About

Hello

Hello and welcome. I’m Ida, an experience designer and strategist based in New York City. My career is dedicated to fostering new insight through adventure and play, which I first explored through game design, then adventure design, and now strategic convenings.

My work has taken the form of games, rituals, gatherings, expeditions, and research. I’m driven by an innate appetite for exploration and coloring outside the lines. Nothing delights me more than seeing people surprise themselves when they stretch beyond their known limits.

This website, uncommonplaces.com, is my online catalog of creative endeavors. Let’s go somewhere new together.

Currently

In 2020, I joined the Rockefeller Foundation as their first Director of Dialogue Design and Community Engagement.

Independently, I’m exploring the design of transformative social experiences. The research started by comparing sex parties, funerals, and wilderness trips through graduate work at the School of Visual Arts’ Design Research Program.

Projects I advise include:

  • NEW INC, the first museum-led cultural incubator dedicated to supporting innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship across art, design, and technology
  • Nautilus Sanctuary, a non-profit center for psychedelic medicine
  • The Artist in Residence program at the Esalen Institute, a retreat and research center that explores human potential

You can occasionally find me hanging out at Orbital, a studio for building networks.

Formerly

As a Senior Experience Designer at the consultancy SYPartners, I helped infuse play, creative risk-taking, and emotional vulnerability into convenings of executives and social impact leaders.

I co­-founded two design practices:

  • Sextantworks orchestrated adventures in places you aren’t supposed to be, with press coverage in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Businessweek, and Folha de São Paulo
  • Antidote Games creates playful experiences for understanding complex realities for clients like the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, the International Federation of the Red Cross, and the Innocence Project

Before that, I traveled extensively doing documentary projects and collaborative media production in Guatemala, India, and Brazil, and was a Fulbright Fellow to Ethiopia.

Academic degrees:

  • M.A. in Design Research, Writing, & Criticism, School of Visual Arts
  • B.F.A. in Design & Technology, Parsons School of Design
  • B.A. in History, The New School University

In junior high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Discover Time Travel.”

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