

Kickstarting Europe’s biggest smart energy company
Strategies to bring a new product to market.
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.


Invigorating a pharmaceutical company’s culture
How four simple words helped a global company activate its purpose.
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.


Creating a social enterprise to bring learning into the real world
Designing for youth, with a focus on learning as a lifestyle.
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.




Designing for smarter mobility
Helping Ford evolve from an automaker to a mobility provider.
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.


Could AI Replace Design Researchers?
Our look at the future of communication with London’s Design Museum
Spirit is a simulated AI, a provocation created by IDEO’s London Studio in response to a commission from the Design Museum. It asked designers and their teams—including Yves Behar of fuseproject and furniture designer Konstantin Grcic—to contribute to a project on the future of aging as a sequel to an exhibit of the same topic that they hosted 30 years earlier. The museum asked IDEO to explore what community might look like in the year 2047.
For our project, we aimed to start a dialogue about the role emerging technologies might play in the way people connect as a community. In the future, we may no longer need to drive our children to school, speak with anybody to go grocery shopping, or visit a human doctor. Technology often makes us more independent, and less reliant on human contact and support. To counter the social isolation that may arise, we developed the concept of a free and open-source social AI, a system built to foster strong and healthy communities by strengthening social bonds and keeping people active and mentally stimulated.
Creating the Exhibit
We designed the interactive part of the exhibition for three reasons: We wanted to give visitors a glimpse of what it would be like to interact with an artificial entity; we wanted to see how people would feel about the interaction; and, obviously, we like playful experimentation and prototyping.
Current AI technology is in its infancy when it comes to having a real dialogue with a human being. But just as autonomous cars learn with every mile they drive, these technologies will learn the more they interact with people. Current popular AI products (Siri, Alexa, etc.) listen to user commands and respond. We found it interesting to reverse that by having our Spirit actively ask visitors questions, and rather intimate ones, including: What makes you happiest? What would you be scared of forgetting? Would you trust an artificial intelligence to choose your friends? If you lived to 120, how many partners would you want to have?

The exhibit had two states: An idle state where visitors were encouraged to talk to Spirit and it displayed selected quotes from previous visitors and visualized the data it gathered through a generative visual design, and an interactive state.
The interactive dialogue state took place inside an audio booth. The system greeted visitors with an audiovisual message and a stylized speech-bubble that mediated the conversation. The system then asked different questions, engaging in deeper conversation over time. For example, Spirit might ask, "What makes you happiest," and the answers could vary from "rich relationships" to "when it stops raining," "playing football," or "creating new things and solving problems." Each answer created a new pebble in the visualization, the color, size, and shape of which were determined by an analysis of the length and the emotion of the response. When the visitor finished answering, the pebble merged into a sea of pebbles representing all of the interactions collected so far.
Visual interface design and data visualization by Studio Waltz Binaire
Building Spirit
The technical challenge of the exhibit was to have the system running for five weeks, seven days a week, eight hours per day. There were a lot of pieces talking to each other, and we needed to be able to track the feedback from thousands of visitors.
Spirit used a bespoke script to follow the conversations, and when the answers veered too far from what it had anticipated, it would send the answer to a chatbot API to find an appropriate answer. Unfortunately, the voice to text turned out to be not very reliable in the museum environment, so we focused on the scripted questions.

The technical setup consisted of two components: the audio booth and the large display facing it. To let Spirit know when somebody was present in the booth, we installed an Arduino with an ultrasonic sensor that communicated with an iPhone 6 via Bluetooth. The iPhone was connected to a directional microphone and a speaker.

Here is where the magic happened. On the phone, we ran a custom app. The app turned the voice into text using the Apple Speech Framework, and then analyzed the emotions in the answer using IBM Watson, an iconic AI developed by IBM, while also checking if the answer is in the pre-written script. If it wasn’t, it used another API to get an answer from the chatbot. The information about the answer and emotions was stored and sent to a custom program written in vvvv that communicated with the iPhone app via OSC.

