Interview with Ivy Ross, by Alison King, January 2007

Ivy Ross is the Executive Vice President of Product Design & Development for Old Navy.  She is an industry veteran who joined Gap, Inc after developing Project Platypus at Mattel.  Before joining Mattel in 1998, Ivy managed design groups at numerous consumer product companies including Calvin Klein, Coach, and Bausch & Lomb.  Ivy is also a celebrated metal-smith and jeweler.  Her work is displayed in design museums around the world.

KING: Please describe the relationship between good design and collaboration.

ROSS: I think in some ways there are no unique ideas any more.  The only way we are going to get to truly new ideas is to have this diversity of thinking to create something new. When I look at what’s going on in the bigger universe right now, the messages that are coming through are really about oneness and connection with each other.

In the Industrial Revolution, the goal was to be as efficient and do things cheap, so it was this very assembly-line mentality, both in the factory and in the front office.  It was very hierarchical.  That made sense because of the task-at-hand.  The task-at-hand then was faster, cheaper, quicker.  So you needed this kind of organizational structure in design. 

Let’s face it.  Everyone has everything.  We are not about price anymore.  Everything exists at every price level.  It’s about the connection you find with the object.  You have to dissect what is the value of that connection.  It used to be about price and value and color.  Now it is going to start to go beyond that. 

We are at a point we are at this pinnacle moment.  We have to invent new ways of being, a new aesthetic.  It has got to come from this diversity of people building on each others’ ideas to create something totally new. I think it’s the way we are going to get breakthroughs to happen.

KING: Why do you think now is that turning point?

ROSS: Because I think we’ve played out all the others.  We’ve exhausted all the rest.  It used to be more singular. My dad was in industrial designer work for Raymond Loewy.  I know that model well.  It’s staying at your desk and figuring out the problems and I just think that was right for then.  That was about individual excellence.  I always look towards the kids and what they are doing, reality and fantasy getting all mixed up.  I just think it is about everyone jumping in.

KING: How did past work experiences inform your current leadership style?

ROSS: Project Platypus I created at Mattel was that tipping point.  I was hearing the buzz words ‘innovation, innovation, creativity, creativity’. Looking out over the sea of gray cubes, what we were really doing was designing towards realities, not possibilities.  What the world wants is what’s possible.  I thought I’ve got to get these people out of their boxes. 

I had to think about my own creative process. What I did for myself was feed myself.  I took on a question and absolutely ate everything I could.  I allowed myself the freedom without restrictions at a really organic pace to explore, like a kid.  I also believe that creativity and innovation are around trust and freedom.  Companies don’t get that.  They think it is a process. It’s really about creating trust between the people creating and the freedom to go to new places. 

Platypus was a constant flow of taking 12 people from the company and we’d spend 12 weeks together on developing something new. Afterwards, I would ask them why they think Project Platypus worked.  They said because they felt valued, trusted, and freedom.  They were allowed to do what they do well.  It also became known ‘if you want to get pregnant, go work for Project Platypus.’  It wasn’t because Platypi were having sex with Platypi.  It was because they say stress affects your ability to get pregnant.  These were women who were happily married who were all-of-a-sudden conceiving.  They had never felt as relaxed in their job, relaxed and stress-freed.

KING: 12 people for 12 weeks?  What’s up with the number 12?

ROSS: People literally thought it was a science.  The truth is that I thought ‘how long can I pull someone out of their job?’  Then I thought about maternity leave is usually three months.  Someone leaves on maternity leave yet the team keeps up.  It’s long enough to give that person a break but short enough that’s it’s not like the coworkers can’t keep up with the energy.

KING: What does the phrase “a time-to-graze” mean?

ROSS: I think that was Gordon MacKenzie who wrote, Orbiting the Giant Hairball.  He did this great analogy of cows.  You think of a cow giving milk and you only think of the end-result. If the cow had not had the time to graze, there wouldn’t be any milk.  To me it is the same thing in companies.  We are always just hooking people up for output, output, output.  We are not giving them time to feed. Even computers need input to get output.  We forget that.

