

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.


Get inspired by these designers’ side gigs
Passion projects help us stay inspired, push our edges, and bring new ways of thinking to our day jobs
For one, creating keeps you inspired, giving you something to cling onto during those moments when the daily grind gets you down. It also forces you to push your edges—creatively, mentally, maybe even physically. By exploring your own creativity on your own terms, you’re bound to uncover new ways of thinking and working that will serve you in more ways than one.
Not sure where to start? Soak up some inspiration from IDEO designers whose side projects keep them sharp and creatively engaged.

1. If you want to learn a new skill...
IDEO New York’s Alex S. calls himself a “digital alchemist”—in other words, he loves making weird stuff on his computer. When he decided to teach himself 3D coding, he embarked on a slightly unsettling but majorly entertaining side project to create an online, 3D dance floor for his virtual colleagues to get jiggy with it.
READ: How I Taught Myself to Code in 3D

2. If you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and make something…
In his role as a design director at IDEO Cambridge, Michael Hendrix spends his days thinking big (and staring at screens). To keep his fingers nimble and his mind open, he started a simple yet satisfying side project: Making a paper collage every morning.
READ: I Chop Up Faces Every Morning and So Should You

3. If you’re looking to start a business on the side…
Kim Powers spends her days designing the experience of working at IDEO San Francisco. Two years ago, Kim and her husband purchased an abandoned dry cleaners and transformed it into a coffee shop—and the journey turned out to be directly relevant to her work.
READ: Thinking About Starting a Side Business? Read This.

4. If you want to find a way to mash up your passions…
Legal designer Sean Hewens has a taste for the absurd. On one hand, he’s a fictional mapmaker, and on the other, he brews his own beer. Sean’s side project manages to combine those seemingly unrelated hobbies into what he calls “the ultimate beer drinking experience.”
READ: What Brewing Beer Taught Me About Design

5. If you'd like to build your kids something special…
When she’s not designing software at IDEO Cambridge, Ashley Holtgraver is busy raising her newborn son. To help him grow up healthy and unscathed by the pressures of today’s digital world, she used her programming skills to build her son a “Slow TV.”
READ: Why I'm Building a TV For My Baby

6. If you want to get involved in your community…
Jacob Waites spends his days designing for emerging tech with IDEO CoLab, but on the side, he’s a founding member of Foremost, a creative collective intent on bringing culture to small town Florida. Together, the collective gutted an old gas station and transformed it into a community art center.
READ: How We Turned an Old Gas Station into a Community Hot Spot
At IDEO, we’re passionate about our jobs—and everything else. Our writers, designers, and researchers spend their spare time going after everything from beer making to starting their own businesses, making toys to writing stories. Why? Because big, small, physical, digital, experimental—no matter what we create, we know it’s valuable.


The bright side of design constraints: 3 tips for leveraging limitations
Three insights for turning design constraints into better client relationships and more effective prototypes
Some of the best lessons I learned on the topic come from my time working at IDEO.org, our non-profit arm, which focuses on improving the lives of people living in poverty.
Here are some key lessons that can strengthen your approach, no matter where you’re designing.

1. Lead with empathy
While at IDEO.org, I worked on Health XO–a team focused on designing better access to birth control. Translation? We went into urban and rural communities throughout East Africa and talked to teens about their sex lives. These conversations are very personal for anyone, but for many of the teens we spoke to, having a sex life before marriage is stigmatized and risky. In this situation, having empathy meant considering all aspects of the topic: the individual experience, cultural taboos, and the larger community.
Because the stakes were high, I found myself paying particular attention to how I conducted research. Was the setting private enough for the young women to feel safe? Was a group interview among friends a better way to structure it? Would the girl feel more comfortable if we met a few times before launching into the more personal topics?
This experience made me realize how important it is to take a moment before every interview to make sure my attitude is collaborative, not extractive—even in for-profit design work. This makes all the difference in protecting and honoring the people you’re researching.
Ask yourself: What can I do to make this experience beneficial for my research subject? How might I approach their situation with empathy, and without the end-game in mind?

