The following bio is written in the third person to facilitate copying of it for use on speaker bio sections for events that I’m speaking at. This is also the headshot photo that should be used for those purposes.

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Karel has had a long career as a design executive, most recently as the Global Vice President of UX Research at IBM. He serves as an Industry Professor in the McMaster University’s DeGroote Schools of Business and Medicine, is a regular international keynote speaker, and co-hosts the Life Habits Podcast.

Karel has co-founded and led large global projects such as the COVID-19 Design Challenge with the World Design Organization and Design for America and the Future of Design Education Initiative alongside design visionary Don Norman. He recently co-founded and now co-leads the Habits for a Better World project and nonprofit with filmmaker Carly Williams, addressing global challenges like climate change, animal and human suffering, food insecurity, human health, biodiversity loss, and GenAI challenges through research-driven, documentary-inspired behavior change.

At IBM, he developed and introduced User-Centered Design across the company in the middle 1990s, led the company’s designers and researchers, developed a worldwide education program, a design and researcher toolkit, and published the book “User-Centered Design: An Integrated Approach”.

Karel has led design and research teams for some of IBM’s most iconic products including the first large-scale commercially available Artificial Intelligent product, IBM Watson. He also formed and led the team that developed the One UI Design System, IBM’s first developer toolkit that drove consistency in user interfaces across all of the company’s products (the predecessor to the Carbon Design System).

After carrying out research that helped inspire the reboot of the design program in 2013, Karel introduced and taught IBM's Enterprise Design Thinking and Design System to each of the business units of the company globally, software, consulting, sales, and infrastructure, and to hundreds of other companies — often with their c-suites and boards — as well as startup incubators, scale-ups, public organizations, and universities. He also worked with the top design schools globally resulting in the doubling of IBM’s hiring from those schools contributing to hiring many of the company’s current 3,000 designers and researchers. His work with the services part of IBM led to clients getting products to market twice as fast, a 300% ROI, and 50 percent reduction in design defects.

He founded the Design Executive Team comprised of top managerial design executives in each business unit and led the Design Leadership Board comprised of the technical and managerial design executives responsible for the review and appointment of Design Principals and Distinguished Designers. Karel’s responsibilities included the design profession, designer skill development, and design culture for the 3,000 designers in the company and for external engagement, academic programs, and the social media presence externally.

In addition to publishing the book mentioned above, Karel has also authored over 100 conference and journal publications, and several book chapters. He also blogs regularly to more than 40 thousand readers per year.

Karel has given industry keynotes, workshops, and guest lectures all around the world including in Australia, India, China, South Korea, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the US, and Canada.

He co-developed the Innovation by Design programs for the DeGroote School of Business and Medicine, the Health Leadership Academy, Collaborative Health Governance, and a pan-university course at McMaster University. He currently teaches in the Digital Transformation Executive MBA program, the Directors College, the Collaborative Health Governance program, and the National Health Fellows program.

Karel founded the Life Habits Podcast more than 16 years ago which has reached millions of listeners and he now co-hosts it with Paige Heron. He shares the knowledge and expertise from his doctoral level training in cognitive science, clinical psychology, and human-computer interaction and from working at IBM as a design and research executive and mentor to thousands of people for more than three decades in his podcast and also in his career and life coaching practice.

He did undergraduate, masters, and doctoral studies, research, and teaching at the University of Toronto initially in cognitive science and clinical psychology which later led to research, specialization, and his life-long passion for, practice in, and leadership of design and research. Karel blogs on karelvredenburg.com and his social media coordinates include @karelvredenburg on Instagram and on LinkedIn.

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