How do you lift up the middle class in a developing country?

That was the challenge facing Peruvian entrepreneur Carlos Rodriguez-Pastor, who hired IDEO to build an entire network of schools powered by a progressive new learning model. IDEO’s mandate: to redesign Innova’s entire K–12 learning experience, from the curriculum to the teacher training to the school buildings, with an eye toward expansion and a goal to provide international-quality education at an affordable price—about $100 a month.

Innova Schools is a part of Intercorp, a family of 35 businesses that span everything from banks to retail stores and added schools to its portfolio. In 2010, the company had five existing schools but realized that its existing model could not grow. The shortage of well-trained, high-quality teachers in Peru, combined with rising land costs, meant the schools would need to radically change course to succeed.

To learn about scalable school models around the world, IDEO researchers visited inspirational schools and learning programs, and looked to analogous systems like retail, hospitality, and health care to understand their approaches to scale. Throughout the project, they collaborated with teachers, students, and the Innova Schools team in co-designing the work itself.

Together, Innova Schools and IDEO developed the curriculum, teaching strategies, buildings, operational plans, and underlying financial model to run the network of schools.

"I was blown away by Innova Schools," said Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy. "It's inspiring to see such an affordable school deliver a quality of education that would rival schools in the richest countries."

The new Innova Schools combine teacher-led, project-based learning in small groups with self-directed time using digital learning tools. Teachers monitor students’ work online and offer personalized guidance. Parents can view their children’s progress online as well.

Dynamic learning environments include community spaces, media labs, rooftop study areas, amphitheaters, and cafés that are optimized for flexibility: furniture on wheels, movable walls, and efficient uses of space to allow for different modes of learning.

An online Teacher Resource Center includes a database of more than 18,000 custom lesson plans based on a progressive new teaching approach. The center helps teachers learn their craft and gives them a chance to connect across the network.

The business model of Innova Schools was developed at the same time as the school experience. Designers leveraged the economies of scale that come from building a network of schools and centralized tools, such as data systems that allow all the schools to learn together.

The project has allowed Innova to open more schools at an affordable cost to families, ultimately giving more of Peru’s youth the chance to compete in the global economy. This comprehensive approach to system design ranks as one of Latin America’s most ambitious privately funded educational projects, and is on track to become the largest private school network in the region. To date, Innova has opened 63 schools in Peru that are serving more than 50,000 students.

A good system design doesn’t end with strategy. The work on Innova Schools also had a huge influence on the company, according to Rodriguez-Pastor. Through the creation of new roles and an aligned set of values, Innova’s central office has become a much more nimble and creative organization. They’re constantly scanning the world for inspiration in how to best educate their students, while building out the new innovations. They realize that design thinking can become an integrated part of their daily management of this growing network of schools.

Western Digital, the leading provider of external digital-storage solutions and a pioneer in the field, and IDEO collaborated on a number of products that produced reliable, secure, high-performance hard drives for personal and professional use and have won numerous design awards.

The projects include:

• MyBook external hard drive: IDEO and Western collaborated to find a new design language for their external hard drive MyBook. In just six months, MyBook became the number-one hard drive in the Americas, and grew US market share by more than 50 percent.
• MyBook II: Looking to regain MyBook’s original number-one position in the hard drive market, IDEO and Western came together again to refresh the original design, finding ways to further differentiate the product and the brand, and winning a 2008 Spark Bronze Award.
• MyPassport: Western and IDEO designed the 320GB, ultra-portable USB-powered hard drive that appeals to the mobile user, which won both the 2008 IDEA Bronze Award from IDSA and BusinessWeek, and the 2009 iF Award.
• MyBook and MyPassport 3.0: Again, IDEO and Western collaborated on bringing the popular MyBook external hard drive to the next level in the hardware, the software, and the packaging. IDEO also created in-store merchandising, the graphics and information featured on product packaging (and the “out-of-box experience”).

The city of San Francisco wanted to help its people become better prepared in case of emergency. While no one feels totally prepared for a natural disaster, people who are most connected within a local network fare better in an emergency.

