PATTERNS

Jim Collins

Jim Collins is a mechanical engineer and designer at IDEO. Prior to joining the firm,  he created surgical instruments for hip and knee replacements. Today, he focuses on society’s toughest social and environmental challenges using the tools and methods of design thinking. His work encompasses medical product design, industrial machinery, consumer power tools, and energy conservation. He loves improvisation, whether it appears in a timely engineering solution, in humor, or in vernacular dance. Jim particularly likes PATTERNS because it is a constructive application of improvisation.

Jenny Comiskey

Jenny has collaborated with a wide range of clients to define new platforms, service experiences, and innovation strategies. She has an abundant curiosity for uncovering the small nuances of individual behaviors, complementing that with a macro view of emerging social and cultural patterns. Jenny is most at home when tackling messy systemic issues, applying design thinking to reframe complex problems, enable positive impact, uncover new opportunities for value creation, and define “what’s next.” When she’s not busy reading white papers or pattern hunting, she’s out getting muddy in the garden or riding her bike.

Colleen Cotter

A design strategist at IDEO, Colleen has an unshakable belief in the power of design thinking to address social issues and business challenges around the globe. She’s worked with clients to reinvent the emergency department, transform a public school’s approach to education, tackle childhood obesity in America, and reshape finance models for rural farm communities. Colleen studied design at Columbia University and currently works closely with the Stanford Graduate School for Design Thinking. Her bottomless curiosity drives an addiction to podcasts, lectures, and coffee retreats with inspiring minds.

Kevin Dame

Kevin is a leader in IDEO’s Health & Wellness practice, where he applies the principles of design thinking to help people live healthier lives. Through project work across a range of industries including retail, entertainment, financial services, and food, Kevin has observed a recurring pattern of people aspiring to be healthy who are ultimately undone by their stronger impulses. Kevin believes that designing for this age-old “battle within” is key to a healthier society. Kevin is an engineer, MBA, consumer marketer, design thinker, baseball book author, and soon-to-be father.

Isabela de Mello

Isabela is a guest writer for IDEO PATTERNS. Her daily job as a design researcher can easily take her from shaving rituals to cancer treatment, to healthy prepared food - a fertile ground to recognize patterns across the range of content areas IDEO engages in. Isabela found her niche in the intersection between human behavior, ideas, and things through a long journey that started with producing TV commercials and later devising marketing strategies. Isabela takes a break from observing people by turning her attention to other species, e.g., equine and canine.

Meghann Dryer

Meghann is a business designer at IDEO, where she likes to invent new businesses and devise clever ways to take things to market. Meghann came to IDEO through business, but entered business through design. She’s worked in a range of product management roles, most notably in children’s shoes, consumer electronics, and high-end gaming enterprises. Lately, she’s been thinking a lot about loyalty and how to design meaningful customer relationships. Meghann is an avid experience collector, so she’s up for just about any adventure.

Betsy Fields

Betsy is a design strategist and project lead at IDEO.  She enjoys tackling unwieldy problems and taking a bold approach to difficult design challenges.  Her work runs the gamut from smoking cessation initiatives, to weight management programs, feminine hygiene and organizational transformation. She regularly leads research studies in Europe and Asia.

Betsy studied Product Design at Stanford University, where her senior thesis project—a tampon applicator for beginners—earned her the Chilton Memorial Prize for Excellence in Product Design.

Jane Fulton Suri

Jane Fulton Suri is fascinated by the patterns we create in response to the world, as it affects us. Whether we’re sorting laundry or putting together an outfit, inhabiting a hotel room or connecting with our personal network, we’re making detailed design choices that shape (and are shaped by) our experiences and cultural norms. As a pioneer of empathic observation, Jane pays attention to vernacular design and everyday creativity as a source of insights. She’s brought this approach to bear on social and business problems alike, believing that design, like life, is about seeking creative harmonies between one’s own interests and those of the broader community—and by extension, the world as know it.

Aradhana Goel

Aradhana co-leads the Systems@Scale Practice at IDEO Chicago and has experience ranging from architecture and urban design to experience design to service innovation. She is passionate about understanding human behaviors, how they inform the collective societal patterns, and how these patterns intersect with technology and business needs to inform innovative product or service solutions. Her current desire and future focus is designing for emerging markets like India that are highly value-conscious and require systems-level scalable innovation. She also is a passionate traveler, who loves both the water and the mountains.

