KV

Karel Vredenburg

Habits for a Better World

President & Co-founder
Karel has had a long career as a design executive, most recently as a Global Vice President at IBM. He is an Industry professor at McMaster University’s DeGroote Schools of Business and Medicine, where he teaches Innovation by Design to EMBA students, health leaders, and board directors. He has served on the Board of Directors for the IBM Employee Charitable Fund, was Vice President of the VegTO Board of Directors, and currently serves on the Advisory Boards of BITE and the startup PRAXXI. He co-founded and led several large-scale global initiatives, including the COVID-19 Design Challenge with the World Design Organization and Design for America, and the Future of Design Education Initiative alongside design visionary Don Norman. These efforts demonstrated that large-scale, volunteer-driven design-for-good projects can have outsized impact. Insightful conversations with award-winning filmmaker Carly Williams sparked the breakthrough idea of combining research and design with storytelling and filmmaking to tackle major global challenges. That vision led to the founding of Habits for a Better World, which they now lead together. Karel did undergraduate, masters, and doctoral studies at the University of Toronto initially in cognitive science and clinical psychology which later led to research, specialization, and his life-long passion for, practice in, and leadership of design and research.
Click here to see the full program
All sessions
Sandbox Stage
Jun 3, 2026
12:30 PM1:00 PM

Can AI Change Human Behavior? The Science of Habit Design

Karel Vredenburg
Description
What if the same AI reshaping how we shop, learn, and work could also reshape who we are? We've spent decades designing products that hijack human behavior — what if we flipped the script? Karel Vredenburg and Carly Williams have mobilized 400+ researchers, designers, and filmmakers to do exactly that. The science of habit change is older than the internet. The tools to deploy it for good are brand new.
All sessions
Loading