Karel Vredenburg, director of design at IBM, will deliver the 2019 Interdisciplinary Lecture at York University. The lecture will take place on Monday, March 4 at 4:30 p.m. in Room 125, Bergeron Centre for Engineering Excellence, Keele Campus.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is presented by the York University/NSERC Chair in Design Engineering Innovation at the Lassonde School of Engineering and the Department of Design in the School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design.
In his lecture titled “Designing your Career for the Future,” Vredenburg will examine the insights he has gleaned through a series of innovations, including the global transformation of IBM, working with startups, other Fortune 500 companies and teaching. He will share with participants how they can design their careers to be optimized for the future.
As director of design at IBM, Vredenburg is currently responsible for global academic programs. He introduced IBM’s new design system to the executive and staff of each of the company’s business units over the past six years as well as to numerous clients around the world. In addition to his global role, Vredenburg is also head of IBM Studios Canada.
In his academic work, Vredenburg is an industry professor at McMaster University and he teaches in the Executive MBA and Directors College programs at the DeGroote School of Business, in the Emerging Health Leaders program in the DeGroote Leadership Academy and in a pan-university Innovation by Design program across multiple Faculties at McMaster.
Vredenburg joined IBM in 1988, introduced user-centred design at IBM in 1993 and assumed a company-wide role in 1995. He has written more than 60 conference and journal publications, authored the book User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach and contributed chapters to other edited books. He served as special issue editor for the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction special issue titled “Designing the Total User Experience at IBM” and the “Ease of Use” issue of the IBM Systems Journal. He blogs at karelvredenburg.com, hosts the “Life Habits” podcast and is based in Toronto.
For more background on Karel Vredenburg, check out his website.
To register to attend the lecture, visit tinyurl.com/KarelLecture.