Everyone is creative and resourceful at heart.
As Partner Emeritus, Jane is dedicated to sustaining and evolving design insight and inspiration, developing future creative leaders and maintaining a human focus in this data-oriented world.
She came to IDEO with a background in psychology and architecture and the ambition to bring social science-based perspectives to design practice. Working on diverse challenges for clients in multiple industries, Jane pioneered human-centered approaches and fostered a collaborative community of kindred spirits, including designers, anthropologists, and others. She evolved techniques for empathic observation and experience prototyping that are now employed widely in the design and innovation of products, services, and environments, as well as systems, organizations, and strategies. Jane went on to co-lead IDEO's global Consumer Experience practice, and then became IDEO's Chief Creative Officer.
To increase the accessibility of human-centered tools, Jane coauthored and published IDEO's Method Cards. She also created Thoughtless Acts? Observations on Intuitive Design (Chronicle Books, 2005), a collection of snapshots that depict the subtle and creative ways in which people interact with the world. Jane believes that everyone is creative and resourceful at heart—and we mutually benefit from tapping into that capacity. As designers face increasingly complex and systemic challenges, she has been looking beyond human behavior to explore how patterns in nature and living systems may inform and inspire design.
She taught the first IDEOU online course Insights for Innovation and published IDEO's Little Book of Design Research Ethics. Jane is a popular public speaker: she addresses design and business audiences, and has taught at the California College of the Arts, Stanford University, and the University of California, Berkeley, and other schools internationally. Her work has won design and research awards, including Industrial Designers Society of America and Industrie Form Europe, and she holds several patents for design innovations.