This is a biography of Dana Cho. Dana Cho is a partner at IDEO in Palo Alto, California. She is responsible for helping designers, clients and organizations create great and scalable brand experiences. Her areas of focus are hospitality, healthcare, and retail. Dana brings a people-centric perspective to drive product innovation and create new services and experiences that inspire customer love and loyalty. She has a proven track record of combining a design and people perspective with commercial viability and technical viability to create new value for clients and businesses.
Dana’s father was an architect and her mother was a nurse. Because of her father, she grew up with an optimistic attitude about the role of design and the change it can bring. Her parents were immigrants to the United States, so they often worked late, and her mother worked the night shift as a nurse, so she spent much of her childhood with her grandmother, who raised her. In her early days as a designer, grandmother became very ill. She felt vulnerable and powerless at the time and observed many things in life, large and small. She found that experiences and interactions can be better and more empowering for patients and caregivers. After her grandmother died, she felt even more strongly that there was no other field in which she could make a more meaningful change as a designer. So she started working on more and more healthcare projects at IDEO, and my personal mission became to take a people-centered design perspective to drive better products, experiences, innovation, and growth in health.
When Dana started working as an architect, she felt limited by the practical importance attached to the built environment. The part of the design process that Dana loved as a student — understanding and shaping the interactions that make up the human experience — was missing. As a result, Dana joined the design firm IDEO in 2001, “IDEO was the first place I worked as an architect where I was able to fully apply the design process that I had trained in and fell in love with,” Dana says. Fifteen years later, Dana is now a partner and executive creative director at IDEO Palo Alto. During her career, Dana has pioneered the company’s work in retail and hospitality, and led projects for clients such as Mayo Clinic, Virgin Australia, and Ritz-Carlton.
Since joining IDEO in 2001, Dana co-founded Smart Space, an internal IDEO business focused on applying human-centered innovation processes to large-scale entities, experiential brand experiences, real estate development, and urban design. At the same time, Dana pioneered IDEO’s work in retail and hospitality and has led major projects with clients such as Nike, Mayo Clinic, Virgin Australia, and Ritz-Carlton.
Dana has made a lot of contributions not only at her own company IDEO, but elsewhere as well. Cho has taught at Calarts, and she is a lecturer at Stanford Business School. She graduated from Harvard and went on to work for various architecture firms, including Gwathmey Siegel, Morphosis, and SOM. She has appeared in Fast Company, Core 77, PSFK, and Rotman magazines. She has also spoken at conferences including Childx at Stanford, WWD CEO summit, SX, ULI, healthcare design, and GlobalShop. Dana currently serves on the advisory board of Harvard’s Master of Design Engineering program and serves as an advisor to the board of directors of USG, a public company.
Dana Cho’s rich and excellent experience has made her a famous and helpful designer in the field of design. “Top-down hierarchy suggests that people at the Top have more information than the people they’re managing,” “Design thinking, by definition, is about being exploratory enough so that you can get to a non-obvious solution. And in order to do that, you have to Assume that really amazing ideas can come from anywhere.”
resources： https://www.linkedin.com/in/danascho/
