Charles L (Chuck) Jones
2008 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI RECIPIENT
BA 1981, Industrial Design
Chuck Jones joined Masco Corporation on May 3, 2010 as Chief Design Officer. He is responsible for the global leadership of design strategies across Masco’s business units.. Jones is recognized as an international leader in the field of design and innovation.
Prior to Masco Corp. Jones was the Vice President of Global Product Consumer Design at Whirlpool Corporation, and oversaw a global staff of industrial designers, product engineers, anthropologists, interaction designers, design strategists and human factors engineers. He was recruited to Whirlpool from Xerox Corporation in 1995, and initiated his career at Whirlpool as a leader in the Advanced Product Concepts group before being promoted into his role as vice president.
Jones attended Purdue University and graduated magna cum laude in Industrial Design and Human Factors Engineering. Chuck was the first student to graduate from Purdue with such a background. Additionally Jones successfully completed a non-degree MBA and Management Training program while at Xerox Corporation. Jones has been an active member of the Industrial Designers Society of America and the Human Factors Society since a student at Purdue in 1979.
Jones’ professional work experience prior to Whirlpool has been with Herman Miller Incorporated, Zeeland, MI and Xerox Corporation, Rochester, NY. During his tenure at Herman Miller, Jones was General Manager of a start up division focused on creating strategic alliances with other corporations with the goal of developing alternative methodologies of product development and reducing development cycle times. He was recruited to Xerox Corporation in late 1991 to transition and ultimately manage the global industrial design/user interface design/human factors engineering/usability test function at Xerox, with locations in North America, Europe and Asia.
Jones has been the subject of over 90 magazine and syndicated newspaper articles including Businessweek, International Design Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and Abitarie as well as interviewed for numerous books related to design and business. In addition, he contributed to the editing of the recently released Creating Breakthrough Products by authors Cagan and Vogel published in 2001, and was featured in a chapter in the Cagan/Vogel book The Design of Things to Come, published in 2005. Jones has received over 30 international awards for product design excellence and has been awarded in excess of 20 patents.
In 2007 Jones was named a guest lecturer to the Kellogg Business School at Northwestern University covering the topics of branding, product development and innovation.
Jones is internationally recognized as a key leader in effectively managing multi-disciplinary product creation organizations as well as establishing and leading cross-cultural product development functions. He is viewed as a thought leader in the area of brand development, especially in the linking of brand strategies and deep consumer insights to the product development process. Jones was a College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Alumni (2008), an Old Master (2009), and he was mentioned in Facts at Your Fingertips, Noted Alumni.