So the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management (SF DEM) and IDEO teamed up to create SF72, a revolutionary platform that helps to reach people where they are. In times of emergency, the city will need citizens to be self-supporting for 72 hours (or longer) before local services or outside help kicks in. With that in mind, IDEO developed an accessible platform to help people prepare for those 72 hours in simple ways that fit into their daily lives.

The SF72 website helps people with five important tasks: Get connected, gather supplies, watch stories, make a plan, and have access to an updated Google map. SF72’s content is hyperlocal, but IDEO and SF DEM also created an open-source toolkit for cities worldwide. From San Jose to Denver, other locales are using the simple toolkit to create a City72 platform of their own. Most recently, the city of Oakland collaborated with Code for America to develop its own platform. The City72 Toolkit enables SF72’s ethos of social connection for resilience to scale and grow—city by city.

Team Rubicon, formed in 2010 as a response to the devastating earthquake in Haiti, is made up of former military veterans who swoop into help in times of disaster. The organization started with six vets in the US who were eager to transfer their battlefield readiness in to frontline relief efforts, and has grown to more than 28,000 volunteers across the world.

To explore its growing global effort and to shape the future of the organization’s venture, Team Rubicon approached IDEO for help. After an 11-week collaboration with government, military, and veteran groups, a vision for Team Rubicon Global emerged. Inspired by sources as diverse as TED and The Hell’s Angels, the three-tier model consisted of an anchor network to share best practices across the organization and two supporting platforms designed to help countries with varying capacity and needs.

Team Rubicon Global coordinated its first deployment in April 2015, when a quake struck Nepal, sending US and UK teams to double down on the rescue effort. According to Vince Moffit, Team Rubicon USA Incident Commander, that incident alone validated the network effect of IDEO’s work. “We couldn’t have done this without Team Rubicon UK,” he said.

And for the veterans who are part of Team Rubicon, the shared desire to serve—applying skills ideally suited for disaster response—creates a renewed sense of purpose, community, and leadership that helps reintegration to civilian life.

It turns out there’s a strong correlation between social media use and nap entrapment. Personally, I found my Instagram use skyrocketed during the first four months of my then-newborn’s life. And during the entrapment days, two Instagram accounts really stood out from the rest. The first was the actor/rapper Will Smith’s energetic, curious, family-friendly account. His posts are a mix of throwback photos featuring Jeff Goldblum, comparisons of his baby pictures to Rhianna, and vintage videos of wife Jada mouthing off to Eazy-E about feminism.

The second belonged to the musician and artist Patti Smith. Her account is poetic, reflective, and sincere. Its posts range from a meditation on the morning light playing upon her “thinking chair,” to fanning out hard over Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

Perhaps it was the sleep deprivation. Or maybe it was a hankering to fit some synthesis—the IDEO designer's process of creating a cohesive narrative from a sea of nuanced human stories—into my maternity leave. But I grew intrigued by their common last name.

Thus came constraint number two: Could one create a captive, compelling Insta feed, one that guides the viewer on an engaging, winding, whimsical journey, featuring only Smiths? What story would come out of weaving multiple online personalities together? It was synthesis, but with other people’s lives.

To make things really interesting, I added two more Smith feeds. Kevin, one of the masterminds behind films like Clerks and Dogma, balances goofball humor with poignant reflections on life and health. Singer Sam, the fourth and final Smith, is a modern day crooner who keeps his posts pithy and punchy.

Together, the four Smith feeds created balance in a random sort of harmony. Squinting from just the right angle, I was surprised to find common threads in their posts. Stills from Sam’s iconographic performance stages flowed seamlessly into Patti’s gently-lit trip to La Recoleta cemetery. Kevin’s collection of Weebles set up Sam’s visit to a trinket-ridden open air market, before handing off to Will’s portrait of an eclectic man’s fashion in Tybee Island, GA.

With nothing more than a ubiquitous last name and fame connecting these four, gestural themes emerged. Parenthood, childhood, dental hygiene, activism, Rhianna.

These are more than Smith themes. These are modern human themes. But Instagram’s real-time format muddied this story. I wondered if there was a way to create a thematic flow—one long, chaptered story—rather than a chronological one. The solution lied in a third, and final, constraint: a fixed feed. One in service of a single story in time, rather than a constantly evolving one.

