io studio
a storytelling, research, and design studio making our way toward an equitable and liberatory world
It starts with listening.
Listening opens a space of understanding, where the truths of people, places, and communities can be heard and understood. Listening is at the center of all our practices across storytelling, research, design, strategy, and facilitation.
Storytelling as a slow design practice
If research helps us make sense of the world, then storytelling is where it all begins. Through storytelling, we honor lived experience and complexity — bridging distance across identities, cultures, and geographies. We return to storytelling as a slow research and design practice, a way to create in relationship with one another.
Creating in partnership with changemakers
Long-run impact is stewarded by changemakers: those with the truest connection to a place, a challenge, a vision. As a studio, we partner and create with people, organizations, and movements centering dignity, equity, and freedom to create the world we want to see.
Our Services
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Blending rigorous research methods with empathic inquiry: unearthing the greatest needs, insights, and opportunities to inspire perspective and clarity. ❯
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Keeping people, planet, and equity at the center across an iterative process of framing, sensemaking, ideation, prototyping and testing to deliver high-confidence designs. ❯
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Validating the value, usability, feasibility, and viability of a product strategy within your organization’s unique context, to launch from idea to impact. ❯
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Drawing upon a variety of mediums, from photography to documentary film, to bridge the empathy gap and honor the lived experiences of people, places, and communities. ❯
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Equipping teams and communities with the time, space, and capacity building to co-design, incubate, and grow work for the long haul. ❯