How Google's Chief Design Officer, Ivy Ross, built a career by following instinct, not ambition.
Ivy Ross on why designers are the most strategic people in the room.
By 26, Ivy Ross had jewellery in the permanent collections of 12 international museums, including the Smithsonian and V&A. She went on to hold executive roles at Calvin Klein, Swatch, Mattel, Gap, and Disney before arriving at Google, where her hardware design team has since won over 240 global design awards and helped Fast Company name Google the most important design company in the world in 2018. Her book Your Brain on Art, co-authored with neuroscientist Susan Magsamen, became a New York Times bestseller. She is one of the most creatively accomplished people working in business today.
Future London Academy spent a day with her in London, and here is what we’ve learned.
Spend the first two weeks of every project doing "nothing"
We don’t ask computers for output before giving them input. But we do it with people all the time.
"Creativity is making new connections. But if your people don't have the time to take in new things, how can they come up with new things?"
Ivy runs inspiration trips for her teams to different cities to have shared experiences together. She also ran a 12-week product development experiment where the first two weeks were spent entirely on getting to know each other. People were competing less and collaborating more, and the work was better at the end. But more importantly, people were happier.
Chief Design Officers are no longer optional
For a long time, the investors asked startup founders to hire a CFO first, then HR, and design somewhere further down the list. A venture capitalist she knows told Ivy that for many startups, the Chief Design Officer has become the second senior hire after the founding team.
The market is finally realising that creativity can shape the product, the brand, and the business from day one. If investors are now demanding design leadership early, senior creatives should start building the business fluency to become CDOs.
Trust a chill down the spine
Ivy describes that a chill down her spine tells her when something is true or worth pursuing.
This sounds unusual in a corporate context, but she argues it's actually more data-driven than we think. When she and her team intuitively knew a particular shade of blue was right for a Google phone and were challenged to justify it with data, she said: "95% of what we take in goes into the subconscious. Only 5% stays conscious. A collective intuitive hit from designers is based on more data than you might have in your cognitive mind."
Six months later, the head of marketing called her. Every gown at the Academy Awards had been that blue.
Irrational people are brilliant with AI
Machines can process and optimise. Humans can make unlikely connections rooted in lived experience, emotions, and irrational ideas. The two are the perfect combination.
"It's the combination of the irrational and the rational – the human and the machine – that will make us collectively more creative and take us to a place we can't even imagine right now." — says Ivy
The creative who understands AI will always outrun the AI that tries to be creative. Get fluent in AI, but also stay fluent in being human.
No goals = better work
Ivy sat on the board of the National Institute for Play. The scientific definition of play is “doing something different from what you do every day, with no preconceived outcome.”
"As kids, we just jump in to smell the roses or pick up the flowers, or take a cardboard box and make it into a tent. There's no goal, there's no end game. There's just pure joy in discovery."
Unfortunately, adults don't do this anymore. But it's exactly what creativity requires. So your job as a Design Leader is to create the conditions for your team under which some play can happen.
