

Boston's new citizen-centered site
Designing a welcoming, intuitive platform for Bostonians.
More than 7 million people each year came to the Boston.gov site to tap into all sorts of city services: reporting a pothole, learning the assessed value of their property, paying a parking ticket, checking recycling schedules.
Boston wanted to create a beautiful platform that would make the process of finding and navigating information easy and intuitive, one that prioritized the needs of its people.
The Boston.gov site had outgrown its existing structure and needed an overhaul. The user experience was mired by the fact that Boston City Hall has nearly 50 different departments, each with its own microsite, navigation and content standards that feed into a centralized site.
So the City of Boston hired IDEO to design its new digital home, Boston.gov. IDEO designers worked with the major stakeholders—department heads, employees, and Boston residents, with a focus on those in underserved communities and those with varying levels of technical proficiency—to gather insights into what users needed.
The objective was to design something that would simplify how people navigate the site, to make it easier for residents to find answers to common questions, and, in the process, serve as a community facilitator—an up-to-date, reliable resource that makes life in the city more manageable.

Rather than organize the site by the city’s departments, the design solution was rooted in illuminating relevant content by topics—people’s life moments—many of which overlapped through different branches of government. Owning a car in the city, for example, is closely related to preparing for winter, so bridging those common threads allowed for a more intuitive organizing principle.
In the process of the site redesign, IDEO also helped to create a visual identity system that underscores Boston’s strengths: the city’s confidence, humility, personality, and optimism.

In addition to the web architecture and redesign, IDEO also produced a comprehensive style guide to help maintain design consistency, so departments can add content without compromising the overall integrity of the site, as well as a brand look that the city has decided to adopt across nearly all of its consumer-facing media. Now you’ll see the famous underlined B on T-shirts, banners, and even snow shovels.
Holding true to its mission to include Boston residents and all site users in its design process, the new Boston.gov site was piloted for six months, and the process document on the city’s blog (including the IDEO designed brand guide), before a full launch was rolled out in July 2016.
“The website should act like a helpful human. This is one of the big differences between the old site and the new site,” said Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the city’s chief of information technology in a Boston Globe article. “Oftentimes, when you looked at something on the old site, it would feel like you were interacting with some sort of lawyer-robot that was speaking to you in government-speak, using very formal language. We are trying to move away from that so your experience is akin to a person.”
The City of Boston was in need of a new digital home—one that emphasized a shift to a more welcoming tone and commitment to its citizens.

Growing an American brand in China
How an outdoor retail company found a new audience through digital and physical shops.
In the Western Hemisphere, The North Face brand has long represented an active, sporty lifestyle that’s filled with challenges and adventures. But appreciating “the great outdoors” in China is less about extreme sports and more about connecting with nature in a communal, spiritual way. This research-based insight led the team to identify new opportunities for The North Face to better target its messaging.

Designers found a key opportunity: Encourage Chinese consumers to escape the pressures of hectic city life by enjoying the freedom and renewal that comes with spending time outdoors.
Today, as people find less time to enjoy the benefits that lie just beyond China’s large cities, there’s a tangible desire to return to the outdoors to refresh, reassess, and renew oneself. The North Face aims to help consumers do exactly that.
To create a compelling new brand vision for The North Face in China, the team’s design research tapped into Chinese ways of spending time outdoors. IDEO’s insights and creative brief provided the essential brand story for The North Face in China and informed the tagline of the company’s current marketing campaign, “Go Wild” (去野). The North Face brand’s new messaging links “old nature” and “new outdoors” through a combination of digital, retail, and interactive community channels.

