Have you ever had that gnawing feeling, just as you’re sitting down to your computer at work, that you’ve left the central heating on at home? You’re not alone. Rising concern about wasted energy and the financial cost of unregulated thermostats, as well as the convenience of a connected and cozy home, all point to the rise of the smart thermostat. Berg Insights projects it’ll grow 64.7 percent over the next five years.

Founded in Munich in 2011, tado° is Europe’s biggest maker of smart thermostats and air-conditioning controls. Looking to grow, tado° approached IDEO, a longtime collaborator, with a late-stage prototype for a new, wall-mounted gadget to connect any air-conditioning unit to the web so it could be controlled remotely through a smartphone app.

Dubbed tado° Cooling, the device recognizes when people leave their house and heats or cools the house upon their return. The brand tasked IDEO with a three-fold goal: gauge interest in the device, raise brand awareness, and work out product/market fit.

After stakeholder interviews, research, and prototyping, IDEO supported tado°’s team in refreshing the industrial design of the hardware and creating a distinctive yet unified user-interface language for the brand’s existing and future products.

To work out what potential customers thought of tado° Cooling, tado° turned to a novel research medium: Kickstarter. Its ultimate goal? Knowing whether people would part with their money for one. The IDEO team provided an overarching crowdfunding strategy, including funding goals, giving tiers, and marketing, and shot the brand’s Kickstarter campaign video.

As a result, the campaign burst through its $150,000 funding goal to $200,000, and scored coverage in a raft of tech media outlets including TechCrunch, GigaOm, TheNextWeb, Engadget, and PC Magazine. After hitting its “stretch goal,” tado° is adding non-A/C device controls, a Windows Phone app, and IFTTT and Jawbone Up integration.

In addition to media coverage, and showing the public’s appetite for the device, the Kickstarter community’s conversation unearthed further user insights that fed into product development, according to tado° head of design, Jens Pohl.

Buoyed by that success, tado° enlisted IDEO to translate user insights and a big-picture overview of the connected home sector into new services to enhance the device’s UX, and introduced new business models to strengthen its European brand strategy. Early visual concepts, learnings, and evidence from this exploration supported the brand’s investor pitch, securing a further round of $15 million venture capital.

Dr. Reddy’s, a 36-year-old global pharmaceutical company headquartered in India, was growing at a rapid pace. Over the years, the company’s main focus had been on producing affordable generic medication. But with more than 24,000 employees and seven distinct business units operating in 100 countries, there was an urgent need to identify a core, unifying purpose—one that would articulate a set of shared values and align leaders on key business decisions and goals.

G.V. Prasad, the company’s Co-Chairman and Managing Director, knew that the vision had to be simple and elegant–an emotional drive that every employee across the company could relate to and act upon.

Prasad partnered with IDEO to distill the focus that would align the company. Over the course of several months, Dr. Reddy’s team worked with IDEO to learn about the needs of everyone, from shop floor workers to scientists, external partners and investors. Together, they defined and distilled the essence of the company, paring it down to four simple words that center on the patient: Good health can’t wait.

The simplicity of these words belie their power. According to Prasad, the newly articulated purpose has resonated across the company, changing the whole culture of the organization. The idea of infusing a sense of urgency and nimbleness to their systems as a means of serving their customers has had a direct application in almost every corner of the business. Employees connect the message to their own experience, and each of the different business units are now moving towards a common goal.

A Shift Inside

“Good health can’t wait” has become a powerful recruitment tool and employee rallying cry. It makes clear that the company is in the business of serving patients, not just creating products, no matter how innovative or affordable. This has given a new sense of meaning to all personnel, from frontline sales representatives to senior leaders to scientists. Many key decision-makers, including new CEO Erez Israeli, share that the purpose statement inspired them to join the company.

Articulating Dr. Reddy’s purpose has empowered these employees to take risks, experiment, and work together. For example, the marketing department has refocused its efforts on finding solutions that improve patients’ consistent use of their medications. And motivated by the idea that patients can no longer wait for a cure, employees from different disciplines are coming together to find inventive ways of bringing new products to market in record time.

