designing an aesthetic mindset

There is a particular quality of light in Ivy Ross’s living room, the kind that moves across surfaces with intention, catching the yellow of a leaf in a way that seems almost deliberate. She notices these things; she always has. As Chief Design Officer for Consumer Devices at Google, she oversees the creation of phones, laptops, earbuds, and watches that will touch millions of lives. But on this morning, she is speaking about something significantly older than technology, something interlaced with the texture of human existence itself: the deep and often overlooked truth that we are feeling beings who have learned to think, not the other way around.

This distinction, she believes, changes everything.

Ross grew up watching her father, an industrial designer, study the world with a particular kind of attention. “Look at that hubcap,” he would tell his young daughter at car shows. “Look at the way it’s constructed. What else in the world could be constructed that way?” While other visitors gazed at the spectacle, five-year-old Ivy noticed herself at eye level with chrome and metal, absorbed in the details, lost in the geometry of how things connected. “He gave me the gift of wonder,” she reflects. It was training she did not recognize as training.

// Continued on PAGE 19 in VOLUME I //

PHOTOGRAPHY // Thom Milkovic