IDEO also collaborated with the company on designs and prototypes for a new digital platform and an updated store-within-a-store merchandising display. The digital community aims to attract newcomers and connect them with more experienced outdoors enthusiasts and clubs. As the platform evolves, it will help aspiring adventurers plan trips, learn skills, and share their experiences through photos.
The retail community space aims to integrate this digital community with in-store shoppers and an effort to turn the “buy-a-product moment” into a “join-the-outdoors moment.” Both will be integrated to provide a holistic brand experience in China centered on nature and community.
In the West, The North Face, with its decades-long history, has long symbolized an adventurous, active lifestyle. In China, however, the outdoor market only began accelerating in the early 21st century.
Success in this growing market depends on building strong and deep connections with Chinese consumers.
20% sales growth in China
from 2012 to 2013—the year the project was completed—propelling the brand from sixth place to a market-leading position


Nearly 40 years of designing pharmaceutical excellence
How a decades-long collaboration with Eli Lilly has transformed patients' lives and health outcomes.
Over the last 36 years, IDEO and Lilly, along with the pharmaceutical giant’s other design, development, and manufacturing partners, have collaborated on more than 250 projects. During this time, Lilly has not only honed its engineering-focused internal device-development team but also transformed into a human-centered organization with extensive, robust in-house innovation capabilities.
Early in the relationship, a team of IDEO designers and Eli Lilly leaders traveled the world to understand how people with diabetes live with the disease. Their findings led to the design of a series of award-winning insulin injection pens like SAVVIO. Portable, aesthetically pleasing, and discreet, the pens are suitable for use in both medical and personal settings. Combined with Lilly’s technical design prowess, this human-centered focus allows the devices to seamlessly integrate into patients’ lives and routines, making a challenging disease like diabetes feel more manageable.
Fast forward to today, Lilly’s innovative, easy-to-use auto-injectors are not only continuing to provide life-saving treatments to people with diabetes but also enabling the adoption of the popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs Mounjaro and Zepbound, which together accounted for the majority of the company’s annual revenue in 2025. Perhaps most importantly, patients consistently rate the experience of using Lilly’s auto-injectors as relatively pain-free, easy to use, and preferable to competitors’ brands, improving adherence, satisfaction, and health outcomes.
This unwavering focus on driving innovation through a patient-first mindset is evident in some of the most impactful projects Lilly and IDEO collaborated on over the years:
GLP Auto-injectors
Convenient and cutting-edge, the first Trulicity injection device was originally designed to deliver the GLP-1 drug to treat type 2 diabetes. Today, it has been adapted for use with other GLP-1s, Mounjaro and Zepbound, which are increasingly popular weight-loss drugs and are also administered once weekly via fixed-dose injections. A wide base enables the pen to be held securely against the injection site, and the device automatically regulates the dose and needle depth.
Taltz Injectors
For most patients, living with severe plaque psoriasis means being your own medical technician—metering your drug dosage each time, and attaching and removing needles by hand. Taltz provides patients with clear visual and auditory feedback throughout the injection process through simple icons, bright colors, a translucent material, and clicking sounds. The devices are available in both autoinjector and prefilled-syringe formats and are adapted for Emgality, a preventive monthly migraine treatment, and Ebglyss, which helps treat eczema or atopic dermatitis.
HumaPen SAVVIO Injection Pen
Key insights informed the design of SAVVIO, including patients’ preference for insulin pens that look less like medical devices and more like everyday objects you’d find in a backpack or purse. The sleek, colorful device was created to help patients feel comfortable and confident about fitting mealtime injections into their everyday lives.

Refillable Human Growth Hormone (HGH) Injector and Reconstitution Device
Designed to be kid-friendly, the Refillable HGH Injector leverages insights into pediatric treatment adherence to create a more integrated, systematic approach to treatment, while the Reconstitution Device makes mixing Lilly’s powder-and-liquid drug easier and less intimidating for parents and healthcare professionals alike.
KwikPen Insulin Pen
KwikPen is a next-generation, prefilled insulin injection pen that builds on the success of two previous designs, reducing its size to 5.7 inches and enhancing ease of use for patients.
HumaPen(R) Luxura™ Insulin Pen
HumaPen Luxura combines several innovations into a robust yet elegant pen that can be carried and used anywhere—an insulin pen solution that improves dosing accuracy, dose setting, and injection force.
In addition to designing products to meet the needs of people with diabetes, IDEO and Lilly have developed innovations in areas of oncology, autoimmunity, and men’s health. The results of this collaboration and expansion have won numerous design awards and produced one of the longest and most fruitful innovation relationships in IDEO’s history.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Eli Lilly had a number of new, life-changing medications and two big challenges: Most of its drugs were self-injectables, not pills, so patients were hesitant to take them. And its drug-delivery device platform lagged behind its drug pipeline.
99%
of Trulicity users reported the auto-injector was “easy” to “very easy” to use in a JDST study
$36.5B
of Lilly’s $65.2B 2025 revenue came from sales of its auto-injectable GLP-1s, Mounjaro and Zepbound, a 45% increase from 2024