2. Find out what happens when no one is watching
Maybe you’re designing something you know a bit about. Or maybe you just have an idea about what would be cool to make, and prototyping seems like a waste of time. When we’re designing in our own backyards, it’s easy to ignore prototyping. But as I began designing in less and less familiar contexts, I found the value of prototyping increased significantly. The prototypes had to speak for themselves.
When our team worked with a local organization in the Kibera neighborhood of Nairobi, we were tasked with finding more effective ways to engage men and boys in reporting instances of gender-based violence. In order to understand the contexts where people felt most comfortable making reports, we worked with local metalworkers to build boxes where anyone could anonymously drop a written report about incidents. We installed them throughout the neighborhood: in bars, public toilets, on the street, and in barbershops. Within a few days, we began to see patterns in where reports were—or weren’t—submitted. This informed our strategy going forward.
Prototyping is especially important if you want to observe behaviors that can be difficult to suss out through interviews alone.
Ask yourself: How might we build a stand-alone prototype that more effectively gauges how people might behave when nobody’s watching?

3. Help your clients build their own design skills
Deliverables matter. But without client ownership, even the most thoughtful design can gather dust. This is true no matter who your client is. But when you factor in a separation of 9,586 miles between you and your client, skill-building suddenly feels much more important.
One of the largest scale projects I worked on with IDEO.org was with Marie Stopes International. Our goal was to design avenues for teen access to birth control information and services, across all of Kenya. We worked side-by-side with the health workers who go from town to town as traveling medics. Not only were we learning from them, but we were also able to share how they could use design thinking methods to improve their current model.
Making sure that all team members have the tools they need starts with understanding the value that you—and your clients—bring. Our partners on the ground offered incredible expertise in the local landscape, regulations, and healthcare needs. We offered tools and a way of thinking that enabled these healthcare providers to try new ways of working, based on human-centered insights and a shared vision.
Ask yourself: What are the superpowers that my client has? How can I harness this knowledge in our designs, and include them in the creative process?
See what I mean about constraints? The next time you’re approaching a design project, take a moment to consider how you approach your work. Chances are, a step back from your day-to-day perspective will help improve your process, and your output.
Constraints are a designer’s best friend. When you have a small budget or a tight timeframe, constraints help you focus, force tough decisions, and require you to take a very exact approach. The more I design, the more I have come to value constraints. When you’re working on low budgets in emerging economies, with a language barrier, or in rural conditions, embracing the design process is key.

Why I made a GIF every day (and you should, too!)
How tiny projects can make you a better designer
So last summer, in search of some sort of spark, I decided to take on a personal project: I would make one animated GIF per day, every day, until I felt like stopping.
It may sound silly. GIFs often are. But it turns out, making GIFs is a great design exercise.
For one thing, they’re extraordinarily simple by design. Steve Wilhite, a computer scientist working at Compuserve, the first big online service company in the U.S., created the GIF in 1987. He had been asked to make a simple graphics format that works on all kinds of computers and could display sharp images even over slow internet connections. (Yes, in the late 80s the image quality of a GIF was considered “sharp.”) One of the first animated GIFs is this famous airplane.
What he wasn't asked to do was create a platform for animation. In fact, the spec sheet for the then-new file format clearly states that though GIFs could be used for very limited animation, that isn’t what they were made for.
But that’s largely what we use them for these days, which means we end up working under a lot of constraints. And creativity thrives under constraints! You have to experiment to leverage limitations and quirks and make them work to your advantage. When you make a GIF, you’re working with a limited color palette (less than 256 colors). Your animation has to be very short and simple or else your file size will be so big that the GIF is no longer easy to share / quick to load. The small file size might frustrate you, but it also might force you to think more abstractly about the most concise way to communicate something complicated.
Another defining constraint: GIFs generally loop. And since those loops are short, you’ll usually see this a GIF in its entirety a couple of times. The best GIFs take advantage of this constraint and make it a central component of their design.
One last incredible thing about animated GIFs: They’re not precious. People aren’t afraid to mess with them. So many animated GIFs are the result of people adding to or altering or juxtaposing existing media, which is sort of like a weird form of collaboration if you look at it from the right angle.
With all those things in mind, I started the challenge.
Since each of these were so small and self-contained (I worked on them once for a limited amount of time and then never returned to them), I felt free to make some that were purely formal or technological explorations, which is not typically my jam. I played around with the tools and applications to see the unexpected things I could do with them. Stakes were low, possibilities endless.
This project revived my passion for making things. Because of the medium’s limitations and my self-imposed one-GIF-per-day requirement, I couldn’t let what I made get too complex. The GIFs were quick, self-contained, and ultimately really joyful to create. I had to to embrace experimentation and overcome the fear of sharing "bad" design that plagues so many designers. If you force yourself to make and share something new every single day, guess what? Some of that stuff probably isn't going to be your best work, and that's all right. This is an attitude and approach that I've carried with me since starting my GIF project, and I think it's made me a much bolder and better designer.
Eventually, a cross-country move and a new job meant I was both more regularly inspired through my work and a whole lot busier, so I stopped making daily GIFs. But I have decided to keep up with weekly GIFs—and a lot of my colleagues in Chicago are now doing it with me. It sounds like a small project, but for us, it has made it easier to share half-baked ideas, inspire each other, and keep on making.
Need a little help getting started? I learned by converting from video to GIF with Photoshop, and this guide can explain how. And for those who are less technologically inclined or don’t have access to Photoshop, Giphy’s GIF Maker is a great tool.
In a previous job, I was really struggling to feel inspired or challenged. That’s not ideal when your job is to be creative and make things, so I was a bit desperate to find something that could help me rediscover the joy in making—after all, that was what had drawn me to becoming a designer in the first place.


