About

Photo by Luiza Ferraz

Hello

Hello and welcome. I’m Ida, an experience designer and strategist based in New York City. My career is dedicated to fostering insight through adventure and play. My work has taken the form of games, rituals, convenings, expeditions, and research. I’m driven by an innate appetite for exploration and coloring outside the lines.

Uncommonplaces.com is my online catalog of creative endeavors.

Currently

As a Senior Experience Designer at SYPartners, I help create systems of human-led, purpose-driven transformation at the organizational and societal level.

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.

Organizations I advise include:

  • NEW INC, the first museum-led cultural incubator dedicated to supporting innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship across art, design, and technology
  • Photography, Expanded, an initiative of the Magnum Foundation to inspire documentary photographers to extend their storytelling practice beyond the still image

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

Formerly

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.”

For more, try the FAQs.