As a Partner and Executive Managing Director at IDEO San Francisco, Michelle Lee leads multidisciplinary teams of researchers, designers, and engineers across sectors ranging from healthcare and workplace culture to responsible digital design and the circular economy. This year, she brings that range to Fusion Forward: Design for Home, Core77’s design competition with Autodesk Fusion, where she’ll help evaluate entries designed for the domestic environment.
It’s a natural fit. Lee’s sharpest instincts trace back to the toy industry, where she learned to apply the logic of play, its openness to iteration, its tolerance for mess, to problems that look nothing like toys on the surface. Home products, judged on material selection, form, and utility, are exactly the kind of everyday objects that reward that instinct.
“I appreciate friction as the secret sauce that brings meaning, growth, connection, and joy to our lives,” Lee says. “Eliminating friction risks removing the elements that make us human.”
It’s a pointed rebuttal to the current product design directive to smooth everything out and remove every obstacle and extra click. Lee isn’t arguing against usability. She’s arguing that ease and meaning aren’t always the same goal, and that designers who chase one too hard can lose the other.
That same resistance to easy answers runs through what she’s watching in the field right now. Asked what excites her most, Lee points not to a tool or a technology but to a moment of reckoning. “This moment of rapid change is introducing new tools and practices that provide an opportunity for us, as designers, to deeply reflect on the role we play, the values we hold, and the outcomes we want to shape,” she says. “It’s challenging us to approach our work with refreshed purpose and intention.”
For entrants preparing their Fusion Forward submissions, Lee’s advice goes beyond the standard playbook. She isn’t asking for a clean problem-solution story.
“Have a clear point of view that goes beyond just solving a problem,” Lee says. “Why is your approach the best path forward? How do your values manifest in your design? Does it resonate at an emotional level that goes beyond pure function?”
It’s a fitting standard from someone who co-instructs IDEO U’s Creative Thinking for Complex Problem Solving course and sits on the design team for the Aspen First Movers Fellowship. Lee’s throughline, across toy design, healthcare, and circular economy work alike, is that good design asks something of the people who encounter it: a reaction, a value, a point of view. Function gets you in the door. What you believe, and how clearly that belief comes through, is what she’s looking for once she opens up an entry.
Fusion Forward: Design for Home is now open for entries. Three categories to choose from, $9,750 in prizes. Deadline for entry September 28.