“The website medznat.ru required immense collaboration between various teams—medical, information technology, marketing, and analytics,” says Mvsma Raja, Head of Strategy and Marketing for Emerging Markets. “This served as a platform to bring the latest happenings in the area of pain management to doctors in Russia, who we learned are looking for the latest medical updates on the go.” Building on this cross-functional collaboration and momentum, Dr. Reddy’s established an internal design studio dedicated to using consumer insights and rapid prototyping to drive innovation.

New Offerings

“Our brand belief has inspired how we’ve thought about our future growth,” says CEO Erez Israeli. The new purpose unlocked a series of initiatives, including the aforementioned website for Russian physicians and innovative pill packaging that helps patients better understand their instructions.

Purple Pack is a new type of pill package that ensures that vital information like the expiration date is not torn off and thrown away. Born out of Dr. Reddy’s in-house design studio, Purple Pack allows the pharmacist or patient to mark their daily dosage and reminders on the packaging itself, as paper prescriptions are often misplaced.

A Business Boost

“Good health can’t wait” has not only attracted and unified talent and inspired new offerings, it’s boosted both sales and profit. For example, Dr. Reddy’s generic oral diabetes medication, Metsmall, has become the fourth largest brand in India based on the number of pills sold. The medication is distinct from competitors’ versions in that the pill is smaller and easier to swallow—a clear embodiment of product development oriented around the patient. With its signature Purple Pack convenience packaging, the medication has been one of the fast-growing Indian pharmaceutical brands over the last two years.

Looking ahead, both Prasad and Israeli hope to continue building a purpose-led culture that influences the business from the inside out, inspiring employees to be empathetic and responsive and realizing its mission to deliver good health to all.

In 2006, the MacArthur Foundation made what became a big bet about the future of education, shifting its attention away from the traditional school-based model of reform toward a more youth-centered approach.

By 2014, the bet was starting to pay off, but for it to really succeed, it needed an innovative path to scale and an entrepreneurial approach to sustainability. That’s when MacArthur came to IDEO for help in designing a new organization.

Together, IDEO and MacArthur set out to transform the foundation’s efforts into a self-sustaining enterprise that could balance the social responsibilities of a nonprofit with the lasting viability of a business—an opportunity that was as much about designing a new infrastructure as it was about creating a new culture.

Using a novel prototyping process, IDEO created three illustrated scenarios to tell different versions of LRNG’s possible future, each with an alternative portraiture of its purpose, vision, operating structure, product portfolio, and business model. Through a playful, modular storytelling structure, the stakeholders considered the potential trade-offs of the different approaches and how to prioritize their organizational goals with clear definitions of success.

These different future-forward scenarios helped funders and partners grasp a radical organizational vision, as well as a clear operational model that was go-to-market-ready.

In October 2015, the MacArthur Foundation launched Collective Shift, the organization behind LRNG, with $25 million in seed funding and 30 partners, including Arizona State University, Gap Foundation, the Boys & Girls Clubs, Electronic Arts, and musical artist John Legend.

Based on the scenarios created by IDEO, LRNG is dedicated to creating a “learning as a lifestyle” movement that will transform the learning landscape and close the equity and opportunity gap for young people.

Hundreds of millions of people, from excitable teens driving their first hatchback, to new parents going in for a minivan, have driven Fords off lots around the world since the first Ford Model A was produced in 1903. And cars have changed how we shop, travel, and work; they’ve reshaped our homes, towns, and the world’s infrastructure.

Today, Ford, along with the entire industry, is at an inflection point. As millions around the world move into gridlocked, polluted cities, the allure of owning a shiny new car has dulled. In some places, young people are driving less, and getting their licenses later or not at all. Lightening their load, city dwellers are relying on ride-sharing services and other alternatives to individual ownership.

Technology underpins that shift from ownership to usership. Smartphones, sensors, and open data have enabled new ways of getting from point A to B: from car-sharing services like Zipcar to taxi services like Uber or clever transport apps like Citymapper that help people skip effortlessly between the bus, a shared bike scheme, and renting a car.

