Stephan Merkle

A native of Germany, Stephan Merkle is an industrial designer whose love of travel and cultural immersion fuels his work. After studying and working in Cologne, Wuppertal, Umeå, Nambia, and Seattle, Stephan joined IDEO Chicago from 2009 till 2013, before he returned back to Germany and now freelances for established brands and consultancies in centrural Europe. In all of those places he has contributed his strategic and innovative thinking as well as his proficient sketch-and-build prototyping skills to projects ranging from athletic footwear, consumer products, home appliances, and power tools to medical devices and automotive interiors. His natural curiosity and interest in the intersection of aesthetics and mechanical engineering has helped him translate in-the-field research insights into tangible design solutions for such clients as Ford Motor Company, Samsung, and Brooks, among others.

Before IDEO, Stephan interned at Carbon Design Group in Seattle, WA, where he designed consumer and medical products for Microsoft, Pathway and others. He holds a master’s in Industrial and Strategic Design from the University of Wuppertal in Germany and was part of the Advanced Product Design master’s program at the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden. For his thesis, he designed hyper-realistic prostheses and worked closely with amputees to understand the connection between the emotional and physical problems they experienced everyday.