Reimagining San Quentin
Bringing together many voices for a report for the Governor of California.
“…the Advisory Council will recommend transformational programmatic, cultural, and physical change to San Quentin that can serve as a practical model that can be replicated and scaled to other institutions.”
Source: Office of Governor Gavin Newsom: Governor Newsom Names Leading Criminal Justice and Public Safety Experts to San Quentin Transformation Advisory Council, May 05, 2023 https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/05/05/san-quentin-transformation-advisory-council/
The Advisory Council included the expertise of established criminal justice, public safety, healthcare, academic, reentry, and rehabilitation professionals, along with system-impacted/formerly incarcerated community leaders, and representatives of crime victims/survivors. The premise of IDEO’s involvement is to augment the Advisory Council Co-Chairs’ and members’ expertise in evidence-based best practices and lived experience living and working in prisons, with expertise in collaborative design, synthesis, visualization, storytelling and bringing visions to life.
Specifically, IDEO was brought in to facilitate input-gathering, and assist with incorporating the many viewpoints into a single, cohesive report of recommendations to the Governor. This included meeting the challenge of bringing together the viewpoints of 21 people on the Council (17 members, three Co-Chairs and an advisor to the Governor); incorporating the views of people who are most impacted (those incarcerated at San Quentin, San Quentin staff, community-based organizations, victim/survivor groups, among others); and formatting and designing the final report.

IDEO’s facilitation included workshops with the full Advisory Council, individual interviews and check-ins with Council members to gather their input to inform the recommendations. Each Advisory Council member was asked to speak with, and record feedback from, no fewer than five people at San Quentin or in affected communities and to share this feedback with IDEO. IDEO integrated this information and feedback into this report.
Research activities included visits to San Quentin to speak with and facilitate conversations with:
- San Quentin residents (100+) including the Citizens/Inmate Advisory Council, focus groups with Spanish-speaking residents, former gang members, ACT (LGBTQIA+), Voices Heal, People in Blue, San Quentin Citizens Advisory Council.
- San Quentin staff (100+) including interviews with numerous officers.
- San Quentin staff and residents together.
- Current participants and staff at Amistad (MCRP) and Beacon (former lifer) campuses (many who were previously incarcerated at San Quentin).
IDEO also organized listening, information sharing and feedback sessions, both at San Quentin and in the community, between Co-Chair representatives and various stakeholder groups, including victim/survivor groups, labor unions, and advocacy organizations. These perspectives were also brought into the report.


Need Feedback? Here’s 5 Ways to Reinvent the Focus Group.
Think dinner party, not two-way mirror
To better understand the madness of the focus group, I decided to do a bit of research on how it came to be.
The story begins in 1938, when a psychoanalyst named Ernest Dichter left Vienna to escape the Nazis and headed for the US. When he arrived in New York, he made an interesting career decision. Instead of helping individuals understand their problems, he decided to offer his psychoanalytic services to corporations.
One of Dichter's first clients was General Mills, which had a problem with its Betty Crocker cake mix. Its food scientists had formulated a dry mix that required only the addition of water. Once placed in the oven, it miraculously blossomed into instant cake. But after a good start, sales flattened. The executives were baffled: The product was more convenient. Why weren’t the housewives buying it?
Dichter gathered groups of women and put them through exercises derived from Freud’s methods of probing the unconscious, including free association and Rorschach tests. He explored their feelings about relationships and their role in the family. And then he started asking them about cake.
What he took away from these sessions was that cake was more than just a sweet baked product. It was loaded with sexual symbolism. He was particularly fascinated by the ritual of the wedding cake, which featured the husband taking a long knife and plunging it into the white cake.
His conclusions, like a good cake, were multilayered. First, the cake was symbolic of the wife’s relationship to the husband, and so she felt guilty making it by just adding some water to powder. Second, the sexually charged nature of the cake meant that it had associations with fertility, even childbirth.

