Bruce Claxton, FIDSA

A graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Art, and the Georgia Institute of Technology in Design, Claxton has over 30 years experience in industrial design and has been with Motorola over 20 years. He directs the award winning industrial design and human factors innovation teams for Motorola’s Government and Enterprise Sector. His design and human factors teams create the vision of future products. Social science, art and design provide a rich context for innovation. His team leads design for numerous Motorola businesses worldwide. Handheld telecommunications and data products equipment are designed in Florida and Malaysia to support customers globally. The teams include industrial design, graphic design, user interface design, human factors and strategic design planning. These teams have been recognized globally for their excellence. He has transformed the group into the Design Integration team which is recognized in Motorola for driving future vision for the product roadmap. He has led initiatives for Motorola that redefine the traditional boundaries of industrial design. With creative problem solving (CPS) as a body of knowledge, the design team has facilitated numerous strategic sessions addressing a range of material from engineering and design issues to future business strategies for new directions for the corporation. Claxton’s creative problem solving background includes Synectics, the Parnes method, and other techniques. He is also an alumni of the Creative Problem Solving Institute at SUNY University of Buffalo, N.Y. Claxton has led numerous workshops on creativity and strategy generating. He is known globally for his work on innovation, creativity and design. Claxton is a Fellow of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) and a past national president. He served as the Board Chair of the Industrial Designers Society of America in 2005–2006. His design work includes consumer products, heavy equipment, personal care, business equipment in addition to the wireless communications / computing products from Motorola. He holds 46 U.S. patents and numerous foreign patents and is a “Distinguished Innovator” at Motorola. In 1998, he participated on a four-person UN delegation to China sharing the value of industrial design with educators, businessmen, and senior government officials resulting in a policy on design for China in the new century. He is well known in the international design community, and has sponsored several student programs both in the U.S. and abroad. Claxton has lectured internationally at design symposiums and universities. In 2000, he contributed to “Design Policies for the 21st Century” in a published piece in Japanese Design News. Claxton presented a paper and was a host for the Tsinghua International Design Management Forum in Beijing, September 2002, and again in Tsukuba, Japan, in 2003 as a keynote speaker for the 6th Asia Design Conference. Workshops on innovation and design were held in Taiwan during 2003. In 2004, he was a keynote speaker at prominent design conferences in Valparaiso Chile, Wuxi, China and Hong Kong. Claxton has led numerous student design programs in the U.S., Taiwan, Mexico and Chile. In 2001, he sponsored the first international student design competition for universal design for communications in alliance with Motorola and IDSA. His team won a best in class “Gold” in the consumer product category with the “Talkabout” two-way radio in the 1998 IDSA/BusinessWeek Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition. The design team was again was awarded a “Gold” award from IDSA/BusinessWeek for the i1000 Communicator in 1999. The Talkabout series of products also won a “Gold” award for the “Design of the Decade” issued by BusinessWeek and IDSA in 1999. Both of these products were accepted November of 2000 into the permanent collection of the Smithsonian as a result of the Design Triennial National Design Exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt Museum. Five products received Innovation awards at the 2002 Consumer Electronics Show and the Talkabout T4300 radio won a Bronze IDEA in 2002. Three additional products were recognized at the 2005 CES show in the Innovation Showcase.