Roshi Givechi

Partner, IDEO

 
Roshi Givechi is a Partner at IDEO and Managing Director at IDEO NY. Prior to her move to New York, she completed a nomadic year plus as Design Director working between IDEO’s offices in Asia Pacific. As she is driven to instill something new into every interaction, she works toward deeper engagement with clients, teams and other stakeholders through all forms of storytelling. Through communication, interaction and time-based media, Roshi enjoys defining how people interact with objects, space, services and one another. She believes the stories themselves leverage IDEO’s global insight-based design approach, and these stories become the currency that fuel and bridge an organization’s strategic vision down to the tangible expression of what we ultimately design for people out in the world.

As a former director of the San Francisco studio, she was as keen to consider the ecosystem that fosters good design through good talent as she has been experimenting with design herself. Whether leading Bank of America’s “Keep the Change” work – where she and her team nested something that’s hard to maintain (like saving money) into something that’s easy to do (like spending money) into a simple 2-in–1 interaction – or designing a vision for the Kauffman Foundation to represent the interests and opportunities in a community so that city developers could ideally build the right thing, Roshi is happiest when she works with others to have cultural impact. She has worked with Anheuser-Busch InBev, AT&T Wireless, Fotile, Forest City, the Gap, Midea, Nokia, NASA, Ritz-Carlton, Steelcase, Timberland, United Media (Dilbert’s Ultimate Dream Cubicle), among others.

She’s taught cross-disciplinary design at the California College of Arts, facilitated innovation workshops, spoken at conferences, and before joining IDEO in 1998 (as the 4th interaction designer in Palo Alto), designed websites at Microsoft and MSNBC. Roshi holds an MFA degree in Graphic Design/New Media from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, a BS degree in Design from the University of California, Davis, and spent a year at Il Bisonte International School of Graphic Arts in Florence, Italy – where she learned she is not an artist, but a problem-solving designer.

In January 2009, Roshi was profiled in I.D Magazine’s “I.D. 40” list as one of 40 leading design innovators. She is working hard to make sure she has something important to share in 2049, and saw living and learning in Asia as a nice step in that direction.