KING: Looking into the future at the perfect collaborative space for design, what do you envision?

ROSS: The first thing is room to explore.  When you are in the zone of creativity you can’t explain it.  It has to be unjustifiable.  That means instead of getting your allocation of ‘200 square feet per person’, there has to be central spaces. The idea that creativity comes from chaos and mess is really important.  Space is to mess. 

Certain vibes of certain spaces hold the container for certain things to emerge.  When I have my staff meeting we all meet here and pick a new space to go to.  We can try different spaces and see if that shifts the way we treat each other or the ideas we come up with. It’s the variety of types of spaces and their aesthetics.

KING: When I hear all your collaborative style, there is seems to be a back and forth between stereotypically masculine and feminine concepts.

ROSS: It’s funny you ask that.  After I did Project Platypus and it was on the cover of Fast Company I got invited to speak at a number of different kind of groups.  One of them was the Fortune 500 women’s conference.  I did this standard presentation about what happens in Project Platypus.  Then, this is no joke. All of a sudden, I just started crying.  I thought, ‘Oh my God.  What is going on here?’  It wasn’t because I was scared.  ‘You know what?’ I said to the audience, ‘I just got a hit.  I just realized what Project Platypus was about.  It’s about being fearless to be female in a corporation.’  It was this huge release for me. It just hit me that the words about relationship, trust, finding the good in all of us—which is what I did—was be fearless to bring the female qualities to the corporation.

KING: What do these ideas mean for the future of design?

ROSS: I think that the things we are going to be designing will change. I think designers can design systems, ways of working.  Design, to me, is just a way of taking in information and processing it and being fearless about how you reconstruct it.  Believe me, I was very inspired by my dad who was a car designer.  He was looking at hubcaps and pure form.  Female designers, contemporary ones, will be looking beyond pure form.  That’s everything from designing ways of working to designing spaces, the holistic perspective.  I think the future of design is not just designing the object.  We are going to design entireties, entire entities.

One more thing on this.  The spirit in which something is created is transmitted to the consumer.  I’ve seen this.  Consumers may not know why they are drawn to this product versus one that was designed with angst.  That will transmit. 

KING: None of this is empirically provable.  When you look at companies with accountability (stock-holders, etc), how do you see these ideas permeating those organizations?

ROSS: The good news is I’m smart enough to know you can’t go in there and say that.  Those things are the hidden extras that make it work. The other good news is that within companies in the design world people usually don’t understand 100% what creativity is.  You are good as long as you can keep producing results.

KING: You’ve studied this?

ROSS: For the last 20 years of my life my vacation time has been spent going to science conferences, medical conferences and sound conferences.  This has been the way that I’ve fed me.  I can walk my talk.

KING: Is there anything when you think about the future of collaboration that we haven’t touched on?

ROSS: Let’s see we’ve talked about space, trust, people, diversity, stimulation, time-to-graze.  You also need to really get to know each other on a deep level.  You take out all the games people usually play in companies.  If you can get that out of the way and really start to work with who’s there, and take the time to get to know who’s there.  The future is somewhat being an orchestra conductor as opposed to a boss. It is knowing your people well enough to know that these five people will create magic together, around this issue. 

KING: How do you deal with reward?

ROSS: The joy is at the end being able to say you created something bigger as a group that you could have created on your own.  It’s the joy in not taking ownership to any one part but to the whole.  I think it is definitely a shift.  It’s how you let people celebrate and present the whole. 

You have to find what turns the individual employee on and allow them to do that.  I remember when I worked for Bausch & Lomb designing eyewear.  I hired a designer who was also a professional mountain bike racer.  I let him work part-time.  Management thought I was crazy.  I thought it was fantastic.  You can’t strip him of who he his.  Let him take the prototypes and go and use them then bring us feedback.  You should tap into people’s true nature instead of trying to change it. 

Go with the flow instead of against the flow.  Some corporations have a really hard time with that.  It means you have to really know your people rather than knowing them as a social security number.  You have to know what juices them, what recharges them.  It’s acknowledging that we are not machines.

Copyright 2007 Ambidextrous Magazine, Inc.