Ernest Dichter and a Betty Crocker ad from the 1950s that anoints cake as the great unifier—almost as good as make-up sex.
His solution to these complex issues was simple: General Mills should remove the powdered egg from the formulation, and instead require housewives to add their own fresh eggs.
It’s hard to know whether the executives were swayed by Dichter’s Sexual Theory of Cake, or whether they liked the fact that removing the eggs would save money. Either way, they took his advice. And, sure enough, sales soared.
In the following decades, Dichter imitators turned his methodology into a hackneyed formula, and the focus group lost its way. We wondered if we could bring emotion and surprise back with a 21st-century reboot of the technique. Here are the five principles we followed:
1. Break the mirror
Hiding in a dark room behind a two-way mirror distances you from the consumer. If you want to find out what makes people tick, get eye to eye with them in the room. If you find this uncomfortable, suck it up: Discomfort is a sign that you’re learning something.
2. Lose the clipboard
The dynamic of “moderator and participant” creates an authority relationship in the room, which can lead to participants saying what they think they are “supposed” to say. Try having the questions served up differently—such as pulling them at random out of a jar. People will share more when they feel they’re having a natural conversation.
3. Think dinner party, not jury service
The original idea of focus groups was to create an environment in which people encouraged each other to share their feelings. Today’s sessions are often stiff and with the same amount of social interaction you’d expect from people doing jury service. So, do whatever you can to create a warm social environment. In our recent experiment, we started the session with 30 minutes of improv exercises, run by a trainer from Second City.
4. Record video confessionals
When Dichter ran focus groups, he would make all the interpretations and deliver a report to the client. These days, the client needs to feel some empathy themselves. The best way to achieve this is video, but an intrusive camera lens can cause people to clam up. We solved this by running interviews using a hidden-camera technique pioneered by the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris (see below).
5. Talk about the why
All the clever methods in the world won’t help if you don’t have the core goal in mind: understanding the motivations behind human behavior. We live in an age of data: We have more information than ever before that will tell us what people are up to. But the greatest inspiration comes when you can form theories about the why. Despite being more than a half century old, the focus group is still one of the best techniques for achieving this.

The Errol Morris–pioneered "Interrotron" puts interviewees at ease by giving them the impression they're speaking to another human, not a camera lens.
Focus groups suck, right? Bored people sitting in front of a mirror, delivering canned opinions on demand. Everyone from Silicon Valley to Amy Schumer pokes fun at them. But it wasn’t always this way: When focus groups started in the 1950s, they represented an exciting new way to probe the emotions and motivations underpinning human behavior. How did they get so staid and safe?


The Room That'll Make You More Creative
Hint: There's a throne
How did it all begin, you ask?
Long-time IDEOer Alan Ratliff was using the loo in Santa Cruz a few years back and took note of the graffiti on stall walls. He was struck by how openly and honestly strangers could share their most heartfelt feelings—in a public space. Combining this insight with the pause for thought that often strikes while seated on the throne, we thought we'd try inviting the same behavior on our own walls.

And how have people at IDEO responded?
Though the wait has admittedly increased, which brings no one joy, designing the bathroom as a place to intentionally linger and gin up ideas has become a point of pride.
Curious to learn more about how we nurture a culture of creativity? We tell the whole bathroom story, and many more, in Leading for Creativity, a new course taught by Tim Brown at IDEOU.com.