And so, Selected_Smiths was born. A static Instagram narrative, comprised of snaps from all four instagram feeds. The final edit was made on July 22, 2018. 59 posts total, culled from the original Smiths’ feeds. Best viewed from bottom to top and with 30 minutes to spare, so as to read all comments and hashtags.

What started as a nap-trapped experiment turned into a lesson on the power of constraint. Selected_Smiths was born of three constraints: one situational, one coincidental, and one editorial. If Selected_Smiths is the steel ball, then these constraints were the bumpers in the pinball machine of my mind. Launched with gusto, frantically bouncing past flashing lights and through sound fields, the bumpers present a barrier, ricocheting the ball to loss or victory. Constraint demands perseverance, triggers ingenuity, and every once in awhile helps you execute on a weird idea.

Like creating one story with four people who share the same last name. Funny, serious, flip, human—the internet really does it all.

Nap-trapped (noun): When an infant falls asleep on a person in such a way that they are rendered immobile. As in: On maternity leave, I often found myself nap-trapped in a position that demanded complete stillness of all extremities… apart from my right arm. This constraint inspired a somewhat esoteric design research experiment that I took on—sometimes literally—with one hand tied behind my back.

This lack of contextual thinking and foresight is why so many innovation investments fail—it’s not for lack of ingenuity, but because companies build innovation teams, then neglect to design a complete ecosystem to take promising ideas forward.

Here are the three most common traps that cause even the smartest business leaders to throw their innovation money away:

1. The Outcome Trap — If you don’t define a clear vision for how innovation is supposed to contribute to your company’s growth, don’t be surprised when innovation teams fail to make a contribution.

2. The Incentive Trap — No one wants to play Russian roulette with their career. If you don’t incentivize business units to make the right mix of bets, they’ll have no reason to invest in anything other than short term sure things.

3. The Metrics Trap — Success isn’t subjective. If you don’t create innovation metrics that the rest of the organization can understand, the rest of the business may view innovation as frivolous.

The Outcome Trap

About 10 years ago, a parcel courier (one of those companies that brings cardboard boxes to your door) built an innovation unit to help power their future. Senior executives had held inspiring conversations and decided that “innovation” would build the future of their company, so they built a new team and recruited a former startup guy to run it. Everyone had high hopes for the team’s success.

What happened next? The startup guy built them a startup. The team found some cool technology and a strong customer need. They used that to build, launch, and sell a profitable new solution to a small but growing pool of customers.

Was it a success? Well, only to some stakeholders. When the team began to share their results, they faced surprisingly hostile reception: One senior executive wanted to know when the innovation division was going to yield strategic insights for the core company. Another asked when it would start developing new technologies for the core business. A third wondered when it would train her teams in innovation. Despite some wins in the market, few stakeholders were happy with the results. Within 18 months of their launch, they were disbanded.

This company fell into a surprisingly common trap: Everyone thought that “innovation” was important, but nobody ever talked about why they wanted it. It was like the execs had asked a waiter for ice cream and then got upset when their server showed up with Rum Raisin.

So, how can you avoid the Outcome Trap?

Work backwards. First, define why innovation is important and why now. Once you define the outcomes needed from innovation, you can craft a portfolio of projects designed to meet those goals. That portfolio then suggests the talent, skills, and even the number of people or teams you’ll need to drive innovation. When we break them down, successful innovation portfolios consist of a mix of four activities.

In the graphic below, we’ve plotted businesses and teams based on our evaluation of their primary objective (even though many of these teams invest in more than one quadrant).

As shown in the above graphic, Discover teams focus on uncovering new insights or opportunities that could be developed into new businesses or offers. This long-term innovation work includes the efforts of R&D labs focused on emerging technology. Those in the Invest quadrant develop, launch, or acquire new businesses in the short term. This includes the work of M&A teams, accelerators, incubators, and corporate venture capital. Define teams initiate tangible strategic visions for how existing business units may need to evolve to succeed in the future, and reveal opportunities for how current offers can adapt to changing customer demands or new technologies. And lastly, Evolve teams differ in that they partner with existing business units to adapt to a changing environment—develop new offers, approaches, and skills to improve the business in the near- to mid-term. This includes the services offered by SWAT teams, internal agencies, and coaches.

