Alumni Innovators
It’s not often that an ongoing nightmare during graduate school helps shape a career. “I would dream I was stuck on a project. And instead of figuring it out, I would talk with other students and give them advice,” says Angela Yeh (M.I.D. ’93). A consultant was hatching, even if gestation took some time. Today, as president and founder of Yeh IDeology, Yeh believes her Pratt education and those dreams helped her to create a new, innovative business model for recruiting.
D x D
Yeh IDeology does a lot more than match employee and employer. It takes an inventive, consultative approach that includes helping its corporate and agency clients learn how to value design and invest in it. “We focus a great deal on strategy; we are like a McKinsey for industrial design. That is why being multilingual, in the business sense, is so important. We understand our clients’ industries and can help them identify and solve problems. At the same time, we also help them understand the many ways design, in all of its variations, can be one of their most important tools.” Yeh’s interest in the bigger picture came early. When she entered the industrial design graduate program as a psychology major, her classmates had backgrounds in marketing, finance, and engineering. “I learned that people work, process, and solve problems differently—and discovered how to collaborate to take advantage of these different perspectives.” Later, she had her on-the-job revelation as associate design director at Estee Lauder: Yeh realized she was fascinated by design and interacting with designers, but not with doing design work herself. That is when she moved into recruiting and began to shape her innovative approach. “Pratt’s ID program encouraged us to think on our own and gave us the means to take our thinking to another level,” she says. “That is how I was able to envision, and then build, Yeh IDeology.”
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Yeh IDeology
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