Ambient noise was our biggest worry. It could have prevented the system from understanding visitors’ answers. Also, the position of the microphone was fixed, so reaching different visitor heights and voice volumes was a challenge. This actually proved to be a problem, as there were several interactions in which the voice was unintelligible.
The Data
One good perk of the interactive system is that we had real-time access to the data, so we could follow how well the installation and exhibition were performing, and what the audience was saying. After the exhibition ended, we found a bit more time to use Python and Pandas in the analysis, and Excel to plot the results.

We had a total of 8996 individual sessions with Spirit during the exhibition, about 10 percent of the visitors to the Design Museum.
The emotion recognition system that we used, IBM Watson, is not yet totally reliable (as an example, “yes” was considered a 100% J=joyful answer). But with the amount of data we gathered, the system was still able to give some hints about visitor moods. And the variations in mood could be correlated to external events. For example, we saw a peak in feelings of joy on the 24th, when London hit its highest temperature after a cold January.
When we looked at the answers, we discovered that they seemed more spontaneous and playful than others given via written questionnaires. They were also more honest, suggesting that for some people, sharing intimately with an AI might be less intimidating than talking to a human interviewer. Others, though, were critical and disconcerted. It became clear that it is important to start a dialogue about how we want to interact with AI in our daily lives.
Though the experiment obviously didn’t culminate in a fully-formed product to help the elderly, the interaction model helped us create the kind of AI we would need to build community and increase social interaction, and allowed us to test people’s reactions to emotional and intimate questions from an AI. The experiment also directly related to the work we do with design research. We frequently send design researchers out into the field to talk to people to learn more about their needs and habits, and how we can design solutions to fit their lives. Our work with Spirit begs the question—could even a design researcher be replaced by an artificial researcher at some point? For now, we don’t have a lot of answers, but this experiment helped us push our understanding forward, and we’re excited about the AI-driven insights that will come in the future.
In the top floor of London’s Design Museum, as dozens of visitors walk by and the rain hits the windows, a woman speaks with an AI bot called Spirit. It asks her how many partners she would like to have if she can live until she is 150. She giggles and answers. “Just one—and that is because my husband is next to me.” According to Spirit’s analytics, her answer is 33% sad and 12% joyful.


How to Use Your iPhone to Create Frameable Art
How a design constraint helped me make art
Fast forward to fall of last year. Adobe announces an update to its Lightroom iOS app that allows users to capture RAW photos using their smartphone camera. Slowly, I began experimenting with on-the-go editing techniques similar to those I’ve developed over time using Lightroom on desktop. Could the iPhone, with its tiny image sensor, actually be the magic gadget I craved?

I’ve long wanted to do a project that celebrates the diverse architecture of my adoptive city, and my newly augmented smartphone camera provided just the opportunity. So, I set out to answer my own question with a specific aesthetic in mind and a simple design constraint in place: I would use my iPhone, alone, for both photos and edits.

I have now captured and shared more than 40 photos—one each day since April 1st—and will continue to do so until the series tops out at 100 images. The constraints I held myself to and the consistency of daily publishing have allowed me to quickly refine and iterate the technique—an accidental outcome as happy as it was unforeseen.

As designers, we often yearn for carte blanche freedom to explore and create as we see fit. What we forget is that our best solutions often come from imposing limits on that freedom, and seeing what comes of it.
How I did it: all photos in the series are captured using an iPhone 6S, and all edits were performed in roughly 60 seconds using some black and white alchemy in the Color tab of Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile app for iOS.

Want to see more of Burton’s work? Check out this, a NATO & G8 protest he attended in Chicago in May of 2012. And this, the stations of the Moscow Metro he captured during a visit in the fall of 2015.
When I first moved to San Francisco, I spent every free moment exploring my new locale, camera in hand, with a backpack full of lenses and a tripod. With time, however, the weight of my DSLR and pack felt more like an albatross than an accessory, and I adopted the usual photographer’s lament, yearning for a magical gadget that could output images of a quality inversely proportional to its bulk.


