He received a Ph.D. in Media and Governance from Keio University in 2003. Then, he studied as a visiting scholar at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence during the 2009 academic year. He is the president of CreativeShift Lab, Inc. and a board member of The Hillside Group. Collaborating with his students, Dr. Iba created many pattern languages concerning human actions like Learning Patterns (2014), Presentation Patterns (2014), Collaboration Patterns (2014), Words for a Journey (2015), Project Design Patterns (2016) and academic books in Japanese such as the bestselling Introduction to Complex Systems (1998). The Presentation Patterns received the Good Design Award 2013, and Words for a Journey received the Grand Prize of Dementia Friendly Award 2015 and the Good Design Award 2015.