Ivy Ross

Ivy Ross is the vice president of hardware design at Google. Ivy and her team created the design language for the Google hardware products that launched in 2017, winning over 240 design awards over the last three years. Business Insider recently named her one of the 15 Most Powerful Women at Google. In 2019 she was voted number 9 of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company. She was featured in the Surface Magazine issue on barrier-breaking figures in 2019. Previously, she held executive positions ranging from head of product design and development to chief marketing officer and president of several companies, including Calvin Klein, Swatch, Coach, Mattel, Bausch & Lomb, Old Navy, and Gap.

Ivy draws on her background in wide-ranging fields including sound therapy, quantum physics, psychology, and play. One of her most notable innovations is Project Platypus, an experimental design initiative where a core team develops a new brand in an enriched environment over three months; the model has been adopted by Mattel (where she was formerly head of innovation) and Procter & Gamble (on whose design board she served). She also served on the Vatican’s Arts and Technology Commission and judged the 2017 Spark Design Awards, the 2018 Core 77 awards, Dezeen Design Awards 2020, Frame Design Awards 2020, Design Leader of the Year Awards 2020, and the Fast Company Design Awards.

Ivy has been a contributing author to numerous books, including Louis Carter et al.’s The Change Champions Field Guide: Strategies and Tools for Leading Change in Your Organizations (Pfeiffer, 2004) and Stuart Brown and Christopher Vaughan’s Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (Penguin, 2009). She has been referenced in Tom Kelley’s The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO’s Strategies for Beating the Devil’s Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization (Currency/Doubleday, 2005), Tom Parker’s Rules of Thumb: A Life Manual (Workman, 2008), and James M. Gordon’s Unstuck (Penguin, 2004), among other books. More recently, she was featured in 200 Women Who Will Change the Way You See the World (Chronicle, 2017). Ivy was the keynote speaker at the Nokia World Design Conference, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit, and Wisdom 2.0 in 2018. She has been cited by Fast Company and Business Week as “one of the new faces of leadership.”

In her earlier career as a jewelry designer, Ivy opened a store in New York City that Vogue called “one of the most influential” of the 1980s. Her innovative metalwork in jewelry is in the permanent collections of 12 international museums, including the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City. She has received a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Diamond International Award for her creative designs. Ivy believes that combining art and intuition with science and technology makes magic happen—and brings timely ideas and brands to life. Ivy is a frequent presenter at major international conferences and meetings including recent talks at Cannes Lions Festival, FORTUNE Brainstorm Tech Conference, SEMICON West, London Design Festival, TEDx, Mind the Product London, Transformative Technologies Conference, Frame Design Awards, and Semi Permanent. In addition to these presentations Ivy is a featured expert in Wired and Fast Company magazines and was recently interviewed on Time Sensitive and Design Milk podcast series.