What’s in my Moleskine: Adam Cristobal
Take a peek into an interaction designer's sketchbook
These days, I frame my life less as a sensible narrative with a rise and fall, and more as a series of small, densely packed moments that leave sweet and sour aftertastes. These moments are the ones I choose to draw in my sketchbooks, usually several months after they’ve actually occurred. The unimportant things, I forget. What’s left for me to draw is what matters: moments of wisdom, aged by feelings that have grown more complex and multi-dimensional over time.
Here are a few moments that have stuck with me:
Blame it on the Boba

When I first moved to San Francisco, I started dating someone—less because it made sense to date him in particular, and more because I was enamored with the idea of christening my new city with a new relationship: new city, new boy, new me! Predictably, things didn’t work out, because that’s what happens when you rush into things for the wrong reasons.
Over a year after dumping me, however, he asked me out to boba. Somehow, we ended up seeing each other again. And again, predictably, things didn’t work out. Apparently, I saw things differently the second time around. I rarely drink alcohol, but that doesn’t stop me from attributing my poor life decisions to boys touting sweet beverages.
Most People are Terrible

I met one of my best friends, Cory, over two years ago. Since meeting him, I’ve probably drawn him about ten times. A savvy reporter with a sharp tongue but a heart of gold, Cory has provided me with many invaluable nuggets of wisdom. One of the most memorable nuggets was a sobering reminder that I tend to assume the best in people too quickly.
In some cases, this just means that someone who I thought had excellent taste in clothes, music, books, or food actually doesn’t. In more serious cases, this means that I have a difficult time distinguishing charm from crazy. In any case, and particularly the latter, I keep this axiom close to my heart.
Not Assholes, Just Shibas

In 8th grade, I met a girl named Mira who is now one of my oldest and closest friends. Mira is much more charismatic and social than I am. During our younger years, I always thought were two sides of one coin: she was the outgoing and social one; I was the quiet and taciturn one.
However, a few years ago, she told me that she’s actually a total introvert. I realized two things: First, that our introversion was probably what brought us together in the first place. Second, that I had completely misunderstood one of my best friends. But that’s water under the bridge at this point. Lately, we’ve started characterizing ourselves as shiba inus, who aren’t exactly the cuddliest of dogs. But they’re not jerks, they’re just independent. Just like me and Mira.
At the end of the day, I use these moments to remind myself that I can always adapt when life doesn’t work out exactly as I expect. And if all else fails, finding humor in turbulent moments is the quickest solution for a bad day.
I’m a huge nerd. I grew up watching a lot of fantastical and post-apocalyptic anime, and I’m a former literary history student with a fondness for medieval poetry. Having spent enough time with Chaucer, Boccaccio, Satoshi Kon, and Hideaki Anno—most of whom tend to leave their audiences hanging or uncomfortable—I learned to appreciate stories with ambiguous endings. I’ve carried this same sentiment into my sketchbooks.


Your Body as An Art Project
How one young British artist is pushing the boundaries of bodily design

