Tom Hardy

Tom Hardy (born 1946) is an American design strategist and Professor of Design Management at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). As corporate design advisor to Samsung Electronics (1996-2003) Hardy was instrumental in transforming their brand image from follower to innovation leader by creating a new brand-design ethos: "Balance of Reason & Feeling", and building significant global brand equity through judicious use of design strategy and management. While at IBM (1970-1992), he was an award-winning industrial designer and later served as corporate head of the IBM Design Program responsible for worldwide identity. His leadership contributed to the revitalization of IBM's brand image via differentiated design such as the iconic ThinkPad. Early life and education Hardy's early life was spent in Alabama where he graduated from Hueytown High School in 1964 and pursued his undergraduate education in industrial design at Auburn University (1964–1970) under Eva Pfeil (German) and Walter Schaer (Swiss), former students at the famed Ulm School of Design in Germany. During his graduate work in the History and Sociology of Technology and Science at Georgia Institute of Technology (1995-1996), he consulted with Georgia Tech to create CoLab, a unique multi-disciplinary innovation laboratory that integrated engineering, marketing and industrial design for industry-sponsored projects. Career IBM Early in his career, Hardy was the industrial designer of numerous award-winning IBM products, including the original IBM Personal Computer introduced in 1981. During the 1970s, he also designed advanced industrial design concepts for 'single user computers' during the infancy of personal computing. His work included a human-centered design model in 1973 to complement the IBM engineering prototype of SCAMP dubbed by PC Magazine as "the world's first personal computer". Examples of Hardy's advanced PC concepts are published in the book: DELETE: A Design History of Computer Vapourware