This work has earned him an OBE for services to social enterprise, the 2020 Cambridge Social Innovation Prize, and, most recently, made GoodGym the first-ever charity to win the Sky Zero Footprint Fund Grand Prix.
Speaking with Future London Academy co-founder Ekaterina Solomeina, Ivo shared ten ideas any design leader should consider to make a more positive impact in the world.
The best experience you can have are interactive, they're participatory.
So much of design has been about making things quicker and easier. Ivo references Don Norman, who teaches on FLA's executive programme, on how digital services have been engineered to remove friction wherever possible.
Ivo's take is that friction is often where the good stuff happens: the detour, the conversation, the moment of doing something together rather than just receiving it. If you take that away, you lose the chance encounters that make an experience worth remembering in the first place.
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Ivo points to the difference between watching a great film and being part of your own wedding, the birth of a child, or climbing a mountain with a friend. You might enjoy the film, but you'll remember the climb, because you were there to make it happen.
He thinks most services are still designed around getting people to an outcome as efficiently as possible. But the far more memorable experience is one where people feel their own contribution, however small, was acknowledged.
We already have more free time than any generation before us, with food delivery apps, ride-hailing, and AI doing more of our jobs. Wellbeing research, in Ivo's view, is clear that it hasn't translated into happiness.
He'd like design leaders to spend less energy optimising for consumption and more on designing for contribution. Systems that give people a genuine, acknowledged role to play, so they can build a sense of identity from what they give as well as what they receive.
Knowing your company's purpose is the easy part. The harder question is whether the thing you're building actually helps the person using it get closer to something they care about, rather than just reminding them the brand exists.
Putting a slogan about community on a billboard isn't enough. Ask what your customer is actually trying to become, or feel, or do, and whether the product hands them any real part in that.
If you design for competition, for one person to win, someone else has to lose. When you design around contribution and what people can give rather than what they can beat, there's no ceiling on how many people get to feel good about it at once.
Next time a feature nudges toward ranking or comparison, it's worth asking whether the same energy could go toward recognising what someone's put in instead. A version where everyone involved comes out as a winner.
Their Kipsta football boot went through a proper data-led rethink of materials and manufacturing. The result: a 63% cut in carbon, a €5 lower price for customers, and a 220% jump in sales.
It's tempting to design systems that assume people will behave predictably: follow the steps, stay in their lane, do the sensible thing every time. They won't. Give people any kind of trust and responsibility, and you'll get the occasional rule-break, mess or surprise you didn't plan for.
That's not a design flaw, it's just the cost of building something that depends on real human involvement rather than a scripted flow. You don’t have to tighten the process until nothing unexpected can happen. Get the essential safeguards right, and then leave enough room for people to be people.
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