Arvind Gupta

Arvind joined IDEO as a multidisciplined designer with experience in design strategy and business. He is a specialist with hardware and software integration projects, and serves as a senior design lead and director for much of IDEO’s work in Mobility. Arvind’s focus is on the interpretation of behaviors —then designing integrated solutions and interactions that enable new ways of connecting with what matters most to people. His award-winning work has been published in Time, Surface, and Fast Company. When not in the studio, Arvind can usually be found in the shop designing furniture or on the mat training Brazilian Jiujitsu.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard

Suzanne is editor-in-chief of PATTERNS, which she started with others to raise the bar for discussions about human-centered design both inside and outside of IDEO. A zealous observer of people and cultures, Suzanne came to IDEO via a crooked path involving archaeology, museum exhibit design, teaching high school, studying anthropology of religion, and being a dot commie. She crosses the full range of IDEO’s offerings from high-tech education environments to postpartum hospital experiences to convenient yet healthy foods. She also is a passionate traveler, climber, sailor, research geek, and mom.

Lydia Howland

Lydia Howland is a Human Factors Designer at IDEO London.  In that capacity, she works assiduously to uncover insights, identify unmet needs and desires, and pinpoint opportunities for design, based on her observations of people and culture at large. Before joining IDEO, Lydia was a social policy researcher at Demos, a UK-based think tank, which is where she first became interested in the politics of public behavior. Lydia also, allegedly, has a slightly obsessive relationship with cheese—only rarely of the American variety. 

Simon King

Simon’s work spans macro and micro, from long-term platform strategy to pixels and milliseconds. To satisfy this range of interests he has worked on diverse projects including medical devices, retirement services, mobile payments, and the digital experience of the Olympic games.  Simon holds an M.Des. in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University where he explored product evolution, information visualization, location-based interactions, and slow design. Currently located in Chicago, he continues to act as a sponge for new technologies, behaviors, and theories that can inform his approach to design.

Devorah Klein

Devorah has learned about people’s needs by visiting operating rooms in southern Japan, delivering ice cream in Barcelona, hanging with cadets at West Point, and betting in the casinos of Las Vegas, though not all for the same project. Looking for patterns across projects is a powerful way to help IDEO build on previous knowledge, and Devorah has been doing this with the Adherence project for over 4 years. When not working to bridge insights to design, you might find her making spaetzle, crepes, gnocchi, or other delicious starchy food.

holly kretschmar

holly directs emerging thought for IDEO’s Food & Beverage practice, focusing on projects that create business and social value. She is a design strategist with degrees in business and anthropology, and her work focuses on using market forces to improve quality of life, with a current emphasis on the obesity epidemic in the US and unsafe water issues in emerging economies. Prior to IDEO, holly worked as a brand strategist, video editor, travel writer, anthropologist, and online media producer. On the weekends, holly runs, writes, wrestles with her son and her husband, and attempts to chip away at her 10-year backlog of New Yorker magazines.

Sally Madsen

Sally is a designer and project leader at IDEO, and a leader of IDEO’s Social Innovation domain. As a child, one of her favorite rainy day activities was sorting and arranging different objects in her house into different categories—she has always been a pattern spotter. Today, she brings a holistic view to the design of products, services, and systems, believing that good design touches on each of these. Her experience at IDEO includes programs for social and commercial clients in India, Ghana, Kenya, Bangladesh, Mexico, and the U.S. She’s an enthusiastic globetrotter, traveling with open eyes (and an open mouth) and a camera around her neck, immersing herself in a unique array of experiences.

Jennifer Maer

Jenn joined IDEO with over 10 years of ad agency creative experience, and now leads brand-focused projects for clients as diverse as Campbell’s, Marriott, and The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. She combines a passion for language with an obsession for pop culture, and firmly believes the best ideas come to life during long walks or hot showers. When she’s not writing or strategizing, Jenn fronts IDEO’s all-employee rock band, which is, rather unfortunately, named “Fishlocker.” (She swears she didn’t name the band.)

Tatyana Mamut

Tatyana is an economic anthropologist whose curiosity is unbounded by time and space. She has done fieldwork across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and her projects have ranged from recreating the economic institutions in low-income housing to helping NGOs in Africa increase smallholder farmer income. Prior to IDEO, Tatyana was a senior planner and futurist for the Leo Burnett Group and headed her own brand & futures consultancy, Emergent Thinking. She holds a PhD in anthropology and has received major grants for her work from the National Science Foundation and the Soros Foundation.

Patrice Martin

Patrice Martin is a lover of all things quirky and a bit unusual. Finding the odd details and the interesting bits are her never-ending source of inspiration. Patrice has followed her passions at IDEO along a twisting path, through brand strategy, spatial experiences, designing for community and systems design. When not sniffing out a good story, you can also find her doing yoga, looking for a good Scrabble game and wishing she cooked more.

Michael Phillips Moskowitz

Michael Phillips Moskowitz is a communication designer and writer at IDEO. His work focuses primarily on storytelling, brand experience, and design strategy. Michael’s prior professional work spans a variety of sectors and disciplines – foreign policy, fashion, publishing, and start-ups.

