UX Leader | Poet | Organizer

Lauren Ito is an American Gosei (fifth generation person of Japanese ancestry) UX research leader, poet, and community organizer committed to advancing equity through art and design.

As an artist and organizer Lauren delves into the tensions inherited within diasporic experiences, spanning explorations of American concentration camps, political agency, and the genealogy of home. Lauren’s work has been featured by The San Francisco Public Library, The Seattle Times, Japanese American National Museum, and Nomadic Press. She is currently the Artist in Residence for the National Japanese American Historical Society. As a 2022-2023 San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grantee, Lauren is working on a collective “love letter to ancestors: past, present and future,” convening Nikkei poets and visual artists to collaboratively create artistic works.

Lauren founded Political Inheritance, an arts exhibition and poetry performance series exploring experiences—passed down in cultures and families—that shape Asian and Pacific Islander communities’ relationships with United States political systems. Her latest intergenerational poetry show, ILLUMINATE, drew more than 2,000 attendees nation-wide.

As a UX research leader at Google, Lauren cultivates the reimagining of how interdisciplinary teams practice their crafts in service of liberatory, resilient, and responsible futures for generations to come.

Prior to Google, Lauren was a Director of Research and Insights at global design firm, IDEO, where she co-founded the Inclusive Design Collective, a multidisciplinary organization advancing methods for inclusive, ethical, and responsible design. Her portfolio included crafting the bipartisan, equity-centered strategy for a $350M justice reform investment, the largest in U.S. history, and leading research that founded a digital product innovation lab to design products by, for, and with people choosing career paths beyond a four-year degree

Lauren’s design philosophy centers co-creative, ethnographic methodologies, which practice design in partnership with people and communities. She believes building with research participants as core collaborators ensures designs are a direct reflection of people’s perspectives, desires, and needs. Her design research and community design skills have launched of two multi-organizational labs and projects that span portfolios, including the future of workers, driving nation-wide political will to support early childhood learning, reimagining accountability in the child welfare system, and expanding racial representation in early childhood literature, to name a few.

Lauren’s approach to both art and design interrogates the question:

How might we create the conditions in which people feel understood in a language of their choosing?

She currently lives in San Francisco and can almost always be found by the sea.