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Ivy Ross feels at home at the crossroads of art and design. Since 2016, the Yonkers, New York-born executive and jewelry designer has served as Vice President of Design for Hardware Products at Google, where she and her team are responsible not only for designing phones, earbuds, watches, tablets, retail stores, and product packaging, but with researching and gathering feedback about the user experience. The role, which follows her 2014 appointment to Head of Google Glass at Google X, aligns neatly with her career path: prior to joining the mammoth tech company, she held top jobs at the likes of Calvin Klein, Gap, Inc., Mattel, and Art.com. (An additional feather in her cap: a dozen international museums display her metalwork jewelry designs, including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)
After a pandemic-imposed moratorium on traveling, Ross, now based in Mill Valley, California, is back on the road. This year alone, she’s scheduled to log some eight trips, to New York, Los Angeles, and various locales in Europe—and she couldn’t be happier about it. “I love to travel because there’s a sense of discovery; it’s different than something you do every day,” she says. “And since I’m into aesthetics, my eyes are always wide open.” Here, we chat with Ross about her recent trip to Milan, where she oversaw the company’s installation at the annual Salone Internazionale del Mobile di Milano—Salone del Mobile, for short—also known as the Milan Furniture Fair.
What was the destination?
I went to Milan in April for this year’s Salone del Mobile. The whole trip was about seven days, with two days of travel. We got there five days before the show opened, and then we had a pre-opening party and attended the fair itself.
What was the purpose of the trip?
This is the third time that the Google Design Studio has exhibited at Salone, which is the largest design fair in the world. Over 300,000 people from 118 countries attend. Google goes there to show up as a thought leader because doing hardware products is fairly new—we’ve only been doing this for about seven years.
We started [presenting at the fair] back in 2018, and it was really to make people aware that Google is actually designing and making physical hardware products. But we don’t sell products at the show. It’s not like a trade fair—it’s for people to really curate experiences and exhibits based on their design thinking, and their latest designs. It’s for people who love design in all areas. It started as a furniture fair and now it’s everything, from cars to electronics.
What’s beautiful is that this is a place where the designers and I get to exhibit our products in the spirit in which they were designed. Our installation this year was called Shaped by Water. We got the idea for it during COVID-19. The team was looking for ways to deal with this idea of things changing, when all of our lives were changed. We always study natural elements, and one of the teams came up with this idea of using water, which is so resilient because it can change forms; it can go from liquid to gas to ice to melt. I think the universe is the best designer, and we look to her for a lot of cues. This idea of water being the most resilient element was pretty amazing, so we started diving more into it and playing with it. When we were designing our watch, the team was dropping water onto different shapes and seeing the way the water formed. And it was so beautiful—this radius of what happens when water keeps building up before it breaks. That now forms the radius of the watch. So Shaped by Water was really about celebrating how we’ve been inspired by water.
