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Product, Design & Strategy · Amsterdam

Hello! I'm Gustavo. Designer and product strategist, currently designing IKEA's AI Home Imagination Platform.

During my 10+ years in business, I've led teams in exploring fuzzy problems and designing novel digital experiences. I've been responsible for delivering new platform experiences in emerging business areas for IKEA including AI and Circular, designing circular services at PwC, and building experimental emerging-tech propositions with Baidu and JD.com in China. Before that I was a co-founder and entrepreneur.

My work has taken me across cultures, giving me a global outlook to experience design and innovation. I like to spark teams with new human insight and collaborate with them in defining the ideas worth betting on and strategically differentiating ourselves in customers' eyes. Alongside, I bring commercially sound judgement and expertise in 0 → 1 product development.

In my free time you'll find me seeking stories of connection, taking photographs, exploring new cuisines, or building apps. Explore them under .

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Selected work

The home imagination framework overlaid on a person facing their home.

Home Imagination Platform

IKEA · Design research program · 2026

Reframing IKEA's home-planning AI from a configurator that helps you buy into a companion that helps you imagine.

Good Food, a world map of home cooking.

Good Food

Self-initiated · Product development · 2026

A living almanac of the world's home cooking. Designed, built and shipped solo.

Six women who lead their households.

Better Living Platform

IKEA · Concept development · 2025

Taking untapped, female-led households as a vehicle for new IKEA services.

Portraits of diverse households.

The Next Many

IKEA · Design research · 2025

A data-driven study of who "the many" are becoming, across four markets.

Second-hand Marketplace

IKEA · New product development · 2022–2025

One place to buy, sell and care for second-hand IKEA furniture. A Cannes Lions winner.

The six-segment engagement framework.

Future of Engagement

IKEA · Design research · 2022

A brand-agnostic framework for where engagement is heading, across four markets.

Environmental Footprint Insights

PwC · New product development · 2021

A CO2 tool that makes each employee's mobility emissions personal. Dutch Creativity Awards.

JD.com drone delivery in a dense city.

AirPaths

JD.com Logistics · Concept exploration · 2018

Urban use cases for JD.com drone delivery in dense cities.

AI to detect online propaganda (confidential).

AI to detect online propaganda

Baidu × Tang Consulting × iCenter · Design research · 2018

Turning the qualitative tells of propaganda into signals an AI could learn.

The Meera marketplace for refugee-made products.

Meera

Self-initiated · Social innovation · 2017

A social enterprise turning refugees' materials into income and self-reliance.

RFID accessibility concept

Hands-free Transit

Fray Servando Library · Design research · 2016

An RFID bracelet letting blind riders pay and board Monterrey's buses hands-free.