Book Mentions
Life Is In The Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age | The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
Press
The New York Times (1, 2) | Fast Company (1, 2) | Businessweek | NPR | The New Yorker
Life Is In The Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age | The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
The New York Times (1, 2) | Fast Company (1, 2) | Businessweek | NPR | The New Yorker
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.
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:
You can occasionally find me hanging out at Orbital, a studio for building networks.
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:
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:
In junior high school, I was voted “Most Likely to Discover Time Travel.”
For more, try the FAQs.