Get in touch!

Karel has spent his professional career dealing with design, technology, human affect, cognition, and behaviour primarily through the human interface to technology.

His current interests are in advances in design practice, design-based organisational transformation, the innovation ecosystem (design school, business school, university, entrepreneur, and enterprise), and the ways in which technology can extend, optimise, and improve work, play, relationships, education, health, and overall fulfilment.

He is director of design at IBM and responsible for IBM’s global design leadership as well as its global academic programs and serves as the head of IBM Studios in Canada. He's also Industry Professor at the DeGroote School of Business, the DeGroote Health Leadership Academy, and McMaster University.

Karel joined IBM in 1988 after having done graduate studies, research, and teaching at the University of Toronto. He introduced User-Centred Design at IBM in 1993 and assumed a company-wide role in 1995 leading IBM's community of designers, leading the development of design methods, languages, and technologies, and leading the design of the commercialisation of the IBM Watson. In 2013, Karel help found a new IBM Design program together with General Manager of Design, Phil Gilbert, and IBM Fellow, Charlie Hill. Karel personally introduced the new design program which included Enterprise Design Thinking to IBM product development laboratories worldwide and introduced a tailored version of it to IBM consulting services and technology services organisations worldwide from 2014 through 2016. He next focused on the development and activation of Enterprise Design Thinking for client facing professionals worldwide and rolled that to IBM’s top client accounts in 2017 and 2018. He has also conducted workshops with the c-suite and senior executive teams of hundreds of industry leading companies worldwide as well as with startups, scale-ups, and public organisations.

Karel has written over 100 conference and journal publications, a book entitled "User-Centred Design: An Integrated Approach" and contributed chapters to other edited books. He is a frequent keynote speaker and panelist at industry conferences and on university campuses.

He co-developed the design thinking programs within the DeGroote School of Business, the DeGroote Health Leadership Academy, and McMaster Univer

Support the show

Since its inception in 2019, Design Education Talks podcast has served as a dynamic platform for the exchange of insights and ideas within the realm of art and design education. This initiative sprang from a culmination of nearly a decade of extensive research conducted by Lefteris Heretakis. His rich background, intertwining academia, industry, and student engagement, laid the foundation for a podcast that goes beyond the conventional boundaries of educational discourse.

See all of our work on on https://linktr.ee/thenewartschool
Follow us on twitter at @newartschool
Read our latest articles at https://newartschool.education/
and https://heretakis.medium.com/

Equipment used to produce the podcast:
Rodcaster pro II
Rode NT1 5th generation
Elgato Low profile Microphone Arm
Monster Prolink Studio Pro microphone cable

The rest of the equipment is here 👉https://kit.co/heretakis/podcasting