While the owner of the very first commercially available Model A—Chicagoan dentist, Ernest Pfennig—couldn’t see more than a century ago how cars would change the world, Ford is squinting into its future by prototyping it now. Building on a longstanding relationship with IDEO, the carmaker approached us, along with a number of other partners, to undertake two of 25 experiments exploring a car company’s place in the changing world of mobility.

The first, Data-Driven Insurance, investigates a new pay-as-you-go insurance offer based on people’s driving behavior, as measured by a small adapter plugged into the car. The second, Infocycle, plots a snapshot of how bikes traverse the city and interact with cars and public transport by using Ford’s open source API, Open XC, to track cyclists around San Francisco.

Tackling the tangled ecosystems of bike sharing, private cars, and open city data proved an international effort. The two projects brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers, hardware and software developers, data scientists, and interaction, industrial, and business designers from IDEO’s San Francisco, Palo Alto, Chicago, and London studios.

Have we cracked the future of mobility? Probably not. And that’s okay, says Fields. Smart mobility is simply part of Ford’s journey of evolution. Along with global competitions, collaborations with universities, and opening up their hardware and software platform Open XC, these experiments help Ford meet the needs of a fast-changing mobile world. “As we drive innovation in every part of our business,” Fields said, “we are determined to learn, to take risks, to challenge custom and question tradition, and to change our business going forward.”

More information on Ford’s Smart Mobility projects can be found here.

The podcast talks about how mycelium and mycorrhiza give plants a natural network for absorbing and sharing nutrients in soil. The fungi create connections with the rootlets of individual trees and grow further out to connect with the root networks of other plants. These networks create an “underground economy” by which trees can trade and share nutrients.

This method of sharing is a good lesson for business: A lack of connections can create inefficiencies and tensions between potential collaborators. Looking at these networks raised a question for us: How can we facilitate connections between real-world businesses that would allow them to share resources?

We got so excited about the idea we jumped right into building something: a prototype called Myko, a smart scale and sensors that create a mesh network allowing two businesses to share streaming data that benefits both parties. We took the opportunity to build with Nomad, an open source streaming protocol Reid Williams and Gavin McDermott have been developing at the CoLab.

Nomad works as a decentralized messaging system, an open source protocol to discover, publish, and remix live data streams from anyone, anywhere. Nomad is built on IPFS, a distributed network, engineered as universal infrastructure to be open, scalable, and durable.

The Nomad API is based on a publish and subscribe system. When someone creates a node, it can either publish data to peers on the network, or subscribe to other peer nodes on the network. Publishing nodes are called “atomic” nodes, while subscribing nodes are called “composite” nodes. When someone creates a node on the network, it’s given a unique ID. For a composite node to receive data from an atomic node, all that’s needed is this ID. From then on, any data that the atomic node publishes is delivered to the composite node in real time.

Warning, nerd paragraph:

Using a couple Particle Photons and force-sensitive resistors, we quickly set up two atomic nomad nodes capable of broadcasting real-time data from two connected objects. I used the particle event stream API to output data in a JSON format, so I could easily parse event objects just like I would with any REST API.

Since the Photons can broadcast anywhere with wifi and a power source, these nodes will always be running, providing a constant stream of data no matter how far apart they are.

In this prototype, we built two connected weight-sensing plinths for coffee pots to rest on. The weight data from the plinths allowed us to determine when new coffee was brewed, how old it was, how many cups had been poured, and how much was left (we could even see the cups being poured in real time). One pot sat in our office at the CoLab, and the other sat in a nearby coffee shop.

When the CoLab pot was old or out of coffee, and when the cafe’s pot was fresh or about to be emptied (which happens every 45 minutes at our local cafe — they’re serious about freshness!), a signal on the plinth at CoLab was activated to tell would-be coffee drinkers to head to the cafe for a walk outside and a fresh coffee. At the same time, a signal was activated on the cafe’s pot, letting them know that IDEOers were being sent over.