Imagine, for example, using parts from an eel to shock the human heart with current when it’s having a heart attack? In an exhibit called Domestic Futures at Nationalmuseum of design, Stockholm Haines showed exactly such a “product”. Goodbye defibrillating paddles, hello electric eel!
More recently, IDEO’s London studio collaborated with Haines for New Old, an exhibit at the Design Museum London. The result was “Spirit,” an AI assistant for the elderly. After working alongside Haines, we found ourselves intrigued, so we caught up with her to ask a few questions about what it means to be a budding biodesigner.
When did you first think about getting into design, and why?
When I was younger, I had many misconceptions about design that I think are still problematic today. You rarely get to see the messy, exhausting, and all-consuming guts of design work, but I think it is an incredibly engaging discipline. I got my masters in the Design Interactions department at the Royal College of Art, and am now undertaking PhD research at Transtechnology Research at Plymouth University.
Who are the designers, artists, writers, and thinkers that have influenced your work?
Noam Toran, my tutor on my MA course, offered many fascinating and unnerving threads of research, along with Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby, who promoted alternative ways of thinking. I also like Floris Kaayk (a bit of enjoyable grossness there!), who always seems to have something fascinating in progress; my close friend designer Soomi Park, who is highlighting sensitivity to emotion in artificially intelligent objects; and recently, I saw a great talk by Hyphen-labs, which probes some really important questions about design.
Tell us what you produced for the “New Old” Design Museum exhibit
For “Spirit,” I made some sculptures of potential body modifications—visualizing how a fictional company might improve sociability in the elderly. The IDEO team, including Ed White, Daniel Tauber, and Javier Soto Morras, had researched alterations that could be made to the body to send biological notifications. The work made me aware of the pressures and expectations on the elderly.
Tell us about three of your favorite projects
In 2013, I produced “Transfigurations”, which depicted babies with structural modifications. The work encouraged people to consider whether surgical procedures might offer solutions to future social and environmental problems. I think the cuteness of these sculptures made the work both disturbing and delightful. Another project, involved dissecting sculptures of anatomical parts, suggesting potential future procedures such as the removal of a cyst from a bionic eye implant. The tactile element helped this work to become a lightning rod for discussion regarding scientific research. Currently, I am developing “if you prick us do we not bleed?” about how we interact with humanoid robots by including bodily fluids. I was, of course, inspired by the famous Shylock monologue in the Merchant of Venice. “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” .It's still a very powerful message about the mistreatment of those perceived as different.
What does it mean to use the body as a design medium?
All of my work is, of course, speculative. I don’t spend much time actually moving human material around, although I did once spend a very interesting day at a cadaver research laboratory! Instead I research the tools and materials that may have an impact on the body, or how we perceive the body. There are already disciplines that have to view the body as editable, and moving this way of thinking from a surgical or dental domain to a design or engineering one is where there is space for interesting interventions. There seems to be lots of interest in nanotechnology, and like many biotechnologies, this means there will be interactions with designs we can not see, but can perhaps feel, and maybe also artificial intelligence that may make design decisions for us.
Want to see more of Haines’ work? Find her current exhibits and talks here.
Agi Haines’ artwork isn’t easy on the eyes. But to her, it looks just like home. As the daughter of two South East London artists who met while working at Madame Tussauds wax museum, her childhood home was populated with wax heads, antique surgical tools, and sculpture scaffolds. Viewing the human body as raw material for design interventions wasn’t the stuff of some sci-fi future—it started as a family affair (her sister, Beatrice Haines caught the bug, too) and Haines has been working and speaking about it ever since.


Lindsey Turner
I’m passionate about building brands, products, and experiences that help organizations show up with meaning and momentum.
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.


Rachel Young
My work helps organizations see who their products aren't working for—and build the will and the tools to do something about it
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.


Brian Pelsoh
I lead with craft, ensuring our work is creatively excellent: rooted in deep human insight and imagination, while also grounded in the realities of business and technology.
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.


Tony Wong
I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth.
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.
How to use AI as an editor, not a writer
Ed White shares how he uses AI as an editor—not a writer—to sharpen storytelling, rehearse ideas, and preserve the productive friction that makes creative work better.
Ed White has a rule he's tested on his own writing: hold yourself as the writer, and let AI be your editor. Ed is a Senior Design Director at IDEO's London studio, where he co-leads the firm's AI portfolio across Europe. Before IDEO, he spent 12 years as a writer and editor at the Financial Times, Wired, and Contagious. So when he talks about when to use AI for storytelling and when not to, it comes from two decades of crafting his storytelling skills.
In this episode, Mina Seetharaman talks with Ed about two specific tools he uses to keep AI in an editor's seat: a "roasting agent" prompted to critique his drafts without any sugarcoating, and a simulated audience he rehearses pitches on before the real thing. They also get into what Ed is hearing from design leaders at Anthropic, Lovable, Shopify, and Google Creative Lab about how creative work is changing, and why he thinks the friction of writing something yourself is worth protecting rather than automating away.
Building a personal AI for the messiness of life: Sida Li
Becca Carroll talks with Cue co-founder Sida Li about designing a personal AI for the messiness of everyday life—not just work. They explore how Sida stays anchored to human needs while navigating fast-changing technology, product tradeoffs, business-model experimentation, and the realities of building an AI company today.
Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.
In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.
The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.
This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.
Designing GenAI for the emotional side of money: Johannes Seemann
Designing financial tools around the feelings that shape money decisions.
Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.
The curious leader's edge in uncertainty: Scott Shigeoka
How genuine curiosity helps leaders navigate uncertainty with greater confidence.
Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.
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