It requires a lot of communication, understanding, and clarity. But with this, there’s no one else to weigh in. It’s my yoga.

3 favorite possessions?

1. Black and white photographs of my family in Russia, where I was born. I moved here with them from Moscow when I was 18.
2. Jewelry from my grandma that I never wear but always keep.
3. A collection of handmade paper that I haven’t found a project for yet.

What does a typical work session look like?

I usually get the idea for what I want to do with a leaf in the morning, then do the repetitive work in the evening. Most of the time, I don’t listen to music, but if I do, I listen to meditation music. Otherwise, I end up analyzing the music instead of focusing on what I’m doing. It’s important to be fully in control of your process. It really teaches me to make decisions and be confident in them.

How do you get over creative block?

Fortunately with leaves, I haven't encountered creative blocks yet. It really puts me in a different state, and helps quiet my mind when I make decisions.

What was the last item on your to do list?

Go to the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium. I want to learn different techniques for collection and preservation.

How do you see the world in 2078?

I hope that technology will get better at allowing us to manage and do things faster and easier, but I also hope that in the process of getting there, we can maintain the environment that we need to live.

What’s your number one bucket list item?

I want to live in Italy and speak Italian. The language is so beautiful.

Who are you creative crushin’ on lately?

My crush right now is the artist Sheila Hicks. The thing I absolutely love about her is that she’s still inspired and creating art at the age of 83. No matter how small or large her work—big, sculptural balls of wool fiber, or something tiny—it has this amazing impact. She’s so fluid in expressing any possible emotion. It’s so important to have that in your life, especially over such a long period. To me, she is the luckiest person on earth.

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By day, Rina Kushnir works with illustrators and designs layouts for the New Yorker. But on her own time, she paints leaves she collects in her Brooklyn neighborhood, meticulously studying their patterns and adding dots of oil paint, punched holes, and patterns.

I had some time to kill so I asked a few questions. He neatly tied his theory to aliens, a league of physicists, and a deal with China. Crazy, you might say, but research suggests that the majority of us believe in at least one conspiracy theory.

We’re living in a tornado of misinformation, conspiracies, and fake news. But instead of simply lamenting that fact as you continue scrolling through your feed, let’s learn from it.

As a designer who works to help school systems become more innovative, it’s my job to help spread good ideas. Why not borrow from the sticky, sharable methods behind conspiracy theories to get some good ideas out into the world?

After chatting with my friend at the auto shop, I took a long look at what makes conspiracy theories so compelling and came up with a list of five practices we can nab to spread good. (Know Rogers’ Attributes of Innovations that spread? Conspiracies fit right in!)

1. Start with something recognizable

Memorable conspiracies begin with something familiar—an entrenched belief or a curious phenomena.

The “chemtrails” conspiracy, for example, says that planes leave behind biological agents with lasting effects on the population. People saw white lines in the wake of airplanes in the sky and wondered about it. From this, a new belief was formed.

There’s a lesson here for getting new ideas to take off! Try introducing new concepts through existing beliefs, habits or built-in systems. When we talk about design thinking with educators, for example, we often note that prototyping is just like doing a lesson twice in the same day, but differently. This helps educators reconcile a new practice with an old one.

2. Address a common pain point

Most conspiracies offer up a scapegoat.

It’s common to blame Big Pharma, for example, for withholding cures to diseases for profit.

Blaming large groups of people for complex problems isn’t a good habit. But, when sharing good ideas, we can change the script on scapegoats by proposing a partner to help solve a problem. Leaders in the civil rights movement, for example, helped to spur a broader conversation about women’s liberation—both movements were helped by the other.

3. Let people dream

Some of my favorite conspiracies allow farfetched wishes to come true. Tupac and Elvis, they’re still alive! These conspiracies are rooted in desire. To help new ideas take off, connect them with people’s wildest dreams.

4. Create iconography to build identity

When we see alien iconography out in the world, it gives us a sense—true or not—of how widespread belief in alien life may be. In Roswell, New Mexico, you can pick up all kinds of little green man kitsch—T-shirts with slogans like ALIENS ARE ALIVE and bug-eyed masks at the International UFO Museum. We’re much more likely to believe something when we think lots of other people do, too.

5. Keep it simple

Lasting conspiracies are easily explained in a sentence or less.

The Moon landing hoax, for example, makes a clear and simple argument: Americans wanted to outpace the Russians in space exploration, so they faked the landing on the Moon. The details of how and why may be a wormhole, but the thesis is simple.

Likewise, when you want to share a new idea, make sure that its value is explained simply and unambiguously. The #neveragain movement managed to powerfully convey its message with a simple hashtag.

Conspiracy theories and fake news teach us a lot about how information spreads—and that can be useful as we try to spread good in the world. Here’s one last lesson: All of us believe in something that’s not entirely true. Our shared habit of believing things we want to be true—regardless of what they are—unites us.

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On a road trip up the coast of California, I ended up stuck at an auto repair shop with a man who had some interesting ideas. “The government has a zero-point energy machine that could end our reliance on fossil fuels,” he told me.

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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.