The partnership possibilities created by this workflow are endless. For example, what if CoLab diverted some of its monthly studio coffee budget to create a steady income stream for the cafe? Could the cafe institute dynamic pricing on its coffee to reduce food waste? What about baked goods that go stale the next day? Could neighboring cafes use infrared sensors to share their current occupancy to load-balance their wait times in line or their occupied seats?

These questions sparked a lot more ideas and another experiment, in which we used Nomad to reduce coffee and food waste at the cafe. When a barista brewed a fresh pot of coffee, they simply pressed a button to send a notification to customers with the app. After 15 minutes, the price of a cup of coffee dropped by 10%. After 20 minutes, it dropped by 45%, and so on. Since we knew the cafe threw out its coffee after 45 minutes, we could set a timer to reset the price to normal levels when a fresh pot was ready.

In our prototype, coffee drinkers could see dynamic pricing via an app. This website was a small nomad web app powered by data from the Myko button in the cafe.

Whenever the user viewed the app, it displayed the current price of the coffee and a “buy now” button that used Stripe to create a purchase. When a user purchased a coffee, they received a unique code to redeem for the cup they purchased at the shop. The app operated off of a simple set of events whose time and content could be customized.

Something I didn’t have time to implement in the experiment was customization. Ideally, a cafe owner would be able to create new events themselves, adjusting elapsed time, content, and price with just a few taps. While this example isn’t a perfect design, we’re inspired by the live connections it can form between the cafe and its patrons.

Coffee isn’t a life-changing mechanism, but these prototypes represent a developing form of communication between objects and organizations. As we create digital twins of real world objects, our world becomes a living, breathing network, driven by data that we generate by going about our daily lives. Will smart cities be able to divert traffic through different routes based on live congestion data? Can a group of sensor-outfitted machines in a factory automatically organize a group-buy of replacement parts at a discount to the facility owner? These are questions that I’m hoping to answer through these digital fungal relationships.

Adapted from IDEO CoLab’s post on decentralizing chat here.

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At IDEO CoLab, we love thinking about what nature can teach us about emerging technology. Recently, we revisited an old podcast from a source we adore: Radiolab. Their episode From Tree to Shining Tree inspired us when we were thinking about naturally-occurring mesh networks.

Since 2008, when I officially started making music under the name Crunchybird, I’ve learned a fair amount about recording and playing. One of the biggest lessons has been how awfully lonely being a one-man band can be—not just socially, but creatively. There's no pushing and pulling, no building on each other's ideas.

So I asked myself: How could I pull in some of my friends from around the globe to make music with me?

I’ve always loved the concept of Exquisite Corpse, the Surrealist parlor game where someone starts a drawing and passes it on to others to continue. The final artwork is always unexpected, occasionally horrifying, and unavoidably original. Could we pull off a musical version? I was curious to see where it could go, so I threw the challenge to a motley crew of musically-minded colleagues around the world.

The rules were simple: Start something and pass it to someone else, somewhere else. That person spends a day adding to it, then sends the track to the next collaborator. And so on. We called the project "Exquisite Chords."

I learned a lot from the process. Before I walk you through the track my friends and I built together, here are some design principles to get you going.

3 tips for creative collaboration

1. Start small and let go. When you collaborate with others, it’s tempting to set up a very detailed structure with a lot of constraints. For this project, it was fun to start with something more basic and give people the room to interpret it and shape it their own way. Don’t overthink it. Just let everyone throw something into the mix.
2. Make each other successful. It can be really cool to see how participants take each other's work and improve on it. It's the musical version of the classic improv response "Yes, And…" Take what’s awesome and make it more awesome.
3. Guide the vision. Creative collaboration can be terrifying. You have no clue how something will turn out, and it can be a disaster—the phrase "too many creatives in the kitchen” comes to mind. But as the leader, you have the opportunity to influence the end result. It’s important to respect people’s contributions, but to also know when to take the wheel and shape the outcome.