Michael came to IDEO directly from EngineMPM, a brand strategy consultancy based in Palo Alto, California. Prior to founding and serving as principal of the agency, he was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of TODO Monthly, a lifestyle publication in San Francisco; the co-founder and creative director of Gytha Mander, a luxury menswear label; and a research staffer at The Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, MEMRI, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford.

Madison Mount

Madison Mount is an associate partner at IDEO and leader of Consumer Experience Design—IDEO’s largest business community. Madison is also the co-founder of IDEO’s Food & Beverage practice. In both of these roles, Madison helps companies and organizations solve their toughest challenges. This includes advising clients on strategic business and organizational decisions as well as envisioning the offers that bring those strategies to market. Current and prior clients include P+G, Campbell’s, ConAgra, the Gates Foundation, Levi’s, and Callaway Golf.

Nicole Oncina

Nicole Oncina is a business development associate in IDEO’s Food & Beverage practice and Consumer Experience Design business community. She works closely with clients to design engagements that deliver business opportunities at the intersection of human desirability, technical feasibility, and business viability. Some of Nicole’s clients have included Chiquita, Levi’s, Electronic Arts, and Qualcomm.
Prior to IDEO, she worked as a journalist in the US and Italy, and led communications initiatives at international architecture firm SOM. Nicole attests to loving most things made of Core-Ten steel, Sangiovese grapes, and pork.

Ashlea Powell

Ashlea’s work at IDEO focuses on storytelling and designing brand experiences for clients as diverse as the TSA and KODA, a social media startup. Her writing has been recognized by a variety of awards and publications, including Cannes and the Effies. She finds inspiration through teaching children the art of expression, wandering the aisles of antique markets, and people watching on public transportation.

Colin Raney

Colin is a business designer at IDEO. His work has ranged from software strategy to retail design, and many points in between. He’s addicted to people watching and finds design inspiration in some of the strangest places, from water towers to taco trucks. He believes that strategies are about systems–successful businesses require offerings, brands, and services that complement each other. He holds no prestigious or impressive design awards, but his mother continues to insist that she is quite proud of him.

Lauren Shimek, PH.D.

Lauren is a member of the Food and Beverage practice at IDEO and labors relentlessly to develop insights into human behavior. Her expertise when it comes to said behaviors spans several categories, as seen in PATTERNS. 

Lauren is IDEO’s resident food science innovator and a technical build-guide. She brings to the firm, and to all food and beverage products, both a passion for all things edible and a command of food science knowledge. Lauren also publishes a monthly Eater’s Digest newsletter and a personal food blog, http://www.foodspiration.com.

Doug Solomon

Doug Solomon is chief technology officer at IDEO.  He works on a wide variety of projects at the intersection of technology + health, consumers, social impact and collaboration within complex organizations.  Doug’s journey to IDEO was a long and winding road, but it seemed to prepare him for the diverse innovation challenges IDEO confronts with clients on a daily basis.  He is trained in international public health, as well as information theory and behavioral science.

Prior to joining IDEO, Doug worked for several of Silicon Valley’s leading technology companies and played a leading role in the creation and investment of social capital. Doug believes that humans are fundamentally pattern finders and is delighted to share his freshly baked perceptions. 

Caroline Stanculescu

Always on the look-out for a challenge, Caroline has worn a number of hats in her time at IDEO. From recruiting new IDEOers to facilitating design sessions for social entrepreneurs in India, Caroline’s been on the front lines of emerging work in the public sector, finance, education, and brand strategy. Growing up as a “Third Culture Kid,” Caroline has an affinity for engaging with other languages and cultures and is always planning her next travel adventure (currently under consideration: a group camper adventure through Ecuador).

Beau Trincia

Beau Trincia is an environments designer at IDEO. Approaching thorny design challenges as an architect, his primary area of expertise and background, Beau’s work has been celebrated and exhibited widely. Prior projects have been featured in the Vitra Museum and published in Transmaterial, Network Formations, and Metropolis magazine. He has also taught courses in design at UC Berkeley. In his spare time, Beau can be found laser-cutting everything he can get his hands on, playing the synthesizer, and immersing himself in the chaos of city life.

Gabriel Trionfi

Gabriel is a psychologist who escaped academics to join the design circus. As a human factors specialist at IDEO Gabriel has an opportunity to explore patterns with insanely talented designers. Gabe’s work at IDEO ranges from iPhone apps for toddlers to larger strategy projects for the U.S. government. Gabriel earned a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Clark University where he studied play, imagination, and imaginary companions. It is Gabriel’s passion for understanding developmental change that brings him to design. If you bump in to Gabe’s old advisor don’t tell her he is having such a good time under the big top.  

