Karel Vredenburg

Industry Professor, DeGroote School of Business

Karel Vredenburg is an Industry Professor in McMaster University's DeGroote Schools of Business and Medicine. He teaches senior leaders in the Executive MBA, Directors College, and Health Fellows programs. His teaching brings together design thinking, behaviour change, and human-AI collaboration. It focuses on helping leaders strengthen the human capabilities that matter more, not less, as AI advances. 

He brings more than three decades of practice to the classroom. As Global Vice President at IBM, he introduced User-Centered Design across the company in the 1990s. He later taught IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking to every business unit and to hundreds of companies, startup incubators, and universities worldwide. He led the profession, skills development, and culture of IBM's 3,000 designers and wrote User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach.

Karel co-led the Future of Design Education initiative with Don Norman and co-founded the global COVID-19 Design Challenge with the World Design Organization and Design for America. He is co-founder and president of the nonprofit Habits for a Better World, which uses research-driven, design-inspired behaviour change to address planetary and personal health, responsible AI, and compassion. He also hosts the Life Habits Podcast.

He did undergraduate, masters, and doctoral studies at the University of Toronto initially in cognitive science and clinical psychology which later led to research, specialization, and life-long passion for, practice in, leadership in, and teaching of applied design and research. He serves on the BITE and PRAXXI Advisory Boards. More at karelvredenburg.com.