Dr. Leifer's engineering design thinking research is focused on instrumenting design teams to understand, support, and improve design practice and theory. Specific issues include: design-team research methodology, global team dynamics, innovation leadership, interaction design, design-for-wellbeing, and adaptive mechatronic systems.
Dr. Leifer has taught ME310 for over 20 years and continues to redesign the course ever year with new methodologies and technologies. Once a design student himself at Stanford University, he has started many design initiatives at Stanford including the Smart-Product Design Program, Stanford-VA Rehabilitation Engineering Center, Stanford Learning Laboratory, and most recently the Center for Design Research (CDR). A member of the Stanford faculty since 1976, his research themes include:
- creating collaborative engineering environments for distributed product innovation teams;
- instrumentating that environment for design knowledge capture, indexing, reuse, and performance assessment;
- design-for-wellbeing, socially responsible and sustainable engineering.
