Patrick Whitney

Director, The Institute of Design,
Illinois Institute of Technology

Professor Patrick Whitney is the director of the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, and is the Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor of Design.

Whitney has published and lectured throughout the world about how to make technological innovations more humane, the link between design and business strategy, and methods of designing interactive communications and products.

His writing has focused on new frameworks of design that respond to two transformations: the shift from mass-production to flexible production; and the shift from national markets to markets that are both global and “markets of one”.

He is on the Distinguished Advisor Board of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction (ACM-SIGCHI). He has been on the jury of numerous award programs including the 1995 Presidential Design Awards, and was a member of the White House Council on Design. Whitney was chairman of the program of the 1978 US Conference of the International Council on Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA), which was the first major meeting addressing the issues of evaluating design from the perspective of users. Professor Whitney was the President of the American Center for Design (ACD) and the editor of the Design Journal, its annual publication. He edited Design in the Information Environment, a book published by Knopf in 1984.

He has consulted to numerous corporations, including Aetna, Texas Instruments, McDonald’s, and Zebra Technologies, and has conducted private education programs for executives from government agencies and corporations in the USA, Europe, and Asia.

Recent speaking engagements include the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, and the TED Conference 2004 in Monterey. He is the principal investigator of a research project called Global Companies in Local Markets, and of the Institute of Design’s Design for the Base of the Pyramid sustainable development initiative.