There's one stop we always make on our office tour: the john. Walls blackened by chalkboard-paint, every month presents a new opportunity to pose a controversial question and weigh in with controversial answers. Indeed, our bathroom has become one of the most—forgive us—productive places on the premises.


Take a Sonic Shower
Some mornings, we sit in a conference room together and just listen to music
Unless I’m at a gig or a concert, it’s rare that I listen to music in the presence of other people. There’s background music, sure, but that feels different—I’m not really listening. Here in New York, there’s always live music on subway platforms, but we don’t listen by choice (and while it’s often great, it can also grate).
Listening to music with others need not be limited to experiences of live music, though. Deliberately listening to recorded music with other people can be a magical experience. That’s especially true if you’re hearing it in a context that's a little unexpected, such as a conference room.
It’s a luxury to be in the same space as others and not need to talk—to just be present.
In our New York studio, we’ve been gathering for a series of shared listening sessions, called the Sonic Shower. It’s a really simple format:
• every month or so
• we spend 15 minutes
• first thing in the morning
• listening to 3 to 5 pieces of recorded music
• from around the world
• that are selected and ordered around a theme
• and played on speakers in a room
• while people listen over coffee
• and glance at light program notes, if they so choose
Three things we like about the Sonic Shower
1. IT SUPPORTS OUR COMMUNITY
It’s just a lovely thing to start the day with music. And it’s lovely to be in the company of colleagues without the pressures of drumming up conversation. Listening together creates a delicate, light experience of community that works for everyone, even if you don’t feel much like chatting first thing in the morning.
2. IT’S A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION
At IDEO, it’s our job to seek inspiration wherever we can find it. It fuels great design by keeping our teams engaged. We’re great at hunting down visual inspiration in art, type, and digital experiments. But it’s easy to forget to open our ears up in the same way—to expose our brains and hearts to sounds we’ve never encountered before. Music is sonic storytelling—it opens up imaginative doors that we’d be crazy not to go through. Each Sonic Shower is a mix of songs that are somewhat easy (or familiar) and somewhat challenging (or likely different to what you might normally hear).
3. IT ENGENDERS GRATITUDE
In so much of our work, we’re interrogating experiences—figuring out what underpins them and picking out aspects that we can replicate or evolve. But during a Sonic Shower we just listen to the music. We don’t feel an obligation to discuss it or derive meaning from it there and then. It’s a luxury to be in the same space as others and not need to talk—to just be present. And, while it does help our work, we don’t treat the Sonic Shower like work. That gives us permission to receive the music as a precious gift. And gratitude feels good.

Sample a Sonic Shower
Here’s what we listened to at a winter-themed session in December. You can find the music on Spotify here.
Hvild (2009) by Hugi Gudmundsson
Now based in Denmark, Gudmundsson is one of the bright lights of contemporary Icelandic composition. A few years ago, in a neat nod to IDEO, he was awarded one of the country’s most prestigious arts prizes: the Optimism Award.
Hvild means "rest." It was written for a friend’s funeral and includes text about carrying water over a mountain...
Snow (1954) by Irving Berlin; performed by Rosemary Clooney and The Mellomen
This is one of the stand-out songs from Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. The movie version features the four leads—Clooney, Crosby, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen—singing the song together on a train. As you do.
Der Leiermann (1828) music by Franz Schubert; poem by Wilhelm Müller; performed by Jonas Kaufmann (tenor) and Helmut Deutsch (piano)
This is the final song of Winterreise (Winter Journey), Schubert’s monumental song cycle for voice and piano. Grab a whisky and listen to the whole thing sometime—it’s an intimate, crystalline marvel.
Der Leiermann translates as "The Hurdy-Gurdy Man." The hurdy-gurdy is an instrument where, to produce notes, you crank a handle that turns a greased wheel against its strings. Here’s the text of the song:
Behind the village stands a hurdy-gurdy man, cranking his instrument with frozen fingers. His begging bowl is always empty; no one listens to his music, and the dogs growl at him. But his playing never stops. “Strange old man. Shall I come with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to accompany my songs?”
The piano does so much more than simply accompany the voice. Elsewhere in the cycle, it becomes a powerful storm, the rush of water beneath ice, a creaking weathervane, and much more. Listen for how, in this song, it conjures up the sparse drone of the hurdy-gurdy.
Winter Darkness (2014) performed by Nils Økland (Hardanger fiddle) and Georg Buljo (voice)
The Hardanger fiddle is a traditional stringed instrument from Norway. Contemporary players such as Økland have coaxed the fiddle into modern music, working with collaborators near and far.
Buljo has done much the same with joik (pronounced ‘yoyk’), one of the oldest vocal traditions in Europe. A joik is both a style and a song form, deeply rooted in the Sami culture of Sweden, Norway, and northern Finland.
All that said, this is a pretty traditional piece—but modern, close recording lets us hear every crack in Buljo’s voice and every bow across the strings.
Does it sound like "winter darkness" to you?
It’s never been easier to share music with each other: Here’s a link, there’s a playlist, and off you go. At the same time, my experience of music has become more and more private, more and more mediated by headphones.


