A creative enthusiast, professor and founding director of the Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR’84) where he works with colleagues in AA, ME, CEE, CS, MSE, Medicine and the Humanities to understand and facilitate creative technical design-team activity.  He is developing objective measures of design team performance (learning) under various structured methodology conditions and using a variety of computational tools.  These studies are focused on globally distributed product design-development on campus, across campuses, and with industry.Leifer’s design thinking research is focused on instrumenting, understanding, supporting, and improving design practice through the development of design theory. Specific issues include: design research methodology, global team dynamics, innovation leadership, interactive interaction spaces, design-for-wellbeing, and adaptive mechatronic systems.

“Hey, every inventor/innovator is in “kid” space. Let the kids within, out to play.”