Patrick Whitney is the former Dean of the Institute of Design (ID), Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where he was the Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor of Design and a distinguished IIT professor. During his leadership of ID, the school created the first Ph.D. program in design in the USA, transformed ID into a leading institution in design methods and theory, and created an executive education program translating design to organizational leadership.

After his Deanship, Mr. Whitney served a five-year term as Professor in Residence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he co-founded and directed a design laboratory to bring design to public health. In 2023, this interdisciplinary agenda moved to Brown University, where he currently serves as a Professor of Practice.

He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award from the Hong Kong Design Centre for bringing human-centered design and strategic design to Asia. Business Week has featured him as a design visionary for bringing together design and business; Forbes named him as one of six members of the “E-Gang” for his work in human-centered design; Fast Company has identified him as a “master of design” for his leadership in the design field of linking the creation of value for users and economic value for companies; and Global Entrepreneur Magazine named him one of 25 people worldwide doing the most to bring new ideas to business in China.

Mr. Whitney is widely regarded as a thought leader for pioneering human-centered and strategic design. He has conducted workshops and lectures worldwide for hundreds of organizations and thousands of executives, academics, and the public about ways of making technological innovations more humane, the link between design and business strategy, and methods of designing interactive communications and products. Examples include Aetna, BP, Godrej & Boyce, Proctor & Gamble, SC Johnson, Texas Instruments, and government agencies in Denmark, Hong Kong, India, and the UK. His writing is generally about new frameworks of design that respond to three transformations: linking insights about user experience to business strategy, the shift from mass-production to flexible production, and the shift from national markets to markets that are both global and “markets of one.”

Mr. Whitney earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual Communication Design at the University of Alberta, followed by a Master of Fine Arts in Design at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Mr. Whitney was appointed associate professor and chair of the Division of Design at Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1979. Five years later, he was appointed associate professor and head of communication design at the ID. In 1987, he was appointed Professor, Director, and then Dean of the institute.

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