5 Ways to Design a Great Effing Meeting
Hint: Confiscate the phones

We thought about the physical context: If looking at a screen put viewers into a mode of judgment, what environment might lead them into a state of openness and wonder? After a few false starts—and ruling out marijuana—we settled on a campfire. Everyone has experienced the magnetism of a flickering flame and its power to open you up to a good story.
Burning wood was going to be a challenge indoors. But then another part of our talk occurred to us, in which we identify iPhone addiction as a scourge that prevents people from engaging in creative daydreaming. What if we took away the audience's phones and used them to stoke up the flames rather than dowse them?

Here’s how the experience played out. We gathered everyone in a conventional classroom setting and ran them through a calendar review exercise (“Look at your last week and count the hours of creative imagination”). Then we shared some recent brain science studies that point to the power of daydreaming to cultivate creativity. Diving deep into the intricacies of neuroanatomy, we could tell we were losing people.
Just before everyone fell asleep, we herded them through a back door to another part of the building. Here, in dimmed light, we had each person load a YouTube video of a campfire and set it on top of a foam-core structure made by our designers in the Chicago office. Soon we had a raging digital bonfire of iPhones, with additional sound effects from having our audience gently crinkle Post-It notes in their hands.
No campfire would be complete without taking turns strumming a guitar and telling stories of things we’d done to rediscover our creativity, so that's exactly what we did. The previously restless audience sat on the floor, gazing at the virtual fire, curious and relaxed.
Look at your last week's calendar and count the hours of creative imagination.

We turned the floor over to the attendees. What strategies did they use in their own practice?
One colleague shared a story of hanging a lamp above his desk to serve as a beacon. When the lamp was on, it let others in the studio know he was available to talk. Another shared her technique of running away from distractions—literally, on foot—until her head was clear. A third announced he would try to change his mindset by drawing for a few minutes each morning when he got out of bed. As the session ended, we asked everyone to write down something they would try in the future to spark their own creativity. Commitments were made and notes were tossed into “flames” as attendees drifted away, dreaming of a new way to work.
In sum, here are 5 ways to design a non-boring meeting:
- Start conventionally, then lead attendees to an unknown frontier
- Confiscate phones
- Commit to a gimmick so they don't complain that you've taken their phones
- Play music
- Ask people to share personal stories
*Only one iPhone was lost during the making of this session… but seriously, who took it?

Our quest: to invent an un-boring meeting. My colleague Michael Hendrix (above, immersed in one experiment—a bubble-bath-based brainstorm) and I were preparing a conference session about the importance of putting yourself in a creative mindset. But the way we were delivering it—two dudes standing at the front of a room with a PowerPoint deck—was about as inspiring as the DMV. We needed the audience to experience the thing we wanted to teach.


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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