Professor Patrick Whitney is the dean of the Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology and is the Steelcase/Robert C. Pew Professor of Design.

He has published and lectured throughout the world about how to make technological innovations more humane, the link between design and business strategy, and methods of designing interactive communications and products. His writing has focused on new frameworks of design that respond to two transformations: the shift from mass-production to flexible production and the shift from national markets to markets that are both global and “markets of one.”

He has been on the jury of numerous award programs, including the U.S. Presidential Design Awards, was a member of the White House Council on Design, and was chairman of the program of the 1978 U.S. Conference of the International Council on Graphic Design Associations (ICOGRADA), which was the first major meeting addressing the issues of evaluating design from the perspective of users. Professor Whitney was the president of the American Center for Design (ACD) and the editor of Design Journal, its annual publication. He is on several advisory boards in the U.S. and abroad and is a trustee of the Global Heritage Fund.

He consults and conducts executive workshops for numerous corporations and organizations. These have included Aetna, BP, Lenovo, McDonald's, Procter & Gamble, Steelcase, Texas Instruments, Zebra Technologies, and departments of the governments of Denmark, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and the UK.

In addition to speaking at major design conferences throughout the world, Professor Whitney frequently speaks at conferences beyond the design field, such as China Daily's CEO Summit, the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, the 50th anniversary of the Aspen Institute, and the TED conference. He is the principal investigator of several research projects at the Institute of Design, including Global Companies in Local Markets, Design for the Base of the Pyramid, and Schools in the Digital Age. His work has received support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and numerous corporations.