Leslie Witt

Leslie Witt is a co-founder of Healthy Living at IDEO, a group organized to promote physical, emotional and financial health by improving everyday behaviors and choices. She is currently focused on the ‘financial’ dimension of healthy living, working to reshape the financial service industry with the idea of ‘health’ at it’s center. Prior to IDEO, leslie was an architect and academic–she continues her involvement in these spheres with a commitment to teaching. When not helping her clients hatch a new strategy or her students tackle a new challenge, she can most often be found enjoying a tasty meal in her backyard oasis with a book in one hand, a glass of wine in the other with a sleeping puppy at her feet.

Kris Woyzbun

Kris is a designer at IDEO who works on all things brand, service, and product. Being a big sports fan, and lover of all things related to fashion, hospitality and film, makes Kris a bit of a culture vulture. Having been raised in a family of 7 in Canada, Kris knows a thing or two about collaboration. She has a twin sister who constantly reminds her how weird she is, but that only makes Kris appreciate the creative work environment at IDEO. Kris also teaches at Stanford University at the d.school where she is constantly inspired and amazed.

Gretchen Wustrack

Gretchen is a design strategist and a lead within the Consumer Experience Design practice at IDEO. She takes a long view in her approach to design focusing on solutions where product, service, environment and communication meet to create meaningful user experiences and robust businesses over the long-haul. Gretchen is coleading the emerging Change+ domain. She brings deep experience in design for adherence to this initiative, which tackles the specific challenge of helping people and organizations meet their long-term needs by supporting sustained positive behavioral and attitudinal change through design. When not thinking about the big picture and the long term, Gretchen lives in the moment savoring the little things like good coffee, good chocolate, and good friends.

Liz Armistead

Liz Armistead is the Digital Production Lead at IDEO and manages PATTERNS’ online presence. Her interest in the visual and interactive powers of the World Wide Interwebs emerged from a motley history working in communications for online services and studying contemporary art and photography. Her work at IDEO has focused on delivering on-brand, compelling digital experiences and exploring alternative channels for the promotion of IDEO-generated content. Beyond the walls of IDEO, Liz is an avid concert-goer and audiophile who loves to travel, takes photographs of everything around her and enjoys the occasional yoga class.

Katie Clark

Katie Clark is a graphic designer and visual asset manager whose passion for beautifying and straightening the world was an inevitable result of the marriage between a painter and a Marine Corps colonel. For the past six years, she has had the privilege of telling the world IDEO’s most intriguing stories through various books, websites, events, and interactions. Katie supports the production of PATTERNS’ online & print pieces and believes the universe could discern most of its fate by recognizing the patterns found in everyday life. Outside of IDEO, she is an active health blogger as well as a classical pianist, guitarist, Stevie Wonder fanatic, and surfer.

Tracy DeLuca

Tracy DeLuca’s work at IDEO is focused on branding and communication design. With a decade of advertising experience behind her, Tracy joined IDEO in the summer of 2008 to work on a diverse range of projects. Everything from financial services and home care to helping create a culture of conservation in British Columbia. A voracious traveler, Tracy authors a popular blog called Travel Betty, where even she can’t believe the good fortune of her experiences.

Barry Katz

Barry is the founder and sole member of the Bureau of Narrative Prototyping (Division of Rhetorical Engineering).  He believes that words are an important medium of design and uses his verbal skills (such as they are) in support of projects of every sort.  In addition to writing and editing, he has given dozens of client presentations in which he attempts to place projects in a historical perspective: credit cards, carbonation (Pepsi), habitable spacecrafts, sitting down (Steelcase), body imaging (GE Medical), chewing gum, etc. etc. etc.  In his spare time he is Professor of Humanities and Design at the California College of the Arts and at Stanford.

Martin Kay

Martin is an industrial designer at IDEO. Whether designing for consumer electronics, transportation, fashion or re-imagining services, he is driven by a passion for the farthest reaches of art, design and creativity. He’s notorious for his illustrative communication design, as well as for having a keen interest in both visual and behavioral trends. Martin’s early work has been recognized by the UK Royal Society of Arts, but he’s more likely to boast about his talent for mixing a mean Dark & Stormy.

Laura Moorhead

Laura works as an editor at IDEO, where she helps articulate the company’s human-centered design efforts through words. At IDEO, she enjoys working with people from different disciplines to effectively explore new ideas—ideas that can become reality and generate valuable new outcomes. A personal passion of hers includes the moments when the media collide with history and social crisis. Laura has presented papers on the topic, including one about the impact of the press on San Francisco’s bubonic plague and another on the scientific writing of journalist Robert Chambers for the Darwin Day Symposium at Stanford University. She keeps both bees and small children.

Trena Partee

Trena Partee’s work at IDEO is focused on human factors recruiting and working to create some additional structure in this arena. Trena joined IDEO in the fall of 2008 bringing with her the experience of running a recruiting department and overseeing the implementation of a talent database. When Trena is not organizing something she is feeding her creative side by doing floral arrangements, building scale models, or exploring the city on urban hikes, discovering new restaurants and art studios.