Learn the basics of coding with a needle and thread
How a hands-on craft project builds digital know-how
I kept going over books, blogs, and videos, hoping for a moment where it all clicked and suddenly I became a chip whisperer. But it just wasn’t happening.
Then things changed. I bashed my fingers into my keyboard for days, failing over and over again until finally—it worked. I had a project idea that tickled my brain in just the right way. It was weird, and it was mine. I made something work, something I liked and that was just for me. I’ve been chasing that high ever since.
Looking back, I can see now that what really changed my relationship to code was letting my creative process lead. I was trying to make “useful” stuff, and that's not always necessary when you’re learning. Let the weird in! We worry about how the computer thinks when we’re learning to code, assuming that it’s smarter. It’s not. It’s a dumb box with lots of opinions. When I started worrying less about how it thought and more about what I was trying to achieve, I was able to find little toeholds in the translation process. I was able to work backwards from an idea, and break it down into tiny little steps. These steps are what every code project is made of.
I wanted to help my colleagues glimpse this feeling of creativity and control over programming—without having them touch a computer. I’m a lover of generative art and have long been inspired by the work of Sol LeWitt. His works are sets of instructions that can be interpreted and performed by anyone. This is also how a computer works. You give it instructions and it interprets them to perform some kind of function. (Literally, the part of the computer that reads code is called an “interpreter.”)
Our studio has a bi-weekly tradition called Make(Believe)Time. At each session, a member of the studio comes up with a creative activity to get us out of our heads and thinking more playfully. It might be to invent a new game, design advertisements for a future Earth invaded by aliens, or exploring our senses through making something strange. Ben Swire runs Make(Believe)Time and helped me craft a session that made this translation of code come to life with needle and thread. Each person received sewing supplies and a blank manila card (made to look like an old Fortran punch card). Everyone was asked to write simple instructions for a stitch on the card. Here are a few:

Ben and I shuffled and distributed the cards into groups. We explained that each card is a statement, a simple bit of instructions to be interpreted by the individual sewer. When each person was done with their statement card, they were to pass it to their neighbor until the group had shuffled through all of the statements. Each group of sewers would be acting like a programming function, performing a collection of simple directives.
When a group was done performing their “function,” their data (aka, the cards) was passed to another group. Much like in a computer, data was passed from one function (output) to another where it was added to (input). We were a human computer!

We were delighted to see the wild differences between each group's interpretation. That balance between constrained instruction and broad interpretation touched an interesting space between active and passive creativity. It was fun and inspiring to see the wide range of outputs that came from such simple instructions.

We’d love to hear how you explain complex processes through tangible experience. Send us your story!
Despite what I was led to believe, learning to code was excruciating. Throughout the process, I was convinced that I was dumb and should just get really, really good at Excel because that’s as close as I’d ever get to making a computer do anything by typing at it.


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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