Mike Leonard is a product design practitioner whose distinguished career includes serving as Product Designer at Exxon Office Systems. He established his own practice, The Design Works in 1982, was owner and principal designer of Designship, partner in Duzeo Product Design, and most recently was principal designer of Mike Leonard, Designer. His clients include Gillette, Cooper Biomedical, Tyco Electronics, Air Products and Chemicals and Abbott Diagnostics Laboratories, among others.
Mike has been a faculty member of Thomas Jefferson University since ( joining the Industrial Design faculty at Philadelphia University in September 1998 and became associate professor of industrial design in 2008. He led efforts that helped build the industrial design program into the world-class, highly regarded program it is today.
Since 2011, Mike has been the Dean of the School of Design and Engineering in Jefferson’s Kanbar College of Design Engineering and Commerce. He was a pivotal designer and implementer of the award-winning DEC (Design, Engineering and Commerce) Curriculum. He has spearheaded and maintained the University’s industry-sponsored projects initiatives, bringing companies like Federal Mogul, Unilever, Johnson and Johnson, Black and Decker, UnderArmour, SDI/iHome, and Armstrong World Industries among others into the classroom to work with our students.
Mike led the efforts to design and construct the $3 million Fashion and Textiles Futures Center, insuring a modern industry-class setting for our legacy textile and fashion programs.
Mike has broad research interests, including human factors and transgenerational design, responsible use of materials, and educational methodologies for instruction in applied design thinking and conceptual creativity. Mike developed and led the longest continually-running interdisciplinary educational collaboration in the University – the 24-year old Occupational Therapy/Industrial Design Adaptive and Assistive Device Design project. He has spoken and developed courses on these topics in many different venues both in and out of the University community. A sampling of courses on these topics include:
