Melody Roberts, Co-Founder & CEO of Liv Labs

ID alum Melody Roberts (MDes 1998) was our 2024 Alumni Speaker. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Liv Labs, she leads the team and shapes the innovation agenda for the Y Combinator-backed consumer healthtech company, which is making convenient, self-care versions of proven-effective clinical treatments for urinary incontinence.

Following is the transcript of her speech.

Good evening ID community, parents and especially: almost-graduates!

If you had told me 26 years ago that I’d be speaking to the 2024 graduating class at the Institute of Design, I would have believed you. I’m generally optimistic, and I had high expectations for my career. And besides, my mother made me take a Toastmaster’s public speaking class when I was 13, and I would never want to disappoint her.

If you had told me 26 years ago that I’d have a home in the American South, and that I’d be running a clinical trial, and that I’d be doing a standup comedy act with scientist friends—I really would NOT have believed you. In fact, this would have seemed improbable, to the point of absurd, even seven years ago. But that, my friends, is how the future works.

Some opportunities—fit your plan. You see them ahead of you, fuzzy and logical.
Some opportunities—catch you unawares, and may even scare you.
Some opportunities—as we all know post-pandemic—are the consequence of things completely outside of your control.

Transitions like this one? Get used to them. Try to enjoy them. If you are sitting here, feeling a degree of stress and anxiety: that’s normal, but not inherently bad. It will pass.

So my first and last bit of advice tonight: lean into this change and the many more that will follow.

Back when I graduated from ID, a product designer made physical things and there were no obvious jobs for one like me, with very rudimentary 3D form-giving skills. At the same time, there were almost no postings for design researchers (not a thing), user experience designers, interface designers (not clearly a thing), or design strategists (what would that even mean)? Back then, job hunting required very creative self-promotion. Potential employers didn’t understand our credentials any better than our parents.

I wanted to work for Philips Design, in the Netherlands. At the time, they were creating these amazing housewares products based on archetypal applied arts in the Dutch tradition. It was so cool and design-y. I don’t know how, but I learned that they had an open role for a consumer research specialist. I know now that it was a marketing job. But consumer research and customer research sound a lot alike. So I got in touch with them. I told them I was going to be in Amsterdam, and could they make time to see me? And they said yes. So I bought an airline ticket and booked a single night in a flea-infested youth hostel. I flew out, I went to Eindhoven for the interview. We all liked each other. And we all remained confused about the disconnect. And I flew home.

I also got an interview at IDEO Boston. The head of product design and I got along well. But there was no one like me on staff, and even though they were tempted to bring me on as an experiment, they dawdled. In the meantime, I accepted an offer from Smart Design, in New York City, to become a Senior Design Researcher. My first assignment was to define “design research.” By the time I left, five years later, I led a key client account and the department included project management and design strategy on both coasts. But the CEO still called us “the misfits.”

I shifted then to IDEO Palo Alto. I was excited to go deeper into client organizations as a member of their fledging Innovation by Design team. At IDEO, I got religion around prototyping. At IDEO, they had a “build to think” approach, the act of prototyping as an intellectual discovery process and a mechanism for team alignment. We prototyped products, services, and systems. We prototyped meeting formats, workshop agendas, and job descriptions. “Let’s just try it” was the mantra, and it was liberating. And the more closely I worked with clients, the more I realized that I wanted to become one.

So I joined McDonald’s, a former client at both Smart Design and IDEO. At that time, the McDonald’s ops and engineering team was really good at prototyping, but not very patient with seemingly wild ideas. They were under incredible pressure to deliver a single, flexible restaurant operating platform for the global business—so the Chief Restaurant Officer could hold every one of the 34,000 restaurants in the world accountable to one standard. And this is McDonald’s we’re talking about. So the leadership wanted it to happen fast.

If I start talking about my decade in that job, we’ll be here all night. I worked on in-store and drive-thru service and eventually a digital strategy. I was a leader, but also a student. I learned Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, political maneuvering, operations research, corporate leadership, what it means for something to be “scalable,” and—most of all—McDonald’s culture.

There’s a saying, “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care.” I was only able to use my technical skills and make a meaningful contribution once I had made friends and proven my devotion to the cause of building restaurants that were better for the worker, better for the customer, and better for the business. Take heed. This is true most places.