Exquisite Chords, step by step

Here's how our musical experiment started: One night, while sitting on the couch on our tiny apartment in Tokyo, with my wife and kid sleeping in the next room, I recorded a one-bar bass line over a simple beat on my Mac. What you’ll hear is an insomniac trying to make some sound very quietly:

I tossed the track over to my friend George Joseph, a communications designer at IDEO San Francisco, and an actual musician. He laid down some sweet, dynamic goodness atop my track in just a couple of minutes because he is, as noted above, an actual bassist. He also recorded an awesome vocal take. The lyrics are still a mystery to me:

George then shared the track with our friend Simon Heather, a business designer at IDEO New York, who we had heard has some shreddy chops on the electric guitar. It was true:

Simon passed the ball to Nick Dupey, a design director at IDEO Cambridge. Nick has a toddler named Julian Rose, who he recorded making toddler sounds:

Nick punted it to merry Munich, where design directors Franz Blach and Trent Huon took the whole affair to another level. Franz busted out a cornucopia of manipulated acoustic guitar sounds. He then arranged the pieces into a more dramatic song structure—verse, chorus, bridge, and outro included:

Trent added a touch of madness, crooning about the changing of the seasons on top of the new arrangement, improving the melody George had created:

And then it went back to San Francisco, where interaction designer Zubin Pastakia tacked on some angelic synths to round out the crescendoing finale:

Once the track was back in my hands in Japan, I realized the bass line that started it all would work better on the piano, so I re-recorded the melody and added a few parts to fill in the new arrangement. The piano complemented Franz’s acoustic guitar, which unfurled into a nice little wandering outro that could probably go on to be another song.

Finally, I worked with my producer friend Hamacide (a.k.a. Yusuke Hama) here in Tokyo to help tuck everything in, smooth it out, and make some final mixing and mastering adjustments to bring it all up to the next level.

Here's the final track, “Leaving Light”:

Our first collaboration as Exquisite Chords was indeed unexpected (and not too horrifying, I hope). What started as quiet plucking on a sleepless Tokyo night had blossomed into a trip-hop adventure for eight people from five cities in three countries. We never spoke to one another—it all happened over email and Dropbox.

It may not be perfect, or even be for everyone, but it's ours.

Want to join our digital jam sesh? Download the tracks above, add your own layer of sound, and tag your new mix with #ExquisiteChords.

I’m not a trained musician. But music is my favorite way to carve things out creatively. That is to say, I tinker with instruments to make noises that sound good together until I am smiling a lot. I'm not spitting out perfect tracks, but I'm having fun.

1. Keep a steady rhythm with ideal line lengths

The length of a line determines how much distance the reader’s eyes must cover to read it from left to right. Long line lengths make the text seem never-ending. Short line lengths make the reading experience erratic, and can cause the reader to miss important words. An ideal line length is 66 characters (including letters and spaces). For one column of text, aim for 45–75 characters per line; for two columns of text, 40–50 characters per line.

2. Use the right kind of dash

Dashes, such as hyphens, vary in length depending on the typeface.

The em dash (—) is a long dash, the length of the uppercase “M.” It can be used as an alternate for commas, parentheses, or colons, and is an incredibly versatile way to create emphasis in your writing. When used in multiples, the em dash also indicates missing portions of a word (s——t).

The en dash (–) is half the length of the upper case “M”—shorter than the em dash, but longer than the hyphen. It is used to separate a range or span of numbers, and is sometimes used to connect a prefix to a proper noun.

Keyboard Shortcuts
Em dash (—): shift + option + hyphen
En dash (–): option + hyphen

3. Don't put hyphenation in auto-drive

In the digital age, we often take hyphenation for granted, opting to use the “auto-hyphenate” setting, but there are some best practices to keep in mind when typesetting with hyphens.

If you are breaking a word between two lines, keep at least two characters in the first line and at least three characters on the second line. Try not to hyphenate consecutive lines. To “un-break” a word between lines, use a soft return (shift + return) at the beginning of the word to force it onto the second line.

4. Know the difference between smart quotes and prime marks

Prime marks ( ' ), also known as straight quotes or dumb quotes, are often accidentally used in place of smart quotes ( ‘ ), also known as curly quotes. Prime marks are a remnant of the typewriter, which only had prime marks to save space on the keyboard. So what’s the difference? Prime marks are used for units of measure (feet, inches, seconds, and minutes); smart quotes are used to indicate something someone has said.