By intentionally balancing the portfolio—say, by focusing sharply on incubating new digital ventures and adapting current offers—the innovation team can define their projects, align their stakeholders, and allocate their staff.

The above graphic highlights the shape of a lab portfolio at a successful retail conglomerate—80% of their efforts are focused on either evolving the current subsidiaries or helping those subsidiaries invest in new digital ventures. The remaining 20% of their effort goes into defining future strategy and discovering new tech to harness.

—
To avoid this trap, ask yourself: Why innovation, and why now? What does success look like? What’s the future vision for our company, and how should innovation contribute to that? Where are we facing the biggest market threats—in the short term or the long term? Will innovation provide services to core business units or will it build new subsidiaries? Your innovation portfolio and your teams will naturally evolve over time, but you can control that evolution by intentionally defining the purpose of the team and the outcomes that they need to deliver.

The Incentive Trap

Once you’ve defined the ideal innovation portfolio, you need to find the right sponsors willing to make the right bets on the right projects. The best strategy is doomed if no one has any incentive to make good bets. That’s the Incentive Trap.

Several years ago, a global home appliances company created a Lifestyle Research Lab to design new products that address consumers’ changing attitudes and behaviors. In isolation, the team conducted their own research and used it to develop new ideas that could transform their white goods businesses—creating radically new dishwashers, refrigerators, or washing machines. When they hit on a juicy idea, they would then try to sell it to a business unit for development.

Now, imagine yourself leading one of those businesses: One day, out of the blue, someone you’ve never met pitches you on a new product. Based on some research you’ve never seen and some shiny concept sketches, this team insists that you should change up your five-year product development roadmap. You didn’t ask for this idea, you didn’t pay for this work, and their analysis doesn’t match up with the numbers that you normally track. Your budget, your people, and your manufacturing are already committed. Even if you love their idea, you’d need to do a lot of heavy lifting to justify changing your plans. Few executives at the appliance company were willing to do that work.

Looking at the innovation portfolio and the purpose that’s been defined, what kind of bets should business units to make?

In a completely rational world, a decision between investing on a sure thing or a smart bet should be a toss up. However, to many executives, investing in riskier projects can feel like career Russian roulette. In your own company, how much of a balance do you have between sure things and smart bets?

To create a more balanced mix of bets, many companies fund innovation from some central, corporate pool. This promotes riskier bets—it’s always easier to gamble someone else’s money. But there’s a catch: when the business units pay too little for innovation, they don’t value the work. Business leaders can see this kind of innovation as a sideshow. When the going gets tough, and those business leaders need to improve their metrics, they will kill any innovation projects that aren’t yet proven.

So, what happens when a business unit pays the tab? Although leaders are more invested in the outcomes (literally and figuratively), their demand for innovation is far lower. When betting their own money, most people prefer sure things—even when the expected returns are the same, they choose an option that’s easier to predict. So, how do you promote riskier bets? With corporate funds. We often see these corporate subsidies falling into three tiers. This model isn’t just true for how business units spend their money, it’s also true for how they assign their best people. They aren’t likely to put their best people on their riskiest projects.

The above graphic illustrates that as you define your portfolio, you’ll also need to define a funding mix for the work that incentivizes the right bets. The incentives tend to fall into three tiers: Tier 1 investments feel more like sure things; tier 2 investments feel a little riskier, but still appealing; tier 3 investments feel too risky to make without senior executive support.

—
To avoid this trap, ask yourself: Looking at your ideal portfolio, what is a healthy mix between sure things and smart bets? How adventurous are your business units, and how much do you need to incentivize their investments? The more corporate pays, the more risk business units will take on.

The Metrics Trap

Once you make your bets, how do you know if they’re paying off? If innovation isn’t seen to create measurable value, it’s worthless. That’s the Metrics Trap.

One sneaky reason that so many companies throw away good money on bad innovation efforts is that innovation may take years to show impact on metrics that the business units typically track, like revenue, profit, lifetime value, or customer satisfaction. But that doesn’t mean that innovation teams can’t show value in the short term. By setting simple baselines, teams can measure progress over time, showing that their work improves outcomes, drives efficiency, or changes behavior. These progress measures demonstrate indisputable value, and can often satisfy skeptical stakeholders in the short term—until innovation’s portfolio of work hits the market and begins to generate real growth.

