Shuya Gong is a Senior Design Fellow at IDEO with a background in mechanical engineering and craft expertise in interaction, systems, and venture design. She started her design practice in blockchains, working with a collaborative ecosystem of financial institutions including NASDAQ, Fidelity, and Citibank to understand how emergent technologies would change everyday experiences. Throughout her career, Shuya has worked across industries spanning food, fashion, and fertility with Fortune 50 companies on shaping their future strategies at the intersection of new cultural trends and technologies. Recently, her work explores the new emotions that cyberphysical interactions and novel digital mediums introduce into products and services.
Her work can be found on shelves at Target through the initial brand concept of Good and Gather, a $2B+ flagship label, and in circular return systems at select Starbucks locations. Shuya is also an innovation fellow and lecturer at Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, a founder and partner of the regenerative design collective Maybe Ventures, and an herbal apprentice at Agape Healing, a traditional Chinese medicine practice founded by her father. Talk to her about rapid prototyping with emergent technologies, living life without plastic, futuring through experiential experiments, and the emotional ergonomics of chaotic cyberphysical systems.
When anyone can create like an artist with an AI assistant, what is the real purpose of packaging and design? What are the new feelings and functions that food brands of the future might evoke? Welcome to a multisensorial field trip through imagining the iconic brand interactions of tomorrow (and an exploration of what remains uniquely human) in the age of AI.