His nearly two-decade partnership with Swiss furniture giant USM shows this thinking in action. What started as an internship has grown into major collaborations like the Soft Panel, which brings tactile warmth to USM’s iconic modular grid, and the Venice Biennale’s official collateral events featuring 142 students across disciplines. Jones has transformed this relationship from client to what he calls patronage through shared values and long-term vision.

In Jones’s hands, design becomes about creating systems of care rather than simply beautiful objects. His studio runs with what he calls a “locker room culture” that applies athletic principles to break down traditional design hierarchies through transdisciplinary collaboration. Like the best playmakers, he sees the entire field, connecting justice, empathy, sustainability, and innovation into coordinated strategies that create lasting change.

No one can articulate this vision quite like Kevin himself, so we encourage you to read our full conversation about his Performance Empathy framework, the intelligence behind USM’s human-centered innovations, and why the future of design lies in dissolving disciplinary boundaries to create something more adaptive, more collaborative, and fundamentally more empathetic.

You’ve described your practice as “transdisciplinary” rather than multidisciplinary. Can you explain this distinction and how it shapes the way Joba Studio operates?

Transdisciplinary practice moves beyond collaboration across disciplines; it seeks to dissolve their boundaries altogether. At Joba, we don’t stack roles in parallel; we integrate them into new, situational identities. A designer might inhabit the role of strategist, sociologist, or athlete, not as metaphor, but as methodology. Each project becomes a site for constructing custom frameworks, where knowledge is synthesized, not segmented.

This process activates what I define as Recombinant Intelligence, the catalytic fusion of disparate disciplines into new aesthetic, structural, and cultural possibilities. It’s not just coordination; it’s collective authorship and it’s not just about working across disciplines, it’s about reconfiguring them in service of something more adaptive, more hybrid, and more future-facing.

Your studio operates similar to what you call a “locker room” culture and team-focused approach. How do you apply athletic principles to design collaboration, and what transferable skills should other athletes recognize?

Athletes are, at their core, intuitive systems thinkers deeply attuned to rhythm, interdependence, accountability, and high-stakes performance. At Joba, we approach each project as a live system, where every contributor’s role is critical and preparation is a form of strategy. The design process mirrors gameday conditions: dynamic, responsive, and grounded in mutual reliability. For former athletes, skills like pattern recognition, rapid adaptation, and situational awareness are not peripheral, they are latent design intelligences, capable of being recontextualized into creative leadership and collaborative innovation.

After leaving the NFL, you chose to return to Virginia Tech. Now, as a Professor of Practice, many of your projects center student collaboration. What role does education play in your creative process, and what do students need to navigate an uncertain future?

Education is my innovation lab, but more than that, it’s the road where two disciplines I know intimately; design and professional sport are tested, balanced, and reimagined. I don’t just teach; I prototype pedagogy. Working with students allows me to explore design thinking not only as a process but as a discipline, one that demands the same rigor, adaptability, and Performative Intelligence as pro sport.

I design for students, then I design with them and for them again, creating an intentional circular economy of knowledge that provides spaces where they are empowered to challenge inherited concepts, deconstruct tropes, and collaboratively reimagine what design and collaboration can be. Together, we test ideas in context, arriving at what’s most effective for the moment, while also building models for future coursework and studios. In a fractured world, students need more than skills; they need fluency in collaboration, comfort with ambiguity, and the courage to interrogate assumptions, including their own. Education, for me, is where practice sharpens, frameworks evolve, and futures take shape.

Your relationship with USM spans nearly two decades. How has this partnership evolved, and what does it mean to transform a client into a “patron”?

In life, relationships matter, but readiness matters even more. I’ve learned to meet opportunities not with luck, but with preparation: by dreaming boldly, doing the unseen work, and consistently showing up with empathy and a human-centered approach. You have to do the work when no one’s watching, before you’re known for the thing you’re pursuing or recognized as the person you’re becoming.

Before I was a professional athlete in the NFL, I was the kid who dared to dream about it. I could see it, I could feel the sweat beads dripping down my face, I could smell the grass, and hear the crowd roaring. Before I designed the Soft Panels and several exhibitions for USM, I was just the intern who imagined quietly but relentlessly; what it would mean to one day contribute something real to the brand that I admired. Dreams do come true, but not by accident. You dream it, you write it down, you pursue it with urgency, belief, and the emotional intelligence to understand what’s needed beyond the brief. What I call Performative and Regenerative Intelligence.

When your dreams begin to align with your client’s values; when your ethos, belief systems, and sense of purpose overlap, something deeper forms. You don’t have to convince a client to become a patron. It happens naturally, through consistency, shared trust, and long-view alignment. What begins as a transaction becomes a relationship that spans time, built on mutual understanding and earned belief.

The USM Soft Panel introduces “warmth” to a system often viewed as cold. How do you approach making design “more human”?

Design becomes human when it begins with listening to people, but also to materials, systems, and the layered contexts that shape lived experience. The Soft Panel was an aesthetic intervention; but it was also a recalibration of the grid; to include tactility, acoustics, emotion, and material ethics. Made from felt composed of recycled ocean plastics, it embodies an expanded definition of sustainability, not only in what is used, but in how it feels, how it performs, and who it ultimately serves.

Integrative Perceptual Intelligence, in this context, is not a soft skill, it is a core design intelligence. It invites us to center human experience while reading systems, materials, and contexts in tandem. Through my doctoral framework of Performance Empathy, I investigate how empathy, ecology, and justice function as overlapping intelligences reorienting the design process toward systems of care.

In a field often preoccupied with form, we ask deeper questions: How does this feel to the body? What histories and systems did this material pass through? Who is included or excluded in the atmosphere we’re shaping? The Soft Panel stands as a case study in this ethos, demonstrating that even within grided modular systems, we can embed softness, activate Ecologic Intelligence, and center human experience. We can design not only for performance, but for empathy, for ethics, emotion, and endurance.