To properly measure both the productivity of individual projects and the performance of the overall investment strategy, many innovation units build a basket of metrics that they can track in various timescales, as captured in the diagram above.

One global financial services company has taken some smart steps to avoid the Metrics Trap. They built a Fintech Incubator to develop new digital offers on behalf of the bank’s business units. Before the Incubator will take on a project, a sponsoring business unit must make a business case for the product, put up a majority of the development costs, and define a series of success criteria for further investment. This aligns the innovation process with the business unit’s needs. On top of those project metrics, the incubator’s leaders also track a set of progress metrics across all of their work. These measures demonstrate how, over time, the incubator is moving down the cost curve. They’ve used progress measures as an argument for how the core business should rethink the way that they build and test new concepts.

—
To avoid this trap, ask yourself: Once you make your bets, what metrics will you use to calculate whether they’re paying off? What does your business value? What will you measure in various timescales to demonstrate the success of your projects, your progress, and your portfolio?

These aren’t the only innovation traps, but they are the deadliest. Innovation should not be a game of Russian roulette. By carefully considering and designing solutions to each trap, you can get that much closer to crafting an investment portfolio and innovation ecosystem that can nurture the future of your company.

Visuals by Gracia Lam.

With threats looming from every direction, it can be tempting to make precautionary investments in innovation. All too often, though, companies bet on new projects without thinking through how they will integrate with current offers and teams. That's like running a water main up to your house, then not connecting it to your plumbing. Yes, you’ll have water, but you won’t be able to channel it toward anything useful.

The office is an important place, and it’s one we believe should be designed with care. Culture matters—that means everything from the physical space to the values a company shares with new hires on their very first day.

Part of workplace culture is fun watercooler talk and good snacks, but it’s much more than that too. Solid culture lays the groundwork for the lightbulb moments that happen when people feel truly comfortable at work.

Good news: You don’t have to be an office manager to concern yourself with company culture. If you’re interested in building a positive, supportive office experience, check out the advice below from the Octopus archives.

1. When you’re curious about the folks that design the place where you work

How does a company agree on its values? What do truly authentic rituals look like? And how does that translate to business value? Follow one of IDEO New York’s organizational designers through a day to see what org design looks like in practice. (For more on what org designers do, read another piece from Mollie and her colleague, Mat Chow.)

READ: What Org Design Actually Looks Like

2. When you’re trying to convince your colleagues or your boss that culture matters

IDEO Chicago’s Annette Ferrera acknowledges that in some conversations, “culture” can mean “cool perks.” But culture is so much more than that: “It’s about creating an environment that makes it possible for people to work together to come up with innovative products and ideas—the same products and ideas that drive revenue.” Annette’s tips are both a blueprint for enacting your own cultural change and proof that a solid company culture can boost the bottom line.

READ: Why Workplace Culture Matters (And How to Build a Good One)

3. When you’re not quite ready to tackle that big project, but you want to make a small change

Designer, author, and IDEO alum Ingrid Fetell Lee runs Aesthetics of Joy, a blog about discovering joy in everyday life. If you’re not ready to tackle culture at an organizational level, use these bite-sized tips—like adding a plant to your desk—to create more joyful moments throughout the workplace.

READ: 6 Ways to Hack Your Workspace and Find More Joy at Work

4. When you’re not sure how you’re “supposed to feel” at the office

American work culture tells us we shouldn’t feel, fail, or fuss in our place of business, but org designer Mollie West Duffy doesn’t agree—in fact, there’s evidence that a little emotion at work can actually help us connect with our colleagues and feel more confident in our work. Learn more about “emotional culture” (and the book Mollie co-wrote on the subject) in this Q&A.

READ: Turns Out Emotions Do Belong in the Workplace—Here’s Why

According to a survey, the average person spends 13 years and 2 months—that’s 4,821 days—of his or her life at work. For comparison, the survey says we spend 1,583 days eating and 1,146 days on vacation. The only place we spend more time than the office? Our beds (12,045 days, or 33-plus years—thank goodness).

