Brian Leonard, IDSA
Vice President, Experience Design Group
Lenovo
Brian Leonard is vice president of the Experience Design Group for Lenovo’s PC & Smart Devices business group. He leads the global design team responsible for all consumer, commercial and SMB personal computing and smart device offerings, including the legendary ThinkPad, multimode Yoga, IdeaPad and Lenovo Legion gaming product lines. He is a veteran award-winning industrial designer with numerous patents, publications and museum exhibitions under his belt. Leonard previously spent 10 years at Dell where he successfully led design teams for XPS, Alienware, Latitude and ultimately the Next Generation design team focused on strategy. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in industrial design from North Carolina State University.
Customer Centric Design: Fusing Insights into Form and Function
How do you reach your customers when they span from an executive to a young student in grade school? At Lenovo, we practice customer-centric design. It is paramount for designers to understand customer needs, desires and pain points across diverse customer segments. Designing for a business user is very different than designing for a gamer, student at school or a person balancing work and personal life with a single device. Brian Leonard will share the process of balancing global trends, brand initiatives, user insights and the designers’ informed intuition into stories that drive brand strategies.