Ame has fifteen years experience finding insights that drive design and creating delightful products. She’s a Senior Project Leader and Design Research Community Lead for IDEO San Francisco, where she’s worked on everything from ATM machines to drinking water delivery systems for India. Ame’s portfolio spans multiple phases: from initial need-finding and strategy, through prototyping, implementing, and evaluating. She led a multi-disciplinary team for Gannett resulting in the launch of The Bold Italic, a groundbreaking community journalism website that won awards from AIGA, IDEA, SF Weekly and the Webby awards. She led the IDEO team that created the Innovator’s Accelerator, an online social learning platform taught by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, Hal Gregersen of INSEAD, and Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University.

Prior to joining IDEO in 2007, Ame was a Research Scientist in the Computing Science Lab at the Palo Alto Research Center (formerly known as Xerox PARC), and at Ricoh Innovations where she focused on ubiquitous computing applications and shared media. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley for her work developing hybrid physical-digital interactions to support the architectural design process and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University Colorado, Boulder.