At these conferences, attendees are split up into group sessions: some big, some small, some on specific topics, and some designed to create new connections. Though grouping folks together might seem like a straightforward task, there is actually a dizzying number of ways to put people together—for one recent conference, the number in the neighborhood of 14 duodecillion possible combinations. That’s 1.4 x 10 to the 40th, which is close to the number you would get if you were to multiply the number of grains of sand on Earth by the number of stars in the universe.

Fortunately, for data scientists, sifting through haystacks to find needles is our bread and butter. We looked at this dataset with one goal: to create groups of individuals that foster conversations and catalyze new cross-disciplinary research. Easy, right?

We built an optimization algorithm that scores combinations of people based on diversity, trying to create well-mixed groups. To make sure we had truly excellent combinations, we needed to run the algorithm more than 1,000 times, after which a human had to examine the top scoring combinations. A human ultimately judging the top few options is crucial to making sure we incorporate nuances that the algorithm does not get. But at more than four minutes per algorithm run, it took an average of three days to get results. Three days! Three days between prototypes wasn’t going to cut it.

To solve our time problem, we turned to serverless computing. While we typically use it to deploy microservices, we couldn’t resist using it to massively scale our computational ability on the cheap. After all, we love hacking and repurposing things for atypical use cases, and digital tools are no different.

In a way, putting these groups together is like making chili—there are many different ways to make it, and all are valid (and many are tasty!). But to have a truly great chili, it’s essential that the ingredients are balanced and cooked properly to produce a dish that is elevated beyond the sum of its parts.

Think of each set of groups produced by the algorithm as a chili recipe. In the spirit of experimentation, you start putting together recipes that vary randomly in terms of ingredient amounts and cooking procedure. You’ve written down 1,000 recipes, and you’re going to cook and score them to find your ideal chili.

After a day of chopping, sautéing simmering, and tasting, you’ve only made 10 batches of chili. That's great, but in the grand scheme of things, that's nothing. So you think of ways you could cook and test your recipes more quickly. The most basic way is to make your cooking process (or code for your algorithm) more efficient: Chop faster and keep ingredients nearby. But this yields only a marginal gain. You would only crank out one or two more batches a day.

To really speed things up, you’re going to need some help. You could rent space in an industrial kitchen and hire chefs (servers on the cloud) who take a recipe, follow it exactly, and deliver the finished product to you. The downside: It takes a non-trivial amount of time and money to recruit and train chefs (much like setting up servers with the algorithm code).

But what if you had an army of 100 food trucks that are fully stocked, equipped, and happy to help you? That’s the equivalent of our serverless computing service. Serverless computing allows us to simply upload and then execute our algorithm code on cloud servers, taking away the hassle of setting up machines and allowing us to scale to hundreds or thousands of simultaneous runs effortlessly.

By using serverless tech, analyzing Scialog results goes from a process that runs in about three days to one that takes less than 10 minutes. With pricing schemes that only charge for the time the servers are being used, we can complete our thousand runs for less than $5.

This is great news, because it allows us to prototype our algorithms at scale much faster. What if, after looking at the results, we realize our scoring is missing a specific kind of input, like the balance of cat people vs. dog people? Previously that would necessitate another three-day wait for results. Now, we can tweak our algorithm, upload the new code, grab a cup of coffee (or chili), and come back to analyze the results.

We love the creative freedom that serverless computing enables (the ability to iterate on prototypes), and especially being able to get tons of computing power on demand—and cheaply.

If you’re interested in doing something similar, we’ve had great experiences using Zappa to deploy to AWS Lambda, but you can do the same kinds of things with other serverless services like Google Cloud Functions and Microsoft Azure Functions.

Now go forth and prototype at scale. And if you get hungry, you know what to do.

For almost 10 years, the Research Corporation for Science Advancement—or RSCA—has tapped IDEO for a little data science help. It's a good match, because RCSA shares our enthusiasm for helping people meet and collaborate. Every spring and fall, they organize conferences called Scialogs that bring together scientists of different disciplines to converse on important topics and inspire further collaboration through grants.

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.

‍

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.