After 12 years in food service R&D, I wanted to do something completely different. An old friend called and asked if I would join her startup. She’d invented a medical device to treat involuntary urine leakage. I gotta be honest, that did not sound appealing. But I thought the invention was worthy, and if not me, then who? Fast forward to today, I lead Liv Labs, where we’re on mission to make continence self-care popular. It’s an $8.7B market opportunity in the US and 30 times that globally. The learning curve has been crazy: business formation, regulated product development, grantsmanship, fundraising, marketing. If we must frame my work today as design, then it’s business design. And I’m lovin’ it.

So I’ve talked a lot about myself, and my very particular path. But what about the rest of my class? Here’s a smattering, just for flavor.

The first startup founder among us was Bill Kerr. He and his wife launched Modern Quilt Studio 25 years ago. They design quilt fabric, tools, and patterns. They publish books and teach classes and are known around the world.

Lots of my fellow grads started their own agencies: Infield Design, Moment, Insitum, Nimble Partners. A surprising number of us teach: at Hongkik University, Hama Art University, Northeastern, Stanford, California College of the Arts, The New School, University of Washington.

Several ID grads from my era lead corporate design groups. Sylvia Park is the CXO of Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical giant. Matt Marcus had the same title at Publicis Groupe, the advertising behemoth. Sung-Gul Hwang heads up design for LG Electronics, in Korea.

Some of us have taken yet another path—leading families, caring for elders, and finding ways to use our designing training part-time, or in the service of our communities. Not everybody is out there climbing a professional ladder—or seeking time at the podium. And I applaud all of these choices.

When I reflect back like this, cataloging careers and accomplishments and pivots, marveling at the change in industry, I realize that my generation was the Digital Generation—even though that word came into favor later. When I arrived, we worked with paint, X-acto knives, rubylith, film cameras. This is a color study I did in 1996, to show how context shifts perception—using paint.

In our first jobs we addressed design challenges like: “If United Airlines were to create a website, what would be on it?” and “If you could take a photo with a cellular phone, where would you go for prints?” And that was radical. ID’s first photo printer took hours to produce a single image!

Boy is that the past.

My ID generation is running alongside yours for the baton pass. And that begs the question: Where is this relay race headed?

Is it headed toward AI ethics and mastery and combating misinformation? It is. You’ll be shaping meaning through new forms of form-giving. My guess is you already are.

Is it headed in the direction of harnessing biotechnology for new food, environmental protection and health? Definitely. Will you be designing things to be grown? You will.

Will the relay race run off the products and services track and veer into the political and governmental one? To designing systems and principles that organize us as a people and help us make decisions? I hear you are working on it.

What, in fact, is next? I am just not smart enough to know. But when we find out, you’ll be on the job. And I’ll be grateful to you. What I love is seeing your confidence. I see that you are…

• Fully aware of your own power to make change in the world.
• Impassioned about caring for the planet we share and improving people’s lives.
• Committed to discovery, experimentation, and innovation with purpose.
• Grateful for the immense privilege of peace and prosperity that makes this education possible.

Will you get tired of design? Is that possible? It is.
Will you still call yourself a designer? It doesn’t matter. Call yourself whatever works.
Change-making is fun. It’s necessary. It’s a team sport.

And having said that, let’s do a quick individual exercise—and this is for everyone in the room, not just the graduating class.

Think back: where were you five years ago, in May of 2019, nearly a year before the pandemic hit? Did you imagine then that you’d be sitting here today?

Now think back ten years ago, to May of 2014. How different then was your life, your self-identity, and your vision of your own future? What did you hope for then?

Now—and you knew this was coming—imagine where you’ll be five years from today.

Clearly it’s easier to grasp the degree to which our lives change in hindsight than it is to imagine how differently they will play out in the future. Your next five years may be pretty easy to predict— or not. I don’t know.

What I do know is there’s no right way to be an ID grad. By tomorrow, you can put MDes or MDM after your name, if you so choose. You can explain what it means to other people, or leave them guessing. You can start teaching right away—or never. Your tuition did not obligate you to follow anyone else’s path. I put a few paths out there to inspire you, but also to just convey the range of potential trajectories. Only one thing is certain: we, the generation that came before you, will be relying on you to pick up where we leave off. To envision. To invent. To act. To lead. Most of all, to care.

Congratulations on your past accomplishments and future potential!