Mastering Design Thinking

Renée Richardson Gosline

Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management

Renée Richardson Gosline is a senior lecturer in the management science group at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a principal research scientist for the MIT Initiative on The Digital Economy, and a digital fellow at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. She is an expert on the intersection between behavioral science and technology and the implications of AI for cognitive bias in human decision-making. Dr. Gosline was included on the Thinkers50 2020 Radar list, which honors thinkers who are “putting a dent in the universe,” and has been named one of the world’s top 40 professors under 40 by Poets & Quants. She is a leading scholar on the science of digital brand strategy and has contributed her expertise to PBS, the BBC, The Economist, NPR, Forbes, and Psychology Today.

Dr. Gosline’s research examines how structure and technology (e.g., digital customer experience, status, and social media) affect performance and choice (as featured in her TEDx talk, “The Outsourced Mind”). Her projects have examined the ways in which cognitive style predicts a preference for AI versus human input, the interactions between brand status and placebo effects in performance, the ways in which consumers distinguish “real” from “fake” products, the circumstances under which customers perceive value in platforms, and the effects of storytelling in social media on trust and persuasion. To address these issues rigorously, Gosline employs experimental methodologies in the field and the laboratory. She is currently conducting experiments on when and why humans prefer algorithmic to human input and how algorithmic bias may result. Gosline is also currently writing a book called The Human Algorithm (MIT Press), which examines the ways in which AI affects our lives and the benefits and perils of our digitally mediated judgments.

Dr. Gosline enjoys teaching MBA and executive education classes on customer experience (CX), brand strategy, nudge strategy, and experimentation. She has also collaborated and consulted with a variety of organizations on CX and leadership, including Salesforce, IBM, OECD, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, TD Ameritrade, and Capgemini. Prior to her time in academia, she was a marketing practitioner at LVMH and Leo Burnett.

Dr. Gosline serves on the advisory board of the National Kidney Foundation and the scientific affiliate board of the behavioral economics group ideas42. She received her undergraduate, master’s, and doctorate degrees at Harvard University.

Steven Eppinger

General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management; Professor of Management Science and Engineering Systems; Co-Director, System Design and Management Program

Steven D. Eppinger served as deputy dean of MIT Sloan from 2004 to 2009, as faculty co-director of the Leaders for Global Operations (formerly MIT Leaders for Manufacturing) and the System Design and Management programs from 2001 to 2003, and as co-director of the Center for Innovation in Product Development from 1999 to 2001.

Steven's research efforts are applied to improving product design and development practices. Conducted within MIT’s Center for Innovation in Product Development, his work focuses on organizing complex design processes in order to accelerate industrial practices and has been applied primarily in the automotive, electronics, aerospace, and equipment industries.

At MIT Sloan, Steven has created an interdisciplinary product development course in which graduate students from engineering, management, and industrial design programs collaborate to develop new products. He also teaches MIT’s executive courses in the area of product development.

Matthew Kressy

Director and Founder, MIT Integrated Design and Management (IDM); Senior Lecturer at MIT; Principal, Designturn, Inc.

Matthew S. Kressy, director and founder of the MIT Integrated Design and Management (IDM) master’s degree track, is an expert in product design and development. As an entrepreneur and founder of Designturn, he has designed, invented, engineered, and manufactured products for startups, Fortune 500 companies, and everything in between.

Matt believes in interdisciplinary, design-driven product development, derived from deep user research, creative concept generation, and rapid prototype iteration. He is passionate about teaching this approach in the design process.

David Robertson

Senior Lecturer at MIT

David Robertson is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he teaches product development and digital product management. Prior to MIT, David was a professor of practice at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2002 through to 2010, he was also the LEGO professor of innovation and technology management at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

David is the author of the award-winning book about LEGO’s near-bankruptcy and spectacular recovery, Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry (Crown, 2013). David has also held several executive management positions in enterprise software companies, and spent five years at McKinsey & Company in the U.S. and Sweden.