Keyboard shortcuts
Left single quote ( ‘ ): option + ]
Right single quote ( ’ ): shift + option + ]
Left double quote ( “ ): option + [
Right double quote ( ” ): shift + option + [

5. Maintain a strong vertical axis

Hanging text, or outdenting, means moving typographic elements into the left margin. You do this to create a consistent vertical axis along the left end of the text. Quotes, bullets, and dashes do not take up as much visual space as a letter, so a list or quote that has not been hung, or outdented, can sometimes be mistaken for a new paragraph and cause unintended breaks in the reading rhythm.

6. Be on the lookout for widows and orphans

Try to avoid widows and orphans in your text. Widows and orphans are one or two words at the end of a sentence that are pushed to a new column or page; widows are at the end of a column, orphans are at the top of a page. They create very short lines and gaping holes of white space that can be visually disruptive for the reader. Maintain the flow of each sentence by using a soft return to eliminate stray words.

7. Track out all-caps text and use all-caps sparingly

When designing fonts, typographers must determine the amount of space around each letter so that letters of different sizes appear evenly spaced. The spacing around uppercase letters is often a little tighter, so that they can sit closer to the lowercase letters in a mixed-case word. When you typeset a word in all-caps, the letters will appear very close together. Remedy this by tracking out, or letter-spacing, all-caps words by about 10% of the point size height. For more details and examples on tracking (and how it’s different from kerning), take a look at Ellen Lupton’s book Thinking with Type, also available digitally here.

If your writing uses a lot of acronyms, consider selecting a typeface with a small caps font. Small caps are all-caps fonts designed within a typeface so that each letterform is only slightly taller than a lowercase letter. Small caps are automatically letter-spaced, and should not need any additional tracking.

Hungry for more on typesetting? Below are a couple of my favorite tried-and-true typesetting references:

A Type Primer by John Kane

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick

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Typography can be expressive, informational, or abstract. But sometimes it just wants to be invisible, allowing the content to take center stage. In this first installment of our Type Talks series—where IDEO designers nerd out about all things typographical—we offer tips for seamless, sexy typesetting (that you hardly notice).

In one sentence, who are you?

I'm a nomadic filmmaker.

How did you learn to do it?

I travel the world and make short films about the places I visit. While I did go to film school, I'd say I learned most of my skills on the road, by trial and error.

WATCH: Hong Kong Strong. A film about the madness and beauty of this seemingly impossible city in the days leading up to Chinese New Year.

What are your three favorite possessions?

1. Good boots

2. My phone with Google Maps

3. My camera gimbal

What does a typical work session look like for you?

Shooting for about 12 hours a day, in the thick of a crazy festival in a foreign country. Then spending another 12 hours editing the footage and hiding from society.

WATCH: Nomads of Mongolia. Training eagles to hunt, herding yaks, and racing camels are just a few of the daily activities of the nomadic Kazakh people.

How do you get over creative block?

Travel to a new place.

WATCH: Tokyo Roar. Tokyo saturates the senses. This is my impression of the city's many personalities.

How do you see the world in 2078?

I see a mix of environmental catastrophe and remarkable human innovation. As the seas rise, we'll meet the challenge with ingenuity and eventually become fully sustainable, because it's the only way to survive.

Who are you (creative) crushing on lately?

Tokyo-born filmmaker Hiro Murai.

Getting the energy of a place on film is not an easy thing to do. Especially a transient place like Hong Kong. The city is both familiar and foreign to me. I was born there, and though I moved away at age 12, work has brought back many times over the years. On one of these trips, I was introduced to Brandon Li’s short film Hong Kong Strong (chosen by Vimeo as one of the best of staff picks in May 2016). In swooping, panoramic shots, it puts the beautiful madness of urban life and ordinary people on display. As a designer, I was instantly taken by Li's approach, as we, too, set about taking snapshots of daily life for inspiration. In this installment of Creative Crushes, I caught up with Brandon to find out more about his work.

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.